Whig Hill

Some gripes

1. The people at UNC-G who choose the student health insurance plan do not have the best interests of the students in mind. Pearce & Pearce, the student health insurance provider is some sort of fly-by-night scam operation. Everyone involved should be ashamed and unemployed, but instead they have good paying jobs with regular health insurance.

2. Why do local historical institutions tend to have boards and directors that are oblivious of standard museum practices and are completely detached from the professionalism of their underpaid staff? Oh, right. They know the rich people.

3. N.C. State Historic Sites continues to make the most baffling hiring decisions I have ever heard of. Dumb. Just, dumb. And that’s all I need to say about that.

Your Lizzie fix (fixed)

I'm just glad I have students like this

So in class yesterday one of my students who is prone to malapropisms was talking about yellow fever and how it came to America aboard ships engaged in the intergalactic slave trade. I laughed. A few other students laughed. He recognized his mistake and laughed. In study group later on, another student presented me with a drawing of what the intergalactic slave trade might look like. It featured the Death Star and Abraham Lincoln flying an abolitionist X-wing fighter. Below was a train. It was the intergalactic underground railroad. Haha. I told him that the Serenity from Firefly would have made the perfect ship for the intergalactic underground railroad, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. I out-nerded him on that one.

Yay

Vikki Bynum, one of my favorite historians and one of the most friendly people you can meet at a conference, has a blog and its all about internal strife in the Confederacy. Completely awesome.

Attn. history and historic site people

Here is an article from the N&O. The report it is based on is the second one listed here entitled "(In)visibility of the slave..." Read them and tell me what you think because I'm not certain how I feel about this.

I have a cunning plan

So my obsession this week is the new album from Chatham County Line and Jonas Fjeld, Brother of Song. To me, it is reminiscent of some of that contemporary bluegrass that WAMU used to play on Bluegrass Overnight on Saturday nights in the early 1990s. That, combined with the feistyness of ca. 2003 CCL. My Lumbee friend and I went to see them in Raleigh on Thursday. Great stuff. Chandler Holt is my favorite banjo player going.

Speaking of reminiscing about the good ol' days: I discovered that Youtube has all the old Blackadder episodes. I'm working through season 3 now, wondering if there is any possible way I can use these in class. Probably not.

Happy 200th Birthday Charles Darwin

Darwin
Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

all the rage

	Her Space Holiday - Sleepy Tigers
	Found at skreemr.com

Getting along

I am deaf, dumb, and blind without my laptop and an internet connection. But that’s fixed now.

Lizzie is fine. Her episode was most likely an ulcer or esophagitis or something like that. Sounds silly now, but when you don’t know if it’s that, or if she’s suffering strokes and neurological events, things aren’t so funny. That turned out to be a difficult week for me as I was beset by an anxiety/depression fit that cold knocked me out of my right mind. The dog triggered it, but it was also on top of financial problems, computer problems, car problems, and it exacerbated a bad start to one of my classes. Most of that is cleared up (but I still feel I’m digging myself out of a hole in that class) thanks to a few wonderful friends, and Xanax.

So I have a new laptop. One of the new 13” MacBooks. If I had an extra $500 laying around, I would have loved to have had one of the aluminum ones, but this one is just white. This is the Second Great Depression, after all. We each must suffer in our own way.

This thing has a built-in webcam so if you want to Skype me and have a completely useless conversation through small, bad, video, my username is whighill. Until then, I’ll be working my hardest to get this fancy clean keyboard all covered with peanut butter and beard hair.

ew.

Also, I do more Twittering than blogging these days, so you can check in here. Be prepared, though, I tend to cuss there.

Alright. I’ve started volunteer dj’ing over at WQFS, the station at Guilford College. I don’t have a show—just subbing right now—but I’ll be filling in Monday 2-4. Lucky for you, they’re not carried over the internet (yet), so you probably won’t be able to hear my mistakes. The funniest thing about all that was that in training, I did an hour-long metal show. Everything I said on air during that reeked of death and had an umlaut over it. It was awesome.

I can’t remember if that’s everything, but I got to get back to the books and papers.