slash and burn

1. I got a haircut today. Much shorter. I think one of the reasons I've taken to procrastinating on getting my hair cut in the last couple years is that the final spin around with the mirror, where I'm supposed to be checking out how the haircut looks in back, is the principal occasion on which I distressingly monitor the creep of my bald spot back there.

2. I started this morning with 157 messages in my inbox. This is even with reading and deleting some messages while I was travelling. I'm now down to 10, including handling the e-mails that I received today. Of course, accomplishing this has taken the lion's share of today. And even as I type this I've just heard the beep of another message arriving. I recently was part of an e-mail exchange where one person (a senior professor at another university) had the following in his signature file: "WARNING: Email remains an inefficient way to reach me. Delays of weeks or months in responding to messages are routine." It struck me that this would probably work better as a permanent vacation message than a signature file message, as people won't get it until the response comes weeks or months later, although maybe he does have it as an autoresponder as well.