Day 41: Grad Students Have No Standards

My lesson today was courtesy of the one and only ACA McGill Student Chapter President/ProQuest ProFessional.

Lesson 41: Grad students have, and will, write about everything. Even boycotting McDonalds with accordions.

If you are doing a project about something and are getting discouraged because you can't find any literature on the topic, and you are completely out of ideas for sources; just search through theses and dissertations. You will find what you need, guaranteed!

Completely unrelated lesson of the day: I am the industry standard size to be a plus-sized model. Though I suppose I'm still not tall enough...

I had always thought that "plus-sized" models were Marilyn Monroe plus-sized; size 12-14, really the lowest end of sizing for any plus-sized line of clothes I've ever seen. But in a twist for the ridiculous, I discovered in the uproar about Lizzi Miller's nude photo in Glamour that she is actually too big to model even plus-sized lines, at size 12-14. They actually want their plus-sized models to be basically incapable of fitting any plus-sized clothes properly; they want girls sized 8-10. Maximum size for a "regular" model? 4-6. Essentially a single size difference.

I looked it up, and most plus-sized lines I found actually start at 14-16.

I mean really, the hell is this?

Day 33: Everything's biographic and nothing hurts

What do you think when you see a web address that ends with ".net"? I just want to make sure I'm not the only one who goes "What is this? The 90s?"

My professor was going over biographic sources today. Talk about week of the biography! My database project, due tomorrow, is a database of biographies. One of the biographic sources she mentioned was Burke's Peerage, something I've never heard mentioned outside a period piece. It's online now, and (nearly) fully searchable. She gave the address as burkes-peerage.net, which is actually an address for sale. I imagine it used to be the address for Burke's Peerage, but then they felt it was too low rent and upgraded to, as I found, burkespeerage.com. I'm interested to check it out and see if I can find any familial links... so far one "Constance Wilkie" married Sir Something-or-other, but that's all I've found.

Lesson 33: Do your own research. Verify and double check all the information you find. It's rare that the information you'll find is actively or maliciously wrong, outside of people trolling wikipedia of course, but even some of the most esteemed sources are just woefully out of date. However, hands down, the best way to find out if someone is dead, has died or is just having a rumour of their demise spread about, is the very professionally named "Dead People Server".

That's right. Dead People Server.

It sounds more to me like the internet for the recently deceased: Surf the net... from beyond the grave!