Deadlines make life so much more interesting. Especially if you have a tendency to forget about them until a short while before they are there.

Thanks to my good luck, I got reminded early on - so I now have more or less plenty of time left to write my article (another one about the spinning experiment, but with slightly different detail information). Though today and tomorrow will sort of not be spent working on the article, at least not much, since I'm off to Prague castle to look at textiles and meet with a dear colleague there.

Though I am planning to get some reading for the article done during the journey. And since I'll be away until tomorrow, there will be no blog post. Here, at least, is a link to the photogallery of Prague Castle.

Anne McCaffrey, sf writer, died of a stroke on Monday. Locus online has an obituary, and I found out about it via ADM's blog post.

Anne McCaffrey was the writer that first made me really realise how different it is to read an English novel in the original from reading its German translation. I bought my first McCaffrey book - one from the Brain/Brawn series - on a bicycle holiday with my parents, and I loved it. With another of her books, I found that the German translation had lost all the appeal that came with her style of writing... and that convinced me to read books by English-language authors in the original, no matter what.


Then, for a while, she was my favourite author. I was in my teens, and her stories were just what I wanted: tales of love and conflict and glorious partnerships (between humans and dragons, humans and human-ish starships, humans and a living planet, and humans and humans). And all of them with a sort of happy ending guarantee. That was back in the days when it was not so easy to get your hands onto English language books in Germany, and I ordered them in via our local bookshop. With a considerable markup on the cover price in that procedure, I left quite a bit of money there.

Over the following years, my tastes gradually changed and evolved, and other authors took first place in my personal ranking. I stopped buying new books she wrote, instead turning to other tales - not so much guarantee for happy endings, not so many obvious storylines, and vastly different styles. Today, I usually tell people they are "Badewannenbücher" (bathtub books) - books that usually have more appeal to females than to males, a kind of story that you take into the bathtub with you for comfort reading when you are feeling down, with a non-taxing storyline and non-taxing style of writing, and something you don't mind too much if a splash of bath water gets onto it. (And there's nothing wrong with bathtub books - life would be much, much poorer without them.)

My sizeable stack of Anne McCaffrey books is still something I look at and remember my teenage days, my discovery of novels written in English. Even though I don't read them often anymore, they will stay - for the occasional day where I need to get into the tub with a book, or a friend does. And because Anne McCaffrey's books are an important part of my own history as a reader.

Rest in peace, Anne McCaffrey - and thank you for your books.

The Olde Yellow Press, medievalists.net, has posted a link to an article by Geoff Egan about medieval miniature toys. It's just a short little article, but hinting at the fact that some things about childhood just do not change.

And if you are not sure why I call them the Olde Yellow Press... click here.

Last week, a friend sent me a link to a blog that I had never heard of before - with an article about why Indiana Jones is not getting tenured. Which he discovers when he comes back from yet another globetrotting adventure and checks his mail.

I can recommend reading it if you like weird archaeologists, Indiana Jones, non-weird archaeologists (do they even exist) or are involved in academia and tenure stuff. Or if you are feeling bored. Or if you are sure that you like the kind of humor I like. Or... oh, go and think of your own reasons. Or not.

If you are interested in medieval material culture, you will surely have heard about the IMAREAL - an Austrian institute that did a lot of research and made a lot of publications about that topic. The IMAREAL also includes several helpful databases, among them the picture database REAL online - which you probably also know. (If not, you should. It's huge and immensely helpful.)

All this institute is part of a larger organisation, the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austrian Academy of Sciences). This is a rather large Academy - in fact it's the largest non-university establishment for research in Austria - and it's an important employer for scientists in social and historical fields as well. 905 people* including admin staff work there, and I have at least two friends who are employed by them.

However, this is about to change. There has been a "Performance Agreement" (that never bodes well, does it?) between the ÖAW and the Ministry for Science and Research in Austria, signed on November 4.
This agreement paves the way for a large budget reduction and, consequently, for the loss or closure of many demonstrably excellent and internationally acclaimed research organisations. With these, up to 300 full-time staff members may have to go between 2012 and 2014.

That's about one third of employees! Such drastic employee cuts are unprecedented in Austrian
history since 1945.  The current economic climate does not serve to justify this severity, and cuts on this scale have not been made in any other areas.
Since third-party funding totaling approx. 22 Mio. Euro was acquired by employees, who now stand to lose their jobs, further negative impacts are foreseeable.  This amounts to a sustainable destruction of knowledge and infrastructure. 

There is a petition online to protest against these budget cuts and the subsequent loss of jobs. The petition page linked is in German, but there is a full English translation available on the page as well, with a translation of the field names and confirmation email you will get (link opens .pdf file). It is even possible to sign anonymously, if you do not wish your name to appear. If you want to go directly to the signing page, just click the red button below.




Please help by signing and passing on the information about this petition - it will only run for 54 more days. If everyone who uses the REAL online database signs, they might be in for a surprise...

* This may not sound much if you have large businesses at the back of your mind - but for social or historical sciences, it's oodles.

And that is guarantee for an exciting spectacle of frost rims on spiderwebs. Like on this bit of spire sage...


... which is all of the blog post you will be getting for now, since I am fresh out of inspiration and need some more coffee before I tackle today's stack of things to do...

Yesterday was a deliciously work-free day, since I went to my parents' house to help celebrate my Gran's 90th birthday. So instead of shuttling back and forth the bits and bytes on my computer, I was shuttling cakes and coffee and having way too many bites of my own.

Milestone birthdays (we in Germany call full decade birthdays "runder Geburtstag", literally "round birthday) are always something else - but now I can tell you: once you turn 90, you can really get a party on! More people stopped by or came for the birthday than I can remember for the last ones, and my Gran thoroughly enjoyed herself. And I did, too - plus I can now have lovely leftovers for breakfast...