Michael Hendry

@PhilipDBunn @JaycelAdkins I have dozens of those, for moves and for books that won't fit on shelves. Liquor stores are good places to find very sturdy, thick-walled boxes small enough not to be too heavy when filled with books. Heineken's boxes fit two rows of OCT-sized books (a common size) very snugly.

@JaycelAdkins The office depot banker's boxes have held up for multiple moves!

Boxing up the library is an opportunity to reminisce with old friends

I LLOLed (the extra L is for 'literally').

One of my old advisors, Chris Carroll, always said his most influential paper had almost no citations because he so efficiently killed off a large body of literature that it didn’t need to be cited after that

I don't teach PhD students at the moment, but if I ever do, I will tell my pupils on Day One that starting today they have exactly thirty years to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk and if they are unable to accomplish this by the deadline I shall have nothing to do with them.

Here we have the more restrained relative of the Boom Chachalaca.

@BretVDB I think someone (accreditors, perhaps) should require universities that abandon teaching Greek, Latin, French, German, Philosophy, Physics, or pure Mathematics (among others) to change 'University' in their names to 'Trade School'. And yes, I am absolutely serious.

A university without a program devoted to the language it uses to teach is like a body without a soul (that is, a corpse).

Wise words from Stephen Owen

@johnkonrad P.S. I imagine you're one of their most distinguished alumni. They should find your career, as well as your reminiscences of grade school, interesting. If I were the principal, I'd cut and paste, format it nicely, and post it on the bulletin board. (It's G-rated, isn't it?)

@johnkonrad It looks like it's not just "still there", it's still an elementary school. Why not e-mail the school, send a link to your story, and ask if the gym teacher can tell you? If they don't know, surely a math teacher could show the kids how to calculate it with angles and shadows.

Confession time. I was in the handicapped gym class in early grade school. They pulled us out of normal class thirty minutes before gym to give us one on one instruction on whatever activity the rest of the kids would be doing that day. It was mostly an anti-bullying measure. Teach us the activity so we didn’t completely embarrass ourselves. It was me & two kids with Down syndrome. It was embarrassing. The worst part came when the regular class arrived early. They had to stand outside & wait for our instruction to end. Then we would file out & they would harass us as we walked past. I had great strength and stamina but zero coordination. (Years later we found out I’m in the top 0.1% for depth perception. My brain was getting overwhelmed by extra information.) So the Presidential Fitness Test was a big deal. The top kids got their picture taken and hung on the wall outside the gym. I thought I had a real shot. It was strength and conditioning. Not hand eye coordination. One mile run. Pull ups, sit ups, push ups. Flexibility. Shuttle run. Obama killed the test because, he said, kids were getting bullied. Like most things Obama said, the truth ran the other direction. This was my chance to STOP getting bullied. Problem was, I was a chubby kid but I put my heart and soul into it & got gold. But in my mind, gold wasn’t enough. Gold got your name on a list. Some schools added a bonus event for the elite tier: Standing broad jump. 50 yard dash. Rope climb. Softball throw. My school picked rope climb. If you got gold and could climb all the way to the ceiling, your picture went on the wall. You had a few weeks to do it. The real athletic kids nailed it the first day. By week two, almost nobody else had reached the top. It was the last day. I was determined. I could get up the knotted rope. The smooth rope was the problem. My hands kept landing in awkward spots, my grip kept slipping, my brain kept misreading the distance. So on that last day, I closed my eyes and started climbing. I felt like I was going to die. This was the 80s. The gym was two stories tall. There were no safety ropes, no mats worth a damn. If you slipped, you could die. Finally my hand reached the top. I was so excited I opened my eyes. I almost fell. I could not catch my breath for the life of me. The mix of excitement and exhaustion made yelling impossible. So I hung there, trying to get someone’s attention. No luck. I was dying and nobody noticed me up there. I tried the Jedi mind trick. No luck. Then class ended & everyone started walking out. One kid pivoted, turned back into the gym to hold the door, and looked up. He yelled, “Look at John!” Everyone ran back in & cheered. Then the gym teacher told me to come down. I refused. I couldn’t talk. I was breathing too hard. I worked one hand free and made the shutter click sound with my mouth. They figured out I wanted my picture taken. This was before digital. You needed a camera, a flash, and film. All of it had to be loaded. The gym teacher had assumed nobody would make the climb that day, so she had put everything away. She begged me to come down and get my picture taken on the ground. I refused. She threatened to call the fire department. I refused. Remember, I was chubby. I had extra weight to hold up there & I never fully mastered the leg lock technique. It was one of the most painful ten minutes of my young life while she got the camera ready. The entire class never stopped cheering. I got my picture taken. I still had to go to the handicapped gym class. But a few times after that, when the kids waited outside & tried to bully me, I just pointed to my smiling face on the wall. So yes, the Presidential Fitness Test matters. More than most people realize. In my experience, it was the opposite of bullying. It was a chance for kids willing to put in the work to be recognized for it. Obama took that away. He called it protection. It was the opposite.

Let's circle back with fewer questions.

Making my big entrance last night at the Meth Gala

@Stefftaving American Indian place names are numerous and often peculiar. Two more good ones are Tuscaloosa and Pocomoke City. Smackover, however, is French: originally Chemin Couvert after the covered bridge there.

I just discovered the existance of a place called Kalamazoo. I am puzzled.

I LLOLed (the extra L is for ‘literally’).

@WallStreetApes The Justine Department? That calls for a "Don't call me Shirley" joke, thought I can't quite make it work.

The Justine Department says they have reviewed over 3 million documents on the Big 4 Meat Packers in America They have found anti-trust practices. The Big 4 have been working together, sharing information and skyrocketing prices “This week, we will be announcing an historic settlement that will directly affect the prices of proteins like chicken, pork, and Turkey” “This business model allows competitors to exchange competitively sensitive information on every aspect of the protein industry and has raised the prices on chicken raised, the prices on pork, and raised the prices on Turkey. The department is also working closely with, with Secretary Rawlins and the Department of Agriculture” They’re also looking for more evidence “I wanna remind everyone and anyone in the industry that if you have information about antitrust crimes, about price fixing, bid rigging, market allocation, or even procurement fraud, the Department of Justice wants to hear from you through our Whistleblower Rewards program” California is run by monopolies. This is why everything keeps getting more and more expensive. Bring back the small farmers

@Defence_blog English-speakers would probably have picked a different set of letters than XTC. Calling an armored personnel carrier an 'Ecstasy' doesn's sound right to them.

Vietnam unveiled its own homegrown armored personnel carrier — the XTC-03. It swims, carries 8 soldiers, fires a 30mm cannon, and is designed to be better than the Russian vehicle it replaces. defence-blog.com/vietnam-develo…

@DrFrancisYoung 'Rerum Antiquarum'? Too obvious. 'Rerum Novissimarum'? 'Rerum Recentium'? 'Rerum Mediaevalium'? So many possibilities.

Have any of the high street betting shops opened a book on the title of Leo XIV’s first encyclical yet? It’s clearly going to be some play or pun on Rerum Novarum

@jonathanbfine What if I read primary texts, but don't want to be an intellectual historian? Textual criticism is much better.

Everyone wants to be an intellectual historian, but nobody wants to read primary texts.

@BookReviewsAsia @TuttleBooks All the Hellenists, Romanists, and Agrigentines reading this are muttering "Did he forget Air, or omit it as a snub to Empedocles?"

📰 Today in the ARB: Ben Woollard reviews "Earth, Water & Fire" by Eiji Yoshikawa, translated by Alexander Bennett @TuttleBooks asianreviewofbooks.com/earth-water-fi…

@jhendersonYT Musical pieces every man should listen to: Vinteuil: violin sonata, septet Adrian Leverkühn: cantatas "Apocalypsis cum Figuris" and "The Lamentation of Dr Faustus"

Books every man should read ☝️ - First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, Volume XI: Hlaer to Jangr - The God of the Labyrinth by Herbert Quain - Don Quixote by Pierre Menard

@ClassicalAegis Twenty-six likes and not a single comment on my matching sock monkeys? The mid-sized one was made for me by my grandmother ~65 years ago from an actual sock. The 1/3-sized one was a Christmas-tree ornament on my parents' tree. And the triple-sized one was bought in a thrift shop.

@ClassicalAegis I bought a 1-foot (30 cm) copy of one of the Riace bronzes at an antique mall in Virginia. I keep it on top of a revolving bookcase with my graduated set of sock monkeys. Why anyone would ever have cast, or sold, one without the other, I do not know: I wish I had the pair.

The Riace Bronzes are over 2,400 years old. A scuba diver discovered them off the coast of Riace, lying on the seabed about 8 meters deep. They remain one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.