How is it already Saturday’s link love?

It has been an insanely crazy busy week.  For those of our beloved blogs that we’ve been neglecting, we apologize!  We did a whole bunch of reading all at once but didn’t have it left in us to comment as much as usual.  #1 is still going to be working all weekend because there’s a stupid service grant report due and she didn’t even get the data until earlier this week.  But hey, summer salary, right?

Let’s see if we even sent each other any links at all… we must have, right?

Minx had an intriguing discussion about how when female slate columnists want to do something trollish and stupid, they put it in the XX bin, but when male columnists do the same, they put it on the main site.  The original link-bait article ze’s talking about isn’t worth clicking on… unless you’re really into reading Miley-style blogs.

What is a Miley-style blog?  Stirrup Queens explains here in this excellent post.  Do you have a Miley Cyrus style blog or an Adele, or something else entirely?  (And what are we?)

Oh, and speaking of Miley Cyrus… CNN asks why we’re speaking of Miley Cyrus when Robin Thicke should be taking equal, if not more, blame.  Honestly I didn’t even know Robin Thicke was involved until I saw this headline!  (I get all my celebrity news these days by reading headlines and not actually clicking on the links.)

Pointless armor now available in dude!

One simple tip that could save a bicyclist’s life.

This is hilarious… if you’re into speed traps.

Stacking pennies discusses identity.

I gotta tell ya, I felt like a BOSS in college when I had black forest cake and a multivitamin for breakfast.

Disney princesses sing for equal pay.

You took that well, scientific sexism (a comic strip guide).

Help me Google, you’re my only hope!

Q:  when did you want another baby

A:  When my first started being able to entertain hirself and to help out around the house.  (Also, DH saw his sibling’s newborn and got baby fever.)  YMMV.

Q:  can i have a gardening business as a second job

A:  Can you have it as a first job?

Q:  reasons you are from the midwest

A:  1.  You were born there;  2. Your parents moved there when you were a child (often for job purposes) and stayed for a while;  3.  Your escape pod from Krypton landed there.

Q:  places for gifted children to hang out on the internet

A:  probably not where I hung out in high school and early college, that’s for sure.

Q:  is it better to have a 403 b or a roth ira?

A:  Both!  If you can swing it.  What do you think your income will be like when you retire?  Would you rather be taxed now or later?

Q:  funny things to say to good looking people

A:  “Madam, I may be drunk but bllllearrrrghhhh.”  –Winston Churchill after too much alcohol

Q:  what will happen if we don’t eat radishes

A:  radishes will overrun us all and start getting all up in our grills.  Please do your part.

Q:  should i buy a home in december

A:  Sure, why not?  (Assuming you have 20% down and can afford a 30 year fixed rate mortgage)

Q:  “pay off mortgage or buy another house”

A:  The former, then the latter, unless you have a lot of money (and the temperament) to play investor.

Q:  nice things to say to your best friend

A:  I couldn’t blog without you!

Where do you get academic mentoring?

Your dissertation director.  Other graduate faculty.  Grad students who are further along than you.  Postdocs.

Your peers on the job market.  People you meet at conferences.

People who write you tenure letters (i.e., those you put on your list, after the letters are over).  Your dissertation director’s other students.

Go up to successful people at conferences, ask if they have a minute, introduce yourself, ask one focused question.  People one step ahead of you.  People who have switched careers.  People in different departments.

Listserves and mailing lists through your professional organizations.  Do they have a mentoring group?  Senior members of whatever professional/academic organizations you are part of.

Propose a symposium at a conference and ask senior people to be on it.  Now you have a connection.

A formal mentoring program on campus.  The campus faculty development center.  Other senior faculty you meet around campus; take them for coffee.  Try to form a writing group or grant development group.

The blogosphere!

Your former boss.  People your dissertation director or boss introduces you to.  Any retired faculty you can find.  The faculty ombudsperson.

Anywhere else?

What are we reading with pleasure and happiness?

Patty in the city: had to interlibrary loan this one. A fun confection.

Discount Armageddon :  Excellent.  My favorites are the mice.

Also excellent is the sequel, Midnight Blue Light Special. Again, mice! (read it.)

Finally got my hands on Gunnerkrigg Court Vol 2.  Well worth it!  And it’s awesome to read through again knowing what I know now… adds new depth and meaning to some of the scenes.  These are such handsome books.  It seems like the first printing had some flaws and wasn’t as nice quality as Vol 1 or Vol 3, but the current batch is lovely (and seems only to be available from amazon).  Aaaannnnd Volume 4, just out now! The art keeps being great.

Reread Daddy Long Legs, caught some of the political commentary hidden in there this time around.

Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (Penguin Classics)
by Jean Webster

Reread Dear Enemy, picked up all the eugenics I’d missed the first time around… (must not have looked very hard, or have been very young…)

Tempest Rising.  It was ok. (#2 really likes this series)

Nice Girls Don’t [do stuff] vampire books — Enjoyable popcorn!

All Spell Breaks Loose, by Lisa Shearin– finally a conclusion to the series!  As a whole, I think the series should have had a book or two fewer, but the end book went a bit quickly.  A satisfying read.

Gave Candice Hern a second chance (with $2.99 kindle books).  She’s no Georgette Heyer, but I enjoyed  A Proper Companion and A Change of Heart.

#2’s been reading up a storm lately.  Particularly recommended:

The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley. If you like Stross’s Laundry Files books, you’ll like this, and vice versa.

The Killing Moon, by N. K. Jemisin.  Really, really good.  Can’t wait to read the next one. (Update: It was good too!)

ZOMG N. K. Jemisin is such an amazing writer. Read her!

I am Not a Serial Killer by (Dan Wells)

The Battle of Blood and Ink

What have you been reading lately?

We have to make a living…

I know y’all feel me out there in academia.  This year I have the pleasure of sitting on 2 search committees and a personnel committee, all within my department, which is in between chairs, and the interim chair doesn’t respect me.  And I hate my classes.  So far, there is a temporary contrast effect where my salary keeps me from leaving, for now… but the job conditions have me on the market (and the dean, too!).

At least I got a raise with tenure… at least I got the tenure bump… at least I have tenure….

#2 notes that she starts bright and early at 8am teaching a math class!  Also, she hasn’t gotten her contract letter for the year yet.  And she has no idea how many department searches her department will be doing, but at least now she has two interim administrators in addition to the non-interim provost (still no word on the interim president).  Oh, and after she completely reconfigured her class homework assignments etc. (but before writing down the changes on paper), the university reverted her blackboard page to what it was 2 years ago, two days before her first 8am class.  Thank you university!

Commiserate in the comments.

Ms. Linken-McLoverton

This is seriously the best idea that anyone has ever had: Privacy PopTent
for your bed.

BuzzFeed brings us 17 problems only book lovers will understand.

Planting our Pennies talks about stretching her boundaries and adorable tiny baby turtles.

Surviving academia talks about the benefits of daycare.

Chacha discusses self-publishing.

Not of general interest finds that sometimes charts and lists don’t work.

This page explains why we can’t get amazon affiliates links to work on our blog.

Ann Friedman discusses men and women and empire building.

this is weird

kawaii baby griffin is scared to fly; also funny: Mutual startlement

more grammar fun from the oatmeal.  Do it for the steeds.

I am very glad that my mom has confidence in me.  I can’t imagine how crushing it would be to have her tell me I couldn’t handle both work and kids.

What now’s partner got the job she wanted!

We were an editor’s pick in this week’s carnival of personal finance!

Ask the grumpies: Gender and Publications

The Frugal Ecologist asks:

I really want to know what you guys think about this study about publication quantity vs. quality in males vs. females. In particular Figure 1 – so many women at the bottom… so many men at the top…
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534713000839

Do they control for time in the profession?  You would get that picture if women have only entered into the field of ecology recently.  Old guys who have been around for a while will have both more pubs and more citations, just because their work has been around longer and they’ve been around longer.

A resource you could check out is:

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/gendertutorial/   starting with tutorial 1.  It will tell you what the numbers are across multiple fields (STEM, law, medicine, etc.) and how we can interpret them (later moving on to why they got this way and how we can change things).  This is a site prepared by an expert in this field, crunching down the data and making it in an easy-to-display form.  The tutorials have voiceover narration that tells you the main points, and you can click around for getting more numbers if you want.  Or read the transcripts.  This is where I would usually point people when they want to know about this topic.  Happy reading!

What do you call your pets (or children)?

Obviously your pets have names, but chances are that’s not what you always call them.

We have Big Cat and Little Cat.  Sometimes we call big cat, “butterball.”  Little cat can be, “baby kitty.”  We may occasionally say “snuggly wuzzikin,” or “kittikens.”  We have some nicknames based on their real names as well.

#2 :  Mine is baby.  fuzz-face.  goober.  fuzzball.  gooberkitty.  sweetie.  [name]-baby. kit-kit.

Children are “snuggle-bun” and “snuggers” and “baby” and  “precious” and “honey.”  Also “little/big guy/girl” as appropriate for age and expressed gender.  Occasionally a “cutie-patootie” will sneak in.

What do you call your pets (or children)?  If you have/had neither pets nor children, what were you called growing up?

Why, Sir Terry, WHY???

I’m having a problem with Terry Pratchett’s Dodger.  And I say this as a huge fan of his.

[CONTAINS SPOILERS]
Does Dodger HAVE to run into EVERY famous person ever?

#2:  he does NOT run into Jack the Ripper

#1:  Charles Dickens, Sweeney Todd, Disraeli…. it takes me right out of the story.  It would be more believable if the names were made-up.  Let’s just name-drop Babbage and Lovelace while we’re at it, no reason at all, they don’t even have lines, we’ll just put them in this scene because Look How Much I Know!

#2:  The little professor has a couple of posts on this

#1:  (wow, I didn’t know that)  is there ever anyone who DOESN’T run into charles dickens?

#2:  I’m just proud of him for not running into Jack the Ripper

#1:  did Dickens seriously know every single person in London?  It’s just…. it’s cheap.  Were Dickens and Disraeli really friends?  I mean, really?  It’s cheap.

it’s like it’s saying, ha ha, in the book.

The things Disraeli does… the whole thing would be more believable if it were someone made-up.  And Dickens is always stopping to make a note of some turn of phrase that is the title of one of his books…. STUPID!

#2:  Yes, he could have had thinly disguised nods to famous people like he does in his Discworld series; however, I thought of Dodger more as a YA fiction, and those often have famous people in them.  Pretend the book is for 12 year olds.

#1:  I thought about that, but then there’s [SPOILER ALERT] domestic violence and miscarriage and baby-killing….

#2:  but not graphic or overt
it’s even discussed in a YA sort of fashion

#1:  but does a 12-year-old know who Disraeli is?  Like, there’s no REASON to have him in there.  If you’re old enough to know who he is, you’re old enough to think it’s disingenuous to have him in there.

#2: The 12 year old learns about Disraeli from books like that.

#1:  I dunno.  I’m just not… I don’t feel very forgiving about this book.  I feel like he’s written much better things.

#2:  He has.  It’s called Discworld.

#1:  he could do Dodger in Discworld though, and it would be better, with all the same themes.  I mean, Good Omens was fantastic.

#2:  Oh, yes.

#2: he’s not as good at children’s fiction, except when he’s not aiming it at children (see:  Tiffany Aching).  Diggers is terrible, and Johnny and the bomb is totally mediocre.

#1:  Dodger is just… cheap.  It’s like he’s saying, look how clever.

the Tiffany Aching books are amazing!  Why didn’t he just keep doing that.
Nudge, nudge, wink wink, can you tell that Karl Marx is in here, nudge nudge.
I don’t want to be nudged. Just make up some damn characters!  You’re a writer!
and I know: he is not my bitch.  But yet…

[Disclaimer:  #2 liked Dodger just fine and would totally recommend it to any middle schooler and up.  Not her favorite Terry Pratchett, but better than many non-Terry Pratchetts.  Her partner thought it was ok, but didn’t think it was great.]

Readers, what makes you mad?

Should we switch to Amazon affiliates?

So we’re currently Powell’s affiliates, and have been since we started the blog.

The amount of $ we’ve seen from this affiliation has, to this point, been… let me count it up… $0.

One person has bought something through one of our links, and not enough to trip the payout amount.  So we’re still at $0.

Every year or so #1 IMs #2 and says, “Should we switch to Amazon?” or “I think we should switch to Amazon.”  And every year or so, #2 reminds #1 why we started with Powell’s to begin with.

#2:  the catch I found before was: “If you have not earned any advertising fees in the 3 years prior to any given calendar month, then on the first day of that calendar month we may charge you an account maintenance fee that will be deducted from your unpaid accrued advertising fees. That account maintenance fee will be the lesser of $10 or the amount of unpaid accrued advertising fees in your account.”

in our chatlog of 7/18/10, you said, “That is a big catch”

#1 is that still true?

#2 “In addition, you hereby consent to us:
sending you emails relating to the Program from time to time; monitoring, recording, using, and disclosing information about your site and visitors to your site that we obtain in connection with your display of Special Links (e.g., that a particular Amazon customer clicked through a Special Link from your site before buying a Product on the Amazon Site) in accordance with the Amazon.com Privacy Notice; and monitoring, crawling, and otherwise investigating your site to verify compliance with this Operating Agreement and the Operational Documentation. ” Yes the $10 charge is still true.

#1hm tricksy.  Well, I’ll write a blog post on the topic and ask the readers one of these Mondays and see what they think.

#2 ok, you do that

UPDATE:  We made an affiliates link, but could not get their links to work with pictures, only text.  I searched their forum but didn’t find anything useful– the people talking about images are doing something really complicated.  I emailed customer service and 20-odd hours later they emailed back saying we should look at the forum and the link has to be copied exactly, as if we weren’t doing that.  So not helpful at all.  I guess the answer is:  We can’t be Amazon affiliates even if we wanted to be.  Powell’s it is.

So, dearest readers, should we switch to Amazon affiliates, or stick with Powell’s?