Hah. The best anti-audioblogging post I’ve ever read heard. It’s worth the four minutes and twenty seconds he asks.
On the other hand, I am able to multitask by listening to him and writing this at the same time.
Or something.
We have the entertaining spamusement, which is much like explodingdog, except not quite as good and with more Viagra and less monster. It informs me that disturbing auctions is back, after a several year mostly-hiatus.
Like disturbing auctions, I also have Who would buy that?, which proves conclusively that my mother is not — by a long shot — the tackiest person on the planet.
Last night at dinner, my cousin (well, my mother’s first cousin, my second cousin, but she’s very close to my grandmother), who is a professor in art history (or something — she’s actually got an MA, not a PhD, but she teaches and curates and goes off to Venice lots, having cleverly designed her research specialty as “Canadians painting in Venice”) started talking about how her students tried to get out of exams, or handing papers in late.
Her most original excuse was that a student couldn’t take an exam because she had to have an abortion that day; her worst liar was the student who forgot that his grandmother also had died a year ago, for a different one of her courses. But the best was a colleague of hers (a grad student, 2nd year of teaching), who for the first time ever got “my grandmother died” excuses (6 of them) and not only accepted the excuse but sent condolence notes to the students.
Today, in class, we did everyone’s favourite: what does a base mean? and how can you convert from base 10 into those other bases? It was fun the first time I did it (in some special class in elementary school), and not too bad the second time but this is now at least the fourth time I have seen base conversions. Honestly, I do not care what the base-13 equivalent of 24716 is. I left halfway through, swearing to myself that I would never ever show up to this class without checking to make sure we’re doing something new. I will have to die if I am forced to deal with propositional logic again. Oooh! If the antecedent of a conditional is false, the statement is always true! Then perhaps we can argue about how this doesn’t accurately represent the semantics of if, or maybe si, since it’s in French, and we can discuss if the word or/ou has the same semantics as inclusive or exclusive or, or if it is ambiguous, and I can cry.
I went to get a coffee, then realised that hey, I have cramps (too). I decided to skip the rest of the day — gee, a lab on converting from base 17 to base 5? No; and I have not the mental energy for the class on “AI”, I’ll just read the handouts which I’d forgotten at home anyways — so I dragged myself to the pharmacy where I bought Midol and stayed at the counter, fumbling as I desperately opened the bottle and swallowed some. I do not yet have relief, but it hurts a lot less.
With luck this will mean that I can skip tonight’s dinner at my aunt’s. This also means that I didn’t get terribly depressed with PMS this month, just a little and also a bit irritable (not that it’s a huge difference for me, being irritable by nature, though I often think it’s just because I enjoy complaining so).
Have I found an eggcorn?
Unchartered waters, appearing 6590 times in Google (note that some of these are articles about charter schools, so this may also be a pun or a typo), to uncharted waters appearing 65,000 times. (The ratio is about the same if you put them in quotes.)
I can’t think of a good explanation for this one. Like a chartered flight? Waters you go through by accident? Uncharted seems so sensible that I don’t get the other. But it’s not much less sensible than wedding vowels, I guess.
The Jewish New Year always made so much more sense to me: it’s fall. School starts in the fall. I count years from fall to fall, though my birthday’s not so much in the fall. Plus apples, honey and fresh challah will beat out champagne any day (and especially when you’re 7 or 8 and get a honey tasting at school).
A week for forgiveness, granted and received; a week for new beginnings.
Have a safe and healthy new year.
Matilda is back to spending overnight outside (I need to stop this; I really dislike it), which means that she comes in around 6 or 6:30, when my father wakes up. Which means that around then she jumps up onto my bed and cuddles. Cuddles! Before seven in the morning! She won’t cuddle in the evenings when I have nothing to do (or with a tad more accuracy, “nothing I am in the mood to do”) but read; she won’t cuddle in front of the tv. No. She cuddles in the morning when I have to get out of bed and get dressed.
Cat! You are so annoying!
Thanks for the book suggestions. I took some from the library, and will eventually work my way through them.
What I want to know right now is why Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is available from amazon.ca but not chapters.indigo.ca. Chapters has real live stores where I can pick it up RIGHT NOW, except not, because it’s not available yet, or something. (My library has yet to order it. Assuming they do — a quick scan of their suggestions list shows a half dozen requests for it, though I have no idea how they actually decide — I’ll be on the list, but by then I may well just own it already. Want. To. Read.) I am also waiting fairly impatiently for the new Val McDermid to show up (you can guess, perhaps, at part of the book’s title).
In case you’re not following Tricks of the Trade (by Matthew Baldwin from defective yeti), I give you the professor’s trick:
If you have to give a poor grade to a student you know is going to object, put a lesser grade beside it on the paper and then scribble it out (but not so much that the student can’t make it out). It will make them think that you originally gave them the lesser grade but then raised it after some thought. 99.9% percent of the time this will prevent them harassing you.
I also like the actual real world use for the pythagorean theorem.
Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
-Anne Sexton