Arg

I brought alcohol and swabs in to clean my keyboard today* and managed to hit some key combination that makes the top menu bar on Firefox go away - the one with File, Edit, etc. Experimentation shows that F10 will bring it back until I hit a key or choose an option in the menu, whereupon it goes away again. Anyone now how to make it come back on a more permanent basis? Solved! Right-click on the top bar, choose "Menu bar". :D Thank you!


* Normally you get a new keyboard when they replace your computer, but I've got an ergonomic keyboard so it wasn't replaced. :D It works perfectly fine, so I don't mind, but it's got 5 years worth of crap on it because I keep not cleaning it.

My new office...

..is located near the Medieval Studies and Archaeology areas of the stacks. And so often titles like Six Thousand Years of Bread catch my eye as I walk by. One that has caught my eye, for being so obviously a product of the time it was published, is Those Gay Middle Ages.

I wasn't really expecting it to be a treatise on homosexuality in the medieval era, as it had the unmistakable signs of being pretty old and having been re-bound back when they were still hand-writing titles on rebound books, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the first real sentence of the book was "Most historians of the Middle Ages make the grievous error of forgetting about the pigs." The chapter is titled "Pigs Is Pigs."

It was published in 1938 and from my quick perusal of it, the title is meant to be ironic, and quite a lot of it deals with how the Middle Ages were really horrible times, what with pigs in the street everywhere and people dropping dead of the plague. It's written with the sort of voice not really allowed in Serious History Books these days, with more character than the dispassionate narrator textbooks of today strive to achieve.