Why the blague?

Other than mindless self indulgence and as yet another scheme to spend more time in front of the computer without doing "work," I thought maybe a blog would be a fun way to:

• Keep family and really bored friends informed of what I'm doing with myself in grad school.
• at least keep up my promise to share my reading lists with interested parties
  
• ramble off some of "intellectual" thoughts in a form outside of the structure of academic writing.
• create a journal of what I was thinking/doing that I can come back to (and thanks to the still-not-yet-evil people at Google, I can't lose it like oh so many notebooks in my life).

So, for my own interest I'm gonna try and update weekly. For you, the probably misdirected reader, I will soon post the infamous reading lists.