Journal Entries
T. REX'S FEATHER RUFF
Posted Sep 4, 2005
For some time now I've had a fond mental image of how Tyrannosaurus rex might have appeared in life. He's had a bad press, and I'm sure his name is no indication of his true nature. What with his sturdy, tripod-like lower half and his diddy little arms and his big smooth head with those powerful teeth, he looks like nothing more than a scavenger. He does not look like the kind of beast who would go stomping around catching prey--hell, they'd see him coming a mile off. Even as a skeleton, he's not exactly inconspicuous.
Since dinosaurs are thought to have been the precursors to modern birds, and since current models of T. rex make him look like a big bald turkey, I like to imagine that he was feathered; that he had a baldish head (for food hygeine reasons) and a great big ruff around his shoulders and a body covered in down, with his arms (for use during mating) concealed under the feathers. I like to imagine that his voice, far from being a leonine roar to scare everything in sight, was a high-pitched cackle to communicate with his own kind.
I was delighted enough when scientists began to suggest that T. rex was indeed a scavenger. Now it turns out he could have had feathers, too.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1764136,00.html
Now I'm hoping someone will discover that dinosaurs could sing.
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Latest reply: Sep 4, 2005
CHURCH OF THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER
Posted Sep 2, 2005
If the teaching of Intelligent Design to schoolkids bothers you, you gotta see this....
http://www.venganza.org/index.htm
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Latest reply: Sep 2, 2005
FLIBBLE
Posted Aug 19, 2005
Gothly's been away on holiday for the past few days, visiting old uni friends. I'd have gone too, but I had things to do, people to see.
"Will you be alright, looking after yourself?" asked Gothly at the train station.
How patronising. Will I be alright. Sheesh. What am I, eight? I was positively looking forward to having some time to myself, to do as I pleased.
Back home, I wandered about a bit, trying to remember what I wanted to do that I couldn't do with Gothly here. Suffering a failure of imagination, I switched on the computer. I could have watched TV I suppose, but couldn't be bothered to figure out how to use the remote control by myself. I thought I'd find out what marital aids are available these days; I recalled reading a news article about a woman who had passed out in the frozen food aisle of a supermarket because of an orgasm brought on by a product she was wearing in her underwear. I decided I must have one of those, so I Googled for 'orgasm' and 'frozen food'. I didn't find the news article, but I did discover that there are vast tracts of pornography devoted to people who like to meet each other in supermarkets.
An ice cream van pulled up outside and I dashed out and joined the queue of kids to indulge myself in a 99 Flake. Got back to the house and realised I had locked myself out. I had locked myself out and Gothly wasn't back for a week. Also, I noticed that it was evening and I had forgotten to eat any dinner.
I crammed the ice cream down my neck and knocked on our next-door neighbour's door. We've never said more than "hello" and "awful hedge" to each other before, but he was most hospitable when I explained my predicament. He offered me a cup of tea and let me use his phone to call our letting agency--which was closed, of course. Then he asked me if I'd left the skylight open: he was all for climbing on the roof and getting into the house that way. The computer is in the same room as the skylight. I had left it switched on, supermarket porn and all.
"Er, no, the skylight's closed," I said, hoping it was true. (It was.)
My only option was to phone Gothly's parents and get them to drive me over to their place for the night.
They were very nice about it, though. They gave me a flowery nightie and everything. I haven't worn a nightie since I was a kid. I regarded myself in the mirror of their spare room, and noticed a disturbing resemblance to a particular Red Dwarf episode. http://www.blogography.com/photos6/Flibble.jpg. But perhaps I was just tired.
I picked up a spare key from the letting agency the next day. They were quite understanding. Just a small snicker right at the start, then politeness itself.
It's been, oh, three or four days since Gothly left and I've lost all sense of time now. I keep forgetting to eat until I'm starving hungry: I haven't had one unburnt meal so far, and I keep wandering into the kitchen to find I've left the cooker on. My sleep pattern's all out of synch. I don't know what's on telly. I think I'm starting to lose my hair. I hope Gothly comes bach soon.
Or Mr Flibble will be very cross....
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Latest reply: Aug 19, 2005
GOLD-PLATED SPIDER
Posted Aug 19, 2005
After my meeting with a prospective ghostwriting client yesterday, I wandered into one of the university buildings to see what the head technician was up to. (He's Gothsis's fiancee.) He was sitting in his office looking hideously bored with whatever it was he was doing, and was glad to be interrupted.
"Let's go and play with the electron microscope," he said.
He led me to the electron microscope room, with was small and warm and cosy. It was lined with dusty old shelves full of odd bits of bioscientific tat, and there were a few falling-apart chairs stacked on top of each other beside a battered workbench. In stark contrast to these was the microscope console, which looked like the inside of a cockpit, what with all the switches and buttons and joysticks and monitors.
The technician pointed out what looked like a beaker of gold standing on the workbench. "That's the electroplater," he said. He explained that many items, especially organic ones, have to be plated with gold before being put inside the microscope, because the microscope scans them by bombarding them with electrons, by the same means as a TV screen is bombarded to produce a picture.
"If something isn't gold-plated first," he said, "you see it sort of burning up on the monitor in front of you."
He had earlier found a tiny dead spider in the room, which he had gold plated, and he showed it to me: it looked as though it had been moulded by a master jeweller the size of a fairy.
The microscope stood at one end of the console, looking like a stumpy iron gypsy-stove. The technician opened the door in its side and inserted the spider, on a little dish. Then he switched on one of the monitors and carried out a series of arcane manoeuvres with the knobs and buttons. The spider appeared on the screen. WOW! The detail was incredible! I used the joystick to rove across its body, feeling like someone in a hot-air balloon floating over an alien landscape. The technician switched off the light in the room to improve the effect and zoomed the image in and out to give me different perspectives of the spider's topology.
You can see pictures of our spider session here: http://public.fotki.com/Snailrind/electron_micrographs/.
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Latest reply: Aug 19, 2005
TO PEE OR NOT TO PEE
Posted Aug 12, 2005
Yesterday, in a panic, I phoned an experienced teacher friend of mine and asked her what I could do about first-day-of-teaching nerves.
"Nothing," she said matter-of-factly. "No, you'll be shittin' yourself. Your hands'll shake, you'll drop your whiteboard marker, and when you see 'em all sitting there staring at you and waiting for you to start, your mind'll go totally blank. Good luck."
Suddenly it didn't seem so bad.
"Just open your mouth and say *something*," she advised. "Once you start speaking, it'll all come back to you."
So off I went on the train today, to my first creative writing class. I had my lesson prepared: some stuff about parts of speech, and a creative exercise to make them think about how they construct sentences. Upon arrival, the social worker in charge said, "by the way, we've got a man with learning difficulties turning up today."
I didn't know what the hell I was going to do.
The lesson was in two parts: the first hour was being taught by someone else, who tried to teach everyone how to write a haiku. Nobody knew what a syllable was. After the teacher had explained, the guy with learning difficulties was at a complete loss, but everyone else coped fine. So he just sat there while the rest of us wrote haikus.
I wanted to give him a hand, but thought that might be seen as usurping the other teacher. Finally, one of the social workers helped him, but she wasn't too sure about syllables either.
When the other teacher had finished her hour, I stood up to go to the toilet. I had already peed about 64 times already that day, but felt I needed to go again, even though I actually felt quite calm and placid. My legs gave way. Turns out it was only the top half of my body that was calm and placid. I pretended I had pins and needles, and staggered out.
As I sat on the loo, gazing in terror at the paper towel dispenser, the thought occured to me that I could just walk out of the building and keep going. Nobody would know I'd gone for a good quarter of an hour. Nobody would come after me.
I returned to the classroom. I opened my mouth in the hopes that words would come out of it and, to my relief, they did. After I'd given them some spiel about how writing is a lot like cooking, and combining words is like combining ingredients, I ran through some parts of speech. Not one person in the room knew what a noun was. One person knew what verbs were. Oh, boy. I'd been banking on the fact that *everybody* has heard of nouns and verbs. But I persisted. I got them all to give examples of 'naming words' and 'doing words', and I wrote them up on the board. The guy with the learning difficulties had shrunk into himself, but I managed to make him come up with a couple of suggestions along with everyone else. I did the same thing with adjectives and adverbs. He'd perked up by that time, and the women in the group seemed quite enthusiastic too. Only one guy looked as bored as all hell.
We looked at some extracts from books, to see what other writers had done with 'describing words'. Everyone decided that "less is more" when it comes their use. The guy with learning difficulties floundered again, so I went through it slowly with him. He didn't see where the adjectives were, but said he preferred the extract that was less wordy.
The other guy gazed out of the window.
The exercise I gave them was to write a description of something familiar as though they've never seen it before--and without using any adjectives or adverbs. Boy, that had them tearing their hair out!
The guy gazing out of the window wrote a paragraph and then returned to his gazing. I was sorry not to have inspired him, because I'd heard that he was a talented and funny writer. Everyone else scrawled away intensively, until I called an end to it. It was clear that nobody had fully understood what adjectives and adverbs were, but that didn't matter, because the object of the whole thing was to prevent them from writing down the first sentence that came to mind, and rather to think about what they were saying. In that respect, they'd all done well and were pleased with their work--except for the bored guy. He was bored.
The student who experienced the greatest sense of achievement was the guy with learning difficulties. Embarrassed by his slowness, he'd tried extremely hard to pay attention and do the tasks. Where everyone else had written encyclopaedia-style descriptions, he had written a story about his first experience of drinking coffee. He had used fewer adjectives and adverbs than anyone else--and he had made it rhyme. How about that! I was thrilled. So was he.
When the lesson was over, everyone thanked me and then I had to go the toilet again. As I sat there gazing at the paper towel dispenser, I comforted myself with the thought that at least I hadn't dropped the whiteboard marker.
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Latest reply: Aug 12, 2005
Snailrind
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