Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket...

[freckles_and_doubt]

Friday randomness is random, apparently. A Christmas pudding and a piece of holly to anyone who can find the connections between these items, I certainly can't.

The internet connection on this benighted campus has been going through wild mood swings lately; part of it has been Ickle Firsties grappling with Groupwise and accidentally setting up autoforward loops, mailbombs to the entire student body and other inane bandwidth-choking digressions. Dear little gazelles, all wild-eyed and apt to dash off herbivorously in unlikely directions. They do make it difficult for me to restrain my misanthropic impulse to club them to death in quivering herds.

My French visa should be ready on Tuesday. The consulate people were very sweet and are ridiculously efficient. Also, it's an ill wind. In the course of hunting desperately behind my desk for the attestation d'accueil, I turned up the remains of the box of bittergingers librsa gave me months ago, which had fallen down there somewhere in the course of my highly self-controlled rationing of the box to make it last longer. Yum.

Friday linkery! because I can. I call on all witterers to support the utterly worthwhile cause of voting for the name of the next NASA space station module. Naturally you will vote to name it Serenity. It actually fits beautifully with the other node names, but more importantly is causing Browncoats the world over to carol "Shiny!" in tones of glee.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I see 76% of voters, as of right now, have, indeed, chosen Serenity. But of course.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Naturally! Browncoats are everywhere.

It suddenly occurs to me that the whole Firefly thing logically had to be doomed - as both series and movie it was never going to be successful, because being a Browncoat is about fighting valiantly in the face of overwhelming if illegitimate odds, and being defeated. Then being snarky and subversive about it. Browncoats to a T. However, a fairly high proportion of the kind of people who care what NASA names its space-station bits are actually going to be mad Firefly fans, so maybe we'll at least get Serenity out in the black somewhere.

[(Anonymous)]

French consulate sweet and efficient? Really? In marked contrast to the one in London, then. Lucky you!

scroob

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

They see you for a visa application submission by appointment only, which means you only wait 5 minutes; their slightly martinet waiting-room controller goes meticulously through your papers and makes sure they're all there and in the right order before you even approach the window; and the visa itself takes three days to process. It's all a bit religious, actually.

[(Anonymous)]

In London, the "appointment" simply means you're only allowed to rock up at that particular time - but it's not an appointment in any commonly understood sense of the word. There are two slots a day, 9am and 1pm. Everybody arrives and queues from at least an hour before that slot opens. You queue outside, whatever the weather, and of course there are no seats. When they finally open the doors, they control entry verrrry carefully, so the queue shuffles forward slooooowly. You can expect to be standing in a queue for 2-3 hours before you actually get in the door. Then you stand in another queue to hand in your papers, and another queue to pay, and so on. All the staff are about as surly as you'd expect from that environment. But you do get the visa in your hand by the time you leave.

I generally advise anyone going to France to pretend they're going to Germany instead. The German visa office is, as might be expected, a paragon of efficiency. And they're nice!