The following, found on page 19 of Elaine Svenonius’s The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization(MIT, 2000), is in its inpenetrability one of the most glorious things I’ve ever come across:

“Work-work relationships include generalization relationships (is a subclass of), the aggregation relationships (is a part of), and various associative relationships (is a sequel to, is an adaptation of, is an abridgment of, is described by).” (italics in the original)

I think it’s trying to get across some sort of object-orienting thing, maybe, and an approximation of some sort of meaning comes less and less fuzzy the longer I stare at it. Still, whatever that sentence is made of would be damn fine material for chastity belts.

OK, so who thinks I should go for the full-on King Mob look? The facial hair–I never mentioned I was growing a beard, did I?–just wasn’t working for me. What with my corpulence and all I knew I wasn’t going to make it to “dashing”, but I was hoping to eventually move past “slovenly”.

Six weeks into the project, I realized my hopes were never to be met.

This afternoon I got out the clippers and went to work on the growth. First I tried giving the beard some sort of shape along the jawline; my jawline being rather well-hidden, this accomplished little. I shaved off the sides, then, but thought I might try leaving a goatee.

That might have been OK, actually, if it weren’t for the weird fact that the hair on my chin and below my lower lip grows in several shades lighter than the hair on the rest of my head. I know not why; my brunettish brother, who sports rather a nice beard, has huge red spots over his cheeks, suggesting that men in my family are natural calicos.

I tried trimming down to a Van Dyke, but that was blond enough to be almost completely invisible. Finally I took all of it off; as I hadn’t seen most of my face in over a month, the visage I met in the mirror reminded me unfortunately of a frog caught in headlights. In the headlights of a particularly low-rding car. Er.

Broken metaphors aside, I realized that my tonsure had grown out enough to frame my face very poorly indeed. I slipped a screen on my clippers–#2, which seems to be the only one I have left–and went to town.

But…well, I know I used to prefer to keep my head as cleanly-shaven as I could, even if it did mean choking back bile at frequent Three Stooges comments from ill-mannered passers-by. I had to keep it at a proper buzz cut in Huntsville, as people there for some reason don’t like tipping slick-headed folks.

Now, though, I’m not working for at least a couple of months, so there’s no economic disincentive. The only things holding me back are an uneasiness at inviting insults from the chattering crowd and the fact that the IT guy in our department has a shiny-clean pate, and I don’t want to look like a copy-cat or suck-up or creepy wannabe acolyte or anything.

So, good people of blogland, what say you?

Googling on tuscaloosa blogs took me to Library Planet, where a little poking revealed a nifty little exercise calledThe Fifth Sentence.

The idea is to pick up the nearest book, flip to page fnord 23, and type up the fifth sentence. I am, as always, game.

The nearest book turrns out to be either David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or (my rather lovely first/first hardback of) Batman Archives Volume 1. These, somehow, have been the only two books to end up atop my desk so far. Must find those blasted dictionaries.

Anyway, I’m guessing that it would be easier to play the game with DFW than with repro’s of Bob Kane’s early works. Page 23 falls within the first of the sections titled “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”. The fifth (complete) sentence:

“Tell me what you think.”

Hm. DFWian in content, surely, but hardly in style. Let’s try the Batman book for a lark, looking rather arbitrarily at the fifth “spoken” sentence:

“The penthouse will require a bit of climbing.”

Indeed it will, Bruce. Indeed it will.

And, finally, from the book I’m currently reading for pleasure, China Mieville’s Iron Council:

“His friends watched him, alarmed at his face.”

Lesson extrapolated from this sample: I read books with sucky fifth sentences. Discordia, why hast thou forsaken me?

Just got back from the first session of my fundamentals-of-research type class, which I think I’ll enjoy muchly. I am, however, a bit concerned.

The course, you see, appears to have a strong intro-statististics component; one of the two texts, in fact, is titled Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics (by a Dr. Neil J. Salkind of KU–know him, Tyler?). The instructor somehow made it all the way through our first day of class without making even a veiled reference to the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote.

Amazing, isn’t it? It’s like a math textbook without a Lewis Carroll quotation or a hallway bulletin board with neither a “Calvin & Hobbes” nor a “Far Side” caroon posted. If this sort of thing keeps up, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a reception area without at least one poster of a fuzzy kitten in an inappropriate situation.

The actual content of the lecture mostly alleviated my concerns over the instructor’s ability to provide what’s expected of her, and she is terribly personable. Further, she won bonus As she seems to be an actually good teacher I won’t be writing a strongly-worded letter to the Office of Cliche Registration and Enforcement. I will, though, be keeping a beady little eye on her.

From the previously mentioned Bates article, describing the essence of information science:

“We are interested in information as a social and psychological phenomenon.”

I am, at last, convinced I’ve chosen just the right field for me. How warm and fuzzy and wonderful. Yay!

Ever come across a sentence so beautiful, so evocative of wonder, that you want to stop reading right then and there lest further explication of the concepts drag the celestial concept down to the base level of dust and muck?

Yeah, me too. All the time.

I am reading an article by Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science”. There on the first page of the article I came across this sentence:

“One does not work long in information science without knowing the names Wilf Lancaster, Gerard Salton, and Llewellyn C. Puppybreath III, and what they are known for.”

I, for one, now do not want to know what Llewellyn C. Puppybreath III was known for, as it certainly couldn’t be magnificent and majestic enough to be associated with such a name.

Working on reading assignments this afternoon, I came across the following sentence in Richard E. Rubin’s Foundations of Library and Information Science:

“Freedom of speech is one of the primary rights accorded to each citizen.”(p.125)

I got a bit shirty on reading that, implying as it does that the government grants us our rights and that it stands apart and separate from we insignificant citizens, who should probably be grateful that our ruling masters consent to allow us to speak freely.

Harumph, I say. While I have no problem with the notion of “rights” as a human (non-divine, non-inherent) construct, I do think it inappropriate to encourage the notion that rights are given, that there is a separate and distinct body who could choose to rescind those freedoms and who would be acting within their purview in doing so. Bad, bad philosophy, Dr. Rubin.

Because of the above, I was already a bit sensitized when I came across the following on the next page:

“At the same time, some serous questions have been raised regarding uncontrolled speech on the Internet and the appropriateness of some of the subjects discussed, especially those that involve sexual and alternative lifestyle topics, e.g., homosexuality, bestiality, sado-masochism.”

Holy fucking Santorum, one of these three is not like the others. I am shocked, apalled, and pretty much all eye-goggly at the fact that anyone writing a textbook with such a generally apparent pro-intellectual-freedom bias could write anything like any of the above-quoted sentences.

Criminy. I don’t think I’ll make a fuss about this in class, but I am definitely irate.

Well, it turned out well. The spice rub I made up didn’t seem to add a lot to the taste, the dominant non-meat flavors being pepper and Tabasco, but on the whole it’s some yummy, yummy stuff.

And tender! The meat actually fell off the fork in little stringy clumps of delectitude, which I think means I did it just right. It was a good bit more done than I prefer my meat, but it remained tender enought that I didn’t much mind.

So, yeah. Yay me, and yay meat!

Here’s something different: The bookstore at which I bought my texts listed, it turns out, only one of the four required texts for one of my class, two of the three required texts for another, and listed one of the required texts as optional for a third.

So, in other words, I thought I’d done remarkably well book-wise and then, to my horror, had to go out and spend another $175 just now. Blech.

Have just finished catching up with the last week of comments, and a nice big lump of shame has been lifted from my chest. I’ll try to get to the emails–and, yes, that means you, Catherine!–later this evening. For now it’s TV–Farscape does, in fact, rule–and, at some point in the evening, dinner.

(Fried ham steak and canned biscuits, which I’m sure sounds amusing to my UKan readers. I seem to be constitutionally unable to make decent biscuits from scratch; anybody know the secret?)