Unusual dissertation titles from the University Microforms International dissertation database:

• “Electrical Measurements on Cuticles of the American Cockroach”
• “Determinants of Flossing Behavior in the College Age Population”
• “Classification of Drinking Styles Using the Topographical Components of Beer Drinking”
• “”More Fun Than Anything” (about cyclopropenium salts)
• “Creep of Portland Cement Paste”
• “Garage Sales as Practice: Ideologies of Women, Work and Community in Daily Life (Volumes I and II)”
• “Finger Painting and Personality Diagnosis”
• “Communication Use in the Motorcycle Gang”
• “‘Santa Claus’: A Mime-Opera Based on The Morality by e.e. cummings”
• “Ritual Drama in American Popular Culture: The Case of Professional Wrestling”
• “Things That Are Good and Things That Are Chocolate: A Cultural Model of Weight Control as Morality”
• “Acute Indigestion of Solipeds”
• “The Making of a Hippie Self”
• “Jock and Jill: Aspects of Women’s Sports History in America, 1870-1940”
• “An Adaptive Surfing Apparatus”
• “The Function of the Couch in Stimulating Altered States of Consciousness in Hypnosis and in Psychoanalysis”
• “I Am You, You Are Me: A Philosophical Explanation of the Possibility That We Are All the Same Person”
• “You Can’t Just Plug It In: Integrating the Computer Into the Curriculum”

One dissertation’s acknowledgment page read: “Yes, Mother, I am finally done; and no, Mom, I don’t know what good a doctor’s degree is either if I can’t fix you when you’re ill.”

(From a UMI press release, quoted in The Whole Library Handbook 2, 1995.)

Episodes from the friendship of the eccentric Sir George Sitwell and Henry Moat, the 16-stone Yorkshireman who served for 42 years as his butler-valet:

Sitwell: Henry, I’ve a new idea — knife-handles should be made of condensed milk!

Moat: Yes, Sir George, but what if the cat gets at them?

Sitwell: (when his dinner guests were 90 minutes late) Henry, it is now 8:30. If they don’t arrive in 10 minutes’ time, I intend to sit down to dinner — if necessary by myself.

Moat: Well, Sir George, you couldn’t ask for more cheerful company, could you?

At Sitwell’s 200-room Tuscan palace, the chauffer, the son of the bailiff, and the plasterer were all named Guido.

Moat: Any orders for the motor today, Sir George?

Sitwell: Yes, Henry. Tell Guido to drive into Florence to help Guido with the painting. Guido can wait while Guido has luncheon, and then Guido will go back to Florence and fetch Guido here.

Moat: Sir George, if you are going on like that, I had better give notice before my mind gives way.

Edith Sitwell described Moat as “an enormous purple man like a benevolent hippopotamus,” and Moat called Sir George “the strangest old bugger you ever met.” (Sitwell had once designed a tiny revolver for shooting wasps; his History of the Fork remained unpublished.) “He and my father [were] mutually critical and at the same time appreciative,” wrote Osbert Sitwell.

And Moat himself could be odd. When Sitwell’s 4-year-old grandson visited Italy, he was attended by a beloved Jamaican nanny whom the butler found inquisitive and bossy. When she asked what was for lunch, “Let me see,” he said, “slices of cold boiled missionary it is today.” At that, wrote Osbert, she became “notably more subdued in manner.”