Blog Archives: March, 2004
Reading season
Well, it’s that time of the academic year again, when squirrely graduate students finish their papers and step out from their labs into the harsh sunlight, see their shadow, and run back into the library, desperately seeking anything to keep them from facing the real world. Accordingly, I’ve spent my last few days reading, taking advantage of the offerings of various libraries and bookstores here in Oxford.
Symphony no. 9 by Ludwig van Beethoven. I remember thinking Scott was a bit crazy back at Waterloo to borrow scores from the library and read them, but then I decided to try it myself and discovered that it’s a good way to re-experience music you think you know. You see (and correspondingly hear) parts that you’d never noticed before and gain a better appreciation of the structure of the piece.
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. This is in keeping with the “best … ever written” theme started by Beethoven’s Ninth, combined with the “going to Stratford to see that Scottish play” a few weeks ago. I’m almost done this one, just one more act to go; I wonder how it ends? I bet they all live happily ever after.
Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a Stanford law professor. He filed suit against the US government, arguing in front of the US Supreme Court that continued copyright extensions were unconstitutional (he lost). He founded an organization called the Creative Commons aiming to provide authors and creators with flexible copyright terms, in the same vein as open-source software licenses. He spoke last summer at a Sun Labs event and gave a fantastic presentation about the challenges of balancing intellectual property rights to an audience whose primary metric of performance is numbers of patents filed and papers published. The book is available online for free, and is also in bookstores.
Dancing Barefoot, by Wil Wheaton. Wil Wheaton played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and has since become a writer and voice actor. The book is short stories based on his life experience. In one of the stories, he writes about how fans’ negative reactions to Wesley Crusher affected him personally and how it took him a long time to get over it and come back to liking Star Trek. Wheaton also has a great website / weblog, wilwheaton.net, which is fun to read if you truly enjoyed TNG, not because he talks about it a lot, but because the same mix of optimism and reality that the show embodied winds its way into his postings. Plus you get to hear cool stories about Star Trek.
No Logo, by Naomi Klein. I’m only half way through this book so far, so I won’t give too much opinion on it yet. Published in 2000, it’s the prototypical left-wing activist book. It made a big impact when it was published, and I often thought of purchasing it, but never ended up doing so, perhaps thinking that it was too clichéd to buy. (Instead, I’m reading it in spectacular Radcliffe Camera reading room of the historic Bodleian library.) My one comment on the book so far would be that it feels dated. It reads as if most of it was written before the dot-com crash (which, to be fair, is probably true). That could just be the first half of the book. We’ll see tomorrow.
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The Boat Race
One of the convenient things about Oxford (and Cambridge) is that you don’t need to use too many adjectives when you’re talking about them. When you say, “I go to Oxford”, no one asks “which Oxford?” So it’s only natural that when Oxford and Cambridge have a rowing race, they call it, simply, The Boat Race.
The Globe and Mail may describe it as “a ritual only the English understand“, but that’s not so. Oxford and Cambridge are large universities with dozens of colleges and seemingly hundreds of departments, so it’s no wonder that the students look to something else to unite them. Nearly every student tries rowing at least for a term, and during the termly races the shores of the Isis and Cam are packed with students and alumni alike.
If you’re at a computer on Sunday at 6:05 pm British time (12:05 pm Eastern time), tune in to the BBC’s webcast. The race is between 16 and 18 minutes long. It might offer a bit of insight into the strange university world in which I live.
Update 2004/03/28: The race is at 12:05 pm Eastern Standard Time, not 1:05 pm as I originally wrote. Daylight Saving Time started today in the UK but doesn’t start until next week in North America, so for this one week of the year England is 6 hours ahead of Eastern time.
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Handyman
I’ve specialized the exam-time technique of procrastination via cleaning to procrastination via do-it-yourself work around the house. Earlier this week, we had a new bathroom floor installed. I felt that our bathroom needed some sprucing up to better suit the new floor, so today I painted the window still in our bathroom. Isn’t that amazing? Who’d have guessed that I could do something useful like that. So now we have a nice, 2-coats-of-fresh-paint smooth, clean, white window sill. And I even used some leftover linoleum from the bathroom floor to do fill in an untiled area under some shelves in the kitchen. If this math stuff doesn’t work out, I’ve got a whole other career path open to me.
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Spring cleaning
Happy Mother’s Day! (No, really, it is Mother’s Day, at least here in England.) And welcome to spring. Word on the street is that Ontario got a pretty snowy welcome to spring, but here in England, we actually had sunshine. Of course, then we got rain and wind, then some more sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain, and so on, about 5 or 6 times. And that was just this afternoon!
I haven’t been meaning to neglect you, dear readers, it’s just that… how shall I say this… watching CNN Headline News for 4 hours continuously is more exciting than my life. I’ve been working on final projects for my course and, well, that’s it. I did some spring cleaning today, that was nice. And looking at the calendar – what’s planned for the rest of the week? Ah yes, more work on my final projects. Wotcher.
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I am ‘experience’
If you read other peoples blogs, you’ll often find results of web-based quizzes answering age-old questions like “which Canadian province are you” (I’m BC), “which molecule are you” (an enzyme), “which breed of dog are you” (a greyhound), “which Star Trek captain are you” (Picard) or “which Internet protocol are you” (SSH v2). But other than the Star Trek captain question, how many of those are of real importance? They ask a few trite questions and then match your answers to stereotypes (I like trees so I must be British Columbia).
So at last, there’s a quiz, based on Real WorldTM issues of meaning and importance: which Canadian Supreme Court justice are you? I don’t know as much about the Supreme Court of Canada as I ought to, but I think it’s a pretty nifty institution. Its members are highly respected both nationally and internationally and manages to rise above partisan politics. The Justices have a tough job – you try deciding the cases on the quiz, and then multiply that by a whole bunch of laws and testimony transcripts, factor in a short but sweet Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and you’ve got one tough job (well, nine tough jobs, actually).
In case you were wondering, I’m The Honourable Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci, the longest-serving of the pusine Justices and described as the voice of “experience”. But we already knew that.
Postscript: I made up most of those “which x are you” quizzes, but then Google-d for them, and most of them do exist; that’s disturbing.
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R-r-rolling in Oxfor-r-rd
Our house had a visitor from Canada today, and, wanting to make a good impression, he brought gifts for all in the house. He brought me two Tim Horton’s R-r-roll Up The R-r-rim To Win cups. So even though I’m not able to collect my prize, I’m still able to play. Alas, I don’t even have a prize to collect; the results of my r-r-rolling: “please try again”.
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Train blasts in Madrid
The BBC is reporting on explosions in the Spanish capital Madrid, purported to be the work of the Basque separatist group Eta; the Basque is a region in the north-east of Spain in which the city of Bilbao is located.
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mmmm… chocolate
Last night my housemate Caroline and I had a wonderful date with chocolate. We spontaneously decided that we both wanted ludicrous amounts of chocolate, so we wandered to our neighbourhood Tesco grocery store (2 minutes walk, open until midnight!) and bought chocolate muffins, ice cream, cream, baking chocolate, and eating chocolate. We warmed the muffins in the oven, melted the baking chocolate to create a sauce, and poured the hot chocolate sauce over warm muffins and cool vanilla ice cream. So, so good. Of course, every luxury has its cost, and this morning I woke up with a chocolate hangover.
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