In preparation for the release of my book (also available here and here!), which should be out in something like a month, I’ve put some of the text online.  I’d love it if you’d check it out—The Anxiety of Obsolescence—not least because the site could use a bit more hard testing.  As the front page will tell you, I’ve optimized the site for Firefox 1.5 (for Mac), and it looks swell in Safari and Camino, too.  It’s a bit wonky in Netscape 7 for Mac (the footer wants to show up a mile down the page rather than right after the main text ends) and it’s absolutely, irretrievably broken in IE for Mac.  (Please tell me you’re not still using IE for Mac!) If some of you Wintel types wouldn’t mind giving me a bit of feedback here on what’s going on on your screens, I’d appreciate it.

And, if you’d like to comment on the text, there’s room for that over there.  I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

It’s spring break here in Baton Rouge; all the students in our apartment complex have decamped for the Florida coast, the restaurants are empty, traffic is light, and life is generally good.  It’s been years, though, since I’ve lived in a place—wait; is there any other place?—where spring break is pegged to the week before Easter, regardless.  The good news, if one is teaching in such a place, is that this year you have a week of quiet a mere four weeks before the end of the semester.

The bad news, if one is sabbaticalizing in such a place, is that there are only four freaking weeks left in the semester!

But the quiet is good.  And yogalates class was fabulous this morning.  And the book review is done, and pretty darned smart, I think.  And I’m about to move on to a fun project, which is great.

More thoughts, shortly.

Friday afternoon, I got into the skinny pants.  The ones that have been hanging in the closet for at least the last nine months, untouched.  And they looked mighty fine, if I do say so myself.

(This post brought to you by the part of me that needs a good pep talk right about now.  Go, self!)

Strange and interesting things that I have learned from the NCAA website in the course of an extended email exchange with a colleague about college sports:

1.  LSU has won the 6th highest number of national championships in Division I sports.

2.  Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are UCLA (97 national championships), Stanford (91), and USC (84).

3.  The drop-off between the California schools and the rest of the pack is precipitous.* Oklahoma State comes in #4 with 46 championships, and Arkansas is not far behind with 42.  (LSU has 40.)

4.  Of the top 6 championship-winning Division I schools, LSU is the only one that has won more national championships in women’s sports (24) than in men’s (16).  Neither Oklahoma State nor Arkansas has won a single national championship in a women’s sport.

5.  LSU is ranked 3rd in the number of national championships in women’s sports, behind Stanford (34) and UCLA (28).

6.  All 24 of LSU’s women’s national championships are in track and field, 11 indoor and 13 outdoor.

7.  Somewhere down the line, LSU won one national championship in men’s boxing.

8.  Football is not included among the sports that the NCAA counts in these championship figures, as “the NCAA does not conduct a championship for Division I-A football.” On a linked page of past Division I-A national championships in football, however, one can see that over the past 136 years, there have only been 27 seasons in which the championship title has been considered undisputed.  Of those 27, 13 date from 1892 and earlier.  Of those 13, 7 went to Yale, 5 to Princeton, and 1 to Harvard.

Make of that what you will.

—–

*I remain very curious about this concentration of championships on the west coast.  Some of it is attributable, I suspect, to the inclusion of certain sports in west-coast athletic programs that simply don’t exist in the midwest or east; I’m thinking here in particular of water polo.  Some of it may well be climate-related; California’s mighty conducive to sports in general, with its mild temperatures and low humidity.  And some of it, no doubt, is a legacy factor, in which the championship-rich get championship-richer, through more easily obtainable funding and greater ease in recruiting.  But I’m just not convinced that those three factors are enough to explain the nearly 50% dropoff between USC and Oklahoma State.  Theories?

I have days when I really wish this blog were anonymous, or that I had another anonymous blog in which I could write without the kind of self-censorship that comes with knowing that many of my students, colleagues, and friends are reading along.  I’m having a bit of a rough time right now, but the roughness of the time is entirely internal, and personal, all about my thought processes and emotional baggage, stuff I’d love to be able to write my way through, but that I don’t really want to share with the world.  At least not with that segment of the world that knows who I am.

And so… I’m left wondering what to write about instead.  I get up every morning and look at the blog, and think… nothing.  I’ve got nothing.  Which is, as you might expect, part of the problem.

In sum:  pretty much the standard why I haven’t been blogging and log-jam breaking post.  With any luck, an actual return to writing, soon.

The worst of it is that there’s now no one left to root for in the men’s final.  As I told a colleague of mine via email last week, I am constitutionally incapable of rooting for any team that comes from the state of Florida.  In any sport.  Call it a fault of my upbringing, southeastern sour grapes.

But I also find both of the major Los Angeles collegiate teams to be so relentlessly overexposed, so coddled and pampered, that I cannot pull for them, either.  (Seriously, guys:  get a real conference, and then come talk to me.)

So I officially could not care less—not by as much as an iota—about Monday night’s outcome.  The only thing I could cheer would be if somehow both teams managed to get themselves disqualified.

Which means it’s now all about the women.  Go Pokey!

It’s just too painful.  I’m going out for ice cream instead.