back in Cambridge

Gay and I are back in Cambridge for a couple of days, for a symposium on teaching writing, mostly science writing.  Interesting to be back in the old stomping grounds at an odd time of the year.  (We come to MIT to teach from September through December.  Since 1983.)

We went to an interesting movie last night, on a whim.  It's called MUD, and it's about people who live in same.  Bayou country.  Cute kids of all ages.  Drunken bad guys with shotguns, usually a bad combination.  Especially when you're slipping in the mud.  A pretty girl who stays out of the mud, usually.  Lots of poisonous snakes, some of them human.  Metaphors galors.

(In spite of all the muddy bayous, it's in Arkansas, not Louisiana.  I didn't know they even had bayous in Arkansas.)  (But then I don't have the faintest idea of what they do have there.  A state that encloses the name of another state?)  (Well, I guess West Virginia, sort of.)  (Enough parentheses!)

I was surprised, and pleased, to find that  a vast majority of the participants are female, most of them younger and more attractive than me.  You wouldn't expect that from the event's title, "Communicating Science 2013."  I think of science teachers as male and balding.  Wrong, wrong.

 Joe