I'm Not the Interesting Part of This Post

This evening, a plea for volunteers and a peace offering for everyone else!

As most of you know, I'm doing some graduate work right now, and with all graduate work comes the ever-looming spectre of research. If anybody out there has about ten minutes and would like to help me out, I've got two polls here asking about ethics issues in libraries and museums, and I figure since you fine folks have a vested, mythology-lovin' interest in libraries and museums, you'd be good people to ask.

Ethics in Libraries/Museums
Legal Issues in Libraries/Museums

It's totally anonymous, I will still love you if you don't feel like doing it, and there are only 20 total questions so if you do go for it, it should be pretty quick. There are comment boxes for each question, but feel free to skip them if you don't have anything in particular to say.

For those of you in the audience that didn't feel like being recruited for my academic exploits, here's something totally unrelated but incredibly awesome. The video below - which you should totally listen to until the end because it is so very, very worth it - is of a live performance of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf by professional modern-day skald Benjamin Bagby. Bagby tours the world performing the six-hour epic for sold-out audiences, and it's not hard to see why; he performs it with traditional harp and entirely in the original Old English, and he is fucking fantastic.

If this man ever comes even vaguely within range of our house, we will climb a mountain of corpses and fight the entire MMA lineup in single combat to get tickets. If you want to invite him to be intimidatingly Anglo-Saxon in your living room, you can get a copy of his DVD on his website. The medieval musical group he founded, Sequentia, also does a pretty killer musical reconstruction of what the Edda might have sounded like in the original Old Norse.

So if I offended you mortally by asking for research volunteers, please let me buy your love back with traditional Viking poetic performance. Back to your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow!