4:12 PM:

Well, this is interesting. I just got a "Birthday Reminder from Amazon.Com" in my e-mail box, helpfully reminding me that my birthday is on May 10th, a month from today. Of course, I already know that my birthday is on May 10th, so I suppose there's little point in reminding me of that fact. What they ought to do is send e-mail to everybody else online to remind them that my birthday is May 10th...

In fairness, the major thrust of the e-mail was to suggest that I update my wish list, and to recommend a few items they thought I might like to add to it. And, indeed, the top two items on that list were right up my alley, and I hadn't previously known they existed, so that was nice.

Anyway, I suppose it's good to be reminded that my birthday is May 10th. (Or 8 Iyar, if you prefer the Jewish calendar, which falls out sooner this year.) Not that you guys need to be so reminded; I imagine you've been working on drafts of celebratory e-mail messages for months now. But should everybody else forget, I suppose it'll be comforting to know that Amazon.Com still loves me...

I've gotta learn German, I've just decided.

Oh, I've been up all night again, here in the throes of the end-of-semester crunch. Two weeks to go, with four twentysomething-page papers to write, plus last semester's one remaining "incomplete". Part of the night was spent finding material for the one remaining paper I don't have a topic for; more recently, I've finally been tackling that incomplete. Just now, I'm writing a bit about "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," by Louis Althusser, which was originally written in German. I'm working from the English translation in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is a bit abridged. I wasn't certain whether one divider denoted a section break, or some omitted text, so I went to see whether, perchance, there was a copy of this on the Web. A Google search failed to turn up an English text (not surprising, as it's still under copyright), but did find one in German. In addition to confirming that the divider was only a section break, I was able to understand enough of the text to support my already strong suspicion that the translator had made a minor (but potentially confusing) error a few paragraphs earlier... and to notice that a few other minor liberties had been taken, and that the overall tone seemed somewhat different.

This was all within the past half-hour, but the upshot is that I'm suddenly seeing a world of better understanding to be garnered if I only understood the language. Something I'll have to look into in my copious free time, perhaps. Or maybe this is just the sleep deprivation talking...