Of Root Vegetables and Refereeing

I just finished a referee report for a journal. Unfortunately the paper wasn't terribly good, so my recommendation was to reject. This is the third paper or proposal in a row that I've refereed that was pretty bad. Worse, the papers weren't even bad in an interesting way. Bummer. Reviewing such papers isn't that inspiring.

Another bummer was dinner today, which featured two dishes with root vegetables. They were quite good, but the root vegetables were diced unevenly. This means that they cooked unevenly. Which is to say that some were soft and delicious and a few were crunchy and a little scary.

Nevertheless, I think I'd prefer the occasional crunchy beet or turnip to a long string of poorly written papers and proposals to review.