Man food--again??

Howdy howdy howdy!  Thursday is my busy day, but here at the Historiann chuckwagon we’ve got a few things for you to chow down on:

• First, thanks to commenter cgeye for this insider description of how No Child Left Behind-style standardized tests with essays are actually scored and graded.  And some of you think AP grading is pressured and arbitrary!  It’s a veritable haven of sanity and intellectual freedom compared to the stories at the link above.  Who ever would have predicted?  Oh, I know, I know!  Me.  And anyone else who knows how education actually works–but as we all know, we live in the era that believes that teaching is too important a job to be left to the teachers, right?
• Speaker’s Corner has some good Women’s History Month blogging going on, especially around reproductive rights.  See for example her review of Cornelia Hughes Dayton’s “Taking the Trade,” an article that describes an eighteenth-century Connecticut abortion and its aftermath in small-town Connecticut.  She also published recently a first-person narrative of a late-term abortion in the early twenty-first century called “Back the F^(k Off.”  Also worth checking out:  “Damn those rich teachers and their ’93 Nissan Sentras!”  Hey, that’s a big step up from my high school days, when teachers all drove ’77 Gremlins and Chevettes.  What the frack all do they want–they’re driving cars that are half the age of the ones my teachers drove, 5 miles to school from their crummy apartments and uphill both ways.
• Job Market Cleanup in Aisle Four:  Tenured Radical shares some thoughts about search committee etiquette for letting candidates know that they’re not going to get a job offer.  We do everything now over e-mail; my sense is that candidates want to know sooner rather than later if they’ve been eliminated from the pool at every point.  Why not communicate with candidates who were brought to campus but who were not ranked first for the offer? 
• Finally, Fannie has some news from the essentialist beat–a new cookbook called Mad Hungry:  Feeding Men and Boys.  She asks, “what is so especially tricky about ‘feeding’ men as opposed to ‘feeding’ women? . . . Can’t “the woman doing the cooking” just pretty much fix herself a salad and buy the wildebeasts’ food in bulk from, like, Petco?”

Taking a peek inside, I read the introduction, barfed, made a few farting noises, and then knew ya’ll would want to see it:

“Men eat differently from women- they eat more, they eat constantly, and they eat passionately. They ransack a packed refrigerator and scrounge crumbs from an empty one. They eat standing in front of the fridge, and they eat with their fingers. They always make a mess and never notice.”

So, I do a lot of those things too as do, I suspect, many other women. Especially my lovely girlfriend, whose crumbs I am constantlywiping up. Because I’m the lady. But she cooks too. And we both like food. But we’re both women. Are men and boys are sneaking into our house, raiding our fridge, and leaving crumby messes on our countertops? SO confusing. (OMG, marketing opp. I can see it already: The Hunger: Satiating the Lesbian in Your Life).

Heh.  Well, that’s all folks.  Hope that doesn’t leave you too hungry, or onery.  Happy trails!