Steadiness and planning? Arrrr!

Ganked from esmeraldus_neo, this pirate meme; for yes, it is that kind of day...

( behind a cut, for friendship's sake [friend-ship, get it, arrrr!] )

More seriously...

There's a call-for-papers gone out from an academic conference on detective fiction, right here in N'cle. I'm kind of interested, especially as they want to talk about the confines of genre - this is, after all, something I know somewhat about, indeed have just been writing about for that Gabe Chouinard person - but I've never been to an academic conference, and I don't actually know where (or indeed whether) to begin. They ask for abstracts, and I have noooo idea what an academic abstract looks like.

So the obvious question is, does this in itself answer my question? Is my own ignorance trying to tell me something, like "put the paper down and back away now, sir, before we have to shoot you"? Or should I barge straight in there and get down & dirty with academe...?

Kabanos

Chaz'z adventures in food and internets, vol seventeen, chapter three: so I'm sitting here chewing on a long thin dry Polish sausage while I write (well, no, while I fight the cats off, mostly; but I'm meant to be writing), and it has this flavour that makes me go "ooh! what's that, then?" and then a second later "ooh, I know this; it's that, that seed that they flavour, you know, thingie with..." and I cannot for the life of me find the words for either the seed or the thingie, although I know exactly what I mean (I have, you understand, used the seed and cooked the thingie). So I google 'kabano', which is how the sausage was sold to me, and google is barely any help at all, and wikipedia none at all, and I'm on the edge of giving up and posting here about how frustrating it all is when I remember that (a) the thingie is Hungarian and (b) called goulash (yes, these are the kinds of words I can lose entirely, for days, weeks, decades; ask shewhomust what that phrase is, that I can never remember)(oh, yes - displacement activity, that's the one) and (c) the seed is of course caraway; and then I am smitten by inspiration (d) and google for kabanos, which the person who sold me the sausage obviously thought was the plural. And y'know what? Kabanos is frequently flavoured with a wee hint of caraway.

*feels cocky*

*also exhausted*

(Also, this isn't work. What was that phrase again...?)