Tag: General

From the SWIFT Commentary

Interesting:

The James Randi Educational Foundation is proud and happy to announce the selection of our 2007 academic scholarship winners. Individuals winning awards have been contacted by email, and the Swift Commentary will soon include the names and locations of the four winners, in Texas, Oregon, New Zealand, and Nova Scotia. Many thanks to all who applied. We look forward to next year’s scholarship program and encourage everyone to keep an eye on this website for further details.

Important news coming soon…

But until then, let me reveal to you the beauty of a recent spam comment:

Well, that mastodon is much less flaunting than that conjoint llama.

Isn’t that just sublime?

Magical Video Magic

So, what have I been doing? Making videos for class, of course.

Because my students deserve… Well, I’m not sure what they deserve, but they get it.

In abundance.

Venue Update

Just a note to those of you who are attending the forthcoming course: the room has been changed to:

Room 202, Arts 1 Building, 18 Symonds Street.

Please adjust your filofaxes accordingly.

Finally, Filler

There’s not much to report here at All-Embracing Central; I’ve finally managed to get Quicktime to do the thing I wanted it to do and thus the media for Wednesday’s lecture is ‘sorted’ (as they say down at the docks). The research paper continues a pace and I may have a corporate speaking engagement lined up for the last quarter of the year-that-is.

Thus, no content. Wish me luck for Wednesday, although I’m confident enough to think that I shan’t need it.

My ego will be my downfall.

Certain Immortals I Could Name

The Comte de Saint-Germaine works late night at the University Library. We don’t know what he is studying and it isn’t clear that he is the Comte de Saint-Germaine, but he fits all the qualifying criteria. The beard that looks like a disguise, the archaic language use and, most importantly, the name-dropping of long dead personages.

I only mention this because a similar character appears in Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum,’ and whilst both his character and mine are very definitely mortal men doomed to die they still have a certain majesty and mystery around them that make you realise that learning for-the-sake-of-learning can be respectable in its own right.

Even if it does drive you mad.

The FHG tells me that I will, one day, become such a figure. I don’t know whether that scares or pleases me.