Category: Uncategorised

Plans for the week:

Tuesday: WUS

Wednesday: CAN meeting dinner with sam and sarah, free in the daytime

Thursday: department party, south asia party, activist barbeque. All at the same time.

Friday: My party (eep!)

Saturday: CUID/stop aids/etc garden party in the afternoon (or rocksoc picnic), then Rocksoc May Brawl

Sunday (19th): rocksoc punting in the afternoon. Evening would have been bounce, if I’d been organised enough to buy a ticket. But I wasn’t, so the evening is free

Monday: CUFS punting

Tuesday/wednesday: free so far

Thursday 23rd: Calling

mmmm…my life seems to involve lots of acronyms

Sanskrit set text exams. The good part about them is that the set texts are bonkers. Friday’s exam included two gems

1. ‘He treats like a ladle’

(this is an example of a word that doesn’t exist. But the idea seems to be that it doesn’t exist *only* because the sanskrit word for ‘ladle’ doesn’t end in an n, and not because you wouldn’t want to treat people like ladles. A word that does exist is ‘he becomes chain mail’, which might come in handy for the roleplayers among you)


2. ‘Next, he prays to the anthill’

(This is what it sounds like. It’s a ritual. Somebody prays to an anthill. This is considered normal, as far as I can tell)

There are two more set text papers on tuesday and wednesday. I strongly suspect they will include more ridiculousness.

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I’m not sure people quite believe me when I grumble about the long sentences in some of my set texts. So I thought I’d favour you all with a particularly fine example of the ridiculous sentence. Here’s a fine poetic account of the end of the day. Without full stops. And if you can make sense of the bits about the sandbank and the ivory crocodile, you’re doing better than the rest of us.

Describing sunset without full stops

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Today’s achievements:

– turned up at the wrong time for my first supervision

– turned up in the wrong place for my second supervision

– bought a pad of paper. Failed to notice it was completely un-lined

– locked myself out of my house

And yet, feeling really really happy at the moment. Perhaps this means I should do idiotic things more often.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Not just a lib-dem win in cambridge, but a majority of 4.300, a 19% rise in the Lib Dem vote – that’s incredible. And well worth staying up for.

I hope atreic, lavendersparkle and everyone else who’s been campaigning for Howarth feels suitably proud. Thank you all so much, for doing what the rest of us were too lazy and apathetic for.

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If your dissertation involves a section on mnemonic techniques,

do not

wait until exam term to chase down the references. You’ll find a lot of empty gaps on the library shelves…

Grrr!

On the bright side, I think I’m on target to have a draft finished by monday, which gives me a week to fiddle with it before the deadline. And I

think

it’s going to be good, but then I am a little biased.

In other good news, it seems somebody in the UN read my rant on water in Iraq. At least, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, cited it in his annual report to the UN human rights commission last month. Also, the rant is getting printed for the third time – the latest is a semi-academic anthology on human rights in foreign policy.

Also on the political, we have just put together a piece on the use of napalm-type weapons in Iraq. Among other things, there’s a wonderfully flat denial by Adam Ingram:

The United States have confirmed to us that they have not used Mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time.[Hansard, 11 January]

Unfortunately for Ingram, the US State Department website says:

Mark-77 firebombs, which have a similar effect to napalm, were used against enemy positions in 2003

Oops!

It’s trivia, but it’s always fun to find politicians lying

I’m just leaving this here as a gentle hint to lavendersparkle and jmimages…

Your name alone strikes fear into others; but maybe, just maybe, there’s a little vulnerability and weakness beneath that stoic, fierce exterior of yours. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.