Wooster Collective : Stickers / Posters / Graf / Culture Jamming
You might know about this already, but it makes me smile.
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March 2005 Archives
Dear All,
This is to announce the opening of my new website at:
Check it out. Guarantee there's stuff there you wouldn't expect. Any resemblance to your average prof's website is accidental, unintentional and quite possibly non-existent. If you like it, tell your friends about it.
Best wishes,
Derek
Derek Bickerton is a really interesting and influential linguist. Probably his most famous areas of work have been on pidgins and creoles and on the evolution of language. He came up with the notion of 'protolanguage'. Roughly, protolanguage is an envisaged human communication system which was a first step away from ape communication towards human language. It meant that we could make more sense of the evolution of language as something that evolved without having to make a gigantic leap from nothing-like-human-language to something as complicated as what I'm using as I type and you're using as you read.
Anyway, he's now a blogger.
B-)
We all seem to be having a relaxing time in Devon (except for Clem who is rather excited and went to sleep in her dad's storytelling arms at 6pm today - which would have been 5pm yesterday). Somehow it makes sense that it's while I'm here that I signed up to London Bloggers
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Nice evening with Rupert. Plenty time to eat before the movie for a change. The movie was Sideways It's really good, although I'd have ended it with him driving off from the wedding. The possibility of everything that happens after is already implied. I'd have found it hard to murder the darling scene in the burger bar, though.
And yes, I did manage to be sensible and am now finishing off a nice cup of decaff tea before going to bed.
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NME - Belle and Sebastian album of oldies
And I would be buzzing about this, if I didn't already have most of them.
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NME - new White Stripes album recorded
The playgrounds of North London will be buzzing with this news...
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It's been a busy week. Went to see The Producers with Ohna on Monday. It's not perfect, but I think you have to see it. Brad Oscar is great as Max so we didn't miss Nathan Lane. Interesting that I found the comedy gays a bit boring even though the show is nothing but tasteless jokes, with comedy nazis and comedy old ladies etc. Ohna's been given a blackberry by her work which I would think of as a disaster. Sure enough, she was being emailed in and out of the theatre. We went for a bite afterwards and she was outside on the phone when our food arrived.
Went to an opening with Dug and Alan last night and then Ohna joined us later. Found myself not coping too well with the alcoholic intake, so I'll try to be sensible tonight.
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I thought I was going to lobby parliament with Kiloh and Anna Clare today. The woodcraft folk have had their government grant stopped so we were off to try to persuade some MPs to do something about it. It turned out, though, that I had got the day wrong and the lobbying was yesterday. So we took the opportunity to go bowling and now I'm using the time before meeting Rupert for a movie trip to do a bit of blogging.
This article by David Batty says that some people think they took away the woodcraft folk's money because they were against the war. It can't have been a surprise that woodies were against the war, though. I mean, we spend a lot of our time sitting round campfires singing about things like the H-bomb's thunder and how we're going to lay down our arms and how you've got axes so we'll get axes too.... Like, woodcraft folk are against war, full stop. Anyway, hope they see sense. Kiloh and Anna reckon they might, seeing as how the election is coming up. I kind of think, though, that we've got another goverment who would put me in the category of 'wouldn't vote for us anyway'.
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Yahoo! News - `Netspeak' doing more good than harm to English language
I haven't got time to read this right now but maybe you will?
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Mai just set up a blog. One way in which it will be interesting, for the first few years, is as a record of what it's like to come to London and do a PhD. Unless, of course, blogging takes over from researching ;-)
Well, the reason I've been quiet for a bit is cos I got a kind of flu-like thing last week (10 days ago) and after I got better I had a load of stuff to catch up on. I'm just about back up to speed now, although that partly depends on a few things getting done this weekend. I examined a PhD last Friday when I was just about recovered, which was fun despite my slightly less than 100% state. Since then I've been mainly catching up. Middlesex has carried on with its amazing range of speakers. I went to see David Putnam the other day giving a really good talk on how he moved from film to education. The main idea was that film can be a really important thing if it has to do with our common humanity and collective responsibility. He's fed up with films where bombs only land on just the right people and murders leave no widows. So maybe he was in education even when he was in film? I also made it to the session with Guy Jenkin, who wrote loads of TV comedy including some Spitting Image and Drop The Dead Donkey (I always thought that was a great title and a not quite so great show) and Graham Lineham who wrote Father Ted among other stuff (of course a great show but I've always had a bit of a problem with priests - not that I particularly know any or anything). I would have maybe seen Howard Brenton but he cancelled at the last minute, and I definitely would have seen Michael Rosen (on 'Are books for children worth reading?') if the subject review I was involved in hadn't taken 10 hours (from 9.15am until 7.15pm). This was in Middlesex's country park campus where I used to be based and will be again after summer. Funny to be moving back and it feels longer ago than I'd realised. I'll miss Tottenham but I'm looking forward to being back to the countryside. This week I also managed to miss Kiloh's appearance for the school team in the girls' football finals. I felt less bad, though, when I heard she didn't get to play. She's usually one of the subs but they didn't use any subs in any of their games, which was sad for the four kids who didn't get a game. I was pleased to hear that Kiloh took this really well and said it was the team that mattered. Or is she a bad player if she hasn't learned to get on the moby to her agent as soon as anything like this happens?
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Apoa can move on now from updating us daily on how many days to her birthday, since it's now three hundred and sixy three days to go. We had a really nice celebration, starting with a few kids coming for cake after school on Friday and then going back to primary school for international evening, which was great and fitted in pretty well with my equal opportunities training. I guess 'celebrating diversity' would be the buzzword way of describing it. It was a free, nonfundraising event where everybody brought a dish, we all ate them, and a few groups put on entertainment. The highlights were the caipirinhas, the feast and an amazing group of Turkish dancers accompanied by a circular-breathing pipe player and an awesome drummer (sorry - didn't find out much about the names of instruments etc.) Then it was back home for a sleepover (11 kids, counting Kiloh and Anna) with the DVD of Princess Diaries 2. The grownups didn't bother with the movie. I was particularly put off by the cgi people who looked like leftovers from the deck of the Titanic
Yesterday we served them pancakes and then Ohna took them swimming, meeting up with the nonsleeping over guests at the pool, while I did the lastminute shopping and raced back to tidy up the house and cook. Naturally, the cash machines on Green Lanes were all broken but I managed in the end, diving round to Londis for a couple of postlastminute supplies. It was a carb-heavy meal and they got through an impressive amount of pasta and various forms of bread. They did eat some veg as well, though (yes, we're a bit uptight about this now, thanks to Jamie) I'm off to Londis now so they can have a sandwich when they get back from circus school.
Yesterday evening's DVD was Bridget Jones 2 which was also fairly disappointing. I'm not sure how much of its worseness was to do with it being the second one and how much was to do with it being worse. Anyway, the grownups have a say in the next choice so we're going for Anchorman which sounds much more promising.
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Apoa woke up at 3.30 and at 3.45 but then managed to sleep until 6. She enjoyed opening cards and pressies in our bed and then had a nice breakfast (brownie and milk - putting aside her anti-exczema dairy freeness for one day) but is particularly pleased that it's snowing properly on her birthday.
We finally gave in and bought her a mobile phone. We used to say she could get one when she could afford to buy one and pay for her own calls, but a train plus bus journey every day persuaded us it would be practical if she had one. We made sure the phone came with everything to get started but of course it came without a battery, so I'm off to Woolies this afternoon.
My bike has been in Crouch End for a couple of days now, following the double puncture on Wednesday (that's 6 in the past month) and I don't like cycling when there are icy roads, so I took the bus which was pleasant. Particularly enjoyed being reminded how ahead of their time Cabaret Voltaire were from the Mojo Beyond Punk compiliation, and everyone on the bus enjoyed the bus behind driving into us (slowly) at a bus stop on the way.
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Just received this warning from a cyclists' email group:
Beware Mothers' DaySue has asked me to remind all Little Green Riders that the pubs will be full of mothers this Sunday. That means that it might be an idea to come armed with more food than you think you can eat.....just in case.
See y'all soon.
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Demos - Media - Hope is key to future Scotland
Seems that Scottish people have a 'fatalist tendency' and need to develop 'future literacy'. I'm not sure I see why this is different from saying that Scottish people are a bunch of gloomy buggers who need to lighten up a bit.
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MSNBC - Not the Queen's English
This is useful for anyone who teaches courses that have to do with 'the English language'. We have a few modules where this is relevant. Our first year students wrote on problems with defining 'the English language' last semester.
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The Independent Online Edition - Money
Seems our neighbourhood is 'losing its anonymity'. Naturally, there are a few things us locals wouldn't agree with in this article but it'll be interesting to see if people will begin to have heard of Stroud Green. At the moment I always tell people I live in Finsbury park so that they don't have to ask where Stroud Green is. Crouch End is definitely a bit more heard-of these days, although it was news to me until some of our friends moved there.
When we moved here, Mrs Stefanou told us this was 'one of the nicest bits of Crouch End' while her son told us it was a great place to be because it was 'so easy to get to Crouch End from here'.
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Got up this morning, went past the post office to collect a package containing Apoa's birthday presents from Jed and Ruth, took the parcels out of the box so I could fit them in the bike bag, headed off to Middlesex for a morning of equal opportunities training (more linguistic data than you could shake a stick at (whatever that means)) bought a sandwich and ate half of it before my first tutee arrived at 1.15, then finished it at 5 after the last one left, then went to hear Linton Kwesi Johnson talk about Michael Smith before (now) heading off for a night out with Ohna. Somehow managed to read the start of an MA dissertation and approve three more encyclopedia articles inbetween, which means I'm only waiting for two and then my only remaining job will be to look at the proofs and corrections suggested by authors (hooray). A busy day, but I enjoyed it. Linton Kwesi Johnson is a visiting professor here which is very cool. I pretended to be John Peel, though, and suppressed my starstruckness.
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