Sop to feelings

Yeah, I'm still not happy and not that functional given my low sleep. (test for Thursday has been completed, though, and soon it's on to grading).

But. I received an e-mail from the alumni association at my grad school offering a pair of Redbird Socks with a $25 donation. I couldn't resist them. That's "classic Reggie," the mascot from when I started there (he goes back as far as 1983, apparently). They changed him, partway through my time there, to what I think of as "Aggro Reggie".

Neither Reggie is anatomically accurate. Classic Reggie is a redbird (cardinal) smiling and giving the thumbs-up. (Birds don't have thumbs). But there was something endearing about him to me, I thought he had to be older (maybe of 1970s vintage) with the whole thumbs-up thing. I wasn't happy when they changed to Aggro Reggie (you can see him, in side view, on top of that page).

I wasn't the only one.

I don't think I have a copy of it any more but one of my fellow biology grad students wrote one of the most beautiful letters-to-the-editor about Reggie. Actually, it was about our motto change, not the change to Aggro Reggie. For years, we had a translation of a snippet from the Canterbury Tales: "And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Which was deemed sexist, and needed to be replaced.

What it was replaced with: "Gladly we learn and teach." I'm sorry, I don't like that. For one thing, it's not a quotation from anything, and for another, it's very very Romper Room in my mind - it sounds like what a pre-K teacher would say to their class. I mean, would be be so hard to find something appropriate in Latin or Greek, or even from some other published work?

Anyway, my colleague was not happy so he proposed alternate mottoes, each one more ridiculous than the last. The best, and concluding, one was: "ISU: We've got a bird with thumbs." Which later on some of us amended to "We've got a bird with teeth" when Aggro Reggie made the scene (which, if you're even a little bit of an evolutionary biologist, is doubly funny).

But yeah. Not as much a fan of Aggro Reggie as I am of Happy Thumbs-Up Reggie.

So I donated $25 to their Nursing school in order to get a pair of the socks. I may never be brave enough to wear them (I don't think I ever wore the Rainbow Dash socks I bought from Think Geek outside the house) but I like the idea of having them.

I also think it's mildly funny the site is called GoRedbirds.com, which of course written out in standard all lowercase protocol looks more like gored birds......which could often be a descriptor of what (figuratively speaking) happens to the school's sports teams.