Thank you for your kind comments about my new job(s). I am feeling slightly swamped by what I have to do. I have negotiated the lecturing down to 0.8 of a week, and managed to change one of the units to something I feel more comfortable teaching. Meanwhile I think if I can write about 6,000 words a week on my book I can clear it by deadline. This ( Read more... )

I have been staying with my brother all week. He lives in Northumberland. I haven't had access to a computer but I am laboriously typing this on my phone. I am slow at finger-typing ( Read more... )

Hurrah! I saw a Hollywood film that I didn't hate.

I really enjoyed The Bourne Legacy, which is a sequel to the Bourne trilogy. It stars Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross, a genetically modified super-soldier, the next phase of the Treadstone project. It does not insult your intelligence. The fight scenes make sense - they are strategies within real ( Read more... )

Carol Rumens in the Guardian has posted her own translation of the Pussy Riot 'Punk Prayer'. You can read it here preceded by her explanation of some of her translation choices ( Read more... )

I don't want to bang on about the same old same old, but isn't it about time we acknowledge that mainstream economics is simply wrong. We've been wrong before. Medicine was wrong until about 200 years ago. Physics was wrong at the time of Aristotle. We can look back to the past and say 'In the 17th century they were right about this, wrong about ( Read more... )

This is a web site advertising clothing for Japanese construction workers. The pictures are brilliant. They look like Samurai. Some modelled by women. Yay for the workers. Hope they are real workers.

I have just watched the finale to the second season of The Walking Dead on Channel 5. This is another AMC program. It's not in the same league as Mad Men or Breaking Bad, but I like to watch it. The next season begins in October, and it has David Morrissey in it ( Read more... )

A wonderful day for British sport. 6 gold medals and I saw them all.

Amanda has a review of Breaking Bad up at Pandagon about Walt's abusive relationships to Jesse and Skyler. With both of them he employs an abusive tactic sometimes nicknamed 'gaslighting'. Amanda thinks Vince Gilligan may have been reading up about domestic abuse.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented ( Read more... )

My daughter was the same age as Harry Potter as the books were released, which was great. Now I am the same age as Walter White. Next weekend we both have the same birthday. Also, he's going freelance because his last job didn't work out so well ( Read more... )