It is Monday. Funny how that happens every week. I spent my weekend doing research for a paper I have due for school this coming Sunday. We have to write a collection development policy. This is week four of class and I have already determined that I do not want to be a collection development librarian. All librarians assist with collection development but there are some whose main job is selecting materials for the library.

At first I thought it must be like heaven because you’d get to spend a good part of the day reading reviews and other publishing materials and then putting in orders for new books and movies and what not. Now it doesn’t seem fun at all but rather tedious. Still, it is one of those core competencies one should have for the job market because you just never know. So if posting ends up being sporadic this week, it’s because I am writing a collection development policy for the Perseus Digital Library (it’s just an assignment, Tuft’s University will never see my policy).

Monday calls for something lighthearted I think such as College in a Nutskull compiled by Professor Anders Henriksson. This little gem arrived in the mail as an unsolicited review copy a little over a week ago. At first I thought it was just some annoying how to succeed in college manual and was going to put it on the pile of unwanteds to give away to friends, family and coworkers, when something caught my eye and I opened the book for a closer look. I am so glad I did!

Soon I found myself laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face and the cats were looking at me with concern – was I sad? was I having a fit? had I gone off the deep end? – they were prevented from investigating further because a squirrel was in the backyard and a squirrel is clearly more important.

College in a Nutskull turned out to be a compilation of some of the crazy things undergraduate college students have written in papers and on tests. It is an adventure in misspellings, misunderstanding, words that were not heard correctly during lecture and attempts at BSing their way through something they did not study for.

For instance, did you know that “in his best-selling book, Tabula Rasa, Locke taught that man was born as a blank sheep?” If you find that startling, just imagine my surprise when I learned that “Nietzsche frequently exposed himself to Richard Strauss.”

I was even more shocked to learn that “Impressionism took Paris under its arms and stroked it until it blushed.” But that’s nothing when we look at the artists themselves:

Monet did not like to paint indoors and so would sit with his weasel in nature.

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Too Loose Latreck could be found at work in cafes and brassieres throughout Paris.

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Chagall is hard to understand because he painted in Russian.

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Diego Rivera lived with Frito the Mexican Lady.

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Henry Moore specialized in blobs.

The section on English literature had me wondering what books I had been reading. I mean, I had no idea that

Shakespeare won the Nobel prize on several occasions. This makes you a nobel and involves being nightied by the Queen. It is very cool that Shakespeare decided to set Richard III in Nazi Germany.

When it comes to literary history I was happy to learn that “The concept of Romanticism was introduced by Romans studying English literature. Byron became King of the Rowmatics. His poem about Julia Child and the Pilgrims was extremely popular.” I’d love to read that poem. Anyone know where I can get a copy?

Had enough? The book goes on and on with language, history, political science, psychology, philosophy, geography and more. It is highly entertaining and great exercise for the diaphragm. In all of these bloopers, one student was brutally honest:

Some of these ideas are unfortunately too long for my attention spam.