What is more, yet another conference by no means in my own disciplinary area, but I was comped attendance to on the basis of a long-standing involvement with relevant archives (which also went for that last conference on not my disciplinary area).
Reception last night in Hotel California That Institution of Highah Learninz with which I have had ( Read more... )

How many books is too many books? What makes you a book hoarder? What do you do when you have too many?

This irritates me. Particularly when the ceiling for the designation 'Compulsive Book Hoarder' is a measly 1000.

I don't really think this article makes the necessary distinction between 'book hoarding' and people who keep books because Research ( Read more... )

Blud thikkt with cold at this: High tech turning work/life balance obsolete (via
( Read more... )

Office move. I reckon I now have the equivalent of a further block to walk to get to my work station. Plus at the moment there is all that rather exhausting unfamiliarity thing and not knowing where things are going on.

I got them to move the computer out of the point of the V setup at the work station but it's still not quite right as I now have ( Read more... )

Was moved to have words with a member of staff at the gym this evening following yet another incident where somebody walked through the space in which I was doing reps, with a free weight (this was not the first time since this instance), and frankly, even one time is really too many. Is it people being clueless about gym etiquette or just ( Read more... )

Or are people getting really bad at managing themselves in public spaces?

I have more than once bewailed people who do not get escalator etiquette or the fact that other people are also standing in the Tube and would like to be able to hold onto that pole you are monopolising/lean against that surface you are sprawled across etc.

There are also the ( Read more... )

Maybe I have this wrong end on?

Okay, in the area of the gym I do most of my work out in, there is a relatively narrow space, which also constitutes the most direct route to the corridor, lockers, changing rooms and exit, between various cardio machines and the free weight racks, and depending on what a person may be doing with the free weights (or ( Read more... )

But having been reading about the 1930s, and contrasting with what's going on at the moment -

In that gloom-ridden and depressed decade, local authorities and enlightened businesses and a range of charitable bodies and associations of various kinds with clout with the government -

Were creating public spaces.

Okay, the book I was reading with this ( Read more... )

Oft, my dearios, have I complained (yo, they b hearin the whinge from the Moon) of that journalistic habit of saying 'secret' for things that are, in fact, merely private or little-known (little known at least to them, hem-hem). I.e. the general public do not have access (unless, say, the building is opened once a year or whatever). And why should ( Read more... )

I really liked this: Anne Enright on the cliché of writer as rebel and the idea that children curb one's creative flow:
The writer as rebel is one of those clichés that was possibly never that true in the first place. Many of us, over the centuries, have agreed with Flaubert's dictum that "You must live like a bourgeois and save all your violence ( Read more... )