so tired

[freckles_and_doubt]

Well, that was... lateral. Just spent two hour being trained in basic HTML. This Is How You Bold Stuff. This Is How You Link Things. Mostly I just practiced feeling superior. Although she did explain about nested links, which was vaguely enlightening. bumpycat used to give me slightly incomprehensible grief about nested links.

I think I'm having a glandular resurgence, my neck feels like someone's been biting it, and I'm singularly dead again - spent most of Saturday being nice to prospective students and their parents at open day, which left me utterly exhausted, even more so than usual. So, semi-undeadness and sore neck: either glandular wossnames or persistent and slightly incompetent blunt-toothed vampires overnight. Although I wish my sex life was as interesting as the latter.

Ironic_Buddha sent me this luvverly postmodern singularity/Wodehouse link, which I offer up in default of actually being interesting. Now I shall go and watch Iron Man, leaving it to you to guess whether tomorrow's post will be a fangirly gush or a suave and analytical grown-up review.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was part of a sort of mysterious tour group thingy on which a bunch of us ended up as a result of being abducted. We were unable to discern, looking out of the bus/plane windows at the green and well-kempt suburban landscapes, whether we were in America or Australia - all the place names were ambiguous. Later, as a bunch of refugees, we had to climb huge tracts of ladder in underground military installations, in order to get back to the plane that would take us back to the city before the installation succumbed to apocalyptic nuclear explosion. schedule5 and her daughter failed, for no adequately defined reason, to fit on the plane, and got back much more quickly in the light aircraft with the cute marines.

Comments

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

<we>.. failed, for no adequately defined reason....

Cute marines, hon, cute marines. That's defined enough for me :).

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Valid... ;>. They were very cute, actually. All young and gung-ho.

Mmmmm... marines!

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

We had a boat load of cute marines in town this weekend.

As I stood pondering it out of my office window my colleague declared it to be a warship. Me in a moment of accuracy exclaimed that by virtue of the fact that the ship itself, as well as all of the aircraft on board, were Vietnam era the boat had not been a warship since before I was born. I then felt somewhat smug... about my military awareness.

At which point she said:
"Honey... I'm a lesbian... and that IS a warship... it has clearly declared war on our morality... the seamen out spreading venereal diseases in our town"

I felt a bit bad for the poor marines... but sort of had to concede her point.

Re: Mmmmm... marines!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I remember touring an American navy vessel that was in Cape Town harbour years ago - accompanied by the concentrated army-geekdom of bumpycat and wytchfynder, to the terror of all beholders. I was very amused by the graphic difference between the ship's naval crew (tall, spindly sailors, white uniforms, cute) and its complement of marines (short, stroppy, khakis, cute).

Re: Mmmmm... marines!

[bumpycat.livejournal.com]

USS Whidby Island. The crew was really impressed by our geekdom. :)

And my platoon commander at Sandhurst was a US Army major, who closely fits your description of the marines. Although, he would give me about 100 push-ups for equating him with a marine.

Re: Mmmmm... marines!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

For some reason probably not entirely unrelated to ongoing exhaustion, I read that as "USS Wibbly Island". Come back, Aust! we miss you!

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Hope you're feeling better soon. These glandular things are a real pain (& not just in the neck)

That link (thnx btw) Funny, until you start to think about it all too much, which, perhaps, I've been doing!

Makes me wonder quite why we bother about 'education' at all sometimes. Presumably Wooster had been sent to 'good' schools, & look at the outcome - a perpetual, bumbling only-just-post-adolescent with Jeeves having to play the part of the omnipotent Father/Mother figure.

Hmmm, doesn't sound so different from what's around now, except that Jeeves is either a machine, or absent.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed the link. Scroll down in the comments until you find the link to the Stross story in Asimov's. It's only half a story, but it's dashed good fun.

I don't think you can educate beyond basic brain capacity, alas. Wooster was, IIRC, popularly believed to have been dropped on his head repeatedly as a baby. And I don't think the British boys' boarding school system is necessarily incompatible with having the emotional maturity of a half-baked clam.

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Will do, with the Stross story.

In many ways I think men tend to survive the British boys' boarding school system as much as anything.

As for all the hoo-ha about SATS & how some teachers are merely drilling their pupils in subjects likely to be tested. . .

Of course they are - the schools are allocated funding based on pupil numbers. Parents tend to pick schools that are local & have good SATs ratings.

Even if, as currently designed, SATs don't actually test anything useful, & there is still a horribly large proportion of people leaving primary school (age 11) unable to read & write fluently or do even simple arithmetic. Of course, this could be part of a government plot to keep the masses ignorant.

Or it could just be sheer incompetence - on the part of those who insist on having such badly designed tests!