One batch of marking down, two more to go, four hours' sleep last night. I am high on sleep dep and the incredible relief of killing the shambling monstrosity that is a foot-high stack of Frankenstein scripts. Also, it's bucketing with madly unseasonable rain, my garden is happy, and I'm all exuberant with the simple joy of damp. (See Childhood, ( Read more... )

As a result of a random concatenation of circumstances1, I just spent an hour reading through The Panopticon. It's a knitting blog2. It's very well written and very funny, and features Delores Dolores the cabaret sheep. It has also, in a response straight out of left field, and a horror hitherto unknown in my personal life, left me with a serious ( Read more... )

My sf class is beginning to horrify me somewhat. 19 students and not one of them knows what a LOLcat is! How can we possibly discuss cyberpunk, Neal Stephenson, Sumerian mythology and memes if they don't know what a LOLcat is? Honestly. Modern youth ( Read more... )

Hey! Who let that December in here? Darned bouncers ought to know better. Now it's chased away November with me having done only a fraction of the work I intended. Doom, apocalypse and woe. On the other hand, my Star Wars calendar has cute Luke shots for December. He looks much better in black.

More literary wittering. I still haven't read The Da ( Read more... )

There's something about the process of choosing books for book club which leaves me floundering and slightly shattered. This morning's particular experience may have been partially due to the dual effects of the curiously disorienting and space-warping navigational challenges of the Waterfront mall (memo to self: stick to the familiar entrance in ( Read more... )

For the last year or so my street cred as an English academic, bookworm, pseudo-intellectual and suchlike has been seriously under threat within the confines of our book club by a serious failure on my part, viz. a continued inability to read The Time-Traveller's Wife. All other book club members have raved about this work. Various reviewers have ( Read more... )

What's with this time of year? If I'm going to have a bout of depression, it's usually in January, for no adequately defined reason. At the moment I am not alone in being hormonal, headachy and generally grumpy: Lara is epicly headached, jo&stv are (shock!) disinclined to socialise, the Evil Landlord has been half asleep for the last two weeks, ( Read more... )

Today should have been extremely annoying. On the downside (here we go again), the Army of Reconstruction more or less colonised the house this morning, deploying a painter in the Evil Landlord's bedroom and a clutch of noisy electricians in the roof (they stuck a foot through the guestroom ceiling). The otherwise nice and greatly appreciated ( Read more... )

Courtesy of scroobious, a wonderful collection of cussed Britishness about the bomb blasts. Definitely worth a read.