The teachers are revolting!
Ha ha; at least, that’s one of the quips we made about ourselves on Wednesday. Cos we were striking, and I’m sure a lot of people thought that was either wrong of us (be thankful you have a job, shut up about the crappy pay and conditions), or that we would tear down our darling Premier’s office in a re-enactment of Russia, 1917.
Anyway, I striked (struck? maybe just went on strike). I’ve done this once before, but that was a whole union ‘we hate the new IR laws’ thing. This time, it was me and several thousand teachers, all sitting together in Vodafone Arena, most wearing red (I cringe a bit to think why the AEU chose red…). It was a mostly interesting meeting – our president is not the world’s greatest speaker, although apparently she has improved! Some people decided to use it for some public political grandstanding – and before you start laughing, and pointing out that union meeting for heaven’s sake, this grandstanding was completely irrelevant to the topic of discussion and so was not appreciated by many people at all (someone told me the dude was actually standing for election for one of the very minor parties).
Eventually, we managed to vote almost unanimously in favour of striking again next Feb if the govt doesn’t hurry up and negotiate properly (we’ve been at this since March), and then rolling 4 hour strikes after that, if necessary… I really don’t want to do that, so I hope both sides compromise with regard to pay and we can get on with, you know, developing the leaders of the next 10 to 20 years.
The one thing that’s got me riled about the whole thing is the government’s attitude that, like the police and nurses, we have to create some sort of productivity outcomes, or something like that. And from us, they seem (at least, as the union portrays it, and of course it might be skewed) to expect $$ savings. Since when was education meant to be profitable?? Or even cheap?? Education should be massively expensive – for the government. Victoria already has the best Yr12 retention rates, and on average we meet or exceed national benchmarks for readin’ & writin’ & numberin’, so what more can they ask?? Anyway… is annoying. When we’re the lowest paid teachers in the country….
Star Trek VI
So all that stuff about odds and evens of Star Trek movies is, I have decided, crap. I just watched VI (man I love BigPond Movies!), and it was great. Right from the start it was obvious that it was made much more recently than V, because the effects were infinitely better. And the plot – there was one! And it was a good one! No faffing around at the start; an unexpected double-cross (for me to be surprised by a double-cross is quite unusual); and the acting was probably a bit better than it had been previously.
Kirk got emotion and a turn-around, Spock got devious, Bones got insulted… and Sulu got his own ship.
This one I am happy to recommend to most scifi buffs.
Oh – and Klingons quoting Shakespeare – brilliant! An interesting touch to make them more civilised, which throws the whole Klingons-as-brutes questions into the air and pushes Kirk, and the audience, into questioning the relationship between ‘civilised’ and not, and indeed what ‘civilised’ means.
I liked it.
And there’s a new Star Trek coming out next year, with Karl Urban as Bones! It’s set in the space academy, as a prequel – the original gang learning how to be the insubordinate types we know and love. I’m not entirely convinced, but I’ll probably go and see it.
Free rice! and time wasting!
My friends, I have found the most wonderful, nerdy, and actually-almost-useful time waster.
You get the word’s meaning correct, they donate 10 grains of rice to the UN. Don’t ask me how it works – haven’t read the FAQ – and I choose not to think about the ins and outs of this. Because they’re words, man! And they want me to define them!!
I donated 1520 grains tonight. What I particularly like – and this is where my competitive side comes out – is that it records your vocab level, and if you get a word wrong you go down. The highest I got tonight was level 47.
Free rice love!
Star Trek V
As part of my ongoing effort to watch all of the Star Trek movies, I finally saw this one a few days ago. I think I’ve mentioned before the odds/evens thing with them, and after the craptacular nature of IV I had hopes for V, although with some trepidation. Fortunately, it was most certainly better than IV – although that wasn’t hard. What felt like about the first third was a weird, let’s-get-to-know-the-characters-outside-of-the-ship thing… maybe their audience polling said that would play well? Me, I don’t need to hear Kirk and Bones singing “Row, row, row your boat.” And am I the only one who thought the suggestion of romance between Uhura and Scotty just a bit weird??
Anyway, the storyline was bearable; I quite liked the emotion-mad Vulcan, although most of the twists were predictable. I thought he was a good character, and they used him well. I also liked the way they managed to get yet another ego-tripping maniacal Klingon in there (and all the while reading subtitles, I couldn’t help but think of those people who ‘speak’ Klingon – figuring out syntax from subtitles is hard work!!). As always, I think Bones was my favourite. His acerbic wit and delight in calling Spock out as a nutter are highly enjoyable.
Probably not one for the casual movie viewer. You have to be a bit nuts to watch it, I think.
House
I’ve thought this vaguely in the past, but watching the end of season three on DVD solidified it in my head.
TV’s Dr Gregory House is Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
No wife/girlfriend; drug habit; musical; detective; slightly antisocial; bizarre techniques.
This can’t be accidental, surely. The writers didn’t have to make House musical, for instance.
What is it about dysfunctional people that make them so fascinating to watch or read about??
Assyria, and lectures
Went to another public lecture the other day, this one the eleventh Marion Adams Memorial Lecture, for the Arts Faculty at Melbourne Uni. It got me thinking that I would like to have a lecture named after me, or possibly a book-buying bequest… I might have to set aside some money right now for that to be possible.
Anyway, the lecture: was very interesting. I won’t describe the whole thing here, because if you are interested in hearing it you can – gasp! the technology! – actually download and listen to it. Actually, it wasn’t there when I checked today, but I am sure they’ll get it there. If the microphone was good enough you should be able to pick up Dr Andrew Jamieson* thumping the desk and getting very excited, which was quite worhtwhile. Of course, you won’t get the visuals – unless they upload those too, which I would have thought unlikely – they were really great. The gist of his talk, anyway, was that far from the Assyrian heartland being the sole arbitrator of taste and refinement in the Neo-Assyrian period, there definitely seems to have been toing and froing in cultural borrowings and acquisitions between the heartlands and the conquered periphery. Just makes sense to me, but I take it that this is a new idea in the field.
*Whom, if memory serves, I heard speaking at another lecture last year – this one in conjunction with his brother, who is a physics lecturer also at Melbourne Uni. The whole thing was very good, but Andrew was definitely outshone on that occasion by his brother. Maybe he was sick then, because this particular lecture was brilliant.
George Takei
So, apparently George Takei – who played Sulu in Star Trek and, unbeknownst to me, also had a part in Heroes – has had an asteroid named after him. That’s very nice, and appropriate and all. But what I really want to know is whether there is a lump of rock out there with the sobriquet Shatner? How about Nimoy? or Kelley? (Bones is one of my very favouritest characters, if I as a non-Trekie had favourite Trek characters…). I’ll bet there’s not a Koenig (Chekov), and would bet an even greater sum that there is no Nichols (Uhura – the girl, remember?).
Anyway, this post is brought to you courtesy of my viewing yesterday of Star Trek V, in my ongoing quest to see all of the old Star Trek movies, which is quickly approaching completion. I’ll post more on numero 5 later… since I really ought to be writing reports at this precise moment.
(It started off lovely and warm today, is getting cooler with approaching rain; I have music and the cricket on – which I notice has just been stopped for rain, in sunny Hobart – so if I have to be writing reports, it’s a pleasant way to do it).
Revolutions
My darlings had their exam yesterday. I wasn’t as nervous before it as I had expected – which sounds weird, the teacher being nervous, but remember two things: a) this is my first Yr 12 class; b) before their first piece of school assessment, I felt really quite ill. Anyway, I got emails from two of them last night, and one this morning, saying they felt all right about it. Then I got hold of the paper today and did a little dance – one of the China questions was quite similar to a piece of school assessment we did (at which I did a little dance), and most of the other questions we had covered – I think – fairly well in class. So even the weaker students should have been able to write something… as long as they didn’t just completely flake, which I guess is always possible.
So… an acceptable end to the year, I think. Although it doesn’t actually end until Dec 17, when the results come out. Eek.
Tshirts
I love Threadless. I also love RedBubble, but I have to say that cos of, you know, the conjugal connections and all. Anyway… I had an issue a while back where a shirt I ordered had a mark on it, so I sent it back. Sadly, by the time it got back to them it had sold out (it was a ButterflyFish). So instead they refunded my money and gave me a voucher as well – woohoo! So I promptly went back to the website and promptly spent my money. I bought the Viking Bird and Playground Joust. They just arrived today, and I am terribly pleased. What I am now trying to figure out is whether I can tax deduct them. I teach the Vikings and knights at Yr 8… isn’t that legitimate? Plus, I bought a Communist Party shirt, simply because I taught the Russian and Chinese revolutions this year. What do you think?
Words of wisdom…
I was informed by a Year 10 boy today that defending the rights of refugees to enter Australia because, like, they’re afraid to live in their own country is both a sign of weakness and Zionist propaganda.
This was the same boy who informed me that if the boongs ran this country, there’d be nothing but empty beer cans lying about the place.
Ah, the joys of teaching in a mono-cultural area.
Randomly Yours, Alex 