Monday, October 11, 2004

Five-Throb Frontal Lobe

 

1. One more conversation about authoritative sources and research via the i-net. Roughly: "Never use .com sources; prefer .edu or .gov domains."
2.  Toothache (or some more general category of mouth pain).
3.  How the hell did my copy of Comp in Four Keys (ordered from half.com and sent with a friendly note from a Big Ten alum) get to be so rotten smelling? It really stinks.  Pets and smoke and gin-breath-belch. As I read, the odor makes me wonder whether the person who read it before me reached the end. One of my office mates suggested dashing the smelly book with baby powder. I'm ready to smear on some Vicks vapor rub just to get through this next article.
4.  Read it by tomorrow. Oh, and this too (attachment PDF, 27 pages). And while you're checking your email--this.
5.  News you won't find in the sports section of your local paper: I've been playing Friday evening basketball this semester.  Won a pair of three v. three games on Friday, but I wrenched my lower back so horribly that even today I can barely pull on socks, tie my shoes, etc. Unofficial status for this Friday: questionable. Official status when playing competitive basketball for the rest of my adult life: idiotic.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at October 11, 2004 10:58 PM to Slouching Toward
Comments

Damn! I hate a stinky book.

Posted by: Clancy at October 12, 2004 12:29 AM

Tried to save a few bucks by ordering through half.com. Sheesh! And it would have to be the longest read of the semester--givign it five weeks worth of attention. I've leafed page by page just to find whether something is rotting between the pages. I'm almost desparate enought to sneak-exchange it with one of my colleagues. But I shouldn't disclose much more about that plan here.

Posted by: Derek at October 12, 2004 8:19 AM

You know, I've always read that you can put stinky books in a paper bag with some cat litter to leach the smell out of them, but I've never tried that myself. Makes sense, though.

I love half.com! A good chunk of my books are from there. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't gotten a stinky one yet, although I did get some that people lied about the state of the underlining.

Posted by: Krista at October 12, 2004 9:00 AM

Thanks for the suggestion, Krista. The scented bag (add litter, baby powder, both? and shake) is pretty much what my office mate proposed too (and it really is smelly enough for my office mate to care). Trouble is no cats, no babies means no litter, no powder on hand. Suppose I could raid the spice cabinet. Drizzle it with vinegar?

Funny, when the smelly book arrived, my first thought...okay, my second thought immediately after--dead fish?--was that half.com ought to have an odor rating scale. Listings often include notes about bent pages, dog-ears, underlining, highlighting, etc., but nothing about odor. Close to finished with the science section, so I'm near the end, but the smell is definitely impacting the reading.

Posted by: Derek at October 12, 2004 9:11 AM

As an undergrad, I worked as a ref/admin assistant for a volleyball club. We outsourced our mailing stuff to a local couple who worked out of their apartment. Our members would come in and complain of how horribly our newsletters always smelled, and it wasn't until I had to make a delivery to the couple that I found out why: the apartment was dark, rank like rotten food, and literally filled with cigarette smoke.

Posted by: madeline at October 12, 2004 11:07 PM

Pee-ew! Just when I was starting to think HTML newsletters were the information revolution of the twenty-first c., your comment has me re-thinking whether digital media can come close to embodying the rhetoric of aroma that paper can bear. Two more weeks with this rank copy of _Comp. in Four Keys_, then I'm donating it--anonymously--to the CCR resource room.

Posted by: Derek at October 13, 2004 7:36 AM

Here it is right here. I just turned to page 528 (Bizzell's essay, "Arguing about Literacy"): big ole cig-ash buried in the binding. Looks like it damn near ignited the whole book. (C'mon, grant me one small hyperbole; I'm reading _Comp in Four Keys_ all Saturday night).

Posted by: Derek at October 16, 2004 9:33 PM