Today I am physically, emotionally, and intellectually exhausted. I didn’t think I would be able to post anything today for lack of any ability to string words together, but a few bits of information in the blogosphere today prompt me to talk about them. So, a hodgepodge random of bits:

It’s good to be plump. Good news for those of us who are carrying a little extra weight; it appears that our risk of death is less than those who are at a supposed optimum weight. So obesity remains a not great thing, but a few extra pounds? Cushioning. Just like I always thought.

From the “here we go again” file: Texas decides that gay and bisexual people can’t be foster parents. “It is our responsibility to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable children and I don’t think we are doing that if we allow a foster parent that is homosexual or bisexual.” Good to see we’ve all got our priorities straight. No pun intended.

Unrelated note: I am completely fascinated by every little piece of journalism dedicated to Pope Benedict. Every animated news header and every paragraph of news and interpretation has had 100% of my attention.

A new way to spend our time: the RPG wiki. You and your friends go letter by letter through the alphabet defining things of your choice, pretending to be historians of an era that doesn’t exist. I could get into this.

Preparing for the election. The sponsorship scandal is confusing, complicated, and the details will take months to expose and sort through. How anyone is even slightly surprised about it I have no idea. But I will never, ever forgive the Liberals if their behaviour provokes a premature election and the prime ministership of a certain Stephen Harper. I will blame them for that.

Another unrelated note: an unknown visitor ran a search for ‘panties’ on my blog. I find this disturbing. I prefer the term underpants.

Ipods and education. I have found myself talking about ipods in the classroom lately, and I have to say, I’m not convinced they should be there. Everyone’s talking about their amazing ability to record lectures and interviews, but no one seems to mention the fact that ipods are not actually designed to record. They need an extra piece, called an italk, in order to record anything. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to give students a tape recorder and a walkman? How about burning lectures to a cd and handing those out? How about streaming audio content for students, or, to be even more hi-tech, set up a system where students can offer up their own content for streaming? What is so educational about the portability of an ipod? Or is this all a big marketing ploy to get students to come to their schools? I love my ipod, don’t get me wrong. I would be loath to ever exist without one. But I’m still not sold on the educational angle here, folks.

Librarian in black may be the first to convince me that there’s something useful in this hot new plugin, Jybe. Jybe enables co-browsing, something that makes me a little nervous. But since this sort of co-browsing seems to be more co- than the forced browsing model some v-ref software companies put forward, I can maybe get down with Jybe. Collaborative web browsing might be interesting.Distant Librarian is still reporting issues with the software, however. I’ll have to try it out to see.