RBOC

• Dear Student: when you email me less than an hour before class asking to take a meeting with me later that day to discuss material, you should probably show up to class that day as well.  Just a thought.
• I am sorely tempted to apply for one of the numerous job postings for a new chair for a Department of Pseudology at one university or another.  Permanent tenure and nice salary in a pleasant living location?  Sign me up!  Honestly, if you want to bring in an outsider to serve as chair, then you have some serious internal politics to sort out.  Wouldn't a young PhD only a few years out of grad school be an ideal breath of fresh air to run your department and soothe all fragile egos involved?  Surely there is no strong need for the new chair to have held tenure – or even a tenure-track job – before taking up the post!  Whaddya say?
• I've never received as many begging emails from students as I have this year.  My Intro to Libel and Slander is one of the staple gut courses for the hard science distribution requirement, as well as a requirement for the pseudology major, so a few people need to take it in any given year, and a whole lot more want to do so.  I'm both amused and a little grossed out by the way they suck up to me in these emails, hoping that I will bend the registration rules for them.  I'm glad to hear, young padawan, that you have always been fascinated by pseudology and long to take the course to satisfy your voracious intellectual curiosity.  However, since you haven't bothered to set foot in a pseudology course until your senior year, and you seem to have no idea what pseudology is except for its convenient timing and fulfillment of a distribution requirement, I remain somewhat dubious of your motivations.  (It's a dead giveaway when they express interest in the fundamentals of Fibbing and Little White Lies while seeming to be utterly unaware of what Libel and Slander are.)
• By the way, I'm not doing anyone any special favors with this registration process until the students who really have to take the course have had a chance to register, so stop asking me!  Won't do it!!  Kthankbai
• Oh advisor, my advisor, where have you gone?  That letter of reference ain't gonna write itself.
• The weather here in Cornstate is a little scary sometimes.  I guess the thunderstorms here are about on par with the ones in DOU-Town and Ghosttown, but they come much more frequently here.  Plus, this is the first time I've had to worry about driving for miles in an intense thunderstorm.  What is more, Cornstate is a good bit further north than DOU-Town, so we're getting less and less daylight by the day.  At 7:30 this morning, I was on the road in near-total darkness, which made the occasional flash of lightning in my field of vision almost literally blinding.  Didn't enjoy that.
• Oh, that reminds me: Dear Cornstate, the drainage on your highways sucks.  Please do something about that.  Oh wait, I forgot: a large portion of this state seems poised to elect another Tea Party jackass who seems bent on privatizing the entire government and depriving it of revenue, except the part that keeps women from getting abortions.  Because all government is evil, except the part that enforces your personal morality upon other people's bodies.
• P.S. Fuck you, Tea Party.