Out to lunch

It's the penultimate Friday of the semester, I've had evening meetings every day this week, I read a pile of student drafts yesterday, and my brain wants to take a little vacation, okay?

So here's some time-wasting silliness:

"Our shoes tell tales," insists Slate this morning, and I have to agree: the shoes I'm wearing today look as if they might have been stolen from a homeless person. But Slate isn't interested in my shoes but in "Comparing Shoes of the Very Famous" (read it here). Lawrence of Arabia's desert sandals don't look any more battered than a few I could find in my husband's closet, and I grew up wearing flip-flops just like the Dalai Lama's.


Inside Higher Ed informs us that "College Men Sometimes Think About Things Besides Sex." Don't believe me? Read it here. (Food and sleep. Those are the other things they sometimes think about.)

The linguistics experts at Language Log try to parse the following sentence: "Cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full" (read it here). Don't try to make sense of it yourself or your brain will explode, which would deprive the neighborhood zombies of a square meal.

The Oatmeal offers an alternative high-school curriculum in "What we should have been taught in our senior year of high school" (read it here). The math lesson alone is worth the visit.

And if you want to get all high-brow, the New Yorker asks "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" in an article suggesting that many of the world's great classics were penned by ghost writers (read it here). Moby Dick, for instance, "was written not by Herman Melville but by Herman Melbrooks, who wrote most of it in Yiddish on the boat over from Coney Island."

I don't know who wrote this blog post. Couldn't have been me, because until further notice, I am officially out to lunch.