Frazzled Fraggle

It's all starting to catch up to me, and I'm becoming extremely frazzled. As of today, I have exactly three weeks to revise my dissertation and get it to my committee before the defense! I plan to send off the introduction by tomorrow, but I expect that to require a lot of revisions once I get feedback. Urgh. The good news is that "frazzled" sounds kind of like "fraggle." Try saying "frazzled fraggle" three times fast! At least it will make you smile.

Here's a fearful fraggle:

Now...what cute thing sounds like "frantic"? Because I'm pretty sure that's how I'll be feeling next week!

Palaeography is the BEST*

Today began just like every other day: depressed about the state of the Humanities and its imminent collapse. Until! I saw this THRILLING article in the Washington Post Magazine!

Here's the intro:

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In the Sinai, a global team is revolutionizing the preservation of ancient manuscripts

View Photo Gallery — A treasure hunt in the Sinai: What secrets lie in the world’s oldest library?

By Mark Schrope, Published: September 6

MOUNT HOREB, Egypt — Michael Toth points at a computer screen filled with what seems to be a jumble of Arabic and Greek letters.
To get to this jumble, he has traveled from Washington to an isolated, fortress-like monastery in the middle of the Sinai Desert, home to the oldest continuously operating library on the planet.
He has helped assemble a global team of scientists that arrived with cutting-edge technology at this spot, three hours by taxi from the nearest commercial airport.
The image he has paused to appreciate is one of a steady stream coming from the room next door, where a high-definition camera is focused on one of the monastery’s rare and priceless ancient manuscripts. The manuscript rests in a cradle that looks like a chair tilted back at an angle, but with hydraulic lines and strange lights attached.
One more room over, in the makeshift command center, specialists are scrutinizing the day’s results, and the monastery’s head librarian, a wispy gray beard to his stomach, waits in a red velvet chair for the next request to turn a fragile manuscript page.
“This is the first time since the 9th century that anyone has seen this,” Toth says of hints of text below the more visible words.
The first time since the era of Viking invasions and Charlemagne.
The more prominent legible words are 1,200 years old and are interesting enough, but they are not what the scientists are here for. The team is really after the overwritten text from centuries earlier, last seen by the person who scraped it away to recycle the precious animal-skin parchment.
Such erased texts are known as palimpsests, and until their pages enter the imaging room, no one alive now or, in many cases for more than a millennium, can say for sure what has been hidden. The work is tedious, like carefully brushing away sand at a traditional archaeology dig, but the promise of what can be found is a powerful motivator.
This is Toth and his colleagues’ most ambitious project to date, and it is just one component of a major transformation under way in the desert. The team is working within the stone walls of the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai — St. Catherine’s for short.
For 17 centuries, the Greek Orthodox Christian monks here have protected an unparalleled trove of manuscripts. Now the monastery is in a multimillion-dollar push to physically and digitally protect its treasures and make them easily accessible, in most cases for the first time, to scholars around the world.
In the process, the monks will establish a model for the preservation of irreplaceable ancient manuscripts in a world where more and more of them are threatened by the chaos of war and revolution.
“Working with this stuff is an amazing privilege,” Toth says.

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Technology! Mystery! Palimpsests! Libraries! Monks! NEW TEXTS! Lack of electricity! WHO NEEDS FICTION WHEN THIS IS REAL????

Read the rest here. Kudos to WaPo for publishing something so nerdly and awesome. Now back to my regularly scheduled rage.

*Palaeontology is pretty cool, too.

update your idioms, everyone

While refilling my tank at the gas station the other day, I was eavesdropping on the man on the other side of the pump. He was talking on his cell phone, and where I would've used the phrase "it was like walking on egg shells," he said, "it was like walking on potato chips!"

Brilliant! Next time I'm talking to a college student who clearly has more experience with dirty apartments than cooking brunch, I'll know what phrase to use. ;)