Slush puppies

It dumped another load of snow on the streets of New York last night, about four inches or so - I woke up to see some big, fat, fluffy flakes falling outside my window, which had mysteriously stopped by the time I came back into my room from the shower. The clearing of the snow off the roads and pavement is efficient enough, they seem - unlike the UK - to have the knack of not letting snow paralyse the transport system. It's all very Christmassy, I suppose, although the pools of slush that accumulate very quickly on the kerb don't do much for the atmosphere. Alma Mater (the statue in front of the main Columbia campus building) has a rather fetching white cape and hat right now...

Not a lot's been going on here, apart from my getting on with my two term papers - the one a translation of Nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga's poetics, the other an analysis of Mori Ogai's Maihime. Which will mean squat to most of you, I realise, but that's about it.

I did, however, attend a couple of Christmas parties here - the one in the Law school, where I work, which was very lavish as one might expect - salmon, wild rice, clowns, ice cream, all sorts of stuff. Free alcohol, too, though I couldn't indulge because I was theoretically at work. And in the evening they had a do for 1st year international students. Which is apparently me, although most of the Americans here don't really think of me as "international" in that sense. More free booze, not so much of the food, although one thing was seriously cool - a chocolate fountain. It was a sort of combined fondue and decorative implement - it melted the chocolate at the bottom and then pumped the liquid stuff back up to the top. I am convinced it must have been invented by a woman.