All issues big and small

According to this week’s Big Issue, it has been a ‘bad week for Library fines: an American student was handcuffed and thrown in jail over two overdue library books. Heidi Dalibor owed £20 after failing to return books by Janet Fitch and Dan Brown on the due date. Cops jailed her, forcing her mum to pay £100 to bail her out.’ I will make no comment on whether her reading choices justify such treatment. But it’s a safe bet that the library service won’t see that money again (we wouldn’t). It will probably go towards leather sofas in the Principal’s office…

I see the World Mind Sport Games are about to take place in Beijing, including bridge, chess, draughts and Go. No Sudoku or Scrabble though. Nor Risk (which has nearly broken up several marriages to my certain knowledge). Nor 221B Baker Street. Nor even WOW as I believe the in-crowd call it.

I was reading these snippets on the way home from a particularly well attended but lengthy CDG Scottish Division meeting. (I am partly to blame for the length, I fear). We missed one train and were forced to chat in the pub for a full 45 minutes after the meet.

Train time now and maybe eke out an hour’s useful CDG work tonight…

Cloning for beginners?

Timetables. A fine way to dampen any spirits, if they weren’t already sodden through with the current weather. Eveybody wants a piece of us. There are only so many bodies, so many suitable rooms and so many hours in the day. But of course everyone wants the same slots. And no I can’t teach 32 people in a room with 27 PCs, not if any of them need any help or attention at all.

Take all day to update one modest summer school presentation, due to constant interruptions, mainly involving simultaneous consultation of six different documents. Brain all to pot.

Manage to escape to the gym at lunchtime and get some exercise while hearing good news about Chris Hoy (pretty much the only athlete as far as the Scots are concerned).

Umbrellas at the ready; it’s time to go home.

Apocalypse when?

Back to work after a nice weekend with visiting friend. Ate lots of carbs, drank lots of wine, watched lots of Olympics. Loaned and returned books: we are on a quest to find things that are positive and life-affirming, but it seems my whole collection fails this mission. ‘I see you have lots of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, says she. ‘Er, yes, that would be alcoholism, relationship and mental breakdown laced with the excesses of the Jazz Age’. We’ll keep trying.

Olympics: Nicole wossname thoroughly deserved her gold medal in the cycling road race. Made Headington Hill look like a gentle undulation, then there was the torrential rain… so many reasons why I’m not an elite athlete… Breakfast much improved by two golds in the swimming, even if our boys missed out on the diving. Hey they all looked fab to me. Really quite clever at somersaulting backwards off stupidly high places.

Last night I watched Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s latest language-no-one-actually-speaks, bloodthirsty offering. Was quite good actually. It exposed my woeful sense of history though as I was puzzled to see Europeans turning up in nifty boats at the end. I thought the Mayans and Aztecs and those dudes were like thousands of years BC, back when we were mostly saying ‘ug’. Apparently they were still around in the 16th century. How have I missed this vital information? Could we not have skipped a few terms of spinning jennies and checked this out instead? Also I want my money back from Sid Meier as he always made theese civilisations out to be reasonably peace-loving.

Talking of Ug, I hope you’re familiar with Raymond Briggs’s Ug, boy genius of the stone age and his search for soft trousers. Marvellous. Poor boy castigated for questioning mum and dad about the value of sleeping under rock duvets when there are warm furry dead things lying about… Twas ever thus with progress.

Every day’s a heptathlon for the librarian

Well I’m looking forward to a bit of the old Olympics over the next few weeks, wonder how the Brits will do  – looking out for Tom Daley in the diving, such a nice lad, can I take him home? Wave 102 FM was proudly announcing how many Scots were in Team GB. I think it was about 31. I was in the gym at the time, being very un-0lympian yet equally smug. The Saltire is banned though, I could be amused at this but it may offend some of my regular readers.

Had a dream about work last night – got disciplined by Information Manager for playing too much Tetris. Chance would be a fine thing. I need the equivalent of a long orange one to make all my work problems fall into place.

Teaching is looming large on the agenda, busy updating and writing presentations, working out who’ll have IT accounts when, etc etc. Reassessments I’d forgotten about are back – will I never be shot of this assignment, which I was first marking in December? Really must get the old quality assurance hurdles cleared more smoothly otherwise liable to injure informatic hamstring.