The big show

Tomorrow will see the first day of the academic conference for which I am a co-chair and which I’ve been helping put together for the last six months or so.  We have people coming from all points of the compass to deliver papers on topics roughly related to the subject of exhumation and the revisiting of the past, and, barring a few hiccups here and there, everything seems to be running smoothly.  It took this long to plan it because we were slow and inexperienced.  If we do it again, things will be much more streamlined indeed.

I’ll be scarce tomorrow as I have been today and yesterday.  This bothers me somewhat, of course, because I’d rather be writing.

Still, this is the job.  It will be a good deal of fun as well as a good deal of bother, but it’s only on for two days and then I can go back to what I usually do (nothing).

The latest thing

In a move that will in no sense lead to problems and abuse and easily-predicted trouble, my university has introduced a new system that will allow faculty and other employees to “report quickly, anonymously and in complete confidence any incidents of theft, misappropriation of funds, falsification of documents, vandalism, unethical behaviour, etc.”  The job of administering this system has been farmed out to a company that specialises in such things, so it won’t even have the potential mitigation of being “kept in-house,” as it were.

It is a bad and dangerous idea.