viktweeee!

[freckles_and_doubt]

By which I mean, Victory for Microsoft, curse its name. (An integral part of my new personal religion is identifying That Company and all its works as having the same approximate relationship to Evil as tele-evangelism does to Christianity, i.e. being twice damned not only for Evil, but for commercial perversion of the absolute form). I have restored normal display, but only at the cost of an hour re-installing Win98, and another half hour removing all the dear little bits (Outlook, IE, internet connection, etc) that it insists on infecting me with, in the apparent misguided belief that I'd have any possible use for them other than triggering episodes of linoleum-chewing and foaming at the mouth. However, I can now see my screen again, and read e-mail, which means imminent nervous collapse is averted. So is the headache: the dancing spots in the vision were obviously the display problems, not Barthes, who I actually seem to have under control this afternoon.

A new and horrible student behaviour is rearing an ugly head. They get up and leave in the middle of my lectures. Droves of them. I think probably fifteen or twenty did it in the lecture this morning, out of a class of several hundred. The impression I have is that they listened to my carefully-chosen remarks for 20 minutes or so, and then decided I wasn't interesting, and took their valuable attention elsewhere. It makes me hopping mad. Even more so than the cellphone-answerers - there was only one of him, and he had the grace to look sheepish.

Of course, it's actually possible that they're all receiving silent cellphone calls in the lecture and haring off to answer them, which is in itself a scary thought. Have you noticed that all the cutesy cellphone ads in movies, the ones that ask you to switch your cellphone off, have all recently changed to asking you to switch it to silent? Subtext: it's okay to answer it in a movie, just not okay for it to ring. Basically, the cellphone companies are no longer able to suggest that switching off a cellphone is cool or desirable. We are seeing the rise of a generation who will be constitutionally incapable of switching off cellphones, since that entails, horrors, being out of touch.

I am not of this generation. I've lost my dratted cellphone again - I think I probably left it in someone's car. I keep forgetting about the wretched thing. If it were a tamagotchi, it would be dead. Memo to self: ixnay on the baby production, I'd probably leave it in a supermarket somewhere. Like my mother once did, memorably, with a submachine gun, or possibly assault rifle. (Fails militarygeek roll, despite years of exposure to bumpycat).