Happy birthday alsoname!

Happy birthday, ironed_orchid!

If you haven't seen the new King Arthur film yet, catch it before it leaves the cinemas. It's an example of Umberto Eco's saying that a mediocre film contains clichés, while a great film contains nothing but clichés. In fact, it's pretty much set in Clichéa - there's even a place called The Darklands (where it's too dark). Here are some of the many ( Read more... )

The other day I ran into my esteemed colleague Muzaffer Tunca, who as well as being an excellent teacher is a very talented sculptor and photographer. I mentioned how much I liked his latest photograph and how watching his work on Instagram brightened up my mornings. I used to read Twitter first thing in the morning, but I found (particularly after ( Read more... )

A typical domestic scene: I'm grading papers; Nalan is watching a Turkish soap/melodrama.

Nalan: What would you do if some people kidnapped me and asked for $100,000?
Me: I'd go and kill them.
Nalan: OK. Can you get pizza too?
Me: Sure, I'll kill them and pick up some pizza.

Oh, the happiness of getting a parcel! I ordered some books from Amazon back in November and made the mistake of sending them to my mother's house and sending her a mail asking her to forward them to me. Unfortunately, my mother tends not to read mail much these days. Eventually my brother found the package and sent it on to me. I wasn't expecting ( Read more... )

[Again from my class blog, hence the reference at the beginning ( Read more... )

[From my ENG 102 blog. This coincided with our week of studying mysticism and religion]

1. Tara Brach's introductory guided meditation
I thought for my next mini project I'd try out some different meditations, given that we're looking at mysticism at the moment. For the first day I went back to basics with Tara Brach's Ten Minute Basic Guided ( Read more... )

[From my ENG 102 blog.]

1. Touch
Since we're moving from Epicurus to mystical poets soon, I thought a good bridge between pleasure and spirituality would be sensory awareness. This is an area I've done a little work on in the distant past and thought it might be fun to experiment with again. so I decided this week to spend one day on each of the ( Read more... )

Continuing my ENG 101 blog ...

Wednesday, 22 February 2017, 9:45 AM

Since we're moving on to Epicurus, I thought I'd continue my "happy moments" blogging but focus on pleasure.

• Waking up early and being able to lie in a warm, cosy bed for a while before I had to get up.
• Taste of bread and butter at breakfast. I enjoyed the rest of the breakfast ( Read more... )