Crankiness

First, the kind of crankiness you might expect: I am vexed, terribly vexed by continued craziness at my institution and by a certain electronic output by some of my colleagues, which has devolved into something from the bad old days of the UseNet. It's embarrassing. I wash my hands of it. I will no longer read or comment on it (in my lame attempts to raise the level of conversation to, uh, actual conversation about the subject of the posts). Oh, and some of you may remember that I held a last minute workshop for the parties involved to help them make it better -- more readable, more useful for their message, more interesting to a wider audience. ONE person showed up. And that person thought that only the registered bloggers could see it, so you can imagine the learning curve I was facing there.

Oy.

Can I just say, for those of you who know what I'm talking about, that there are a lot of fantastic people at my institution among the students, faculty, and staff -- fantastic thinkers and creative artists and teachers and scholars (from students to faculty) and researchers and visionaries and organized minds who keep it all going. But it's always the squeaky wheels who get heard.

In other cranky news, but not my *own* crankiness...

Did you know there are *two* Cranky Professors? Seriously, there's the medieval art historian, The Cranky Professor, whom I already knew. And then there's one in English, too! But she goes by the shortened nom-de-blog of Cranky Prof and blogs at Cranky Epistles. Who knew? Did you?

Why are we all so cranky?

Btw, the word "cranky" has now become completely weird to me. Does that ever happen to you -- that is, you say or write a word over and over and it becomes alien in the process?