Some Titles

What I’m reading.
  January 4, 2006

I am a glutton for knowledge.  I am also an extremely disorganized reader: I usually read four or five things at once.  This combination means I often consume articles and papers that hardly leave a trace in my memory, or at best make me terribly confused.  For example, impressions from studies on the low intelligence of incarcerated criminals and the mating habits of silver marmosets recently got me in trouble in a Brazilian jail.  I must be more careful in the future.

Towards this end, I have examined my reading matter over the last week.  Two things are immediately apparent: I have an eclectic taste, and many authors I read like to use colons in their titles.  To wit:

Linguistics: The Missing Participle.  A book restoring “shat” to its rightful place; the section surveying theories of onomatopoeic etymology is particularly groovy.

Eastern Philosophy: Ka-Ching: The Book of Small Change.

Medicine: Missing Foreskin: Managing Ghost Pains in Circumcised Populations.  Also treated: ghost headaches and ghost heartaches.

Western Philosophy: Futilité: une étude abandonnée.  The follow-up to Futilité: un exercice.

And my favorite, under psychology: The Calming Effects of Petting Dead Animals.  Abstract: “The soothing qualities of tactile contact with friendly animals are well known.  We set out to address an important question: does it matter if the petted animal is alive.  In a triple-blind study, control groups were given live cats, dead cats, and a placebo (hamsters).  The results have proved encouraging pending further embalming.”

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