A fashion parade, well not quite.

Over the years I have accumulated mementoes from students.

Over the years I have accumulated mementoes from students. I never know what to do with them, and I am sure even accepting them violates a rule someone in the chancellery has written, will write, or wants to write. I have some drinking glasses, a vase from Sweden, a small tray that came full of Iranian nuts, a Chinese good luck pendant, a Thai hanging to put a letter in, and so on. I keep all these in office. I have also had tucked away in the office a couple of T-shirts acquired from students. Neatly folded and still in the plastic bag of purchase. Hmm.
Inspired by the use-it-or-lose it approach we have been taking at home. (Figure it out.) I decided to find those shirts and use-or-lose them. I thought the best way I could now acknowledge the students who gave them to me was to post photos here, and give my thanks to Michelle Burgis and Andrew Stone. The two gray ones Michele brought back from Greece (on one of her many travels), and the neck tag says “Made in Greece” (and not “Made in China” which was the neck tag say in the Egyptian T-shirt Kate brought back from there. Classy.)
One depicts Socrates drinking the hemlock and the other is a detail from that incredible painting by Raphael “The School of Athens.” Try the Wikipedia on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_athens



The black one bears that electric line from Jean-Jacques Rousseau” “forced to be free.” A perfectly made point in his spare prose but one that allowed ideologues during the Cold War to label him (labeling is the extent of intellectual activity of ideologues) a totalitarian avant le mot. Ridiculous but true. (But not nearly as ridiculous as Karl Popper’s diatribe against Plato, Hegel, and Marx with the same charge in the Open Society and Its Enemies: intellectual dishonesty brought to Olympian heights.
Notice the mangoes hanging on the tree. It looks like another bumper crop this year.