I. R.

There are several trees just outside my office. One of them appears just to have keeled over during the night. Either that or I missed the most incompetent tree-felling attempt of recent history (and if someone did chop it down I will hunt them down and kill them because it was a lovely tree - you never know with university management - they just can't stop building stuff). Anyway, it smashed through a wall and is now standing more or less upside down on a small lawn. It's quite the most exiciting thing to have happened around here for a long time - the area is roped off with 'incident/do not cross' type tape and everything. All the undergraduates have been overcome by a kind of atavistic exhilaration and are wildly jumping up and down on the grass, shrieking and building twiggy shrines and altars for the Elements or the great god Pan or something.

However, on a more sombre note, there's a palpable sense of shock amongst all the small animals in the area. No birds are singing.

PS - sorry about the quality of posts recently. I am very busy.

Labels: falling over, Trees

(Just fast forward through the opening credits).

Labels: zombies

"What is needed for the revolution are men* of sober mind, men who don't cause an absence of bread in the bakeries, who make trains run, who provide the factories with raw materials and know how to turn the produce of the country into industrial produce, who ensure the safety and freedom of the people against attacks of criminals, who enable the network of collective services to function and who do not reduce the people to despair and to a horrible carnage. Verbal enthusiasm and reckless phraseology make one laugh (or cry) when a single one of these problems has to be resolved even in a village of a hundred inhabitants"

Gramsci

* And women too, of course, as I'm sure old Antonio meant to say.

Labels: Gramsci

Tony Benn's on the BBC Question Time panel with Melanie Phillips tonight.

Oh, and in Paris Hilton news, the lovely Paris Hilton has been released from jail on the medical grounds of being too rich and famous to stay in jail for very long. Unfortunately for the other prisoners of Los Angeles this medical condition is not known to be contagious.

Labels: Benn, Mad Mel, the lovely Paris Hilton

This is just an experiment to see if my hit count increases.

Apparently it's of great interest that someone of absolutely no interest who has never done anything interesting and has nothing interesting to say (but who happens to be blonde, thin and extremely rich) is going to prison.

Back when they were good...