eating people is wrong

[freckles_and_doubt]

Completely bizarre faculty board meeting yesterday, in which a senior professor attempted to railroad an item through the agenda proposing that the faculty remove all meat products from all its official functions, on the grounds of cruelty to animals. I cannot get my head around how he could possibly think that an article of personal/moral belief was at all appropriate to the faculty's official academic forum. As far as I'm concerned, it's the approximate equivalent of standing up in a faculty meeting and insisting that everyone embrace Jesus because it's the right thing to do. I am more than somewhat miffed that (a) he should force me to become a captive audience to his personal crusade, and (b) that he should demand consideration of something that affects the personal freedom of everyone in the faculty via a forum in which I have no vote. Dirty pool. And egregious grandstanding, to boot: he can have had no hope whatsoever that his horrible little proposal would have been accepted by faculty. He was making a point, possibly against the current dean with whom he butts heads regularly, but he was so out of line as to be in the next army entirely. (Kudos to our dean, though, for standing his ground with remarkable good humour in the face of rampant idiocy).

I admit, I spent most of the half-hour argument (the entirely faculty, who tend to the vociferously opinionated, leaped on board with vigour) alternately cringing in my seat and suppressing a desperate desire to stand up and suggest that the proposer was occupying exactly the same conceptual position as that horrible little court official in America who's just been jailed for refusing to issue marriage licences on the grounds of gay marriage being Wrong. But unfortunately I have to work with the man, and he's already obstructive enough.

At any rate, there was enough tension in the room that it put the whammy seriously on my tension-sensitive frondy antennae, and I spent a horrible insomniac night with my stomach in knots, unable to get to sleep until something around the order of 2.30am. Then Hobbit, bless his little white socks, chose 5.30am to start a half-hour of thumping and mad dashes through the house, which I'd somnambulistically attributed to sheer joie de vivre until the sudden, terminal, agonised squeaking made me realise he was actually dispatching, somewhat lingeringly, a large rat. (He left the corpse on the floor next to my bed, neatly laid out at an exact right angle in precisely the spot where my bare feet touch the floor as I stagger into the upright position. I am equally touched and horrified by the tribute). I was just drifting back to sleep after that when Pandora, as is her occasional wont, decided that 6.30am was the perfect time for the exercise in purring, kneading and climbing on top of me repeatedly which she is occasionally prone to. Sleep, apparently, is for the weak.

As I was leaving for work the feline tribe had cornered a second rat under the passage curtain, and were sitting around said curtain in attitudes of homicidal alertness. I was running too damned late (see 3.5 hours of sleep, above) to institute a search-and-rescue mission, and besides, I don't get too protective of rats. Two in one night suggests a plague ship may have docked nearby. If the cats wish to leap protectively into the breach, who am I to judge? Particularly given my slightly up-in-arms state of bristle at the mere concept of denying them the right to their carnivore natures. Because the Cosmic Wossnames have their own weird sense of humour, and arrange events in amusing thematic juxtapositions just because they can.

I am going to opera tonight - Merry Widow, Africanised production, should be fun and interesting and good for my sleep-deprived soul. My subject line is not Lehar. My subject line is, of course, Flanders and Swann.

Comments

The English Are Best

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

That, of course, is really why people keep cats. Or at least why they traditionally kept cats. Good to see your two are earning their Kibbles!

Enjoy the Merry Widow. What was it like?

Re: The English Are Best

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

The idea of cats earning their keep always makes me think of the ridiculous Goon Show episode where Min and Henry have an elephant, and Min grumbles "I don't know why we keep him, he never barks at burglars." My cats never bark at burglars either, but they do seem alert and prepared to repel slightly more traditionally prey-type boarders.

Re: The English Are Best

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Which, as I said, is the traditional reason for having them around. My sister had a cat which used to go after the local rabbits. You could come downstairs of a morning to find a few teeth and other odd bits leftover from the midnight snack! Good reason to wear slippers first thing in the morning.

Fortunately it never started bringing home half-dead, or fully dead, bunnies as 'gifts' for the family.

[jeanniewal.livejournal.com]

I've been in meetings like that. The mind boggles. Universities are funny places.

Well done on the rats, Hobbit and Pandora!

[torquetum.livejournal.com]

I haven't. (Been in meetings like that, that is.) And I have to attend Faculty Board meetings in two faculties.

The Higher Education board meetings could conceivably go that way, but it's requires a stretch of my imagination. The Engineering faculty board meetings? No way. Boggles the very mind.

Your faculty is a special snowflake, extemp.