07/07/07
The numerology brou-ha-ha about this date is all crap, btw.... I mention that because of the news hype it's gotten. Which reminds me of newscasters. Which reminds me that one of my pet peeves is people who consistently misuse the language. Not, as you might think, people in general, but newscasters. Journalists. People whose *jobs* are about the use of language to convey information and opinions. And who think "decimate" is a synonym for "devastate"--that one's getting damn near ubiquitous these days. I've blocked out the rest of the ones I heard on the news tonight, but that one stuck with me because I've heard it so often in the last week (I suppose because of the situation in Britain as well as today's being the second anniversary of the '05 tube attacks). Sigh.
Hmmm. I realized there are many things I never mentioned about the trip to the UK,
like going to the Sherlock Holmes museum and picking up a "Baker Street W1" street sign for Dr. Bellows (since she teaches a detective fiction class wherein they read/are supposed to read "The Hound of the Baskervilles") as well as a reproduction of a Strand magazine cover showing Holmes shooting the hound as he savages a victim. Or like walking down Carnaby Street with Darcy, just to show her the heart of the 60's funk counter-culture--and being very disappointed that it's just basically now a pedestrian shopping street for teenagers, with no shop there that would even make uncomfortable the most strait-laced adult. Disappointing, really--though around the corner half a block there was a shop with a number of mainstream-american-inappropriate greeting cards, most of which I can't reproduce in this no-worse-than-PG-rated lj... After that, we met Elva at Liberty's, which as a store is a very upper-middle-class-grandmother-type store (with a few exceptions), but which is in a gorgeous wood-framed building from the late 1800's. Way cool building. We didn't get to Foyle's, which was a disappointment to me, but...
Oh, I heard the results of my Revels audition today: I was accepted. Which I am glad of, I guess, though I don't think it will be as much fun without Darcy's being in it. However, the weekly rehearsals are mostly on wednesday nights this fall instead of saturday mornings, so I might get to the farm a couple of more times this fall than last, which would be cool. I'll be very interested to see who's back this year and who's new. I gather that some of the people who were new last year were recruited particularly for that show and so might not necessarily have tried out for this one. And Xander will be back in the Netherlands. On verra...
I'm having a very good email discussion with MattS about society and the individual and existentialism. He had an interesting point about a social darwinesque approach to societies that I'd like to believe because it's comforting, but that I basically don't.
I cut the yard this morning, getting that in before the rains came this aftn/evening, which was productive and, because it was overcast, only uncomfortable instead of god-awful.
I brought the new edition of the calculus book upstairs this aftn in gentle preparation for starting to go through it to assemble problem sets for math 3, which I'm considering using WebAssign for this year. Also, I'm looking at WebAssign to see which DiffEq books they use in the thought that I might assign some math5 problems that looked good, even though we don't have a book. I'm also considering choosing a reference book for math 5 and making the course a bit more formal, but I've reached no final decision on that issue yet. Honestly, I've not even reached a tentative decision, being still in the pondering stage.