Look, dude on twitter, I'm so sorry the mean dead woman from Texas(Ms. Molly, of course) let you know that members of the powerful classes that you defend so passionately aren't usually funny--well, not on purpose. The best satire really does come from the bottom up.(He's very upset that some sort of lack of permission is being implied there and I think he's insane.) Just mocking people overall is not really satire is it?

Yeah, satire is a very specific subset of mocking people.

Sometimes, it's not even life or death conversations on social networking that come down to "You don't know what words mean."

I made another appointment with my doctor, because my coughing is getting worse again. I am so sick of this.

erika, if your eyes fall out of your head and roll around on the floor, I will help you dust them off again.

Hil, I'm starting to ponder smiting your doctor. I suppose it isn't really incompetance on his part, but really, you could use... well, not House. But someone like the guy I went to when I was a kid.

Every time I go, she does give me stronger drugs. It's not like she's not treating me. It's just that none of the treatments are working.

She's also never seen me when the cough is really bad. I'm usually not coughing too much in the morning, but as the day goes on, it gets worse, especially on teaching days when I've got to be taking deep breaths while I'm lecturing, and I'm inhaling a ton of chalk dust. But with the way my schedule is, and the way the schedule at the doctor's office is, I can only see her in the morning.

Egads, chalk dust in this day and age? Blerg. Is it possible to get an appointment later in the day, or is that just impractical?

Yeah, for the most part, the only place on campus that has whiteboards is the business school. They've got all sorts of cool new classroom stuff. The rest of campus is mostly chalkboards, with a few whiteboards in conference rooms and stuff.

There's not really any way to see the doctor later in the day -- I teach until 5:30, and the doctor's office generally doesn't have appointments after 6.

This is some remarkable chutzpah. A student emailed me to ask if he could take a make-up quiz, because he'd be missing class the day of the quiz. (His reason for missing class was not all that great.) I told him he could, if he took the quiz on Monday, or Tuesday morning, because I'd be handing back the graded quizzes and going over the answers in class on Tuesday. (The quiz was last Friday.) He said he'd be out of town until Thursday. So I said no. Then he emailed me back, asking me to reconsider, because he can't have another zero on a quiz because he already has one zero. The reason he has one zero? He got that zero because I caught him cheating on a quiz. And he's lucky that I just gave him a zero, rather than filing a formal report.