Working away on figures for a paper that will hopefully be submitted soon.

My dissertation paper FINALLY came out. I've ordered a .pdf file for the reprints. I'm a bit upset because apparently my university's spam-catcher "caught" the proofs. And the publisher never called me when they didn't hear back. And now they're claiming that I gave them the wrong e-mail address. (I KNOW my own email address.)

I also haven't heard back on the .pdf file reprints, so I'm hoping that the order went through ok. It cost $107 to request the .pdf file on a CD-Rom.

I'v said it before, and I'll say it again: we pay huge bucks for journal subscriptions (and libraries get it even worse). We often pay page charges. We sign over copyright to the journal so if we want to re-copy our article for our own coursepack, we have to pay them a copyright fee. Yet, when I review articles for journals, I do it for free.

Someone must be getting rich on all of this. And it annoys me that there's money required at every stage of the process, yet it is a process required for those of us in the tenure track.

The joys of publishing. I just hope there aren't any horrific errors in the paper since the proofs were gone with the wind.

****

I also saw something at Mart of Wal this morning. And I preface this with the observation that I know I'm being nitpicky and old-fashioned and all that.

I did something I rarely do: I bought a donut. They have those big self-serve donut cases, you know? With the names of all the donuts on little signs?

Well, they had a shelf of "Bismarcks" (filled raised donuts. I knew them as filled with currant jelly but it seems a custard filling is more typical. And the currant-jelly ones may actually be Berliners.). These donuts are named, yes, for the German Chancellor.

But they also had a shelf of "Iced Persians." A sort of donut/cinnamon roll hybrid.

No, no, no, no. They are not "Persians." They are "Pershings." My understanding is that they were named that during WWI, after General Pershing. You know: Bismarcks (Germany) and Pershings (America). Kind of an early version of Freedom Fries. Or similar to "Liberty Kraut" which is what sauerkraut was renamed in WWI.

(And yeah, I know that Bismarck was not involved in WWI; he was dead by that time.)

And I totally realize that this is a point of minutia. I am probably the only one in my town who cares about it. But. It makes me sad to see that little point of reference dissolve, that little throwback to our past lost. (I suspect that if you polled a number of Wal-Mart employees and customers, more than half would not know who EITHER Pershing or Bismarck were.)

I tend to take things as too symbolic, but to me it's another winking out of a connection with our past, another loss of a reference to something. It's us being a little more unmoored, floating in an amorphous world where nothing connects to anything else, where all knowledge of things more than 10 years old is reduced to obscure questions in a trivia game.

(Okay, yeah. The Pershing/Bismarck/donut thing is trivia. But it makes me think of some of the history I learned - it's a little beacon that reminds me).

And I was tempted to tell someone to correct the signs. But I knew I'd get the eye-roll and brush-off, that I'd be like the Crazy Cat Lady gabbling something they didn't care about at them.

But, dammit, it's PERSHINGS. Not PERSIANS. True, neither one makes sense to be affiliated with a donut. But at least Pershing has the WWI history, the "doughboys" being greeted by the Red Cross volunteers with tubs of donuts - so that makes a little sense.

Of course, given the geopolitical attitudes that they tend to be in my neck of the woods, I suppose there are a lot of people who are more than happy to "bite" a "Persian."