Over the hump of the week?

Radio silence here largely due to the fact that I've been so frazzled that sharing was contraindicated!  Really I have just been disastrously busy from mid-February to late March, and I always pay the price in terms of insomnia and stress.  However I had a very useful day yesterday knocking things off a school-y to-do list; today's still busy with school stuff, but I then have four days completely clear of all obligations (Thursday-Sunday) and a lighter load than usual for next Monday, so I think I am finally going to be able to dig back in on the wretched novel, which has been fruitlessly calling for my attention in the face of an extremely demanding work schedule!

(Absolute priority once I clear this next bunch of deadlines and finish the teaching semester: lower stress levels!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jonathan Mahler's Kindle Single Death Comes to Happy Valley: Penn State and the Tragic Legacy of Joe Paterno (a bit luridly written as well as titled, and not reported from interviews but more like a synopsis of published sources, but informative and worthwhile); Barry Graham's The Book of Man; Lewis Shiner's Dark Tangos. 

Have also burned through most of the first two seasons of The Good Wife on the theory that it might be good if I spent evenings not just reading books so compulsively, but really good TV episodes are at least as addictive as light reading, so I am not sure that this is any kind of a solution.  Stayed up late last night reading the first half of Tim Parks's odd but compelling Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Guide to Health and Healing, recommended to me recently by a colleague to whom I was lamenting my lack of work-life balance.  (Afterwards, though, I realized that it's not really the right term: I don't want work-life balance, I just want to be able to work a lot and be calm and quiet the rest of the time!)

Bonus link: Lee Child's lessons for success.

Two bits

Learning to swim in the seventeenth century. (Via The Rumpus.)

At the TLS, a good piece by Toby Lichtig on the current state of vampirology

No bearing on reality

Virtually unprecedented week-long radio silence at Light Reading - I had no internet access at all over the weekend, and have barely been at a computer for the last couple days either. Lethally busy time of year! But a brief interruption in some frenetic last-minute commenting on student paper proposals to clear tabs, with a promise of some more posts over the next couple days:

Sam Amidon performs his lovely cover of R. Kelly's "Relief" (worth watching the whole 7+ minutes - that song is the second one he sings).

Stephen Covey moves e-book rights directly to Amazon for one year. (I could use a re-read of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People!)

Album of obscene Gillray drawings surfaces in archives of the former Home Office.

Unfortunately a subscription is required to read this wonderful and worrying article about the precarious future of the Adélie penguin by Fen Montaigne at the New Yorker. I saw only one Adélie the whole time I was in Antarctica, out of many thousands (tens of thousands?) of penguins - in that part of the continent, the chinstrap and gentoo penguins really have almost completely displaced the Adélies, which cannot breed in warming climes. The audio slide-show does not require a subscription - take a look at these pictures!