Yesterday

8:00-9:30 - Wake up, eat breakfast, tidy up, walk to lecture
9:30-10:45 - News Reporting Lecture
11-12:15 - History of the Spanish Language
12:30 - 1:45 - Spanish Literature
2:00-3:30 - Eat lunch, mope around, blog about reporting being hard, walk to the Missourian
3:30-5:00 - Newsroom
5:00-6:30 - Footprint magazine meeting
6:30-7:30 - Sustain Mizzou reading group
8:00-11:30 - German Stammtisch

- Looks like I'm going to start contributing to Footprint magazine occasionally. A food fridays features with rice cooker recipes etc... and occasionally covering an event. Tina's in charge of the magazine and I like how its low-key and student managed. I figure it'll be fun.

- We read part of Silent Spring in the reading group. The other three members all found it boring to various degrees, but their reasons sort of puzzled me. One guy said he thought it was boring because he wasn't sure he believed everything said in the book. ??? I'm just not sure I understand this reasoning. I can be bored by something that's absolutely true, even important, like differential calculus. I can also be fascinated by something dubious and trivial, like reports that there are still Thylacine sightings. We talked about how the book would probably be written differently nowadays, or it wouldn't have been as popular. My guess is it would have more of a "so I drove down to a small village to ask the people what happened there" and use a lot of dramatic, first person testimony, etc. Still, I didn't mind it the way it was, either. Maybe I'm just a really big geek... but here the facts were fascinating, presented in capable prose, and I had no problems reading it. Hmm.

- At Stammtisch I talked to a lot of fun people and heard stories of how the sand gets into everything in Afghanistan, including guns which can lead to accidents... and about backpacking through the Swiss Alps and meeting men wearing traditional feather hats and Lederhosen... about five-course meals in Prague that cost under $20. I was feeling like a little snack, and no one else was biting, so as I made my way to the counter to see if they had anything small and cheap on the menu, I passed a recently deserted table with a bunch of untouched cheesy breadsticks sitting there. Needless to say, I grabbed them and ate them, much to the surprise and delight of my Stammtisch companions. "To answer your question," I said with my mouth half full, "This is how I afford to travel so much."