in other weblogs

While post-family-trip insomnia rages:

1. I get caught up on my Wisconsin-sociology-graduate-student-weblogs and discover (a) that some information I have imparted to the Boring-Wishing-Women has turned a career-pessimistic-frown upside-down; (b) that Dorotha has a footnote that caused me to laugh out loud; and (c) that I am enamored with a recent discovery, Punch and Jude, which is surely the feistiest of all weblogs I've seen with to which sociology can make a claim to provenance.

2. I get caught up on my teensy list of friends-from-back-before-blogging-blogs and discover that my friend from Beauxbaton is claiming me as her only known reader. (It's not that she's driven all other readers away; her weblog is new.)

3. I get caught up on my fellow-sociologist blogs and see that Kieran Healy has addressed the new Astrosociology Craze. A couple of omissions from Kieran's post: He neglects to mention the Rastrosociology* movement, which is a joint effort of the fledgling Astrosociology section along with the recently-established (and for-real) Animals and Society section. He also does not mention my own effort to start a sososociology section, dedicated to providing a forum for projects about which sociological researchers are kind of enthusiastic, and kind of not (for projects that just feel like a lot of time wasted, there's always catastrosociology). It follows from the influential dinner party where I was told by a senior sociologist (not at UW) that there are really only two subspecialties in the discipline--CAN and CAN'T--and wanted to follow this up by organizing a CAN'T-sociology brownbag here at UW.** I was even willing to spring for CAN'T-area t-shirts and temporary tattoos, and to chair a CAN'T-sociology prelim, for which the reading list would consist entirely of unfinished work and itself be unfinished.

Incidentally, what I found strangest about the Astrosociology site, besides the issue of trying to present serious academic text on a starry background, is that the diagram and proferred questions presented on this page seems to describe a project that would seem otherwise epistemocartographically located squarely within fairly-old-school-sociology-of-science-and-technology. No disrespect to the effort or energies of its proposer, but the whole thing seems to me to be not so much reinventing the wheel as (re?)inventing a type of wheel and then seeming not really to recognize its wheel-hood.

4. Heading over the the Wisconsin Law Blogs, I find Ann taking a leisurely stroll, in which she links to some collegial posts while noting the absence of posts from the UW's only soc faculty blog. Meanwhile, on NinaNet, I can't help but feel some lineal pride as a happy exchange of links between the law-blogging and sociology-graduate-student-blogging world is made. Note that Nina and Ann continue to prolifically post great images, photographic and otherwise.

5. And, all the while, The Enthusiast lurks ardorfully in the shadows, but with JFW making a cameo appearance onstage in one recent episode. Is it just me, or does our heroine seem a little less enthusiastic in question #4 of this post, esp. when compared to the joys of Walgreens expressed just two questions later.

* Because I have been fretting lately that various TV-heritage sitcom references might be missed, this is a reference to The Jetsons.

** Presumably, organizing the brownbag would be easy work, as you'd expect it to be cancelled most weeks, if not all.