All the Frills: Halloween Countdown

As you may be aware, I get ridiculously excited around this time of year – because it’s almost Halloween!!!!!! This past week I got out all my Halloween decorations and now I’m totally basking in the creepiness of it all.

Weekend Reading:

• I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to know that The Chronicle of Higher Education covers clown colleges.
  
• I was, and remain, absolutely horrified by this incident of shocking sexual violence in India.
  
• The Atlantic’s endorsement of Clinton is fantastic…I didn’t realize they had only made two previous endorsements.
  
• This is an interesting piece on the psychology of victim blaming.

• My work as a historian centres on a period in which the Julian calendar was still used (the Gregorian calendar made its debut in 1582 but wasn’t adopted in Britain until 1752). I’ve always found it sort of fascinating that, because of this, if I’m working a document dated to say February 3, 1589 (as in that’s the date the original author wrote down), I have to mark it as February 3, 1589/1590….because for us the new year started on January 1 but under the Julian calendar it started on March 25. I feel like I’m doing a bad job of explaining this. These short pieces do a better job.