This morning I sit down to run the last few days’ logs, and immediately deduce that some Australian university has handed out an assignment involving “obscure Savoy operas”. (In one of Douglas Adams’ non-Hitchhiker novels, there is a scene where someone patiently tries to explain to a BBC exec that the phrase “too much Mozart” is linguistically meaningless. But never mind that.)

Last week, it was one or more Indian universities assigning Three Men in a Boat. The week before, it was interpretation of a passage in I forget which E. M. Forster novel. (I'm tolerably certain that the name E. M. Forster does not so much as occur anywhere on my site.) The week before that, it was a passage purporting to be from Little Women--except that it wasn’t, unless the visitors and/or their instructor did some spectacularly bad cut-and-paste work. And every year, sure as death and taxes, there will be assignments involving the Paston letters. Often the word-for-word identical assignment, year after year.

Would it be appropriate for me to research sites that offer mail-order diplomas, and put up some links? Can’t help but feel it would save everyone a lot of time, money and aggravation. But you can’t just tell your own visitors to get lost, can you?