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All my suits are either a shade of blue (usually dark) or a shade of gray varying from medium to dark. My blazers are all differing shades of blue and the accompanying pants are either gray or blue. My shirts are all white and my ties vary from shades of blue to sometimes shades of maroon or dark red. Why am I writing this? Is this my application to be a model for GQ? Or am I about to start a fashion consulting business?

As noted previously, my son has not "applied himself" as thoroughly as he might have in high school. He has instead focused on music, and we have fought to keep him in music electives and after-school band projects against the efforts of teachers and administrators who felt strongly that his music was a destructive distraction from more serious academic studies.

Sure, it's a good time, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better.

I really like Facebook Scrabble – I spend far too much time on there, with only a vague justification that it “increases my vocabulary.” Over my Christmas holidays, I spent the vast majority of my 10 days off napping and finding new Scrabble opponents. All my grandiose plans of completing my Special Studies proposal (Sex and Jane Austen – woo!), preparing my section of the introduction for the book I’m working on, editing chapters for said book, submitting papers to journals and/or conferences – yeah, none of that happened. Well, the barest minimum of it happened anyhow.

In my circles, the answer to this question is fairly obvious. But as I was trying to explain to undergraduates how messed up scholarly publishing is, I realized it's hard to grasp unless you already have been bruised by current practices. When you're just learning how information works and have only gotten as far as "you ought to use scholarly sources," it's very puzzling indeed. So I thought I'd try to break it down.

The smartphone has become a regular part of my daily workflow, and I find myself using it regularly for To Do lists, email, reminders, and keeping up to date on news and such. Recently, I've found a couple of apps that have been particularly helpful in keeping me on track, so I thought I'd share them with you all. There are some similarities in these apps: they all do one thing and one thing only, and they place a premium on doing those things as quickly as possible, so you can spend less time on your phone, and more time doing other things. Also, most of them have reminder systems built in, so you don't forget to use them to do the things you want to do. As a side note: I'm an iPhone user, and I've done my best to find alternative apps for other smartphones. Please use the comment field to add any useful alternatives for other platforms!

Why my job is to get my students to do peer review.

In a meeting this week, a frustrated professor described politics as “trying to get one group of rich guys to convince another group of rich guys to do the right thing.” I thought he nailed it.