From hours of procrastination...

....A few glimmers of insight:

On academe (from The Weekly Standard):

the kind of perfectly characterless man who will eventually--that is to say, now, in our day--rise to the presidencies of universities all over the country. Cozening, smarmy, confidently boring, an appeaser of all and offender of one, "idiot savants of success" (Jarrell's perfect phrase), not really quite human but, like President Dwight Robbins of the novel's Benton College, men (and some women) with a gift for "seeming human"--in short, the kind of person the faculty of Harvard is currently hoping to turn the detoxed Lawrence Summers into if they can't succeed in firing him straightaway for his basic mistake in thinking that they actually believe in free speech.

Ms. Goldstein is quoted on the interesting point that at Princeton Jews become gentilized while at Columbia Gentiles become judenized...

On hKetG's assertion of yesterday that all of academia is bullshit, or at least, certainly that humanities is (she always manages to exlude herself from grand generalizations...):

the poorest dressers in academic life (there are no good ones) are the mathematicians, followed hard upon by the physicists. The reason they care so little about clothes--also about wine and the accoutrements of culture--is that, Goldstein rightly notes, they feel that in their work they are dealing with the higher truths, and need not be bothered with such kakapitze as cooking young vegetables, decanting wine correctly, and knowing where to stay in Paris.
Where the accoutrements of culture count for most are in the humanities departments, where truth, as the physical scientists understand it, simply isn't part of the deal. "What do you guys in the English Department do," a scientist at Northwestern once asked me, quite in earnest, "just keep reading Shakespeare over and over, like Talmud?"
"Nothing that grand," I found myself replying.

I haven't included links to the full articles because you really shouldn't bother...just because I've wasted time doesn't mean you should. And don't worry about it, I've culled anything that may be remotely worthy.

One really must bemoan the ever-declining quality of procrastination material on the web...

On the other hand, what fun to be a guest blogger! This way I can pollute hKetG's pristine consistency of writing, keep up my ever-evolving creativity for procrastination tools, and contribute to above-mentioned deterioration.