Hello lovely Academia Obscura pledgers :)

In case you missed it, Times Higher Education published a piece I wrote about the academic twittersphere a couple of weeks back. The response was great! Following the success of this piece, and the earlier article on the hidden silly side of higher education, THE have agreed to let me write this nonsense once a month!

Some great stuff has come across my desk lately. My favourite is this shining example of brevity, and humour, in academic writing (full paper here):

I also found this lovely notice (ignore missing 'apostrophe''s''):

Crowdfunding Update

The crowdfunding effort plods along, slowly but surely! Thank you all once again for pledging and sharing the book pitch with friends and colleagues. The good news is that Blackwell's flagship academic store in Oxford is going to chip in £1000, as well as host a launch once the book is done.

The prices on the pledge rewards have been lowered, so do go back and take another peek: a very special Academia Obscura lecture will now only set you back £100 (I am both cheap and cheerful), while we are hoping that at £150 we will soon appoint a Mice Chancellor! Meow!