Stranded in Michigan with 3200 medievalists!!1!

Well, I put up a post about Kalamazoo and then took it down again because of (rare for me) qualms that if you don't have anything nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all. The town itself is not so very bad, but I'm not fond of conferences, and this is really the über-conference. Hopefully I can get away with not going again ever.

One disturbing thing was meeting a professor who has been working on the same project as me for a while, the project that misguidedly paid for me to go to "the 'Zoo". Apart from e-mails we were both cc'ed in on, the first communication I had from him was to tell me that he'd had a dream about me. Ah, I thought, reaching for my I-Spy Spotters' Guide to Academics, an Elderly Amiable Lunatic. (You don't get many points for those.) But when I met him he turned out to be relatively young and good-looking -- he really must be at least in his late forties, but he looks younger. Which made me rethink the whole thing and find it rather creepy. I don't know if it's OK to be prejudiced against the attractive? A troubling moral question there. My personal feeling is that they get away with things so much that it's actually an act of cosmic justice to give them a hard time.

Anyhoo I'm back at Chicago O'Hare airport waiting for my flight to London, so it's all nearly safely over. The rats are in Devon, amusing themselves in various ways -- Muesli managed to convince my poor mother that she was at death's door, but then was fine the next day. I've got nearly three hours to kill. 4oD doesn't work overseas (booooo...) but luckily I have discovered a rich vein of Peter Cook on YouTube. Back in 1990 he did a series of twelve short Christmas things as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (of teaching ravens to fly underwater fame). It's called A Life in Pieces, and here is episode one.