Sideshow
Having just watched Paul M’s new show, I will be fascinated to see how long it lasts. There was a bit of swearing, which was amusing given the timeslot – which McDermott kept emphasising, like a little kid trying to push his parents’ buttons. Truly he is like a mischevious boy, who is so cute that no one is willing to tell him off.
I like Tripod – they are incredibly talented, and their song tonight I could relate to: honey I love you, but can we just wait until I’ve finished this level? I’m not a huge fan of the Kransky Sisters, and their story tonight – about one of them being punished by her mother – was really in poor taste. Flacco is always amusing, and Ed Byrne was hilarious…. The show will survive if, and only if, it continues to get guests of the same quality as this.
And if Paul occasionally sings, that will help a lot too. 🙂
Adjectives
I hate it when people use phrases such as “woman president.” The French woman would be a female president if she gets elected! It’s like calling someone a Germany athlete or a happiness husband.
Drives me nuts.
Bride and Prejudice
Of all ridiculous things… this movie!
J is out for the weekend, so I got some girls over to eat and catch up, which was great, and we ended up watching Bride and Prejudice. It was hilarious… I generally find musicals very uncomfortable, for whatever reason, and I did a bit this one too, but it’s just so over the top and ridiculous and beautiful to look at that you can’t help but laugh and enjoy it.
The Good and The Bad
Random Way to Make Yourself Feel Great Number One:
Be young, and buy a $10 (or higher) badge from an old coot selling ANZAC Day badges (in April; also works in November with poppies for Remembrance Day). They will be amazed at a young person caring. If you are old, either enlist a young person to do this for you and do it yourself and strike up a conversation (conversation starter: “these young people today don’t know how good they’ve got it…”).
Random Way to Make Yourself Feel Smaller than a Snail Number One:
Run out of petrol.
Mentioned in a thesis!
My dear friend AB finished her thesis and handed it in on Monday – hurrah! And I got a mention in the thanks section, which I think is rather nice – I helped with some proofreading. Not a whole lot, but I picked up some things, which I hope were useful. Anyway, based on the relief of handing in an Honours thesis (oh, such a long time ago…), I can imagine the joy of handing in a Masters.
Go AB!
Comfort Reading
As escape and for comfort, I pulled Stephen Baxter’s Space off the shelf on the weekend. Gosh it’s good. I’ve always liked scifi, but I think he’s the one who really got me into hard scifi – credit him with my appreciation of Alastair Reynolds, I think. I really must find my copy of Time, the first one written in the Manifold series – someone out there has it – or maybe I should just deal with it and buy another copy. I feel a bit bereft without it.
I am torn
Part of me thinks: woo hoo! Not so much time with the kids in the next few weeks because of an assortment of public holidays, pupil-free days, and excursions! My ears will have a break.
The other part of me thinks: oh no! Not so much time with the kids in the next few weeks because of an assortment of public holidays, pupil-free days, and excursions! How will I fit everything in? Eep…
I vacillate between the two. Depending on the state of my ears, usually.
Robin Hood
We saw the final episode of this in the UK – oops. But it did get us quite excited about the fact that ABC bought it, and it started tonight.
It’s pretty bad, and pretty good at the same time.
Bad:
Oh, the action
The music – very Superman/Star Wars
So, so may cliches
Two arrows at once?!
Robin is short
Good:
Oh, the action
Robin has to work for Marion
The music – very Superman/Star Wars
Very, very modern
OK, so overall it was pretty bad. Definitely no Ivanhoe, Will Scarlet is no Christian Slater, the scenery didn’t even try to emulate 1190s reality (1190s? Didn’t he mention it was Urban II’s crusade??). But the sheriff – he is SO bad; and Guy of Gisborne, from what I have seen in this and the final episode, walks that wonderfully fine line of being bad but evoking a fair amount of sympathy from the audience – enough that it makes things a little bit uncomfortable for them, And, to make matters worse in the UK, just after the final episode was the Christmas episode of the Vicar of Dibley, in which the actor who plays Guy was the romantic lead… very, very funny.
I think I will be watching more. If only to find out how the Arabic girl (oops, slight spoiler there) makes it into the Merry Men.
History of Writing
Finally finished this today – you know how it is when you’re nearly finished a book, but the last half a chapter just seems like such a slog… yes. Well, that’s exactly how I’ve felt with this book, much as I have enjoyed it.
Let me get the gripes out of the way to start with. Lack of definitions irked me. Maybe Steven Roger Fischer is only writing for experts – although it doesn’t really seem like it – but he talks about graphemes and logography and other such words and doesn’t give a definition for any of them until about chapter 5, and then only defines a couple! So that was a bit annoying. I also should say that I didn’t entirely understand all of it; part of that is me – I am definitely not an expert in the area, and some of it just went over my head, as I knew it would – but some of it is Fischer: while he mostly writes plainly, every now and then he got a bit carried away with fancy-pantsed academic language that may not have been necessary.
Anyway… the first chapter is “From Notches to Tablets” and the second “Talking Art” – fairly obvious what they’re about. Mostly concentrating on the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian area (Fischer is a proponent of the idea that ‘complete writing’ started in just one place, Sumer, and developed everywhere else because of foreign influence), it looks at why complete writing developed, and how, and the advantages that came because of it. Knots, notches, pictography… humans really are quite creative. In the development of writing I particularly like the idea of the rebus – smart cookie, whoever realised that you can substitute a picture of one thing for something else that sounds the same but means something else (eg a bird’s bill for Bill).
Chapter 3 is “Speaking Systems,” It looks at the dissemination of writing throughout the Mediterranean and into India, Phoenicians and the Middle East and all. Basically tracing how syllabaries (where a sign represents a syllable) developed and influenced one another.
“From Alpha to Omega” is the fourth chapter, and there are no prizes for guessing its emphasis: the Greek alphabet. From Greece to the Etruscans to the Romans, and then on into all areas conquered by them, is the story told here. Mention is made of Ogham, Slavonic scripts, and Gothic script too. Very interesting, and lots of pretty pictures showing different writing styles.
Fifth is “The East Asian ‘Regenesis'”, which mostly looks at Chinese writing – its development, changes, and how it has influences cultures within its orbit, such as Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Mongolia. I had already read about the Korean script somewhere else, but the story of it being developed in the 1400s by the king (or at least under his aegis) is a brilliant one. And I had no idea just how complicated Japanese is… crazy, the amount of stuff Japanese kids have to learn just to be literate! And my students complain!
“The Americas,” the sixth chapter, is not one I had expected to be very long, but it was actually quite involved. It looked at who might have had writing when, who influenced who, and what role writing might have played in the different Mesoamerican (primarily) societies. The Spanish have a lot to answer for, with regard to destroying Aztec records, but then I guess we knew that.
Penultimately, “The Parchment Keyboard” looks at the development of handwriting styles in Europe basically from Charlemagne on, the dissemination of them and literacy more generally, and then the development and impact of printing. It always amuses me that we place so much emphasis on Gutenber, in the West, when the Chinese had been using paper and block printing for centuries before him. The joys of Eurocentrism…
Finally comes “Scripting the Future,” which is Fischer’s attempts at prognostication, for the most part. What the impact of computers will be, the likely success of trying create a ‘visual language,’ and the scripts that will still be around in 400 years.
This is a very, very brief overview of the book. I really liked that, in general, Fischer was not triumphalist, smug or assured about the overwhelming use of the Latin-based alphabet. Indeed, he went out of his way to emphasise that this is not necessarily the ‘best’ alphabet – pointing out a lot of the problems with it, calling it deficient, which I liked – and holding up the longevity and usesfulness of Japanese writing systems (three of them!) in contrast. It is mostly readable, and reveals things about writing that I had never thought about. Good for nerds who like thinking about the way things are done, and why, and the history of things we take for granted.
Easter
Ah, Easter. We love it because it’s a four-day weekend (five days, before Kennet, not that I know I know anything about that little deal, seeing as I arrived in Melbourne only a little bit before he was defeated and I was at uni anyway). Of course, it’s also the anniversary of the death of Jesus Christ, and for those of us who are Christian it is therefore a sobering time of reflection – and joy. I love Easter because it’s the anniversary of my becoming a Christian; I was eleven this year. Yay for me!
We took the opportunity this year to go away for Easter. J was in the musical at St Jude’s – well, he was playing trumpet, which I guess isn’t technically “in” the musical, but he was participating in it – and the last night was Good Friday, which I really don’t get (I’ve also always been amazed that it is Good Friday: I mean, as a Christian I understand why it is a good day, but still…). This meant we didn’t go away until Saturday morning, but that was ok, since I’m on holidays and he moved his day off from Friday to Tuesday so we still had four days.
The first night we had in the Grampians. We had lunch in Ballarat with the in-laws – they’re on Stage Four restrcitions (actually, they are on tank water, but the town is on the restrictions), and if there are no changes they’re looking at having NO water by December); it’s really scary, until you remember that this is Australia, people, and we SO have to get out of the European mindset.* Anyway, we then went to the Grampians, and met up with MG and his fiancee (which is a bit exciting – been waiting for that for ages). They took some pics, then we eventually ended up at Burrough (sp?) Huts, at about 7.30pm, which was totally infested with people. We had a BBQ and went to bed.
The next day, Easter Sunday, we decided we would see what the Little Desert was like. J has this mad plan of taking pictures in every single one of Victoria’s national and state parks… it will be interesting to see how that turns out. Anyway, we travelled the 100km or so, went past Dimboola (and Wail, with a really cool nursery that we could only see through the glass), and finally got into the Little Desert proper. It’s not really a Desert, is the thing. When the Wimmera River is in flow (there were only a couple of bits with water – the bendy bits, mostly, which must be a bit deeper), it will/would be a most spectacular area. We camped at Acles Camp Ground, at about lunch time. I read for a large chunk of the day, and It Was Good. And when there is water – well, as I said, it will be spectacular. This is somewhere I would definitely go back to. J took some pics in the evening – a number of them from the riverbed, since it was as dry as a road.
After the night at Acles, with just one other car about 100m away (although we could hear some hoons over at Horseshoe Bend…), we drove a little way into the Desert, but turned around after 20km or so after we couldn’t go much further. We then went back to the Grampians, aiming for the Mt Stapylton campground, but going via Mt Zero Olives first: I love the idea of visiting organic-y, exclusive type places like this. And Mt Zero is really nice: a fantastic setting, great produce – we bought some basil oil, mellazina olives (my world has consequently been substantially changed), and some beetroot&orange relish. We also had lunch there, which was delightful – great food, great view, reading and ignoring the dog who adopted us because we were stupid enough to throw the stick for it… until someone else arrived, at which time we were promptly ditched as being Too Boring.
From Mt Zero, we went to the Staplyton campground, where again we sat around reading and dozing until J went to take pics (and being interrupted by middle-aged rednecks who thought that only non-English-speaking backpackers would be our age and in a Landcruiser like ours. Not sure how to take that.). He didn’t end up taking many good ones, which was a shame. We did end up sharing our campfire with some climbers, who were sort of interesting: a 25-ish bloke who works for a climbing gym and is obsessed, and a 30-something dude who works in the steel industry and is possibly even more obsessed, spending most of his weekends in the Gramps so he can climb, and 3 nights at the gym, and so on….
The next day we went to Horsham, via Natamuk, which J had heard was an interesting little town; he was so wrong. Then we drove to Ballarat for the night; we got some good light around Mt Buangor, which was good.
So our time away finished Wed morning, very early (we got home at c.8.30am).
*One of J’s cousin’s has really bad hot water, in Sheffield (UK), so they leave their water running for fully five minutes before putting in the plug to do the washing. I nearly died of shock. And I really will post some stuff about the trip at some stage….
Randomly Yours, Alex 