Young people nowadays

Mirthful 1 Comment

I had a “what’s wrong with young people nowadays?” moment yesterday. I’ll get to that eventually, first an update:

Because I obviously have too much spare time on my hands (ha!) I’ve signed up for a couple of subject – one at the department where I work and one in English studies. The former promises to be both interesting and useful if I can manage to get enough work done on it to actually pass the exam. The latter was the only class this semester at my old department that looked vaguely interesting, and I thought it would be nice to get back to English literature and to possibly get in touch with the department again in case I ever manage to do something about this doctoral thesis I’ve been contemplating for the last 8 years. (Phew, long sentence.)

This latter class is entitled “Working class fiction” and is supposed to deal both with social history and literature. Sounds promising, no? Actually, it was one of only two classes where I hadn’t read most of the set texts already, and the other was on Native American fiction, and while that might be very well it’s A: way off my chosen field hypothetical-thesis-wise and B: twice the workload (and I really didn’t need that). A brush-up on D.H. Lawrence and an introduction to Walter Greenwood, Alan Sillitoe, Arnold Wesker, Willy Russell and Mary Beckett can’t be all bad, though.

There are two problems. One is time. Getting the reading done ought to be doable, after all, I do read quite a lot, I just need to make sure I read the right things rather than whatever takes my fancy. The main problem, time-wise, is lectures. They are all during working hours, which means I have to make up the time (which is doable), but if we are busy or something needs doing yesterday I can’t just disappear for a couple of hours. So I will probably only be able to attend a fraction of the lectures.

The other problem is my fellow students. This course is bachelor level, which means my fellow students are mostly in their early twenties. It also means a lot of them have no idea why they’re taking this course, they are there because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. There will, I assume (or hope), be exceptions.

Hence we come to our “young people nowadays” moment. The first lecture was yesterday. We were supposed to have an introduction to the social history and then to look at two short-stories by D.H. Lawrence – The Odour of Chrysantemums and Fanny and Annie. These two stories we’d been told (via the university’s “community” boards) would be available in a compendium. However, the compendium was only available as of yesterday. First I figured I’d let the students who were actually students rather than just joyriders like me get the chance to check out any Lawrence than the library might have, and that I’d wait for the compendium to arrive. Wednesday, however, when it (the compendium) still hadn’t (arrived), I popped in at the library to check if they might, on the off chance, still have a Lawrence collection. They did, I checked it out and read the two stories Wednesday evening. I did wonder, because as far as I could see the library was only supposed to have one copy of Lawrence’s collected short-stories, and I thought it was a bit odd that it was still available. Then, yesterday in the one hour of lectures I managed to sneak in between the chaos that is work, the lecturer asked if anyone had managed to find the stories anywhere else, seeing as the compendium had been delayed. Two people put their hand up. Me, that’s one. Another girl, that’s two. And the other girl had only managed to find Fanny and Annie. Which is when I thought: “Young people nowadays!” And then realised they were just the same back when I was a bachelor student, I remember being vaguely shocked at how little initiative the average student managed to show back then as well.

Don’t people realise that it’s a good idea to have read the text before hearing a lecture on it?

Don’t people realise there are such a things as libraries?

Apparently not.

Still, what little I managed to catch of the lecture was interesting enough. Unfortunately, I only managed one hour. And since the lecturer is from Bergen, this course is “condenced” with lectures only in weeks 4, 9 and 13 – and long lectures in those weeks. And I didn’t manage to get away today. Which means I missed a grand total of 9 hours this week. Pity. Still, there’s a chance things at work will be slightly less hectic in week 9, so there is hope.

We’ll see.

Wordwise

Mirthful 1 Comment

So it turns out aardvark is not the first word in the dictionary. Not by a long shot. Not THE dictionary, anyway. The OED has several entries preceeding aardvark. I assume most other dictionaries would also have “a”, as in “a word”, as an entry, but the OED has other stuff also, some obsolete, being the OED. Anyhoo, I’ll let the aardvark keep the honour of being top of the list for the time being, since it’s the first creature – South African, in case you didn’t know – in the dictionary (also THE dictionary). Following hot on its heels (possibly also literally, though you’d have to check with a zoologist) is “aardwolf”, also South African (blame the Dutch). So now we know.

Voice in my head: Vera Lynne singing We’ll meet again (blame the husband, it was his farewell tune this morning, except he sang “We’ll meet again, got-a-clue where, got-a-clue when”, whereas Vera is sticking to “don’t know”. She is, however, singing “You’ll muddle through just like you always do”, rather than the more conventional “Keep shining through”, and, if you think about it, it actually makes a lot more sense that way, though it sounds less heroic, I suppose.)

Future’s bright

Mirthful

Saccarina‘s dismissal of “trendforskning” reminded me of a “news” item a week or so back, where people who are supposed to know about these things made predictions about the future. The predictions mainly fell into the category “blindingly obvious, aaargh, hand me my sunglasses, please, for the love of God!” but one or two – ok, I exaggerate: one – stood out:

“Planes will be increasingly automated and we will no longer need pilots.”

Yeah. Despite the last few days chaos in Scandinavia because of dissatisfied pilots calling in sick THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL I’D GO UP IN A PLANE WITHOUT A PILOT!

I don’t doubt that planes will become more automated. But machinery fails. Machinery fails quite alarmingly often, in fact. And I can’t really see the stewardess pressing the reset button and not-so-automagically everything is hunky-dory again. Can you?

About books

Mirthful

I’ve been tidying the bookblog. A few days ago (it may be weeks by now, actually), I decided I really needed a category for book-related posts. I could just put them in this blog, obviously, but I like being able to include them in the bookblog, I feel they belong there somehow. Still, they obviously don’t belong under a specific author, so hence the new category “Aardvark – on books in general, booklinks, bookmemes and such”.

Aardvark because it’s the first word in the dictionary and so likely to keep the category on top of the alphabeticised list.

Today I decided to do something about the stupidly long category list I’ve aquired by reading books by too many different authors. It’s not a problem as such, obviously, but MT creates one file with the individual entry and one for the category archive and for all these 1-book authors those two files were basically the same. So I created a one-hit-wonder category for all those books that, for some reason or another, are likely to be the only entry on that specific author for the foreseeable future. It’s not a reflection on the quality of the book, at least not necessarily, in some cases the author simply hasn’t written any more books (like Sylvia Beach), in some cases I mean to read them, but not any time soon (like George R.R. Martin). Sometimes, of course, it’s because I didn’t much like the book, but those are actually the exceptions rather than the rule. It should be obvious from the entry which category the book in question falls into.

The question now, of course, is: What is the second word in the dictionary. I need to get the category listing moved up from the O’s.

Thar she blows

Mirthful

Or, rather, it blows. The weather front affectionately known as Narve, that is. You could call it windy.

Martin, unfortunately, had to go to a meeting in Oslo today. His plane managed to leave Trondheim, which is impressive, no planes were allowed to land here in the early morning. Hopefully, Narve will have lost some of his huff and puff by this evening when Martin’s du to come back – since we’re supposed to go to a birthday party tonight…

It’s only a fresh gale, apparently. Well, at least one can still stand on one’s feet. The dry snow blowing into every possible opening is a bit unpleasant, and, on the whole, I’d rather not go outside unless I have to (unfortunately, this is not a job that allows for a home office, so I had to brave it this morning).

The expected weather this morning is -3.3

Just a note

Mirthful

… to say that voice in my head this morning is, I think, Dean Martin. Singing King of the Road. Except when he gets to the “trailers for sale or rent” part he sings “Sailors for trail or rent” which is very whimsical of him. I find the transposition rather entertaining, though it’s possible the sailors might object. And why the king of the road would sing about such goings on I have no idea. He does, though.

Rush-tid, kaller du dette rush-tid?

Mirthful

I går var vi som sagt i bursdag. På Tiller. Vi tok derfor buss 46 fra Munkegata, og turen var mer enn vanlig interessant. Jeg skal ikke si så mye om våre medpassasjerer, ikke engang han som satt bakerst og sang på et noe uforståelig språk (definitivt “midt-østensk”) innimellom brokkene av samtale han hadde med kameraten som satt noen hakk lenger fram.

Derimot skal jeg si et par ord om TT-sjåførens serviceinstilling. Men ved holdeplassen før City Syd sto en gjeng på 7-8 stykker og ventet på bussen (tror forresten sangeren var en av dem), og en av disse hadde sykkel. Før han i det hele tatt hadde rukket å prøve å få sykkelen på bussen sa sjåføren bestemt at han ikke kunne få ta den med da det “fortsatt er midt i rushet” – “vent til City Syd stenger” sier han. Joda, vel og bra. Men bussen er knapt halvfull, og nær slutten av ruta si. Det er ingen barnevogner på, og ingen står i rommet der de eventuellt skulle stått. På neste holdeplass kommer det riktignok på en dame med barnevogn, men det hadde fortsatt vært plass til både en sykkel og en barnevogn til. Det er greit at bussjåføren vil sikre seg, men kunne han ikke sagt at “hvis det blir fullt må jeg be deg gå av igjen”, for eksempel?

Jeg finner ikke noe om sykler på TTs nettsider, så jeg vet faktisk ikke hva slags betingelser de har. For Oslo Sporveier er regelen som følger: “Sykkel, hund og sparkestøtting: Barnetakst. (Du kan også ha 3 måneders kort for hund eller sykkel. I slike tilfeller skrives “hund” eller “sykkel” i fotofeltet på kortet).” Det må jo være en grei ordning. Uansett hva ordningen er i Trondheim er det dårlig reklame for TT som “miljøalternativet” med en slik holdning til syklister.

Det hjalp ikke at sjåføren litt senere kom bakover i bussen i ilfart for å få klipt et klipp til på et klippekort for barn etter at jenta som leverte det ikke hadde sagt fra (eller ikke sagt fra tydelig nok) at det skulle klippes for to.

Eller at han kjørte for fort i svingene og stadig fikk sleng på bussen på grunn av holkene i veien.

Kanskje han hadde en dårlig dag. Det kan skje den beste.

Jaja, vi kom vel fram, tross alt.

Men han med sykkelen vet jeg ikke hva som skjedde med. Kanskje syklet han hjem på glattføret, kanskje står han der fortsatt.

Pictures

Mirthful

Or, as Martin would say, nasty, horrid picturesesssessssss. Never mind.

I’m experimenting, ever so slightly, with flickr. So far I found all of three pictures on the laptop that I felt like uploading. More will follow, eventually. I’ve added a “badge” to the main blog page, until I have more worth viewing I will stick to the one.

Addendum: If anyone uses MT 3.2 in combination with flickr successfully and can explain why I get invalid username/password errors when trying to set it up, please do.

Unger

Mirthful

Vi var på bursdagsfeiring hos svogeren min i går, og da vi ankom var den eldste nevøen og kusina hans på vei opp i andre etasje for, som han sa, å “leke mor og far og barn og disko”.

Dette er en ny lek for meg og viser at verden har utviklet seg siden jeg var fire år.