Low Corpulent, Stout or Stooping?

A friend, needing to order academic robes, passed this little curio onto me. It's the actual order form she needs to fill out. "Please, please tell me I'm not on my way toward 'low corpulent,'" she wrote. Indeed, one might worry about one's chosen profession when allowable body type options include low corpulent, stout, and stooping and when it is assumed one has one low shoulder: "Low Shoulder: Which? R_____ L______."

Mr. Collins??

After an agonizing three minutes of deciding upon my ideal "Man of Austen"( "Mr. Darcy! Henry Tilney? Willoughby! Colonel Brandon (only if it's actually Alan Rickman)? Frank Churchill? Mr. Knightley... Mr. Darcy!"), I finally decided on Henry Tilney. His interests in fashion, shopping, horseback riding and long walks in the country finally tipped the scales in his favour. Not surprisingly, Mr. Darcy ranks first among people like me who spend part of their Monday nights weighing the merits of various fictional men. But, Mr. Collins in 8th? Gack! Who is voting for Mr. Collins?!?! Maybe it's Lady Catherine de Bourgh? What would Miss Austen say? Vote for Willoughby?

We Tell Stories: Digital Fiction from Penguin

Lately I've been doing a lot of reading about the history of the book, the future of the page and all manner of topics related to those questions. Today I stumbled upon the We Tell Stories site which looks very interesting. Six authors. Six stories. Six Weeks. This week it's Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps, an homage to John Buchan's The 39 Steps. It is, as the site says, "an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps." Penguin has just given me another reason to love them.

What White People Like: or, today I discovered what a predicatable demographic I am

Thanks to PB for pointing out this nifty blog. It starts out being sort of funny and then it turns kind of eerie. Like Barack Obama?: yup; own one of these water bottles?: indeed; am I one these coffee drinking people?: uh huh; own Apple products?: yep; go out for breakfast?: that too; fan of the Bluth family?: guilty as charged; Wrigley Field?: been there; and sigh, there's this too. I'm going to stop now.

Presidential Libraries and you.

This is pretty neat. From the Chronicle and sent to me by MA.
"For millennia, great and not-so-great leaders have celebrated themselves in monuments. . .
Modern U.S. presidents have only their presidential libraries. Now that the George W. Bush era is almost over, the world needs a place to archive the legacy of the 43rd president. That place will be Southern Methodist University, in a building designed by Robert A.M. Stern. The building will probably cost $500-million... We thought that Chronicle readers would have their own ideas about how that building should be designed, and we invited people to send in designs on the backs of envelopes. About 120 people sent in sketches that were good, bad, serious, humorous, abstract, or really angry. Their designs took the form of toilets, bunkers, crosses, and W's, some crudely drawn and some very elegant. A sampling of those designs is displayed on these pages."