The Continuing Misadventures of Friar Dave
Hey folks! It was a busy weekend, and although later this week looks fairly clear, it was an unexpectedly busy Monday evening for yours truly. The article I promised will have to wait until later in the week, as I was forced to parse it into two parts due to time constraints on Sunday. There are a few other things that I'll be posting this week, but I wanted to share these tidbits from my good friend, Friar Dave.
As some of you will remember, Friar Dave is a graduate student at a major midwestern university, studying and teaching on the subject of medieval and ancient history. From time to time, when he gets entertaining answers on various exams, he shares them with me, and I share them with you (with his permission, of course). We have a real gem today.
For the record, the correct answer (as Friar Dave and I indicated) is Hadrian's Wall, a structure that I've visited in spirit - I arrived in Carlisle on 11th September 2004 (which I've blogged about before), only to find that Carlisle was in the west, and all of the actual remains were nearer to Newcastle in the east. I remember eating at a little Italian joint, very classy, called the Ristorante Adriano; I remember it really clearly, actually, due in no small part to the fact that there were a number of attractive young waitresses, dressed entirely in black; they weren't allowed to just stand around, so they seemed to float about the room like black-clad ghosts. Looking through my travel journal from that 2004 expedition (which took me to Scotland, Orkney, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and France, not to mention England and Germany which I'd visited over the preceding weeks), I actually found a napkin from that restaurant that's traveled something on the order of ten or twelve thousand miles in the last three and a half years.
Anyway, nostalgia aside, Friar Dave mentions that he has a twenty page paper to write. When I arrived back at Van Dieman's Station last evening, I promptly received another message from him:
Highly entertaining. For the record, a twenty pager usually takes me at least a week to write - one time I wrote a thirty-seven pager that took me a solid two weeks. For the good Friar to have written one in only nineteen hours is both a testament to human endeavour, and a scathing admission of inadequate preparation. Kudos to him!
* * *
In a continuing effort to keep Mighty Mo entertained at work, I present the video of the day: an a capella rendition of "Cry Me A River" by Justin Timberlake by a bunch of dudes dressed up as nerds.
Not normally my kind of music, but I'm pretty sure that Timberlake at least wrote the song (he had to have collaborated on it, at least), and it's sort of catchy. These guys give it a good rendering. Enjoy!
* * *
I'm curious, and I'll keep this brief (as I hear Mighty Mo snickering): have any of you regulars figured out any resolutions for 2008? I'm curious what you're dedicated to accomplishing. I'll post a comprehensive list of my own in a few weeks, but my underlying resolution, I think, is going to be to force a degree of balance on myself. I feel like there are enough things dragging me to and fro in my life that I ought to make a conscious effort to find equilibrium, and I think the search for that equilibrium (among other things) will be my big focus in 2008. How about you?
Have a great day, and stay tuned - there's more comin', I guarantee.
As some of you will remember, Friar Dave is a graduate student at a major midwestern university, studying and teaching on the subject of medieval and ancient history. From time to time, when he gets entertaining answers on various exams, he shares them with me, and I share them with you (with his permission, of course). We have a real gem today.
Friar Dave: are you going anywhere in the next 15 minutes or so?
The Fly: Nowhere fast.
Friar Dave: All right. I have one more list of gems for you, but i need to organize them.
The Fly: Okay.
Friar Dave: so give me a few and i'll get back to ya
The Fly: Perfect.
Friar Dave: It's worth the wait, I promise.
The Fly: I'm not going anywhere. Watching a video about Mormonism on the Interweb.
Friar Dave: I'll whet your appetitie by noting that multiple students marked "Babylon" on the map portion for where Constantinople should be
The Fly: Appetitie? Freudian slip?
The Fly: ROFL
The Fly: Well, the place is Istanbul now, so they're not THAT far off.
Friar Dave: they had three choices, Byzantium, Constantinople, or Istanbal. All of which would be right. Babylon? Wrong.
The Fly: Hahaha I'm laughing over here, this is great.
Friar Dave: That was just to warm you up to it.
Friar Dave: One of the other map locations was Hadrian's Wall. To you and me pretty simple, right? Not to the students. More than a fifth of what i graded got it wrong. Answers included
Hinslish's Wall
Harenia
Hassium's Wall
______ Wall
Hadman's Wall
Wall of Britain
Somebody's Wall
Whittman's Wall
Harudin's Wall
Habian's Wall
The Habeis Wall
The Berlin Wall
Haritre's Wall
The Fly: WTF?
The Fly: Hinslish? Hassium? Whittman?
The Fly: These are great!
Friar Dave: *shrug*
Friar Dave: granted, it was the first time a manmade structure was tested over, but it was on the study map, we'd talked about it in class, and they should have known it.
The Fly: Yeah, that's not a tough one.
The Fly: The Berlin Wall has to be a joke answer.
Friar Dave: you would suppose.
Friar Dave: That's all i got. I have to go write a twenty page paper.
The Fly: Hahaha
The Fly: Alright, it'll get posted. Very good, sir.
For the record, the correct answer (as Friar Dave and I indicated) is Hadrian's Wall, a structure that I've visited in spirit - I arrived in Carlisle on 11th September 2004 (which I've blogged about before), only to find that Carlisle was in the west, and all of the actual remains were nearer to Newcastle in the east. I remember eating at a little Italian joint, very classy, called the Ristorante Adriano; I remember it really clearly, actually, due in no small part to the fact that there were a number of attractive young waitresses, dressed entirely in black; they weren't allowed to just stand around, so they seemed to float about the room like black-clad ghosts. Looking through my travel journal from that 2004 expedition (which took me to Scotland, Orkney, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and France, not to mention England and Germany which I'd visited over the preceding weeks), I actually found a napkin from that restaurant that's traveled something on the order of ten or twelve thousand miles in the last three and a half years.
Anyway, nostalgia aside, Friar Dave mentions that he has a twenty page paper to write. When I arrived back at Van Dieman's Station last evening, I promptly received another message from him:
Friar Dave: i do not recommend what i just did
The Fly: ?
Friar Dave: i just wrote a 20 page paper in nineteen and a half hours
The Fly: Holy shit, that thing must be terrible!
Friar Dave: there's a good posibility
The Fly: Hahaha
Highly entertaining. For the record, a twenty pager usually takes me at least a week to write - one time I wrote a thirty-seven pager that took me a solid two weeks. For the good Friar to have written one in only nineteen hours is both a testament to human endeavour, and a scathing admission of inadequate preparation. Kudos to him!
In a continuing effort to keep Mighty Mo entertained at work, I present the video of the day: an a capella rendition of "Cry Me A River" by Justin Timberlake by a bunch of dudes dressed up as nerds.
Not normally my kind of music, but I'm pretty sure that Timberlake at least wrote the song (he had to have collaborated on it, at least), and it's sort of catchy. These guys give it a good rendering. Enjoy!
I'm curious, and I'll keep this brief (as I hear Mighty Mo snickering): have any of you regulars figured out any resolutions for 2008? I'm curious what you're dedicated to accomplishing. I'll post a comprehensive list of my own in a few weeks, but my underlying resolution, I think, is going to be to force a degree of balance on myself. I feel like there are enough things dragging me to and fro in my life that I ought to make a conscious effort to find equilibrium, and I think the search for that equilibrium (among other things) will be my big focus in 2008. How about you?
Have a great day, and stay tuned - there's more comin', I guarantee.
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