Israel and Boobs

I believe Pratchett had Vetinari hide a book he wanted for his sole personal use in the cover of “Lives of the Great Accountants, Vol. 4,” or something very similar.

I normally aim for sensational blog post titles myself. The most offputting one I’ve managed recently is ‘Gnosis then and now’ (http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2006/04/23/gnosis_then_and_now~748631). But because I write a lot on historical subjects, it would be fairly easy to produce a boring post title by focusing on a particular obscure historical figure I’m discussing rather than the wider theme I hope it illuminates. For example, a post I wrote on ‘Puritans and the rise of the underclass’ (vaguely interesting) could equally well go under the rubric of ‘The social theology of William Perkins’ (very offputting, unless you’ve ever heard of the man before, which I hadn’t).

“Farmers Use Bull Semen to Inseminate Cows”

Oh, wait, I got it backwards. I thought you wanted a genuinely interesting sounding title that would make a horribly boring and pointless post…

(Sorry; I’d seen the bull article at Yahoo, but not the CT post.)

“The Psychopathology of Everyday Things” was Donald Norman’s original title for his book on design failures, and a design failure in itself.

Oops, forgot the links: 1 2. Personally I think the defensin-like peptides are more interesting, but CNP made for a title better suited to this thread.

“Insurance Accounting in the Communist Countries”

I bet you Chinese insurance accounting practices are at least as exciting as Vietnamese railways.

Just about any of the recent articles on the late Syd Barrett could have been entitled “East Anglian Diabetic Suffers Complications”.

“You Are Seeing Me Write Something”

OK, so I’m doubly cheating–I have the book and it’s close to one of your titles–but “US GAAP for Life Insurance”* is my nominee. (Yes, I can easily write a post on and how it affects non-actuaries.)

*AKA, The Big Black Book

At this juncture, I’m rooting for #18. Forget _Calumet_ _K_.

ooh that’s pretty good. In general, my assumption is that anything with “Orientalism” in the title is going to be tedious beyond belief. Apart from the book “Orientalism”, curiously.
The nice thing about it is that it’s only three double-spaced pages, so you get through the tedium quickly. ;)

(Although I’ve got to say, after having to read/teach/grade on Orientalism-the-book for the fourth time, I was ready to throw it out the window, right behind Beloved.)

I have other fun things, like “Conflict Created by Static Dominant Cultural Identities” and “Embodied Affective Connectivity”. Of course, looking through other titles I think “well, some people might think that’s bad… but I kinda think it’s a neat title!” so I’ve lost objectivity on at least some of ’em.

For things I haven’t written, I nominate anything by Zizek. Or how about “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization”?

“An Analysis of Unprovability”

Dr. Who Related Bedwetting and anti-Mediterranean Football Snobbery in England/Britain/UK/Albion from the Perspective of US and Canadian Students of German-Irish Heritage Taking Summer Classes in The Netherlands/Holland/Benelux/Low Countries.

My mother once commented on the lackluster title of Bergmann’s “The Metaphysics of Logic Postivism,” which I had bought at a secondhand bookstore

Given that title, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a blog combining the two. Oh.

On topic: lit-crit articles are often great at killing interesting(ish) pieces with leaden titles. I could probably give you 250 on ‘Prosopopoeia and Post-Augustan Mock-Panegyric’ if you were feeling sufficiently masochistic.

Evaluating the Effects of The Pre-Socratic Diet: Into the Bowels of Philosophy

I also have to give my vote to “Perish and Publish.”

Though I will submit. “Using Moore’s Law to Calculate the Optimal Rate of Slacking.”

Which, of course, somebody actually did.

Title of an actual monograph I came across in a technical library.

“Tungsten tipped drill bits and other boring machinery.”

And here’s the opposite of Daniel’s challenge, a vert intriguing post title with a very disappointing follow up.

I’ve just been sent the URL of the useful, but immensely boring sounding ‘Typographical errors in library databases’
(http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html). If you’ve ever been unable to find a book on a library catalogue, even though you *know* it’s in the library, the reason may well be lurking in these lists.

Can’t you see what I mean? Rhetorical failures in blogging.

It doesn’t actually fit, but I have to record the fact that I once saw and article entitled:

Is the Death Penalty Truly Irrevocable?

Perish and Publish: The Likely Effects of the Coming Global Genocide on Tenure and Promotion

I’d be on board with this one too, but only if there was an appendix dealing with faculty governance issues.

Now I need to think up something about Galileo. Or the Bogdanov affair.

How about: “The neodialectic paradigm of discourse and the subtextual paradigm of expression”

Anything else from the Postmodern Generator will do too.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

None of you guys have anything on the economists. Just a couple of titles from the past couple of months’ working paper series:

Epistemology, Normative Theory and Poverty Analysis

Does Conditionality Generate Heterogeneity and Regressivity in Program Impacts?

These are actually pretty good compared to what you can find over the past few years

The canonical Boring Title . . . is the think piece entitled Whither Canada?

I’ll do you one better: New Directions in Canadian Prairie Writing.