extemporanea

why is it our job to save everybody?

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:25:00 GMT

Exchanging emails with one of my orientation leaders for next year: his mail programme is rather entertainingly mangling my original message when it quotes it, ending up with beautifully nonsensical strings. This morning's read "2010 wounehowesour third -howile youyouhavelare good and havere trainedplanneOLyournehowesif I shoOLThabshowk you tyouhavelown", which I promise was reasonably coherent English when I sent it. The extent to which this is amusing me is probably indicative of how stressful this week has been. Seven or eight excluded students per day. There's a high-water-mark of trauma at about chest height in my office, and my Japanese Peace Lily is drooping. Sigh.

On the upside, the chocolate biscuit supply is holding out, and tomorrow is a public holiday, which I have resolved to spend watching movies, making nucato with wolverine_nun and finishing up the Season 2 finale of Supernatural. The one with the djinn last night was slightly heartbreaking. Angsty boys! boys with angst! I keep threatening to make that correspondence chart matching Supernatural episodes with the ones they've ripped off from X-Files, in this case "Amor Fati" from Season 6. There are apparently no new plots in the world.

My adorable Hobbit is apparently an adorable psycho killer, he brought in a loudly-meeping baby bird yesterday and refused to give it up, responding to all attempts with a deeply worrying Harley Davidson growl from his manly ex-tomcat chest. Fortunately he killed it fairly quickly. The high winds over the weekend have apparently brought baby birds down from nests all over, there was another one on campus yesterday, which the university's feral cat population have presumably dealt with posthaste. There's bloody well nothing you can do for baby birds: can't put them back, can't rescue them without traumatising them beyond recovery, they're pretty much doomed to die, which, as Pterry notes, "is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds." Again with the sigh. I think I'll have a chocolate biscuit now.

Earth go boom. Happy.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:17:54 GMT

Deary me, clearly an official Week From Hell, haven't posted since, gawsh, Tuesday. Sorry, internets. Inadequate brain/time representation in the State of Me. Four more days and I'm on leave for two weeks. If I keep the chocolate biscuit supply constant, it's conceivable I may escape before I actually slaughter a student.

In keeping with the current theme of Brain? What Brain?, this morning we (jo&stv + self) took ourselves off to see 2012, on the grounds that if you're going to watch California crumble, tilt and slide into the sea, it may as well be on the big screen. Before anyone feels the need to pillory my taste in film, let me hasten to add we fully expected it to be loud, stupid, clichéd, cheesy and dire, and I'm happy to say it delivered exactly what it says on the box. It was also, in a heady, shitballs-retarded sort of way, and probably as a direct result of our cheerfully low expectations, bloody good fun. The cast was a bit patchy - am I alone in finding John Cusack increasingly unappealing? he seems to be creeping inexorably into Nicholas Cage territory, although mercifully without the wig malfunctions. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt were watchable, though, and I recognised with glee a slightly heartstring-tugging turn from Blu Mankuma, who's horribly familiar most recently from Supernatural as a nice-but-doomed doctor, and way back when in X-Files. Also, bonus Insane!Woody Harrelson, although that might actually be a tautology.

This thing has not much in the way of plot, just enough to vaguely point all the special effects in an approximate direction as they stagger along like drunken juggernauts. I thus feel absolutely no compunction in spoilering it all to hell, it won't affect your enjoyment of the movie one iota since the clichés broadcast their inevitable upshot VERY LOUDLY from the word go, and in any event all the really cool catastrophe sequences are in the trailer. In terms of clichés it has 'em all: separated couple with Cute Kids, check, and Inevitable Reconciliation. Nice Guy new boyfriend, check (doomed, obviously). Hairs-Breadth Last-Minute Escapes, some self-sacrificing, check. Doomed Extraneous Ethnic Characters, check (old black dudes, Russian mobster's moll, Russian mobster, nice Indian physicist and family, Wise/Wizened Gnomic Tibetan Monk). Really Bad Science, check (lots of neutrinos! start acting as a wave! new particle invented!). "My God" count, only 2, but "This is impossible!" probably four or five, I lost count. Entirely spurious moral message tacked on in defiance of logic, consistency or justice, check. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, check.

California go boom. White House go boom (gets an aircraft carrier dropped on it, which I can only assume is an entirely unintended ironic commentary on the Bush regime). Yellowstone Park go boom. Hawaii go boom. Tokyo go boom under crashing tsunami waves. The Cape ends up, in a move which caused the entire movie house to collapse giggling, as the New Hope for all the giant space-agey arks, since apparently the Drakensberg are the new highest point in the world. (All the fancy tech for keeping track of things signally fails to go boom, fortunately for the film's overall comprehensibility. But they still can't pronounce "Drakensberg"). Overall blood, none at all bar scratches, scrapes, one lost leg and a dead moose. Kids and small dogs entirely unharmed, save the little Indian boy, who was a chess-playing geek and presumably doesn't count.

Overall cheese factor: those little highly-processed soft cheese triangles in the individual wrappers. Not much flavour, very packaged, curiously more-ish despite being fundamentally disgusting and leaving you with a thin film of plastic on your tongue.

Somewhere in my future is an extended meditation on exactly why it is that disaster movies make me so incalculably happy. I can't work out if it's my primitive sense of justice, my inbuilt belief in the ultimate insignificance of humanity despite its delusions to the contrary, or if I'm just a nasty, vindictive sort of person, but Earth go boom, I'm happy.

Now I go forth to assist the Evil Landlord in his fixed, Germanicly stubborn purpose of braaing despite a merry south-easter. If I'm off the 'net for a while, it's because a low-flying tree branch has clocked me and laid me out.

theorising cake

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:19:15 GMT

OK, upfront, I don't do kitsch. Or chintz, or pretty-pretty, or pastel, or girly, or practically anything to which can be applied the adjective "bridal" ¹. All and any of the above are productive of aversion and departure or, if forced on me in an enclosed space with no exits, flinching, sneers and, in extreme cases, simulated retching. I also can't claim to possess much in the way of manual dexterity or artistic ability which, coupled with the patience of a hyperactive stoat, means I have no interest whatsoever in cake-decorating, marzipan sculpture, needlepoint, papercraft or macrame. (The knitting thing is a complete aberration and I still stoutly maintain that I only do it because I'm occasionally abducted by aliens).

Given this, it's a bit odd that I have an addiction to cake blogs. There is no student melt-down so torrid that it cannot be soothed by the application of a cup of Earl Grey and twenty minutes with Cakelava, or the CakeWrecks Sunday Sweets. This is, frankly, weird. I don't go for these elaborate occasions, I got all that out of my system with the SCA. I don't want to get married. I don't even eat a lot of cake. But I love looking at them. Mature analytic reflection suggests this might be about the following:

Sheer craft. Ye gods, these people do some beautiful work: not only the meticulous detailed production of these sculptures, but the frequent artistry of their conception. I have a particular addiction to the kind of modernist, minimalist cake that seems to be currently fashionable, all square angles and solid colours with understated detail, not fussy or chintzy at all. Also, the crazy non-Euclidian angles ones amuse me no end.
Sheer illusion. This is food pretending to be something else. I love that. I wouldn't wear ruffles if you paid me, but a cake can wear them in sugar and make me simply happy. It's photo-real leaves or flowers or beetles or baseballs, aping the real in the medium of food. Basically they're modern-day subtleties, the equivalent of a medieval cockatrice or gingerbread castle: a trickery, a happy game of let's-pretend. (This one's from JustCake).
Sheer profligate impermanence. I think this is the deal-clincher, the thing which for me differentiates cake sculpture from twee porcelain knick-knacks, about which I will set with a baseball bat given half a chance. After all these days and hours of loving, painstaking, polished craftsmanship, someone will dig a knife into these creations and demolish them utterly, and that's the whole point. They're all the more attractive because they're transient, because their beauty and craft are real, concrete and fleeting, lovingly crafted for a moment of splendid, celebratory recognition and then inevitable destruction. Tasty destruction.

I like cake blogs, because cake decorating is about food and splendid craft in one happy package, which I will contemplate with pleasure as long as no-one actually expects me to make the bloody things. Spectator sport. Gosh, wow. You go. I'll just watch, and marvel contentedly that such excessive and unnecessary excellence exists in its own fleeting and self-sufficient pocket of time.

¹ I might, for example, have a sneaking attraction to the phrase "bridal massacre", or possibly "bridal zombies".

there’s nothing to explain, in every life a little rain

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:18:41 GMT

Another of those misty Cape Town mornings in which the peninsula has clearly woken up, rolled over in bed, thought "bugger all these seasonal expectations, anyway", and huddled itself down into a comforting shroud of gentle rain, soft skies and a drifting sea fog forming a separate layer below the clouds, like a sheet under a duvet. Come to sunny Cape Town! Bring umbrella.

My image clusters this morning suggest that actually I'd also rather be back in bed. Fair comment. I'm a bit fragile because Sid the Sinus Headache is trying to make a comeback, which I'm ruthlessly undermining from within via a cynical media campaign, using my tabloid agents Lots of Vitamins and Stv's High-Chilli-Quotient Thai curry. The gin/chardonnay combination which accompanied the Thai food last night may also be contributing its mite to the rather-be-in-bed stakes, admittedly. Other than that, of course, the weather is making me predictably happy, and the Monday billboards were particularly entertaining:

TIGER NOW 6 OVER PAR
Poor Tiger's indiscretions are inevitably doomed to give rise to more, and more horrible, bad golfing puns than one would have believed humanly possible. There's a sort of unctuous schadenfreude in it, too - his media image is so much Nice Young Man that the tabloids seem to be deriving a compensatory pleasure in shredding him.

RONALDO REMOVES SHIRT!
I love the complete inconsequentiality of this. Undoubtedly there's an actual incident behind it, but it simply begs to be ramified into a whole string of similar incidents: OBAMA HAS CUP OF COFFEE! BRAD PITT CLEANS TEETH! PARIS HILTON WEARS PANTS!

And, finally, memorably,
GUBAI DUBAI!
Alas Dubai, someone popped your bubble, which was frankly always an absurdly overblown and self-indulgent bubble, anyway. Gubai indeed.

also, the stupid fairy's suggestions are stupid

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:57:48 GMT

Gah. The wages of being terminally conscientious is to spend five hours on a Saturday morning in a student-record-checking meeting which, while productive, essential, illuminating and guaranteed to reduce unnecessary student angst by a small but significant amount, was solely and directly the result of your own concerned suggestion and would in the absence of such have been replaced by a distributed check failing to supply parity and oversight but taking place, importantly, during working hours.

Also, we substantially underestimated the time it would take, so that was five hours without food and only minimal tea supplies. By the last half hour I was actually hallucinating slightly: I'm damned sure the weird monkey-man on the etching immediately opposite me in the committee room turned to look at me at least once.

In other news, these crack me up. I put it down to exhaustion.

Now I shall play Zelda all afternoon, since that's where my brain's at. I'm playing Occarina of Time, which is cute, but at which I significantly suck. The bit inside the giant fish where the flailing tentacle lashes at you from the ceiling has so far killed me five times. On the upside, I get to practise my swearing.

Wanted: Total Perspective Vortex

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:17:11 GMT

A Dear Little Student has just had an epistolary hissy-fit because my Cherished Institution, working at its usual mills-of-god speed, has not yet made available online the result of her entrance test. This is, may I point out, an extremely minor and not entirely instrumental data point in the admissions process: nonetheless, she has informed us that, narked by its non-appearance, she has taken the issue to President Jacob Zuma. The just-post-adolescent state of the undergrad does tend to exhibit a less than tenuous sense of proportion under certain conditions, but this example takes wild, hyperbolic threat to new heights. Normally they content themselves with a scattershot tale of woe to the Dean, the Registrar and the Vice Chancellor. I trust Jacob Zuma, after his first confusion, at least got a good laugh out of it.

I've spent a few hours this week reading the occasionally vitriolic rants at Rate Your Students, and thanking the pedagogical gods that this country's student population fails, on the whole, to aspire to quite that level of blinkered entitlement. Threats to the extreme demonstrated by today's example are on the whole mercifully rare in the annals of our institution. I don't know if young Madam is actually acquainted with Jacob Zuma or if she's merely blowing off steam, but I do wonder if students would try this sort of stunt if they stopped for a moment to consider their actual effect: the whole admin office has been laughing about it all day, it's quite made our week. Dear gazelles, at least they're occasionally good for entertainment.

I had all sorts of plans for this week: I owe dinner to herne_kzn and first_fallen and librsa, and have dismally failed to do anything about it owing to a week infested with board schedules and the concocting of plaintive letters in French to utilities companies who persist in charging my dad for power and phone services he cancelled in April. I'll get there eventually, promise.

bored of being board

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:19:17 GMT

Good lord. In a completely unexpected development, my publishers just sent me a royalty statement. They've sold 196 copies of my book. I was vaguely expecting no money at all, forgetting completely that they'd bypassed the hardback entirely (I would have seen no royalties for the first 500 copies) and gone straight to paperback, where I get 6% of net for all copies sold. This means they owe me slightly in excess of US$250. I'm... a bit weirded out, actually. The one thing I never expected from this academic writing gig was to make any money.

In other news, it's end-of-year, which means board schedule checking, ritual hiss spit. Normally I get to spend my weekend going through a 1.5cm-thick wodge of printouts to lovingly count each student's course totals, manually, and code them accordingly. However, last week it was revealed that this year's schedule requires the board schedules to be checked by Thursday's meeting when they're only produced on Tuesday, leaving us one day for checking. Having, in an unguarded moment, had a small but perfectly formed hissy fit at this discovery, I have won the right to stay at home today. This is mostly because results came out on Monday and there's no way in hell I'll get through all that checking what with the continual string of wounded, devastated students whose lives have ended because they've failed something. Therefore, board schedule checking with mitigating factors of own home, own snacks, comforting feline presence, ability to oversee the new gardener on his first day. On the downside, am not going to be on Teh Internets all day. Sigh. Don't break it while I'm out.

Tuesday wol is Symbolist

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:24:08 GMT

Oh, happy day! the billboard poet is at work again. Most notably:

ALL BLACKS ARE AMAZING!
and
TIGER'S WIFE HAS KITTENS!

In defiance of the evidence both of these are probably about sport, rather than, respectively, affirmative racial politics and Zooborns. But they made me giggle despite the fact that I woke up at 5.30am angsting about the training sessions I'm giving today, and was at work by 6.45 in a state of smouldering resentment.

In other news, Ursula Vernon finally does the gold-leaf Klimt thing to owls, with predictable results, i.e. it's marvellous:

.

Want.

THING REINSTALLED. STILL BLUE.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:39:19 GMT

This week I have faced the following potential melt-downs, not including my own elevated angst levels:

A student who will not accept the transfer credits I've awarded her; after a FOURTH round of arguments with me, she's taken it to the Dean. (Who will refer it straight back to me for comment, but that's another couple of hours of double-checking and justification).
A company sponsoring a student who has had several discussions with me about the student's curriculum and best interests, and then used a broad misinterpretation of the info I gave them to turn around and slap the poor sod with disciplinary action for misinformation.
An annoyed parent-of-student once more on my case threatening to get angry on me because the admin process I warned him would grind out the answer he needs sometime in early December, still hasn't ground it out. (Yes, it's still November).
The need to order exactly the right distribution of T-shirt sizes for my orientation leaders, now, immediately, despite the fact that I can only select the actual OLs in December when results are out. Apparently I'm supposed to count up all the sizes and then proportionally reduce the order to get to the correct number. I shudder to think of the chaos this is going to cause. OLs get extremely plaintive if you put them into the wrong-sized T-shirt.
Ongoing and completely unnecessary venue conflicts created by an administrator in another faculty getting the wrong end of the stick, repeatedly and hard, after not actually reading any of my emails properly.
Three students in crisis and tears because the Summer Term has at the last minute cancelled the courses they need to do to graduate. One of these is partially my fault, I missed a point when counting her courses early in the term, and she withdrew from a course she actually needed. Other than feeling futile remorse there is not a bloody thing I can do about this.

Under these circumstances the only possible response is to contemplate the lot of those more unhappy than I am, namely Not Always Right. This made me laugh until I choked. Tech support humour ftw.

lollipops and candycanes

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:54:18 GMT

Heigh, ho. Yet-another-unsuccessful-lectureship-application last week has induced the usual despair and angst, leading to a vale of tears and self-loathing, a retreat into Supernatural and sewing, and really boring blog posts, for which I apologise. In an effort both at distraction and actual interest, have some Monday morning linkery.

Completely incredible Bioshock cosplay, photographed at an aquarium. Now I want to play Bioshock again. Memo to self, make Evil Landlord buy the sequel when it comes out, possibly by repeat application of creme caramel.
We don't often get to hear about this side of the abortion/adoption debate. Reading this is making me slightly ashamed of even thinking casually about adoption as an issue; it's also engendering the usual feminist rage about patriarchal control of female reproduction and the incredible powerlessness of so many women in this situation. Also, now I like Juno a lot less.

In other, less depressing news, Hobbit has a new trick, viz. lurking under the giant leaves of the delicious monster on the edge of the patio, and ambushing your ankles as you walk past. Fortunately he still hasn't got the hang of this strange "skirt" concept, and tends to suddenly veer off and look embarrassed at the last minute instead of actually connecting with my ankles.

Also, halfway through Season 2 of Supernatural, and am I imagining it, or is the writing suddenly on an upswing? I'm a bit over-emotional at the moment anyway, but "Houses of the Holy", "Born Under a Bad Sign", "Roadkill" and "Heart" were a series of gut-punches which did wonderful things with the emotional arc of the season, and also didn't go quite where narrative cliché dictated they should. ("Tall Tales" was also bloody good fun, and the slow-dancing alien made me laugh a great deal). Also, this show works as a Necessary Perspective Vortex: no matter how annoying my life is, at least I don't have to deal with demon possession, a life based on credit card fraud and running from the police, and the ongoing possibility of having to kill someone I love.

forgettery

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:49:02 GMT

Right, own up. Who's got my Buffy Season 4^H^H^H 7? and, more importantly, what's the deep-seated human foible which leads me to believe, every single time I lend something out, that of course I'll remember who borrowed it and therefore won't have to write it down? Because I never do remember. Never. Because my memory transcends all metaphors of fluff and swiss cheese and goldfish to wander, vaguely and hopelessly, around whole new elevated planes of confusion, absence and loss.

Further to the above: also missing copies of Twin Peaks, Iron Council, several Bujolds and a bunch of other things which, naturally, I can't remember but which are causing suspicious gaps in my shelves. Please interrogate your stashes severely and report back posthaste.

Edited to add: further dispatches from the Elevated Plane of Confusion and Doubt: no, wait, not Buffy Season 4, I actually still have that (which means you can collect it this evening, w-n); it's Season 7 I'm missing. Also Doctor Who season 3. Also, my brain.

whoever the hell she is

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:21:28 GMT

Today's amusing billboard: LEE-ANN SNOGS A BOYTJIE!! I don't know who the hell Lee-Ann is, but I'm very amused by the language choice of the headline. For a start, "snog" is unabashed Brit slang while "boytjie" is very much a South-Africanism; the wide lexical range creates a sort of airy, unresolved bounce between contexts. The use of the diminutive (often an endearment) is playful, denoting an affectionate intimacy with Lee-Ann, but it also diminishes the significance of the partner, clearly a negligible quantity, to allow the focus to remain firmly on Lee-Ann herself (whoever the hell she is). More than this, the language (and multiple exclamation points) contributes to the mere fact of the billboard to suggest, on the "man bites dog" principle, that it's somehow outrageous for Lee-Ann (whoever the hell she is) to snog a boy: I was left with a vague suspicion that she's actually a lesbian. Alternatively, the "boytjie" bit could also imply that she's an older woman shamelessly grabbing a much younger man.

A quick google, of course, absolutely deflates this lovely tension and implication: Lee-Ann is presumably Lee-Ann Liebenberg, a fairly minor South African model/celebrity, and she's found a new boyfriend indecently quickly after a break-up. This is one of those stories where the subject matter is infinitely less interesting than the linguistic play in its headline. Sigh.

In other news, have found the solution to Supernatural freaking me the hell out. Knitting. Another twelve rows on the Ravenclaw scarf while flinching away from ghosts, demons and hellhounds. Still a Sam girl, but Dean is growing on me.

Sunday wol is rather confusing

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:55:48 GMT

So, I have the oddest friends within a considerable radius of this bit of the galactic spiral arm. At least, this is currently my best explanation for it. I got back from Muizenberg at about 11pm last night, having had supper with The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World, to find a small, lovingly-bubble-rapped parcel sitting just inside the front gate, tucked up against the wall. Upon cautious investigation (because I've been watching waaaaay too much Supernatural and in my slightly exhausted state was vaguely expecting a dripping packet of occultly-significant organs) I discovered the following:

I do have a known wol fixation, so presumably this is for me, although this could always be an unduly narcissistic assumption. My best theories: either (a) someone came past late last night, saw by his darkened study that the Evil Landlord had given up on Dragon Age (which was generating an above-average level of swearing last time I looked) and gone to bed, and my car wasn't there, and simply left the parcel; or (b)someone classifies this as a "non-functional owl" and, knowing my known proclivities, was too afraid to give it to me face-to-face. Of course there's always (c), which is not actually incompatible with either of the above: someone's trying to mess with my head. In which case this is an Owl with a Purpose and is thus entirely functional, silly.

Either way, thank you, whoever. It's a cute owl, and the solid, slightly pearly glass makes him pick up the light and glow slightly. Alternatively, if undue narcissism prevails and in fact it's your owl that you accidentally left there for good and sufficient reason which fails to leap immediately to mind, my apologies, and you know where to find him.

Literary Lions

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:39:10 GMT

Following a vague recommendation from someone-or-other, I completely forget who, I've spent chunks of the last few weeks scientifically investigating the works of Tamora Pierce. Pierce is a writer of young adult fantasy, and I was interested in her because she does some quite deliberate things with feminist themes and strong women negotiating medieval, male-dominated societies. It's been a slightly ambivalent reading experience. She's easy to read, and I find myself mentally classing her stories with the Anne McCaffrey Dragonsinger ones in terms of their tendency towards wish-fulfilment and cute-creature-hugging; I also worry a little about a potentially slightly facile feminism. Nonetheless I'm left overall with a strong sense that her Tortall series is a worthwhile project that does something necessary in terms of role models for teenage girls.

The first Tortall series follows Alanna, who wants to train as a knight but has to disguise herself as a boy to do so. The disguised-as-a-boy bit is not treated realistically at all: young Alan should have been discovered posthaste and probably raped. But the urgency of the girl's need to fulfil a role not prescribed for her by her society is very apparent, and you end up rooting for her throughout. It's clearly an early work; the book's writing is a bit halting at times (she definitely gets better over time) and the magic/fighting combination is a little too idealised. The subsequent series which focuses on Keladry, the first girl to actually train openly as a knight, is stronger, more straightforwardly mundane and far more realistic as well as better written.

Good Things: solid detail in fighting, war, tactics (I am so an SCA geek); training is hard work, particularly for girls trying to overcome the strength deficit compared to boys. Prejudice against girls fighting. Page hazing rituals. Social awareness: the feudal system's privilege is neatly deconstructed in Keladry's story. Good teaching. Realistic teen romance! ye gods, how rare is it for teens in y.a. books to (a) play around with sex (b) sensibly (c) in a valid emotional context and (d) with a shifting series of partners, crushes and relationships. Death to the One Troo Love! JK Rowling's bloody saccharine Epilogue, take that!
Bad Things: clunky writing at times, narrative hiccups, falters and rushes. Slightly Shakespearian gender-swapping unrealisms. Too much cutesy power, too many cutesy people, not quite enough grey between heroes and villains. Bloody magically-enhanced animal deus ex machinas, although I can completely see these appealing to the teen girl demographic.

In completely another area of the young-girl-protagonist spectrum, Cathrynne M. Valente has posted the final chapter of her wonderful fairy tale, the one with September and the leopard and the wyverary A-through-L. And the soap golem. Baumish. Nesbitesque. Thurberoid. Other good things, including unexpected and off-beat and occasionally very cruel. Definitely well worth a read, particularly now that the whole thing's up.

amusing! funny! novel!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:23:09 GMT

My Masters student, who has a pleasingly demented streak which has not in any way prevented her submitting a slightly kick-butt dissertation on women in fairy tale (Basile, Perrault and Disney, my work here is done), just popped into my office in order to leave me the following offering:

You add water and it turns into a prince. Apparently. (If you have the duck version, apparently it turns into a princess. The logic here escapes me, although I'm somewhat charmed by the idea of "The Frog Duck to Prince Princess" advertised on the label).

My annoying day full of meetings and annoyance just improved immeasurably. Am off, chortling, to turn frogs into princes and (apparently) watch it grow 600%. For some reason I find this slightly dodgy. In other news, apparently I'm five.

Tuesday wol is looking at you

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:14:22 GMT

... with, in fact, a looking-type gaze. Wols plus bonus Goon Show! Never say I don't spoil you. (Wol courtesy of Zooborns, who are ridiculously cute as well as being rabidly eco-minded).

Memo to self: post more random wols.

freezlefootulated

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:07:09 GMT

So, it's been bucketing with rain for two days. This makes me happy. Except, that is, when I dash through the storm chortling in glee, fling myself into the car, wipe down enough interior windows that I can see through the condensation sufficiently to drive, start her up and take off, only to have about three litres of water cascade gently through from under the dashboard, piling up in the centre console and, with a mathematical accuracy I somewhat resent, inside my left boot. I have no idea where it's coming from. Probably from the ventilation grille for the fan, which has always leaked a little bit but never like this - I'm not sure if a new hole has opened up in the space-time continuum, or if the rain was at exactly the right angle to catch the pre-existing small hole. I shall have to Take Steps. In future, I shall park the car in the inverse position. Wheels in the air.

We had Random Themed Movie Club on Friday night, watching "time travel movies" chosen by stv. The Jacket started out all harrowing and ended up all soppy; Primer was almost, but not quite, completely incomprehensible from beginning to end, and made us realise that that XKCD strip could actually be perfectly accurate. That being said, I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed both of them; Jacket for its snowscapes, small girl child and Adrien Brody, who does vulnerable/haunted rather endearingly, and Primer for its beautiful naturalism and geek-speak observed in its natural habitat - not to mention the unusual experience of watching a film that's clearly considerably more intelligent than I am rather than, as is more common in the average Hollywood dreck, considerably less. The two movies were also a fascinating comparison: the absolute simplicity of time-travel as a plot in one, versus the absolute mind-bending complexity in the other. I feel much more lateral now.

it's only natural

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:41:02 GMT

Memo to self: it's possibly counter-productive to watch Supernatural at night when I'm alone in the house (the Evil Landlord being off at Here Be Dragons), as at a generous estimate I only see about 70% of any one episode, owing to being too scared to look at the screen. The creepy build-up music does it for me every time. This is also causing me to remember that in fact I only used to be able to watch X-Files, back in the day when it was on TV, by dint of importing bumpycat to come and hold my hand every Friday night. I am an enormous wuss. Next plan: watch Supernatural from the other side of the room while filing bills.

On the upside, Sam is cute. On the further upside, Cape Town weather continues bizarre - it's bucketing with rain, and there are branches down all over the garden from the high winds. I am a happy bunny, albeit a quivering, wild-eyed happy bunny convinced there's something under my bed. The main problem is that there often is something under my bed, on account of how Golux likes to go and fossick around in there, among the boxes of role-playing dreck and the small, feral herds of straying boots, making interesting bumping noises in the night. It's probably all good for the moral fibre, if tending to make the nervous fibre a bit twangy.

every night after dark in a dreamy, delirious fight

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:21:47 GMT

Well, that was pretty awful. The older I get, the worse I handle late nights (and, it has to be said, the Demon Drink). Becoming horizontal at about 11pm after a particularly vociferous closing session to Neil's game (we won!), I thereafter spent several frustrating hours pursuing a small, blinking, bi-coloured light around the walls of my room at about head-height. Then, as hypnagogic hallucination gave way to actual dream, I sat through a dreary and interminable faculty selection committee where, despite the fact that I was actually one of the candidates, I had to watch all the rest being interviewed. No-one on the committee would explain why this was necessary, merely looking knowing and making off-hand remarks about how the candidates weren't actually the candidates, anyway. In the middle of it all the Dean's secretary, prompted by an incomprehensible crisis of some sort and acting on a direct instruction from the Dean, hustled me off to catch a plane to Bombay. I still don't know why. I am, however, once more a little frayed.

In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.

The new Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. I spent Monday evening ensconced on the sofa with the Hobbit, chortling at intervals. Terry Pratchett is still very much Terry Pratchett, although I found the book a little scattered and over-busy in its themes and sub-plots: I suspect we're seeing actually a very good writer coming up against the slightly over-simplified limitations of his genre, and being driven to complicate them. The result is a bit cluttered, but the characters are as always warmly human, the digs at both football and academia are very happy-making, and the issues being explored (prejudice, mostly) are real and sharply pointed.
Supernatural. About halfway through the first season: I am somewhat charmed by this series even though its monster-of-the-weekishness is not the only thing it's ripped off from the X-Files. (I swear you could do a direct episode correlation chart). Like the X-Files, it works because of the dynamic between its central characters, who are rather nicely-drawn brothers with a fairly realistic array of tensions, affections and differences. Also, extended road-trip. The actual working-out of the Supernatural Dingus Du Jour is not about reality at all, and I get a bit miffed about lack of consequences such as arrest, but it's a reasonably endearing watch.
Buffy Season 9, i.e. the comics. Joss lets loose without budget constraints, leading to Giant!Dawn, Fray crossovers and whole episodes inside someone's supernatural head. I'm finding the artwork a bit variable - love some versions of the characters, hate others - but the plots are interesting and compelling, and it's a lot of fun to watch the characters develop post-Sunnydale. Buffy is considerably less annoying, too.
smoczek's fajitas. Yum.

why the sea is boiling hot

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:17:18 GMT

Today's two most recent google search terms in my browser: "college impact theory" and "103 Ways to Annoy Lord Voldemort". This tells you absolutely everything you need to know about my working life. On the upside, this Harry Potter paper is taking vague conceptual shape. I darkly suspect we may actually be dealing with institutional climate theory.

In other news, if one more student panics his/her way through that door and turns out not to be clutching the relevant paperwork, I may find myself perpetrating spontaneous avada kedavra tests in a working environment.

hey, bring me more fish

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:50:12 GMT

Gawsh. In the Department of the Inexorable Advance of Time, it's November. Hate it when that happens. It's a particularly blustery one, too. I thought that was supposed to be a Northern Hemisphere thing. Not that I mind, because strong winds make me almost as happy as rain, but damned global warming.

In other news, I have sand everywhere. We went out to the Strandloper yesterday for lunch - up the west coast in Langebaan, the mad outdoor "fish boma" where you eat ten courses of fish, no trimmings except bread and lemon, off paper plates using mussel shells as cutlery. It's all sandy and open-air under shade-cloth decorated with suitably piratical bits of fishing float, net and the largest, fattest, glossiest, best-fed gulls on the continent.

Mussels and mackerel and angelfish and stumpnose and snoek and paella and lamb stew and crayfish, oh my. And, of course, a cooler box filled with white wine and gin (and sand). Also, a rather jolly proprietor who gave us taunt-ammunition for EVAH! by warning us not to let "peaches-and-cream there" (pointing at stv) go out in the sun too much. I confidently predict that getting stv's goat by calling him "Peaches" will get old approximately never. It's righteous retribution for all the punning.

However, on the downside it was very windy and thus very sandy, leaving me with small deposits of sand in my shoes, handbag, hair, camera case, ears, teeth, and stuck to the UV blocker on my arms. I was consequently more than somewhat wind-blown, sun-crazed and totally dead last night, I stuck it out as long as I possibly could and then crawled off to bed, only realising as I switched the light off that it was actually 8pm rather than 9. Basically I'm feeble and not used to the Great Outdoors. Also, the West Coast is aggressively beautiful given that it's mostly composed of vast tracts of more-or-less flat and scrubby nothingness.

going nowhere on the mantlepiece

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:18:58 GMT

Phooey, had a whole post written and LJ inexplicably ate it. I now have a mental image of my poor little paragraphs wandering, lost and aimless, through the wastes of cyberspace, slowly disintegrating. On mature reflection this is not unlike the basic human urge, which I do not share, to believe in some kind of survival of consciousness after death, except that there's probably more actual reason to believe in an after-image of data than there is to believe in an after-image of consciousness.

This random and unprompted cosmic musing brought to you courtesy of a week packed with disintegrating students, some of whom present no really compelling argument for the persistence of consciousness before death, let alone after. On the upside, one of them dropped by my office for absolutely no reason other than to tell me how much she enjoyed my fanfic lectures in the first term. This kind of thing creates an identical effect to that of a chance acquaintance suddenly presenting you with a giant bouquet of flowers on general principles. Also, fanficcers get everywhere, like Hobbit fur.

I don't remember most of the lost post, like the Last Post but less musical. I do remember, however, linking to Gizmodo's rather entertaining analysis of the historical development of incompatible electrical plug formats across different countries. This has produced my current Favourite Sentence Du Jour: "Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature." At last, a use for postcolonial literature. Who knew? (This last statement brought to you courtesy of Academic Bitterness, and not to be taken out of context. Some of my best friends are postcolonial literature).

Now off to fight my current, Fridayish urge to lock my door and pretend I don't exist for the rest of the day. The current degree of student trauma is creating a sad tendency for me to get all empathetically weepy while giving curriculum advice. I think I need a debrief.

like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:50:31 GMT

Good lord, this job has its weird moments. I've just spent 45 minutes digging through a university handbook from 1970, trying to work out whether the Anatomy class taken by Fine Arts diploma students in 1970 is the Med school one, or their own art-based version. The 1970 handbook is... quaint. And somehow far more Oxbridge than the current snappy, market-oriented one. Also, layout not so much. As an encore, I shall now go to a meeting in order to squabble about venues for orientation, since there aren't actually enough large ones to go round. Expanding the university with ever-larger hordes of students is all very well, but the infrastructure is straining at the seams.

By way of distraction from the oddities of university admin, I stumbled today across the delirious and unlikely existence of the planet Nibiru and its apocalyptic intentions for the Earth in December 2012 when it disengages its apparently extremely efficient cloaking devices as it bumbles portentously through our skies. I have every intention of going to see Roland Emmerich's 2012 as soon as it opens, secure in the knowledge that it will be an entirely loud, dreadful, pointless, anti-scientific and badly-scripted collection of nonsense which will nonetheless make me extremely happy with images of large-scale cataclysm. It is a revelation to me, however, as well as a solid dose of fuel for my beliefs about the fundamental stupidity of the human race, that there are apparently vast seething masses of people out there who actually believe this shit. It's not only their touching faith in the infallibility of the ancient Mayan calendar that floors me, it's their unmatched ability to create conspiracy theories about cover-ups as an antidote to all this inconvenient science debunking the myths. Oh, and their worrying tendency to accept viral marketing campaigns for clearly stupidly OTT Hollywood blockbusters as the gospel truth.

The paranoid delusion is at such levels that NASA has a FAQ page about Nibiru and 2010. The Bad Astronomy page is also interesting for its pithy deconstruction of kooky spiritualists and pervy alien-fanciers. Charm these voices of reason never so patiently and rationally, however, that particular deaf adder has its tail in its ears and its head buried under a significantly-carved Sumerian rock, and is moreover shouting "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU!" at the top of its voice. I think I like disaster movies so much because the general apocalyptic devastation seems to me to be no more than we deserve.

this was odd, because, you know, they hadn't any feet

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:05:51 GMT

Today is a random, disconnected list, because I'm feeling a bit random and disconnected. I attribute this solely to the fact that I've run out of chocolate biscuits.

Gawsh. Last night I dreamed I was living in a holiday house in the woods somewhere, across the dirt track from Nathan Fillion. He was a dreadful cook, but later there was snuggling, so it's all good.
It's still raining, a bit, more sort of drizzly, so I'm still happy. Cape Town's delusions of continuing winter keep me sane. Today there's a wild, slightly snide wind growling around and tossing the trees petulantly; I want to pet it and smooth its ruffled fur.
The wretched carved pumpkin on the LJ Halloween header is clearly leering at me. I find this disconcerting in a cucurbitous vegetable. As a result of some bizarrely disconnected series of associations it's also inspiring me to go out and buy the new Terry Pratchett this evening. On mature reflection, leering pumpkins clearly have their own odd utility.
I really like this poster: it's witty, and atmospheric, and kind of tongue-in-cheek, ironic-winking Victorian. I am continually astonished by the absolute lack of conflict caused by my awareness that this Sherlock Holmes film is going to do madcap, iconoclastic, modern, playful, totally inappropriate things to the canon, and I'm going to love every minute of it. I blame too much fanfic. Also, not only is RDJ rather cute in this pose, but I'm really enjoying the way the Watson role is making Jude Law look significantly less like a total skank.

We don't talk about the "Holmes for the holiday" tagline. It's just lame.

hedgehoggy

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:35:04 GMT

The weather is mad again. There was a thunderstorm in the small hours of the morning, complete with thunder and lightning and raindrops so huge and fat they landed separately and distinctly, like a small pachyderm parachute brigade. The noise on my tin bedroom roof was indescribable, I actually got out of bed and bumbled over to the window (falling, as is obligatory, over the cat) to check that it wasn't hail. (This entailed standing there starkers except for my glasses and peering outside until my vision had cleared enough to see that there were no actual drifts of hailstones on the flags. I will not invite you to picture this proceeding in the interests of mental health). The first few splats of rain left wet circles about four centimetres across. Some weirdly giant precipitation up there.

Thunderstorms make me deeply happy, enough that I didn't actually resent being woken up - I have a theory that I subliminally wake myself up deliberately so I can enjoy the sound of rain, anyway. What I did resent was the idiot who thereafter phoned my cellphone at 5.40am, waking me from a sound rediscovered sleep for a wrong number. Who the hell phones anyone at 5.40am anyway? It's not a time, it's a hideous limbo space filled with meaninglessness and the deranged, dawn-inspired tweeting of manic birds. (Manic, damp birds in this case, and serve them right). I am consequently a little fragile this morning, and am only succeeding in bribing myself through the day by copious application of chocolate biscuits. On the upside, for some weird reason sleep-deprivation makes me ungodly productive for the first half of the day. Between processing great tottering piles of credit transfers I have also managed to order more Scary Go Round T-shirts, pay my bills and read a deliriously wonderful paper by someone using Harry Potter to teach basic political science ("ethnic conflict, power political studies and dysfunctional bureaucracies").

I recommend, as a wake-up shock, today's XKCD, which is being all nostalgic about Geocities. It actually made me recoil from the screen with a shout of "Aaargh! My eyes!" Thank the gods the internet Got Better and is no longer a newt in the design stakes. Mostly.

Finally, today's happy-making discovery from Worthless Word For The Day: my subject line employed in the cause of being beautifully rude about religious bigotry. John Ruskin: "So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is." Hee. The proceeding, for a given value of "scripture", also applies, in fact, to politics, education and popular music, and probably also to parrot-breeding and French cuisine.