papers, in retrospect

I just had a sudden urge to get all walk-down-memory-lane-ish. Here are the non-assigned topics I've written papers about at NSA. So far it's been pretty fun.

Freshman year (I wash my hands of #1 and #4):
- Why Hamlet is basically toast (a terrible paper if ever there was one)
- Why you should believe in time travel
- Why straight edge is incompatible with Christianity
- Why I don't like Kierkegaard
- Why Pan's Labyrinth is better than The Sixth Sense

Sophomore year:
- Why Hippocrates invented science (one of the most boring papers ever, can't you tell?)
- Why Gone With the Wind was so darn popular (well worth the extra 1,037 pages of research)

Junior year:
- Why the Greeks thought marriage was depressing
- Why Plato and modern subatomic physics are really the same
- Why the snake in Book V of the Aeneid is a ghost
- Why I don't think Augustine believes in radical evil (forthcoming!)

What's the oddest/awesomest thing you've ever written a paper on?

St Bernard

"[In copies of the Book of Hours,] one also finds eccentric little texts like the verses of St Bernard, sometimes preceded by an anecdote explaining their origin. One day (the rubrics in the Book of hours tell us) the Devil appeared to St Bernard and boasted that he knew of seven special verses in the Psalms so efficacious that whoever recited them daily could not die in sin. Ste Bernard cried, 'What are they? Tell me at once!' 'I shan't,' said the Devil, 'You shall not know them.' St Bernard then replied that he would have the recite the entire Psalter every day in order to be sure of including the seven magic verses, and the Devil, fearing that this excessive devotion would do too much good, quickly revealed the verses."

- Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 176.

Nostalgic Pizza

I've loved seafood for as long as I can remember. This is my favorite childhood pizza: pepperoni, olives, and shrimp. Also, notice anything? My awesome parents got me REAL pizza pans for Christmas (yay!), and I can just squeeze them into my teeny oven (double yay!).

John Donne

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

- from Meditation XVII