Think Globally. Eat Locally.

Now available: FrauDoktorDoctor Co-op Member! (Doubles as Farmers-Market Shopper!)

Dressed in practical but stylish reverse layers, she is ready to walk the aisles, squeeze the fruit, and compare prices. Her reusable tote bag made in a humane, producer-owned workshop in a small village in the Global South from sustainably sourced raw materials comes pre-stocked with her co-op membership card, coupons in whole-dollar amounts, and Love for Earth reusable nylon mesh produce bags. She accessorizes with a colorful woven headband from Nepal.

You may also be interested in Biker Graduate Student and Card-Carrying Union Member. Please note that The Dissertator and Medical Student have been discontinued. Watch this space for Med Peds Intern (coming soon).

Small neighborhood farmers market.

FrDrDr Action Figure, Conference Edition

The FrauDoktorDoctor line of action figures has expanded to five with the long-awaited addition of the Conference Goer! This doll comes with a name badge and an empty tote bag to fill with hotel pens, business cards, and flyers from publishers that you're just going to throw away once you get home. Conference bag starter kit available separately (what's in YOUR bag?).

We no longer offer paper programs; instead, we invite you to download our nifty conference app, which lets you mark the papers you want to hear, map out the closest restroom, and rate the bars/restaurants you visit with friends and colleagues.

IN ADDITION, every conference-worthy outfit needs a scarf with which you can accessorize any suit, patterned skirt, or pair of skinny jeans you want. Fringed scarf comes in paisley teal, fire-engine red, blue-green, and tie-dye red. Let us pick one for you.

Other student action figures include Biker Graduate Student, Card-Carrying Union Member, The Dissertator, and--for a limited time only--Medical Student, which is being discontinued and replaced by Med Peds Intern (coming soon).

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I recently attended a history of medicine conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was great to catch up with so many friends and colleagues. After the conference ended I decided to check out the make-shift memorial to Prince at the First Avenue concert venue just a block and a half from the hotel, so I checked Google Maps on my phone and energetically set off in the wrong direction for 10 minutes. I finally figured out my mistake and retraced my steps, but by that point I didn't have time to treat myself to lunch before returning the rental car at the airport, so I just snapped a couple photos, one of the singer's star on the wall, the other of my impression of downtown Minneapolis (construction and overhead walkways for frigid Minnesota winters).

What Happens If You Push Her Buttons?

Fourth in the FrauDoktorDoctor line of action figures, the Medical Student comes in a short white jacket with her name embroidered on the left and four external and two internal pockets to hold all her supplies. She wears "sensible" shoes with orthotics to support her arches during the long days rounding in the hospital. (Good thing she received money for her graduation, because these were $$$.) Miniature stethoscope available in hunter green or burgundy red.

If you push the button on her back, she repeats several phrases: "Hi, I'm the medical student." "Vancomycin?" "I'm sooo tired." and "I don't know, but I will look it up!"








This figurine comes with two sets of accessories:

The Medical Student Survival Pak includes a variety of "pocket snacks" and toiletries, including ear plugs for studying (...yeah that's it, studying...) at the hospital; a Maxwell's Guide; and the latest History and Physical Exam reference book.

The Medical Student Deluxe Pak contains name tags for each hospital she rotates through; a reflex hammer; a neurological exam kit; two tuning forks (128 and 256 Hz); and a pager programmed with the loudest, most annoying beep known to humankind.

Folding whitecoat clipboard with stickers on the outside with useful information like normal lab values and how to read an EKG sold separately.

***Now get a set of matching scrubs for just $19.95! Sale ends September 1.***

You may also like our other student action figures: Biker Graduate Student, Card-Carrying Union Member, The Dissertator, and Conference Goer.

Southern Illinois, Day 3, Afternoon: Superman

Click here for Day 1: Sunday Drivers.
Click here for Day 2: Garden of the Gods, Pounds Hollow, and Golconda.
Click here for Day 3, Morning: Fort Massac.
Click here for Day 4: Record-Players and Fireflies.

"Truth, Justice, and the American Way"

After a lunch of restaurant leftovers, we decamped from the over air-conditioned house to the swing in the small side garden, where we looked at the albums of wedding photos I had brought with us for precisely this purpose. (Many of you celebrated with us, and it was amazing to see how young we all looked back then!) Then it was time to walk to the Super Museum.

Along the way, we looked for the murals that a local artists' group painted showing various scenes from the history of the town. If you could overlook the undergraduate-quality prose in the pamphlet, you learn quite a bit. Metropolis has been the home of Superman only since 1972. In the 1800s, it was a bustling river town of up to 22,000 inhabitants. When the railway bridge came in 1907, it marked the beginning of the end. One neat fact: you've seen the movie The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion, right? Well, one of the parachutists who got hung up on the steeple of St. Mere Eglise Church was John Marvin Steele, native of Metropolis, later played by Red Buttons. If I had known he is buried in the cemetery north of town, we could have stopped to pay our respects on Memorial Day.

The mural also depicts African-American soldiers from
World War I and WACS/WAVES who served in WWII.

Metropolis, IL, has been known as the hometown of Superman since the Illinois Legislature declared it so in  1972. Plans for an amusement park deteriorated for lack of funding, but in 1986 the city put up a 7-foot-tall fiberglass statue. It wasn't bulletproof, so in 1993 it was replaced with a 12-foot-tall bronze one. The Super Museum opened in 1993, too. Here's what the Super Museum has to say about itself:

"In Superman's home town, Metropolis, across the street from the statue of the Man of Steel, sprawls the Super Museum. It is stuffed with over 20,000 items relating to the 60+ year old Superman saga. The Super Museum is the life's work of Jim Hambrick, who also owns the overstuffed Superman souvenir and collectibles store you must pass through to reach the museum entrance."

Overstuffed, indeed! Dear Husband observed that it was like visiting some guy’s basement. In fact, as a boy Hambrick turned his bedroom into a museum and charged a nickel entrance way-back-when. Sprawling it is not. It does take up a small city block, but the feeling inside is rather cramped, thanks to the thousands of cases, posters, toys, props, costumes, and other memorabilia grouped roughly in themes.

Neither of us knew very much about the character or the series, but from scattered labels and the documentary playing on a television set, we learned a few things. (But not the name of the documentary, available on DVD in the gift shop, which I had to look up later: Look, Up In the Sky! [2006].)

• Highschoolers Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster first created Superman as a villain and got a story published in 1933. Later that year, they re-imagined him as a superhero with a mild-mannered alter-ego. They eventually sold the rights for $130.
• Superman stories appeared as comics and radio plays before moving to the big screen and then the small screen. His costume for the black-and-white features was actually brown and gray, so it would convey the proper color ratios.
• Kirk Alyn (1910-1999) was the first actor to play the superhero (1948-1950), but the most famous is probably George Reeves (1914-1959), whose run in the tv series was cut short by his suicide. He seems to have been unhappy with his inability to find other work during the unpredictable tv-filming schedule: he was too famous to play anything other than the caped hero.
• Both DH and I recognized Christopher Reeve (1952-2004) as Superman, although I was only five when he last appeared in that role.
• Supergirl has just been an excuse to create a sex symbol.

Over breakfast the next morning, Dear Husband asked me what I would collect if I could have a museum, and I had to confess that I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to own so much of. As a historian, I would want to have a few representative examples that I could contextualize and with which to tell a narrative. This is part of what made the Super Museum so frustrating and the documentary DVD so useful. Besides what was dusty or missing, little was labeled in the museum. The OCD part of me wanted to go in to clean, organize, and label, label, label. Otherwise, it's mostly just curiosities to ogle at rather than objects imparting information. I wish we had been allowed to take photographs at the private superhero museum in Indianapolis when we visited for our second anniversary, for comparison's sake. I'm not sorry we went, but I was disappointed.

The Dissertator

Now that this period in my life is almost over, I finally feel like I can joke about it...

We are pleased to introduce the third in our line of student action figures: The Dissertator! Our busy bee wears jeans and a t-shirt so she won't look out of place in the library, at a coffee shop, or at home on the couch. She comes with one stack of library books and one stack of manila folders containing photocopies from the archives. There is even a sheet of stickers so you can choose her laptop screen: MS Word? Facebook? YouTube? For only $15 extra, we'll include one of three distractions: a cat, a basket of laundry, or a pile of Netflix DVDs. Let us choose for you please.

You may also like our other student action figures: Biker Graduate Student, Conference Goer, or their companion, Card-Carrying Union Member. New this summer: Medical Student!

Who Are We?

This past Friday, the student newspaper published an open letter I researched and wrote with two fellow graduate students. We are asking the new chancellor, who just started her second year here, to change the atmosphere between the administration and the labor unions on campus. This University talks a lot about “inclusivity” and how “great” we are, but their policy stands toward graduate student employees suggest exclusivity, a desire to turn us into yet another source of revenue, and a short-sightedness that will hamper research and learning. In honor of this occasion, we have released the second doll in our line of student action figures.

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NEW! Now you can purchase the Graduate Student as a card-carrying member of the Graduate Employees Union (IFT/AFT Local 6300 AFL/CIO). She wears a bright red t-shirt that declares “healthcare is a right” and boots for stomping on injustice. The pockets of her cargo pants are stuffed with a contract and her membership card. One arm is movable so she can raise her fist at rallies, and if you press the button on her back, she yells one of three slogans:

“The University works because we do!”

“No contract, no peace!”
And one slogan that you can record yourself! 

Doll comes with poster, pin, contract, and membership card. Real working toy megaphone and companion union members sold separately.

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One of our union rally cries starts with the leader yelling, "Who are we?" The crowd answers, "GEO!" It's short and to the point, good for making noise outside the windows of administrators. But it is also a question that we see being asked and answered in the bargaining room. The administration seems to see "us" (the University) as a world-class institution...hobbled by the state's financial crisis. We see an institution that has successfully collected record private donations...and that refuses to pay a living wage for all graduate employees. (And that hires yet more administrators while threatening employees lower on the pyramid with furloughs.) This administration sees a homogeneous graduate student population (think: single, white, middle-class, male)...we see parents, international students, veterans, LGBTQ individuals, and an over-whelming majority of bright, dedicated individuals who would not be here without tuition waivers. We would be at other institutions, or we would not be in graduate school. This is an R1 research university that refuses to guarantee full tuition waivers, the standard practice at institutions of higher learning of this caliber. Without full tuition waivers, only the wealthy or the desperate will come here for graduate education anymore. Who are we?

It's good to be green, 2

The last post with this title was about holiday-themed fun with food coloring; this one concerns another kind of green: environmentalism. When we bought our house a couple of years ago, Dear Husband and I decided to try to reduce our carbon footprint. I built a compost heap behind the shed in the back yard for food scraps (egg shells, carrot peelings, apple cores...). We turn off our Christmas lights when we go to bed. I wash our laundry on "tap cold" and hang almost everything to dry on lines in the back yard in the summer and on drying racks in my study during the winter. We even hand wash dishes instead using the dishwasher (mostly!).

In warm weather we try to leave our car in the garage and use other means of transportation. We live just half a mile from the grocery store and so try to walk when we can. However, buying food for two people once a week, plus the occasional bag of cat food or kitty litter, is really too much to carry, even with each of us lugging a large LL Bean tote bag. So DH finally bought me a "bag lady cart." To the left you can see me adding a name tag to the cart after returning from my first trip with it. All of our groceries juuust fit. This will make going to the store so must easier. It's good to be green!

We are both functional bicycle riders (as opposed to biking for fun or exercise). When the weather is warm we bike the 2 miles to church, which is also work for him, and I try to bike the 3.5 miles to campus as often as possible. Here you can see my get-up:

Biker Graduate Student

Biker Graduate Student comes complete with a $50 refurbished, second-hand mountain bike from the local cycling co-op. Affixed over the rear wheel is a plastic crate large enough for a backpack stuffed with laptop, library books, and graded student papers. The bag has pockets for an umbrella and a reusable water bottle (not included). Comes with a bike lock. For an extra $10 you can get the square, hooked, bungee-cord net--perfect for containing her jacket or lunch bag over the bumpy streets!

The action figure's helmet and sunglasses tell motorists to take her seriously. Remove the reflective vest to reveal a snazzy sun dress and sensible black flats. She is ready to zip across town to teach all morning and research all afternoon! Even if she stays late on campus for meetings, the bicycle's safety features include detachable front and back lights, a chain guard, and a cheery bell in the shape of a frog for warning pedestrians to get off the *$&#% bike path!

Click here to view her companion, card-carrying union-member student action figure.

What do you do to be "green"?