Traditions
Each Friday the 13th and leap day is "Josiah Carberry Day" at Brown. Often lectures are scheduled where Carberry fails to show up, and cracked pots are put outside the libraries for donations to the Josiah S. Carberry Fund, which Carberry set up for the purchase of books "of which I might or might not approve."
Those "in" on the joke, however, also enjoy the use of his name: a snack bar at Brown (Josiah's or Jo's for short) and the library's card catalog (Josiah) are named for him. Professor Carberry also writes letters to The Brown Daily Herald, Brown's student newspaper, that are published in the April Fool's Day issue. A Brown-affiliated student housing cooperative (Carberry House) also shared his name from 1970 until its closure in 1998. Professor Carberry also appeared in an American Express commercial in the 1970s. Additionally, the documentation for logging into password-protected areas of the Brown University website often uses "jcarberr" as the example username.
On October 3, 1991, at the First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Carberry was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research, making him one of only three fictional people to have won the award. He was commended as a "bold explorer and eclectic seeker of knowledge, for his pioneering work in the field of psychoceramics, the study of cracked pots."
Read more about this topic: Josiah S. Carberry
Famous quotes containing the word traditions:
“... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)