Okay, I am fairly used to somewhat incoherent solicitations like the following: I am planning to release an Upcoming Issue, for this we are planning to start this prestigious event with your articles and the receipt of your eminent work is the good sign for our success towards [journal with a very broad and capacious remit but only the most ( Read more... )

Well, at least Richard Dawkins didn't think Metamorphosis was actually a work on entomology? - or maybe he did, and somebody said, 'No, Richard, it's fiction' and he was trying to work out how that worked? I picture him as one of those children in Victorian stories taught on the Grandgrindian method, or coming further up to date, along the lines ( Read more... )

In a response to a question on Ask a Manager about saying you're not on social media in a work environment where most people are, somebody makes the following response:
'plastering my life across the internet doesn’t appeal to me'.
Which made me think, o, really, who bloody cares? Nobody will notice. Given that people have to (I get the impression ( Read more... )

Every so often - I would say this happens with relative frequency - not so often as people who wish to Optimize Me, or rather, My Website, for Search Engines but have clearly failed to grasp that I am Not Selling Anything -
Okay, I daresay the idea that one puts One's Knowingz out there free and gratis for The Common Good may be a concept that ( Read more... )

But this time it is the Oxfordian kind, rather than deep Mybuggery about the symbolism of BOARS.
Receiving random spam with the subject line 'Fun', including links, does not inspire me to click those links for fear of finding myself on the wrong end of some ransomware demand, but a little light googling took me to enough places to ascertain that ( Read more... )

Oh dear, has this person actually read any children's literature of the relevant period? These institutional developments were accompanied by a new children’s literature that elevated children’s fantasy and dwelled on its special qualities. The stories of Beatrix Potter, L Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll celebrated the wonderland of childhood through ( Read more... )

What I read
I finished The Beaux of the Regency Vol I, which was not bad, in that it was quite readable and used primary sources and a certain amount of being critical of the sources, and there are probably much shoddier studies published since, but essentially good popular history of the late Victorian/Edwardian era. Also, of course, there is no ( Read more... )

Oft, my dearios, have I mocked at spam emails offering me some dubious SEO service, where it is quite clear that they have failed to notice that my website is not about products for sale and therefore pitching to me in marketing terms is pretty much pointless.
(O, if only they could promise that my thoughts upon certain historical myths might be ( Read more... )

My dear rdrz will have heard me (for lo, they B heering the whingeing on the Moon) rant about certain popular works of history, sometimes by people who have some kind of relevant scholarly credential (and sometimes not) that have the pernicious effect of getting some complete misapprehension into the water.
And sometimes, at least within the ( Read more... )

I have just been doing a certain amount of codslapping on Twitter caused by a confusion over the meaning of 'archives', which in this case meant 'digitised back issues of a journal'.
Which I might have sighed and let go, but that this received a response from an official library person referring them to the archives department to answer their ( Read more... )