I checked my work calendar yesterday to see what Zoom meeting joys are lined up for me this week (only one meeting so far, although it's a particularly annoying university-level one), and realised that this coming weekend is Easter. Easter under current circumstances is peculiarly meaningless: to one of my completely irreligious bent it's just a ( Read more... )

This apocalypse is weird. A small three-person brass band has just wandered down my road, tootling tunes; from the joyously loud clothing I would judge they are Minstrel Carnival remnants. I am not sure what they were trying to achieve, as lockdown and social distancing suggest no-one should be popping out of their houses with donations; it may be ( Read more... )

Day 1 of shutdown. This has had a weird effect on my backbrain, I have had on three separate occasions this morning had to forcibly restrain myself from wildly buying a Nintendo Switch online. Apparently having Witcher 2 and 3 lined up to play over the shutdown is insufficient. Also, all the Animal Crossing content on Tumblr and the Breath of the ( Read more... )

I was driving up Klipper Rd to campus yesterday morning, and there was a dude stopped on the side of the road with his car on fire. Literally on fire. The bonnet was aflame in a more or less circular patch across most of it. I have no idea what would cause that degree of catastrophic failure, but it was beyond catastrophic. Someone actually ( Read more... )

One of the side-effects of chronic fatigue is, it seems, its tendency to rot the memory. I have now honed to a fine and perfect point my ability to forget someone's name within approximately a second and a half of being introduced to them, which adds a particular dimension of terror to my teaching and curriculum advice activities. I also do not ( Read more... )

Things you do not expect to see on a respectable campus while trotting off to the library for your important pile of Girly Swot books (subset: crash course in African cinema): live horses. Six of them. Tethered in the shade against the columns of the old Student's Union, peaceably chomping. There's something fairly major filming on campus at the ( Read more... )

Several Things!

1. I spent the weekend holed up in my study marking Honours and second-year essays, with the net result that when the EL bounded into the kitchen on Sunday morning with a cheery greeting he was the first person I'd actually spoken to since 9pm on Friday night. 36 hours in my own head, particularly my own head colonised by student ( Read more... )

Spam is the new surrealist poetry. I still cherish with some fondness the email I received a few months back from the nice Jewish gentleman with the recently dead wife and the fixation on Kabbalah, "post-Auschwitz Spiritists" and Jewish goddess figures, whose ramblings encompassed pre-Christian gender politics, medieval sex magic, Borges, Bacon, ( Read more... )

Sunday is apparently all about creative and unlikely juxtapositions, or weird genre collaborations, although in the strictest possible terms I don't think you can actually count a manatee as a genre. Nonetheless! Just because, or at the very least just because they poke beautiful fun at superhero body-fetishism and are also incidentally cute, ( Read more... )

I have just spent two days at home with a weird virus thingy which caused me to feel hot/cold, faint, faintly nauseous, slightly hovercraftian1, and as though my arms are around three miles long. It's an odd feeling, watching your hands do things completely independently of yourself. I am now back at work, but am prone to look vaguely at a point ( Read more... )