Cape Town! currently the locus at regular intervals of storms, heavy rain, hail, high winds, cats puddled around heaters, a soaring electricity bill, and that savage bite in the air that tells you somewhere in the fortunate upcountry there is snow. I am, needless to say, an extremely happy pervy cold-weather-fondler. This last is despite a certain ( Read more... )

The Internet is a sticky fly-paper trap. It's a will-o'-the-wisp, leading you into noxious or beguiling bogs. It's a pot of honey, and you're the incautious bee. These admittedly lengthy and complicated workshop minutes are taking me forever to write because I have to keep checking names and dates and the inner historical skinner of my Cherished ( Read more... )

Good lord. I just killed Canada. This is thoroughly antisocial and curiously rewarding. Watch out for Madagascar, if it closes its borders you're toast, and your goal of total extermination will never be achieved.


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I finished watching the last few episodes of Doctor Who this week, resulting in an unusual degree of turmoil in my attitude to Russell Davies. Still needing to brood about the season finale and its manifest joys and iniquities, though, so shall distract myself by memeage while I ponder the analytic mot juste. I was drawn to this one by its first ( Read more... )

This is all khoi-boi's fault. Fantastic Contraption. Fritter your day away in watching your ungainly creation stagger drunkenly across the screen, the very paradigm of design flaws. Or is that just me? Tony Stark crush notwithstanding, so not an engineer.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was infiltrating a medieval castle by suborning the young son of the castle's ( Read more... )

There are actually upsides to these gosh-darned power cuts. They annoy the hell out of me, but (a) the computer being dead, I just spent an hour reading Bleak House, on the grounds that I'm overdue for my annual rediscovery of it, and (b) all the dear little students seem to shrug, roll their eyes and leave campus when the power goes down, which ( Read more... )

I should be marking third-year essays on vampires. Instead, I'm cruising the internet looking for distraction, a technique doomed to success. This follows an entire weekend spent reading highly eroticised Spike/Buffy fanfic. I plead extenuating circumstances. Term has just ended, and I have a cold.

Iain Banks talks about his new Culture novel. ( Read more... )

You know, this academic life is actually a rotten swizz. It's this weird multi-personalitied existence where you are supposed to divide your time between teaching, admin and research responsibilities, each of which is sufficiently demanding in itself to require 80-100% of your time and energy. And the lazy academic obscene vacation time thing, ( Read more... )

1. Tokara. Now starring as my favourite Cape Town restaurant, not that it's actually in Cape Town, but hey. Stunning setting and views down the valley from the head of the Helshoogte Pass above Stellenbosch. Incredible food. The red wine sauce on the fillet of beef was possibly the best I've ever tasted. Thanks, Tinnimentum. You can visit any time ( Read more... )

Work avoidance is a fine art. It's the ten-day vac, and my hierarchy of Work To Do runs roughly as follows:

• Writing fairy-tale encyclopedia entries, which I am avoiding by:
• Writing a paper on Patrica McKillip and medieval romance, which I am enthused about because the Dread Editor really liked the Tolkien paper, although by and large I am avoiding ( Read more... )