Before leaving Oxford, we walked around campus a little, and took pictures at the chapel on the Western Campus (which is actually on the east edge of the MU campus). Found something that looked like an apple, assuming it had been picked after a nuclear holocaust and the tree bearing it had mutated grotesquely. It's not a walnut fruit. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's an alien mind control pod.

Karen interviewed today at the University of Cincinnati. The library here is bigger, and they do have the Early English books, 1475-1640 series on microfilm right in the library. Excellent. The campus is almost claustrophobically squeezed together, and for some reason many of the buildings have the floors numbered oddly. While Miami U, set in a college town, was very restful and laid-back, UC seems frenetic and high-pressure.

We visited the Cincinnati Art Museum, which, thanks to an endowment from Proctor & Gamble, was free. Some great stuff in there (including a special exhibit of costume from the 1890s and 1900s). Dang, those corsets looked like instruments of torture. My personal favorite historical costume was 1590s England, but I have to admit there were some really spectacular fashions around the end of the nineteenth century. It was bizarre being surrounded by beautiful Renaissance paintings, and looking through a door into the "modern" section to see two unevenly painted black squares on an otherwise empty canvas. Yeah, that's art. Subverting the dominant paradigm is just so much more rewarding than painting something which requires effort and talent.

We ate at a restaurant which had been built in a former pottery factory. Good food, and we got some great shots of Cincinnati from the parking lot (situated high atop a very steep hill). We had hoped to hang out tonight with another cool person that we had met in the blogosphere, but couldn't reach her. Rather than sit around in the hotel room, we decided to see Matrix: Revolutions. Yeah, I know, a pretty lame use of two vacation hours, but everything interesting was closed.