Wednesday triple threat.

* The Gervais Principle for corporate organization.



* Congratulations to John Glenn High School for an absolutely 100% legitimate victory over hated rivals Plymouth Wildcats.

* Neilalien explores the monster-carrying-unconscious-woman visual trope with a series of links.

Other stuff:

* Duke swine flu Patient Zero located. Get your torches and pitchforks and meet me by the Chapel.

* NPR is having a microfiction contest, no entry fee (but no real prize either). I've already entered more than 1,300 times.

* Trailer for Ricky Gervais's SFish comedy "The Invention of Lying" about a universe where no one has ever thought to lie.

* What is a master's degree worth? My advice to students in the humanities, as always, is to stay away unless they're paying you to go. Don't miss the structural analysis from Columbia's Mark C. Taylor:

The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble. What people outside the education bubble don’t realize and people inside won’t admit is that many colleges and universities are in the same position that major banks and financial institutions are: their assets (endowments down 30-40 percent this year) are plummeting, their liabilities (debts) are growing, most of their costs are fixed and rising, and their income (return on investments, support from government and private donations, etc.) is falling.

This is hardly a prescription for financial success. Faced with this situation, colleges and universities are on the prowl for new sources of income. And one place they invariably turn is to new customers, i.e., students.

* Also on the academic front is this on the split between reading and writing in English departments from the always insightful Marc Bousquet, at the Valve. Welcome to my future, everyone:

As of Fall 2007, contingent faculty outnumber the tenure stream by at least 3 to 1, roughly the inverse of the proportions forty years earlier. Across the profession, this trend line will drive the percentage of tenure-stream faculty into single digits within twenty years. It is hard to imagine that the trend line for English could be worse--but it is-- and the outlook for literature is worse yet. A 2008 MLA analysis of federal IPEDS data (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) shows that between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole.

However, in terms of absolute numbers most disciplines actually gained a modest number of tenure-track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5 percent new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43 percent. English, however, lost over 3,000 tenure-track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than one in every 10 tenurable positions in English — literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued — and all indications are that it has — by early 2010 English will have shed another 1,500 lines.

I just thank God I have an MFA to fall back on.

Miscellany.

* Republicans have successfully transitioned from passively rooting for Obama to fail to actively sabotaging the economy. Well done, fellows.

* Views from the other universe: Ricky Gervais v. Elmo.

* Lots of people are linking to "the fifteen strangest college courses in America." Maybe this just demonstrates how far out of the mainstream Duke Lit is, but most of these seem perfectly cromulent to me.

* The economics of March Madness: how excessive spending on sports is a money-loser for nearly every Division I school. Marc Bousquet was right!

Whether by pure chance or divine plan, a couple of stories about childhood atheism and/or conversion to atheism ran across my screen yesterday.

* Ricky Gervais
* Calvin & Hobbes
* Julia Sweeney

In varying ways the story of my own "conversion" has affinities with each of these three; I think I've told it somewhere on the Internets before. There's really two stories. The first is the night when I was five or so and figured out that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and all the rest didn't exist, in a row, one after another. The second is a few years later, eleven or twelve years old and obscenely terrified of death because I didn't really believe in God anymore. My parents, eventually fed up with my panic, took me to see our local priest, who gave me a couple of metaphors to chew on and told me I should pray for guidance.

So I did, and when I was done, I realized I'd been talking to myself.

The music video for Coparck's "A Good Year for the Robots" is great fun. Via Tor, which rightly says the video is "part Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and part the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz," but misses the third inspiration: Ricky Gervais's The Office.

Taking care of a little link business.

* How to Organize an Insurrection: tips from the protestors in Greece. (Via Vu.)

* It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. Via Kevin Drum.

* Fimoculous's 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008. #31 for the second year running!

* Burris bags benighted Blago embrace. Democrats demur.

* Jim Webb will introduce legislation to beat back the prison-industrial complex.

* The case for Caroline Kennedy. I find this interesting because it's a completely ends-based analysis, the only field in which I think Kennedy's potential appointment has merit. She will be probably a good senator from my perspective and probably (yes) advantageous for New York—but she just doesn't deserve the nod. The Senate's not the House of Lords.

* The 1,000 Greatest Films of All Time. Subset: The 250 Greatest Films of the Last Eight Years. Via MeFi.

* Also from MeFi: an improbable defense of the suburbs from a most-probable place.

* Franken... wins?

* "Golden Years": A pre-Office one-off from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

* "Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House." 22 days remain.

The headline reads, "Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's 'Missing' Testicle." See also: this Ricky-Gervais-approved German Office parody.

Closing a few open tabs.

* The New York Times has an article on Fermi problems and the importance of intuition in mathematics. (There's a game.) (Via Boing Boing.) Kottke links to some such calculations at 3quarksdaily, saying they used to be part of the interview process of Microsoft and Google.

* Roger Ebert explains why some people say he gives movies too many stars.

* The new season of the Ricky Gervais podcast is out.

* More radio: an episode of This American Life from May that explains the origins of the mortgage crisis.

* And Bill Gates is investing heavily in algae fuel. We're saved!

Thursday joke remainders.

* An intellectual was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. "Don’t cry," he consoled them, "I have freed you all in my will." Old jokes.

* And John McCain's problem with old jokes, blogged here the other day, is actually getting some media attention: Ben Smith wrote it up at the Politico this week.

* Ricky Gervais has announced on his This Side of the Truth filming blog that Karl Pilkington has finally agreed to a fourth and presumably final series of The Ricky Gervais Show podcast.

Leading off this lovely Tuesday linkdump is Barack Obama's college poetry. (Thanks, Tim!) Also in what I loosely refer to as the news:

* Strange Maps tracks the path of a shipment of plastic yellow duckies that fell off their transport in 1992 and still turn up in surprising places. Paging Ze Frank...

* Marginal Revolutions has fun naming ethics papers.

* Bitter Laughter has the sad story of the Rainbow Man.

* And hulu has the original Japanese inspiration for The Office, a surreal and characteristically too-long SNL skit to which there is little to add but Ricky Gervais's own valedictory remarks: "It's funny because it's racist."

Colbert has an update on the superhuge terror list I blogged about a few weeks ago: it turns out notorious freedom-hater Nelson Mandela is on it.



Here's a BBC report with more.

The Victorian freakshow never went away—now it's called Big Brother or American Idol, where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be snickered at by multimillionaires. Andy Millman's rant on celebrity culture from the end of the Extras Christmas special, which wasn't quite as strong an ending as I might have hoped after the stellar second season but which deserves much more attention than the very little it's getting. He's also just announced his and Stephen Merchant's next project: a film about twentysomethings in a small town "where the sexual revolution didn't hit" who have to decide whether or not to stay or to run.

The final, eighty-minute episode of Ricky Gervais's increasingly brilliant Extras will premiere on HBO on December 16. Here's a trailer that highlights the feature's dramatic potential—"We've made a TV movie, really, on a sitcom budget; value for money"—and here's a nice profanity-laden rant.