Sean Carroll is disappointed with academia, at least as revealed through the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s article on guilty pleasures of academics:
As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:
Nothing pleases me more than opening a new textbook.
Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!
I’m with Sean. Surely, we can do better than this. So, what are your guilty pleasures?
Actually, it’s a little tough to come up with anything that really works, in this age of blogging. After all, a guilty pleasure is something you don’t want other people to know that you enjoy, and a lot of the really good candidates in my life are here for the whole world to see. I read trashy genre fiction, and participate in SF fandom, which would count as “guilty pleasures” in the academic community, but it’s not like I’m doing a bang-up job of hiding them. There’s the whole blogging thing in the first place, but people have been finding the blog a few at a time for the last couple of years, and since the book deal, I’ve been flat-out telling people about it.
Probably the best “guilty pleasure” I can offer here that I don’t already talk about regularly is this: Terrible paranormal documentaries on cable. I’m a sucker for “Aliens built the Pyramids” shows, the hokier the better. I particularly like the ones with blurry, overexposed dramatic re-creations, and lots of shots of people with dubious credentials holding forth on the TRVTH and the way that the Establishment is covering everything up.
But, really, that’s not a whole lot less lame than most of what the famous academics interviewed for the Chronicle piece came up with. So, OK, I can’t do better, but maybe you can…