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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In order to celebrate National Tell a Joke Day, I asked fellow Oxford University Press staff members to tell me their favourite joke(s). Some of these jokes will make you guffaw and some will make you groan but hopefully all of them will make you smile. The jokes below range from the strange to the downright silly.
The OUPblog celebrated its tenth anniversary last summer and – over the course of the last decade – has gone from strength to strength. In order to help the blog continue to flourish, our focus will be on expanding our community and growing our discipline specific content. Most of all, we will endeavor to inform and entertain you, the regular reader, as you are what makes the OUPblog so special.
It’s an exciting time to be an editor of the OUPblog. Over the course of the last ten years, the blog has gone from strength to strength. In order to help the blog continue to develop, the focus has been on reaching the right communities with the right content.
The week of the UK general election has finally arrived. After suffering weeks of incessant sound-bites, you will soon be free of political jargon for another few years. Phrases like “long-term economic plan” have been repeated so often that they have ceased to mean anything. From Margaret Thatcher to Harold Wilson, from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, British prime ministers and politicians have uttered phrases that have echoed throughout history. How many of these famous political quotes do you remember?
In order to celebrate the launch of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature in March, we invited OUP staff to dress up as their favourite characters from children’s books. The result was one surreal day during which our Oxford offices were overrun with children’s literature characters, ranging from the Cat in the Hat to Aslan, from Pippi Longstocking to the Tiger Who Came to Tea, and from Little Red Riding Hood to the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was a brilliant and brave effort by all those who attended. Particularly those who commuted to and from work in their costumes!
By Daniel Parker
It’s time to dust off your racket and wrestle the tennis balls from your dog’s mouth. Wimbledon 2013 is upon us! Using Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) as my experienced, disciplined, but approachable coach, I cast a hawk-eye over OSEO’s collection of Shakespeare texts to look for references to tennis.
By Daniel ‘Pussy Galore’ Parker and Gabby ‘Odd Job’ Fletcher
‘Ah’, he says stroking a white fluffy cat, ‘we’ve been expecting you’. Leave Ms Moneypenny with a peck on the cheek, stash your Walther PPK in your back pocket and jump into our Aston Martin so you can join us as we speed through an A to Z of Bond fun, fact, and fiction. We have stories about Roger Moore’s penchant for love-making, tales of fictional islands, and even anecdotes about crocodile jumping. We’ve devoured OUP’s online reference works to bring you a delicious helping of double 0 heaven. Welcome to the world of Bond, James Bond