My first published puzzle; Difficulty * (out of 5)

Merry Christmas to you, if that's your thing. If not, go eat a cookie anyway. It's been a long year.

to my great chagrin, my adviser has temporarily run out of money to fund me, and i have to go back on the dole TA a blasted intro course next semester to foot the bill. this is a severe pain in the ass, and i've already decided to be the meanest, grumpiest TA ever.

haven't really been talking about this much on here, but i've been seriously trying to decide when i should graduate. the committee has said that i've paid my dues, so really all i have to do is scrape together this last dataset into something that looks like it has findings and science in it, and i'll finally become a (fake) doctor. the problem, as ever, is where to go from here. the places i really would like to do a post-doc don't seem to be taking new people on at the moment, and i don't think i'm at all ready to go out on the job market. tentative poking around in the police state has revealed that there is a grand total of one lab that's suitable for me, and guess what: i've been in it. basically, where i'm at is: gross fluctuations between despair and high anxiety. the plan, i think, is to eat a lot of chocolate and drink a lot of scotch this christmas, and tackle the problem again come the new year.

admission

after 3 years of clinical supervision, i still get a kick when i get to begin a case summary with "xx-year-old [race] (fe)male with a history of xyz". tv shows just have too much of an influence on my life.

paddle pop

was wondering with the brother just now about whether or not paddle pop still exists, and where one might get it. i always remember the original paddle pop -- the psychedelic one -- as having a most improbable taste, as if it were from an alien planet. in any case, it appears that it's still all the rage in australia, and that ads for it are still being made (with the olde paddle pop music!), but that the rainbow ones are no longer in vogue:

From The Long Day Wanes:

The fact was that Victor Crabbe, after a mere six months in the Federation, had reached that position common among veteran expatriates - he saw that a white skin was an abnormality, and that the white man's ways were fundamentally eccentric. In the early days of the war he had been in an Emergency Hospital, a temporary establishment which had taken over a wing of a huge County Mental Hospital. Most of the patients suffered from General Paralysis of the Insane, but the spirocaete, before breaking down the brain completely, seemed to enjoy engendering perverse and useless talents in otherwise moronic minds. Thus, one dribbling patient was able to state the precise day of the week for any given date in history; no ratiocinative process was involved: the coin went in and the answer came out. Another was able to add up the most complicated list of figures in less time than a comptometer. Yet another found rare musical talent blossoming shortly before death; he made a swanlike end. The Europeans were rather like these lunatics. The syllogism had been the chancre, the distant fanfare of the disease, and out of it had come eventually the refrigerator and the hydrogen bomb, GPI. The Communists in the jungle subscribed, however remotely, to the Hellenistic tradition: an abstract desideratum and a dialectical technique. Yet the process of which he, Victor Crabbe, was a part, was an ineluctable process. His being here, in a brown country, sweltering in an alien classroom, was prefigured and ordained by history. For the end of the Western pattern was the conquest of time and space. But out of time and space came point-instants, and out of point-instants came a universe. So it was right that he stood here now, teaching the East about the Industrial Revolution. It was right that these boys too should bellow through loudspeakers, check bombloads, judge Shakespeare by the Aristotlean yardstick, hear five-point counterpoint and find it intelligible.

so, after long last, my meta-analysis has been accepted, which is some pretty amazing stuff considering i'm still more or less a nobody. my favorite part so far of the tying-up-loose-ends portion of the exercise is that the editorial team, for some inscrutable reason, needs a paper copy of the manuscript, which i fully intend to send to them in a nice hefty cardboard box. i think it's always been one of my dreams to send someone a manuscript in a nice hefty cardboard box. it feels so like something jane austen would do, although she probably never did.

here's an interesting take on "professional opinions" by josh olson. i don't think i have personal experience with this on any level, but i totally appreciate what he's trying to say.