Rapper's Delight

Yo, yo; er — yo!

Oh.

So...

Many of you, Gentle Readers, already know about the go-go dresses and the PhD thing from my email signature, but for those of you who don't know about the PhD thing, here it is: I am working on my PhD. One day, before the next millennium, I hope, people are gonna have to start addressing me as Dr. Sass. Even my dad.

You, Gentle Reader, if you stay with me, may continue to call me Sass.

The university that may one day grant me the title is Bristol Business School, in the U.K. A few years ago I fell in with a crowd from Windsor who shared my situation and goals — we teach part time at a university business school, we'd love to make it our full time career, but to do so we need to have a PhD, and we're too old and settled to go back to being full time students living on Kraft Dinner. Bristol was the answer.

My PhD buddies are Really Smart People. Denise is researching strategic management issues in human resources. Judy's subject is MIS/e-commerce. Dave, Dan, and Hutch are all marketing geeks, like me. And Jim and Dale are both practicing accountants, with CAs and MBAs behind their names, and are pursuing a PhD in accounting.

As you may imagine, when we get together we throw around words like ontology and epistemology; we discuss Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; we share our copies of Denzin & Lincoln; we assist each other in preparing statistical analyses of our quantitative data; we defend our position in the Burrell & Morgan research paradigms of functionalism and objectivism versus the more subjective approaches of critical theory, existentialism, and postmodernism.

We do this in pubs, whenever possible.

We are in regular contact via email, and a few times a year we get together in Windsor, or Toronto, and in the summer, in Bristol, to discuss these and other serious matters in person. In the pub. This week the serious matter under discussion was whether our tuition is tax deductible. Dale and Jim have been investigating the situation and earlier today Dale sent us an email giving us an update on their pursuit of straight answers from Revenue Canada, Ernst & Young, and Bristol Business School. Which led to the following Wittgensteinian sprachspiel:

"Thanks for the yeoman service, Dale."

"I thought the Yeomen were from York University?"

"Sexist dogs! It's yeowomen!"

"Yeoman... isn't he that Chinese basketball player?"

"No, it's what Sylvester Stallone says — Yo, man!"

"Sexist dogs! It's yo, woman!"

"Oh! I thought he was calling that violin player."

"Yo-Yo Ma?"

"Cello."

"Yo! Cello to you, too, mang!"

"No — yo! Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, not the violin."

"Yo! It's yeoman, as in, Yeoman Rand. Remember, from Star Trek? She's the one who's in love with Captain Kirk."

Gosh, I just love the boots. And the hair.

Poor Yeoman Rand. All those years, in love with a man she'll never be able to have. I can't begin to imagine.

* * *
In the next story, Sass goes grocery shopping. Her fridge full, Sass turns her attention to figuring out whether, and how, to use Picasa and/or Flickr, and, while doing so, a thought occurs to her...

Friends of Tim Bray: the story you've been waiting for is here.