I figured out the bug, thanks to my Audubon insect guide book.

It's a Giant Water Bug, also known as a Toe-biter or Electric-Light Bug.

Toe-biter because apparently it can and does inflict painful bites on people who are wading in water where it's found. And Electric-Light bug because it's attracted to electric lights. (Boy howdy, I'd not want to find a bunch of those flying around my porch light).

There's also a Chronicle article that's causing a little bit of a flap - the (anonymous, interestingly enough) author suggests that people in academia should not keep blogs, because if they apply for a position somewhere, the search committee might just (as the anonymous author did when he was on a search committee) track down the blog and see if the person is a "nutcase" or "strident" or any other varieties of personality quirk that might make them unemployable. (Anonymous writer claims they never rejected anyone solely on the basis of their blog, but how do you know for sure)?

I don't know. I'm conflicted about this.

Part of me wants to scream "We're people too! We deserve to have lives and opinions too!" and adamently blog away. (I do tend to pseudonymize people and I don't write about the things that really hack me off. And I don't gossip about colleagues or students here.)

The other thing is - trolling a blog for evidence of personality quirks? That seems kind of devious. For a lot of writers, the blog is like a safety valve - it's where they put a lot of the stuff they know they wouldn't talk about. Just because you say "I had a cruddy day" on your blog doesn't mean you're depressed. (I would argue just the opposite).

I've served on a number of search committees, and I will say this: I would feel very uncomfortable -oogy, skeevy, whatever you want to say - tracking down someone's online blog secretly to read about them as part of making my decision of whether to hire or not. I think that kind of thing - like a person's religion, weight, family status, gender, race - should be off the table when it comes to hiring. I'd no more ask for copies of letter the candidate sent to his or her mom than I would try to find anything they wrote anonymously or semi-anonymously online.

I will say it sounds like in some cases the applicant PROVIDED the blogaddress to the search committee. In that case, I would only consider reading the blog if it in some way played a role in what they would be doing for us - for example, if it were an edu-blog of someone who was going to work with the people in Teacher Ed, or a research blog of someone doing research. But other than that, I really have no interest in knowing the interior monologue of a person we're going to hire. I trust our search committees to weed out the troublesome folks during the interview process.

I do think tracking down a blog - especially if it's anonymous or semi-so - using Mad Cyber Skillz so you can spy on your applicants is pretty cruddy. It's like calling up people who worked with them but who were not listed as references to get the "inside scoop." (Sometimes you just have to take a chance on an applicant and trust that they're mostly OK. Sometimes it backfires, sometimes it does not.)

And I really don't like the idea of tracing a total "paper trail" so you have every post a person made on a bulletin board site, or every comment they left on someone else's blog, etc. That seems too much like hiring a private investigator to follow someone.

I think faculty - even untenured faculty, even job applicants - should be allowed a certain freedom of speech and opinion. I also think, from my experience with search committees, that the most telling thing (beyond reading the application and checking references) is the interview. I remember voting down one candidate in particular because, as I said at the time, "he's a total ego case and I think he sees us as a stepping-stone to something bigger and better for him. I don't think he'd take the job seriously, and I think he'd rub a lot of the students the wrong way." Could I have told that from reading a blog the guy had written? I doubt it.

There's also the implication in the article that blog-reading can weed out people with "personality quirks." I laugh because I have yet to find a university faculty - in any department - that is not filled with people that fit the whole bell-shaped-curve of personality - from the people who are so shy in person that they're barely verbal, to the ones who come across like used-car salesmen, to the people that you suspect of being borderline autistic, to the people who are total empaths, to the people who are like the worst DI the Marines ever had, to people who are so wimpy you're afraid of criticizing anything they do lest they melt down, to people who are cold fish, to people that you have to pry off you because they're so touchy-feely...and on, and on. I've got my odd personality quirks but so do all of my colleagues. And you know what? That's ok. We tolerate or in some cases celebrate our personality differences. It would be a boring life if we were all right within one standard deviation of average.

But then again, I do admit to a bit of nervousness. I'd die just a little bit inside, I think, if a colleague (or worse, a student) walked up to me and said, "So, are you that Fillyjonk person? She sounds awfully like you and you have the same first name" I don't think I'd quit the blog but I'd sure self-censor a hell of a lot more. (I already self-censor a fair amount; there have been more times than I'd like to admit of thinking about something I posted in the morning, getting into a cold sweat about it, and taking it down or editing it that evening at 9 pm).

The main thing that worries me, though, is that this is a KNITTING blog - I talk a little about teaching and research here but most of the focus is on my hobbies. And I wonder, could the powers that be look at my little blog and go, "Oh, she's way too unserious, she doesn't devote enough of her waking hours to working for us" (which is probably true; I could be a much more active researcher than I am and I could devote every Saturday - rather than every other one - to being in the lab or the field). The other thing that concerns me is that yeah, I do my posting during the day. I do it on my breaks between classes - my office hours, you know? Those time I'm supposed to be available to students? I post sometimes when no students are coming in. Yeah, yeah, I could be reading journals or writing labs or rewriting research or entering data - and that's what worries me a little, that someone might look at the timings of things and add it up and think I never work. (Although I do work harder and longer hours than some people I know...)

I'm also worried that someone in the administration will begin to view blogs as like letters-to-the-editor. It's kind of unclear whether that's frowned upon or not (because we Represent The University even if we speak only for ourselves), and I can see blogs as being seen as similar.

I guess my main worry if someone tracks me down - which is unlikely because this doesn't pop up on google or other search engines I've tried under my name - is that they will look at the blog and go "gee, you spend an awful lot of time knitting...and not much time doing anything else." Which isn't true, really, but I can see how one might get that idea. Or that I'm unserious because I knit and quilt.

I don't know. I don't like the idea of my perosnal life always having to be 100% congruous with my professional life; I'd die more than a little bit if I had to give up knitting or quilting to devote more time to research.

That said:

I love my job!
I spent almost all day yesterday working on research!
I hope to have a couple journal articles (peer-reviewed) published soon!
If you're evaluating my performance as an academician, nothing more to see here! Move along!