On the 3rd November, 2011, I had the pleasure and privilege to attend Brian Lobel's performance, "BALL and Other Funny Stories About Cancer" on the 10th anniversary of his diagnosis with testicular cancer. The performance consisted of the three pieces, "BALL", "Funny Stories About Cancer" and "An Appreciation". I wanted here to briefly jot some thoughts about the experience. First off, no part of the title contributes towards a misnomer.

Send your own to customer-feedback@bl.uk. Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to express my anger at the closure of the British Library, a publicly-funded building, on the 10th of November in order to accommodate the visit of the queen. This is a clear case of prioritizing a single individual at the expense of the thousands who use your facility on a daily basis and is a flagrant waste of taxpayers' money. 1.) The queen has no work to do here.

This is a bit of a spoilsport post, but I wanted to set down, in writing, some of the reasons that I am extremely wary of the #AcBoWriMo experiment that is currently underway on Twitter. #AcBoWriMo stands for Academic Book Writing Month.

...slightly misleading title; obviously, that doesn't work. I have an OCZ RevoDrive SSD which, although very fast, has some serious problems with my BIOS. The consequence is that GRUB cannot see the device (well, it can, but only after a 15 minute de-power cycle), but Linux can. This causes some headaches. The way I worked around this was to put /boot on a separate partition and have the root filesystem on the SSD.

Today is international Open Access Week and, in celebration and to raise awareness, I gave a talk and workshop at the University of Sussex for a cross-discipline audience. I was pleasantly surprised this year at the acceptance of an open culture and intrinsic understanding of the benefits of openness, both in monetary and permissive terms.

On my latest, but numerically beyond-counting, read-through of Gravity's Rainbow , it suddenly struck me that the Fred and Phyllis referenced on page 711: "(who's that tapping and giggling at your door, Fred and Phyllis?)" are none other than Pynchon's long-standing friends Fred and (the late) Phyllis Gebauer.

I had reservations about doing so, but I finally ordered the "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings all the Boys to the Yard" T-Shirt from T-Shirt Hell. I loved the shirt from day 1, but wanted to discuss the issues surrounding this. But you're male. And? This is one of the strangest responses I've yet encountered.

An interesting problem here... Reading for the first year course I'm teaching this week asked the students to read John Donne's Holy Sonnets 14 &

Although arguably a philosopher of his time, Michel Foucault is probably the thinker whose work has had the greatest impact upon me, academically. I first encountered his works in the third year of my undergraduate studies and his revolutionary thinking blew me away. From studies of madness, through the prison system to sexuality, his ability to take conventional wisdom and stand it on its head showed me the power of critical thought.

There was once a man named Werritty, Pal of the defense secretary, But he let down the side, Now it can't be denied, That it's all turned Foxy and Ferrety. Featured image by Kat... under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. The Werritty Feasel was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on October 12, 2011.

About half an hour before the official announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011 (which was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer) reports started circulating on Twitter that the winner was, controversially, the Serbian author, Dobrica Cosic. The source was http://www.nobelprizeliterature.org, which looked like this: Smelling a rat, as the official site is nobelprize.org, I decided to check it out.