Scattered Musings

• TV Tropes has a great name for an all-too-familiar crime: Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma.
• In the department of Hope Springs Eternal, Etc., I am leaving on a jet plane tomorrow. The goal: make it to California without being buried in a snow bank, turned into an icicle, or trapped for several days at O'Hare Airport.   On a positive note, the weather reports predict that Chicago will be sunny tomorrow (unlike Rochester, which will be snowy again).  Then again, as anyone who has ever lived in Chicago knows, "sunny" in winter means that the day will bear an unfortunate resemblance to the lower regions of Hell (Dante version), because the absence of cloud cover is a very, very bad thing.  (In case you're wondering, Chicago is supposed to make it to a balmy high of nine degrees Fahrenheit.)
• Today's baffling weather went something like this:  Sun! WHUMP! (Snow, snow, snow.)  Sun! WHUMP! (Snow, snow, snow.)  Rinse, repeat.  Despite the whumping, it wasn't all that cold.
• A word of advice: if you're going to cite the entirety of someone's article in support of your position, it just might be a good idea to make sure that your Academic Search Premier/General OneFile/ProQuest/whatever search term a) appears on more than one page and b) does not primarily feature as a quotation from another author.
• This Barnaby Rudge chapter is proving difficult, although it's making progress (page eighteen and counting).  I'm hoping to have a complete draft by the time school starts.
• Speaking of school, I appear to have students  in the Victorian survey. The last time I taught it, the course was an...intimate...seminar; this time, it's over twenty students and still counting.  (We have a transfer enrollment session coming up, so the course should get a few more heads.  Er, with bodies attached.)  In the interests of preventing a mass emotional crisis, I took Bleak House off the reading list--my students will read it if asked, but some of them wind up walking around campus with a haunted look, as if pursued by nine hundred pages of text in zombie form--and turned the novel line-up into Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The Turn of the Screw.  This is also the first time in years that I've taught the course on three days instead of two, giving me more room on the syllabus to play with; one of the first things you learn as an instructor is that three hours on two days does not lend itself to the same amount of reading as three hours on three days.  
• A note to a novelist (who shall remain anonymous at this point in time): as a general rule, horses cannot regurgitate.  Under extreme circumstances, food may come up the way it went down, but only if something truly dire is happening--like the horse's stomach is about to detonate from pressure.  Perhaps it's the character's error...

Comments

[Sharleen]

How do you know this (about horses)? Did you look it up for a reality check, or is it something you just happened to know? I'd not have thought of it myself.