Stratofanatic's Emporium

Well, fate has conspired to force me to do several blog posts of late. This one ended up being a hassle, too. As Awards Administrator for the Mythopoeic Society, I'm in charge in shipping out the Aslans -- i.e. the trophies -- to that year's recipients. This year the ordeal took me two (2) trips to the trophy store, two (2) trips to the Post Office, and four (4) trips to FedEx for a whole host of reasons. .... mainly because the trophy store screwed up the first time around, and I didn't catch the error until later. (Then also because FedEx is good at packaging items for international shipment, but the Post Office has drastically cheaper rates.) Long story short, however: the Aslans are now shipped! Three of them international, two of them domestic. The only thing left is for me to get reimbursement. Also, I learned (slightly too late) that I can use my UA English Department's FedEx account to get huge discounts on various services. Well, now I know for next year.

So, here are the dangers of pedagogy when you're teaching a subject area outside of your field of professional study AND don't much care about proper pronunciation:  Within the last week in ENGL 373a, my Beowulf to Milton class, my students have (kindly) corrected my pronunciations on the following: (Southwark (apparently it's "south-verk," not "south-wark" -- this one was particularly embarrassing because I had just told them that the Thames is pronounced "Tems," not "Thames"!) Boccaccio ("boc-ca-cho", not "bo-ca-chi-o")! Scheherazade ("sche-her-a-zaud," not "sche-zhur-zaw-de")! And then! We were discussing the Hundred Years War for Chaucer, and somebody asked me if that was when Joan of Arc lived. I answered with an intelligent, "Um," because I honestly didn't know.  I'm so lucky my students seem to like me, cuz oh man, if they didn't .....

 So, a prospective replacement for me at Fafnir  just asked me some questions about the position, and I ended up writing a too-long email. Since I haven't posted anything in a while, I'm deciding to share here: --------------------------------------------------------------- Hi _____, Great to hear from you. Yeah, when I started as reviews editor, I was in the same boat -- absolutely  no  idea what to expect. So I don't mind talking about this at all. I'll go through a list of topics in order: Start time . Yes, you'd be officially reviews editor for 1_2023, and your name would appear on the front matter for that issue. However, we currently have a backlog of about six reviews for looking at, so a new editor would informally start whenever, since those are the submissions that would appear in 1_2023. In my view, best practice is staying about one issue ahead in terms of reviews ready to go. This means that there's never a last-minute scramble for content, or that ...

 Today, in my ENGL 373a Beowulf to Milton course, we took our midterm from 9:30 am - 10:45 am. Less than a few hours later at 2 pm, less than five-minutes walk from our building, there was a shooting incident at the Harshbarger Building. The individual hasn't been apprehended, but police have a description for a suspect. All in-person classes have been canceled, and we're being asked to stay away from campus. We also just got a message a few minutes ago saying that the person shot has just died. No other details have been released yet, whether the victim was a student or what the motive might have been. I'll be staying tuned, but it's an unsettling situation. EDIT: the suspect has now been taken into custody.