I’m scrambling to finish my paper before tomorrow’s deadline. My ever ambitious Appendix C might not be happening. Nervous e-mails are being exchanged with fellow tardy writers. “Are you done? I’m not. I’m so dead.” “No, I’m deader. I haven’t even finished my introduction.”

This paper has sucked up every weekend and evening this summer, and I’m sick of it. I’m giving myself a vacation when it’s over. I’m going to paint the bedroom a lovely shade of grey and pulling the wall paper off the bathroom — a month of girlie home decorating. Might even take in an episode of Dr. Phil.

Some random interesting tidbits that I stumbled across in the Times today:

Beyond that, Congress needs to grasp the obvious, which is that the quality of the teacher corps is more crucial to school reform than anything else. The original law required states to provide highly qualified teachers in core subject areas by this year. But the Education Department simply failed to enforce the rule, partly because of back-channel interference by lawmakers who talked like ardent reformers while covering up for state officials clinging to the bad old status quo.

Joe Kernan, the morning anchorman of the business cable channel CNBC, confused many in the news media when he jokingly reported that first weekend grosses for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel had broken the record set by “Aquaman,” a fictional film starring Vincent Chase.

Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.

You know nothing is more painful than plugging in citations in a bibliography. Sharp pencils in my eyes are baby taps.

The big question of the day. Is it possible to write a title for an academic paper without a colon? I say no. One half of the colon allows the author to make some ill advised attempt at humor, even letting him take that very wrong turn into pun land, because on the other half of the colon the author can use a theoretical phrase or obscure jargon to establish seriousness. Thus, creating that unsettling image of the nerdy professor who’s hip to that MTV stuff.