30 December 2010

Year in Review

A none-too-fond glance back at calendar year twenty-oh-ten:

  • Courses taught: 4

  • Students taught: 206

  • Number of undergraduates among them: 191

  • Number of those undergraduates older than my cat: 3

  • Amount of respect I can have for students born after 1990: 0

  • Plagiarists busted: 3

  • New books published in hardback: 2

  • Old books published in paperback: 2

  • Old books published in audiobook format: 1

  • Highest Amazon.com ranking for any of those books: 110

  • Lowest Amazon.com ranking for any of those books: 4,959,391

  • Articles published: 6

  • Book reviews published: 12

  • Journal volumes published: 1

  • Articles and reviews edited, copy edited, and proofread: 71

  • Typescripts of new books delivered to publishers: 1

  • Single-spaced pages of notes accumulated for the next trade project: 574

  • New book contracts received: 2

  • Nights in which I got an adequate amount of sleep: 0

  • Conferences attended: 6

  • Presentations delivered: 3

  • Estimated expense of travel, lodging, and registration at these conferences: $1,600

  • Conference trips paid for, in whole or in part, by Rutgers: 0

  • Amount spent on two taxi rides in a single week in April: $395

  • Expert opinions delivered in legal cases: 2

  • Radio interviews to flog The Lexicographer's Dilemma: 5

  • Letters of recommendation written: 22

  • Letters written for promotion and tenure cases: 4

  • Anonymous referee's reports on scholarly books: 7

  • Anonymous referee's reports on scholarly articles: 11

  • Hours wasted in pointless committee service: 1.3 x 1024

  • Visits to hospital emergency rooms: 3

  • Encounters with boneheaded doctors who made my condition far worse, in one case requiring an additional trip to the emergency room: 2

  • Tracks newly added to my iPod: 10,012

  • Number of days it would take to hear those songs, listening around the clock: 28.5

  • Estimated ounces of tea drunk: 4,380

  • Estimated milligrams of pure caffeine in that tea: 46,538

  • Estimated ounces of wine drunk: 2,950

  • Estimated ounces of pure alcohol in that wine: 369

  • Number of Four Lokos it would take to get the same buzz, for caffeine and alcohol respectively: 298, 128

  • Inadequately acknowledged ripoffs of Harper's Index: 1