I spent the best part of an hour cleaning the bath today, and one question kept coming to mind:
Why do baths get so dirty? I mean, they're cleaned with soap and water every single day. aren't they?
Think about it, and tell me in all honesty you can't see the logic of my argument...
One of the things you soon collect when moving in academic circles is name badges in little plastic sleeves, courtesy of some conference or other.
You can tell an academic on the train by either a) the pile of essays they're marking, b) the fact they've still got their name badge on ("look at me - I'm important!"), c) the number of pin holes from said badges or d) the look of desperation on their face as they realise their rare day out is coming to an end.
A particular bugbear of name badges is when my name gets spelt incorrectly. My own fault, I suppose, for having one of those names that no one seems to be able to agree on.
Two conferences spring to mind in this regard. One insisted on getting my surname and forename mixed up, which meant I walked round all day as Mr B Jonathan. The worst, however, managed to get my name mixed up with my menu option, which meant that (for security reasons) I was forced to go through the whole event as 'Mr Vegetable Lasagne'.
I thought it might at least help to break the ice (the worst part of any conference is lunchtime where people who became academics largely because they don't like talking to other people are forced to talk to other people while trying to hold a plate in one hand and a glass of orange in the other). In actual fact, people just avoided me altogether, clearly thinking I was some sort of weirdo, which suited me down to the ground as I still haven't got the hang of small-talk over mysterious fried spicy things.
Looking back it would probably have been quicker to have nipped to a local judge and changed my name officially to Vegetable Lasagne than it was to get the conference organisers to eventually change my name on the stuff they kept sending me.
The first proper review of my book, 'Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice' has been published in Grafik.
Generally very positive although I thought the 'textbook' comment was a bit odd. I mean, it's a book with text in it, isn't it? Oh well, I suppose they have to find something to poke at!
They also got the designer's name wrong - it was Bob Wilkinson, not Lucienne Roberts who designed it.
(Click on the image for a bigger version).
Other reviews are coming in to the publisher from academics who've seen it. Again, they are enthusiastic which is good as it was written to act as an introduction to an area of the design curriculum which is either delivered in a very dry and uninteresting way, or simply not delivered at all.
You can order the book from Amazon.
This is one of the new Apple MacBook Pros (or should that be MacBooks Pro?) Anyway, whatever the correct grammar, I want one.
I also want the kitten that's playing with it. The owner is plainly messing with the remote control and sending the poor cat wild.
Cute.
really expensive cat toy on Vimeo
The lecturers' strike in the UK is beginning to bite in ways that I don't think anyone anticipated. It really looks certain that students won't be graduating this summer as planned. I'm not a big supporter of the action (though I support the cause - academic pay is appalling, and it beggars belief that graduates will go into jobs earning more than the people that taught them), but the 'increased' offer made today by the UCEA (representing employers) of 13.1% over three years is laughable, particularly considering it doesn't even begin to make up for a decline in salaries over the past decade or so, which has meant university lecturers have gone from being paid the same as middle managers in industry to less than bus drivers. Seriously.
And what is it with these 'over three years' offers? 13.1% equates to 4.3% per year (although it won't actually) which is not much above inflation as it stands, but seems to be designed to look good in the papers when the 'over three years' seems to get dropped.
It made me think this morning: what's the difference between a plastic surgeon and the UCEA? One tucks up features... (you can work the rest out for yourself).
I was sitting in the pub the other night staring at an ashtray for some reason, when two things occurred to me (as they do after a few drinks):
The first is, there's a Turner Prize to be won by collecting thousands of soon-to-be defunct ashtrays from the UK's pubs and clubs and stacking them to form one big ashtray, or a wall of ashtrays. So that's a project to keep me going for a while. Forget "shedboatshed" I'm going to do "ashtray-ashtray-er, ashtray".
The second, rather more serious, is that I hope someone somewhere is telling bar managers what to do with all their ashtrays. With the ban on public smoking coming in to force soon, we have the potential for several landfill sites to be brimming over with the things, most of which could be recycled.
Update: Thanks Shaun for crushing that fantasy - he pointed out that someone's already spotted the potential of the demise of the humble ashtray.
White Rabbit, originally uploaded by haadams_rpi.
Ripon, where I lived for ten years, has a few claims to fame (not including the fact I lived there for ten years, of course!)
One of them is the residence of Charles Dodgson, who as Lewis Carroll wrote" Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". His links with the cathedral (his father was a canon there) are thought to have led to some direct inspirations.
This seat (or misericord), made for the clergy to rest on during services, includes a carving of a griffin and a rabbit who is trying to escape down a hole. You can see the bottom of a more successful rabbit already disappearing down the hole on the right.
The architect Sir George Gilbert Scott included figures of the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat during building works on the cathedral in celebration of the cathedral's links with Carroll
When Tenniel was doing the drawings for Alice, he modelled the heroine on the daughter of Canon Badcock, Mary, after being given a photograph of her by Carroll. Here the links between Ripon and Alice get even stronger: Mary lived near Ripon's notorious gypsum faults, which periodically cause huge holes to appear in the ground - leading in turn to quite a few arguments between houseowners and insurers. In 1834 one of these holes appeared a short distance from the Badcock's house, 60 feet deep and 35 feet wide, and it's thought that Carroll visited it and later included it in the tale of Alice's adventures.
Another Flikr discovery. I used to walk past this gravestone every day on the way to work. It's in the cemetery outside Ripon Cathedral and reads:
"Here lies poor but honest Bryan Tunstall,
he was a most expert angler until
Death, envious of his Merit, threw out his line,
hooked him, and landed him here
the 21st day of April 1790"
Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice
(Winner of 'Best Higher Education Title' at the British Book Awards 2006)
by Jonathan Baldwin and Lucienne Roberts
Buy from Amazon.com
Buy from Amazon.co.uk
