I've got to start making my appointments for all the doctors I have to see before I can schedule my surgery, otherwise I won't be having it until April at the earliest.

Put me with the people who took typing in high school, also shorthand. I don't remember how to make many specific letters in shorthand, but I kept all the little words/combinations (the, to, to-the, in, in-the, able, will, willing, do, of, of-the, etc.) which I used extensively in note-taking in school. In grad school in Israel, I took my notes in an ugly mix of English, Hebrew, and shorthand. No one ever borrowed MY notes!

My handwriting has degenerated horribly over the years. I'm not looking forward to my first graduate class next week--I'll probably be spending the hour after class typing up my notes just so I can read them.

This looks like an excellent source for geography quizzes.

Thanks for the link, smonster. Now it's just about setting aside the time to do it justice.

I use math shorthand in my note taking. So things like ∃ and ∀ pop up here and there. Mrs. Shaw would be so proud...

Okay, back to the damned migration mapping. It's kicking my ass.

I also took typing in high school. Class was about 2/3 female, if memory serves. And my parents gave me a typewriter for a graduation present.

Came in real, real handy at college in the (pre-word processing) early '80s, when I didn't have to pay anyone to type my papers, including an 80-page honors thesis (double-spaced) that went through several drafts. By the time I finished that thesis, I was doing at least 80 words a minute.

I took typing in junior high. It was on manual typewriters, though, so even today I use about six times the force needed on my computer keyboard. When I was temping I managed ~100 wpm. This is why I like communicating via email at work. I can type as fast as I can speak (if not faster), and I have a trail of who said/did/committed to what.

I took typing my senior year of high school. After a double period lunch. Ended up cutting class a bunch, but as long as we could pass the tests, keeping our word count up, the teacher didn't care much. I find myself setting up in home position whenever I start typing or when I stop to think about what I'm going to write.

I can tell I depend on home position when I type on dilaudid. Because one or both of my hands will slip and my eyes don't check what I'm typing. Enter gibberish. And I'll happily keep clicking away for a while.

Okay, I just achieved a burst of organisational clarity. This document may yet be completed today. Shame I have to do two, and am lacking sufficient inspiration.

Novelists Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq at war over ‘theft of dead baby’

France’s notoriously lofty literary world is watching in slack-jawed amazement as the country’s leading female writers lunge at each other with daggers drawn in a ferocious battle about plagiarism.

A tennis metaphor — “ladies’ finals” — has been deployed in a magazine headline to evoke the extraordinary energy being invested by the novelists Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq in the pursuit of revenge for various charges and insults.

Their mutual obsession was reflected in the appearance last week of books by each of them about the feud. One was a studious analysis of literary theft; the other was a thinly veiled fictional account of a novelist who is dropped by her publisher after accusing a young rival of plagiarism.

It all began with the publication of a novel by Darrieussecq in 2007, when she shared a publisher with Laurens. Tom Est Mort (Tom Is Dead) tells the story of a woman whose baby dies shortly after being born.

Laurens, who had lost a baby two hours after his birth and who had written movingly about it in a book called Philippe in 1995, accused Darrieussecq of “psychological plagiarism”, a new term in French letters.

So apparently it's not "word-for-word" plagiarism....

Also, 'plagiarism' is spelled weird.

I took typing in high school. I sort of touch type, but make a lot of mistakes in the beginning, then get better as I continue to type. Oddly, when I am touch typing, I sometimes find myself spelling things phonetically.

I would have like to have learned shorthand, it would be handy in meetings, and would have dealt with the guy in my old job who always wanted to borrow my notes after a meeting. I was like "dude, this isn't college, handle your own business".