Maps

While people are on about maps, here's one of another place.

Archaeology

The Small Object of Desire is at a Time Team Adulation Society meeting tonight

She'll be the one stood at the back, with a bottle of vodka, shouting: "Tony! Tony love! Is that a bit of Samian ware or are you just pleased to see us?"

Черная дама

I was the only one in my year doing Russian for General Studies A-Level. Two lessons a week. In the second year of it I started boycotting these lessons. Not because I was bunking off or doing anything especially political: I was dead bored with them so I'd spend my time in the library or in a corridor working on the other stuff. One day the teacher, a dead nice bloke who's name I have shamefully forgotten, bumped into me.

"Can you come along to one of your Russian lessons? I've been telling the Lower Sixth that you exist and they don't believe me."

We got to talking about why I wasn't turning up. I had a bit of a rant:

"I've done five years of Longmans Russian. I'm fed up of Seryozha and Natasha and their jolly Uncle Vanya and his hedgehog joke. I'm sick of Grigor and Tanya and their holidays in Tbilisi and their stopping off at Gum to get half a kilo of sausages and two apples. I can't be doing with it." 

"So you want to read something real then?" 

"Yes." 

"You like reading crime stories, don't you?" 

"Yes."

Which is how we got to reading Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades." And even though we struggled a bit with the rules of Faro (we should have watched the film as well) it was a pretty good experience. Sadly, my Russian's rusty beyond measure these days  (I can just about pick out what the Russian characters are saying in the Swedish detective programmes before reading the subtitles).

Sunday singalong

There is a view in this household that Joan Jett should be commissioned to rehabilitate the whole of Gary Glitter's back catalogue, this giving us back the excuse for a lot of road journey singalongs.

Confused metrics

I've mentioned before that mine is the last generation to be able to get its head around the concept of rods, poles or perches. The Small Object Of Desire And Moon Of My Delight tells me that hers is the confused generation:

"I know how long a metre or a mile is but I've no idea of yards or kilometres."

Learning with father

Overheard on the tram:

"Daddy, what's that blue light for?"

"That shows when there's an emergency."

"What's the green light for?"

"That's an ejector seat."

"Oh. Then what's that red light for?"

"When that's on you can talk to the driver and he'll tell you off for pressing that big red button on the door."

"What happens if you press it and ask him for sweeties?"

"He tells you to fuck off."

Let's parler franglais

I've long since stopped trying to fathom out how, or if, my mind works. For whatever reason, I was reminded of this hoary old chestnut on the bus home tonight. I expect it was told by Stainless Steven or someone of that vintage, back when the menfolk in their audience had a smattering of French after their participation in the first unpleasantness...

The lady two doors down has been taking French lessons and she's getting to be a bit of a bore about it. She keeps dropping phrases into her everyday conversation to show off a bit. Anyway she got her comeuppance the other day. She'd written a note to the coalman saying:

"Voulez-vouz donnez-moi un ton de nutty slack."

So he wrote her a note back.

"Certainments, madame, do you want it a la carte or cul de sac?"

Signs and portents

A friend is having a few work issues at college, one of which is that he's got to be less judgemental when assessing the work of his students. Sorry, customers. Paying customers at that.

"I should have my mark reassessed," said one. "I didn't realise there were questions on the back of the sheet."

These students are training to be lawyers.

Regrets...

I really shouldn't have shaved my chest.

Cut 'n' mix

A friend is a lecturer in thingamybob at the University of Doodad. He's finding himself increasingly struggling with the modern political agenda which has it that universities aren't places where people go to learn things, they're shops which sell degrees to customers. If a customer doesn't obtain a degree it isn't because they haven't warranted it, it's because the course hasn't been taught properly for them to get it.

"I know I've been irritated by the 'customer' thing but I was still doing OK. I could still do the lectures and the tutorials and treat the students as if they were there to try and learn something, but this year's different. It's the first year I've felt that a lot of my students are there because they've 'got' to be there, just like at school."

I can well imagine this. I'm still bemused by the government's targets on higher education because they seem to be entirely focussed on throughput -- 50% of young people shall have gone to university -- than outcomes -- what will they get from the experience besides a huge student loan debt?

"Even the quality of plagiarism's gone downhill. I think this is the first intake of the generation that's never done anything but copy and paste their homework from the internet. I had one essay begin:

"As I have stated earlier in this chapter..."

"And another had as the first footnote:

"1: Ibid."

"He couldn't see why I didn't believe it was his own original work."

It doesn't fill one with confidence.

Lexicography

Being awake in the insane hours, I got to wondering just what a trice is. I mean, if something's going to be done in a trice I need to know whether or not I have to make room in the parlour.

It turns out that a trice is derived from an obsolete English verb meaning "to pull off with one tug."

Which would make masturbation less time-consuming.

Doing the numbers

Having plenty of time on my hands during this morning's voyage of discovery that was the morning commute, I finished the crosswords in both the newspapers on the way in to work (I had to pick up a book to read on the way back).

Doing one of the crosswords it occurred to me that I'm probably going to be of the last generation that would understand the significance of a rod, pole or perch. When I was a tiny tot we all had little red exercise books which had a couple of hundred little boxes on the back cover, each one containing a table of relationships between different suites of avoirdupois and sundry other Imperial measurement units, starting with the nursery slopes:

16 drachms = 1 ounce
16 oz. = 1 pound
14 lb = 1 stone
8 st. = 1 hundredweight
20 cwt. = 1 ton

and then moving right along to scruples, firkins, ells, rods, poles, perches, pennyweights and fathoms. Heady stuff.

I reckon that the move to metrication has made it more difficult for the children of today to get to grips with mathematics away from the calculator, till and spreadsheet. If everything's in base ten then there's no opportunity to practice simple calculations in everyday life. So it becomes trickier to make sure you're getting the right change when you're down the shops doing your messages.

And we miss out on the sheer versaitilty of base twelve. Ah well...