Food:Space

-Pff. "Paris's Tiniest Kitchen"? The sink and desk in my dorm room - plus whatever part of a communal kitchen I can claim at any given time - win this one. And it's not just me - lots of us here, grad and undergrad, French and fern alike, cook despite conditions far less favorable than a studio kitchen. But when ingredients are spectacular and inexpensive - a trip to the Bon Marché food hall will set you back less than one to a dreary Whole Foods - space is irrelevant. Or so says last night's 3-euro pavé de rumsteck.

-It has happened. I'm sick of croissants. I'm also now living in a room so far from the building entrance that my old habit of going out for one each morning would eliminate the possibility of doing much else that part of the day, meaning time for breakfast in the room. I'd heard French yogurt is supposed to be fantastic, so I got some ridiculously fancy and farm-y looking vanilla variety that was of course cheaper than bad yogurt in the States, put some muesli and berries on it, and washed this down with coffee made from water I'd heated in the saucepan - the one and only - that continues to give off a whiff of pavé de rumsteck. Delicious! And whatever grease I now find lacking from my diet will be more than made up for now that a place claiming to be Paris's only Belgian fry stand has opened up shop near the dorm:

Better than they looked, even. And with this, applications to French PhD programs skyrocket.

-The CCOA discussion continues. And I'm running out of thoughts - neither a professor nor a conservative, I may have reached the end point of what I'm capable of contributing to this discussion. But where the Athens and Jerusalem discussion has turned is a question that's also of interest - is the professionalization of academia, in particular the strict requirement these days that profs (with some rare disciplinary exceptions) have PhDs, a good thing? I suppose, as with most cases where things were once otherwise, one would expect the CCOA position to be that things were better when Great Men with merely a junior-high education could become profs. But let's leave CCOAdom out of it. My views can be found in the A&J thread. Tell me yours!