The Observer | UK News | Why chattering classes have nothing to say
Apparently, we're skilled at talking but only talk about trivia. I thought the function of things like reality tv, celebrity culture, politics and the state of the planet was so that we could talk to each other without having to talk about the important things like our relationships, emotions, etc.?
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Apoa's off sleeping over with a new friend she's made at secondary school tonight. I think it's a bit weird to think that she's off in a house we don't know with a friend we haven't met yet, although Ohna is much more cool about it. Must remember to tell her that Roxy is taking advantage of her absence and spending the night with the bed all to herself.
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Went to see this with Robbie, Andrew and Rupert the other night. Fascinating film, funny, sad and real. A bit like a documentary on humans. Structured like a Ramones set, just one two-minute blast after another.
Great to see Robbie and hear more about his new job and imminent relocation to Oxford. Things are looking pretty good, overall, I'd say. I think Rupert had had one of those difficult, draining days that will be familiar to teachers and academics everywhere.
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BBC - London - TV & Radio - Inside Out - Cycling
Not sure what I think about this. Without being particularly assertive, I've several times had motorists honking and being quite aggressive when I'm doing things like indicating right and then pulling over to turn or trying to keep more than a few inches away from the kerb.
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I might have mentioned that I'm writing encyclopedia articles just now as well as editing a section in the encyclopedia. There are just a few articles I'm responsible for that still need a bit of revising, but theoretically I have 6 more to write myself by Monday. Before I left last night I went over one of them changing some things, including stuff I was sure I'd already changed. Sure enough, I just found a version of the paper that already had some of the changes in it. Which means that where I am now is more or less where I had already got to a couple of weeks ago. Grrr! The reassuring thing is that a lot of the changes I made yesterday are more or less the same as the ones I'd made before.
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NME - Tory attacks Pete Doherty
Apparently, Michael Howard said:
'Here you have a man who takes drugs and gets locked up - yet ends up on the front pages'
Does he live in the same country as me?
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The Guardian - Outcry at Kelly's exam reforms
The Guardian - big fall in language students
Neither of these stories is much of a surprise. They made clear they'd be making a retreat from Tomlinson as soon as the report was made public. I'm sure it's as much to do with fear of bad press if they say they're scrapping GCSEs and A levels as it is to do with what they really think about the proposals.
The language news is a complete disaster. One interesting fact that the report doesn't mention is that language courses offered outside degree programmes are doing quite well. Numbers of students taking a language as part of their degree are falling but a lot of them want to learn a language outside their degree programmes.
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The one problem Ohna's having on her bike today is snow getting in her eyes. Not a problem for a speccie.
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Came home last night to find Kiloh had accidentally shaved off part of her eyebrow. Taking a decent photo is surprisingly hard. When she was four, Apoa gave herself what we described as her 'Tellytubby' haircut. It'd be nice to add the eyebrow to the collection. We're wondering whether Kiloh will get teased today or whether everyone will think it's cool.
We woke the kids up around 10 last night so they could look at the snow. 5 minutes later the doorbell rang and Aidan snowballed Ohna when she answered. 5 minutes after that we heard tapping on glass and assumed he was back with another attack. We shouted at him to get lost and then realised it was Christel who'd locked herself out while taking a picture of the wee menace.
Not much snow on the ground today but they say there'll be more later today. The kids are desperate for more. Apoa is fantasising about missing school and worrying about not being able to get home, but I told her neither of these was likely. She's jealous of those Aberdonians (well Aberdeenshire-onians) who had 30 schools closed yesterday. My worry is if the roads get icy as that's the one thing that would keep me off the bike. The thought of public transport is not appealing.
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Way hay, snow! It's dying before it hits the ground, though. I'm totally bored with the freezing weather but snow makes it a bit more bearable.
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Just got my pictures back from the Scottish trip. They're on my mac homepage if you want to see them all.
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BBC - 'Queen does cockney accent'
I hear she also does a good impression of a rather posh elderly lady
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We looked at this example in class yesterday:
His wife loves her husband
It's mentioned by Chomsky (Knowledge of Language 1986) and the question is whether it's grammatical if the referent of his is the same as the referent of husband and the referent of wife is the same as the referent of her
Naturally, when discussing it you imagine a particular couple and the most likely are the current Prime Minister and his wife/her husband. So we were wondering whether this could mean that 'Tony's Cherie loves Cherie's Tony' iyswim. We then tried a number of tests including imagining contexts such as:
A: Nobody could possibly have any affection for Tony Blair!
B: Oh, I don't know. I imagine his wife loves her husband
This all felt very weird in a context where Tony has just been addressing the British people using a metaphor where he's the erring husband and the people are the wife who's had enough, as reported here
David Aaronovitch's comment on this is worth a read (as are loads of others, actually). You can also get the full text here
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I don't feel old for being amazed by skype
Oisin and Apoa were also excited when Dug and I had a free phone call via the internet earlier this evening. I guess one day they'll be remembering when they thought of this as a new and exciting concept.
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Sitting up late reviewing encyclopedia entries. Thank you NME and Channel 4 for putting on the NME Awards shows to keep me entertained. I love hearing musos chat about each other and particularly enjoyed them talking about The Libertines with Pete Doherty being a member of the panel. He really is a charming bugger, isn't he?
I also still get a buzz from emailing an author in the states and getting an instant response at 2 in the morning. I remember when email was new and this was a truly amazing thing. Yes, that's right, I remember when we used the post, sending my first ever article off to a US journal and having to wait for comments to come back in the mail. On bits of paper!
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Had a really nice trip to Auntie Lorna's with Bessie and Ted today. Was surprised to see how much at home I felt in Inverurie with the shops full of lunch hour kids, having been one of those kids for just a couple of years many moons ago. Lorna served up a lovely meal of soup and apple pie and then we enjoyed a healthy helping of photographs and memories. In these days of deferred parenting, I think Lorna deserves some kind of medal for having great-great-grandchildren (she can gather five generations of Mitchells together in one place). Bessie offered a couple of good linguistic examples:
- Lewis calls his grandad 'dyde' as the Belger word for grandad is 'dydie'
- Philip used to call his great grandma his 'afa-grandma' ('afa'='awful')
Followed this nostalgia-fest with a nice evening with Kim in the swinging hotspots of the Broch.
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I just made the radical move of taking a few days' leave during term-time to come and make a long overdue visit to Bessie and Ted in Cairnbulg (or the 'Belger' as the locals call it). Had a nice flight up and then annoyed the locals with my slow driving on the way out (I'm not an eagle at the best of times but I'm Mr. Magoo when driving at night). I felt sensible, though, when I heard about the latest horrible death on the Aberdeen-Fraserburgh road last week.
Bessie and Ted are in bed now so I'm sitting in the kitchen trying to catch up with encyclopedia reviewing in the hope that I'll also find some time to finish my own articles in the next few days. It's quite nice sitting in a quiet kitchen with a newly-double-framed Apoa and Kiloh watching over me while I work. Compensates a bit for missing Apoa's dramatic performance at school tonight (that's literal, as in acting in a play ;-)
I also enjoyed discovering Newsnight Scotland where the debate was about which kind of alternative the Scottish Socialist Party should be offering and how left wing it should be. A nice change from the election debate in England which, as Johann Hari put it, is all about whether Blair or Howard can seem the most rabidly right wing.
I'd have quoted Johann Hari's piece directly but, despite having paid 60p to read the print version earlier today, it costs another quid to read it on the web. I decided to go for it and went through some form-filling which included a question where you tick to receive spam followed instantly by a question where you tick not to receive spam (BT Click&Buy are the ********s who are responsible for this) but then they deactivated my account with no explanation at the end of the process B-}
It was interesting to read Johann Hari's piece straight after reading George Orwell on the rampant spread of socialism around the world in 1948 earlier today.
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Just listening to an electric storm by White Noise, which I'd completely forgotten about until it came 10th in the mojo top 50 most out there! albums of all time.
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We discussed this utterance in class today, which, being a neek, I found in this Guardian article
Later I suggested we'd said enough about a different example we were looking at and and one of the students said, 'Yeah we rinsed it, man'
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Apoa's school phoned yesterday afternoon to say she'd been sick. Since all her mates were staying late and she didn't seem up to going home on her own, the school organised her a taxi. I thought it was a fairly minor thing until I got home and found she'd puked in the playground, gone to the sick room, taken some air, puked again, puked in the taxi home (outside the door as he'd stopped at a light), puked at Andrew and Cathy's house (she had to go there when she got home cos we were out) puked on the doorstep on the way home and then puked a few times after she got home. She's had a quiet day and should be back at school tomorrow, but you know she's not quite right yet when she chooses not to go to pancake night with the woodcraft folk.
Meanwhile, my bike had its third puncture since Friday today (yes, I've changed the tyres) so I had a bit of a rush to make it to school to talk to Apoa's guitar teacher. The other big musical excitement is that Kiloh brought her double bass home yesterday (quarter size but still sizeable). Haringey offered her free lessons and free hire of instrument for a term since not many people have been opting for it recently.
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Spent most of yesterday in Senate House, a beautiful building that was used as the Ministry of Information during World War II and which was the model for George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Funnily enough, Keith didn't know that when he referred to 'Room 101' during one of our meetings. When I met him earlier he said 'this is Richard the Third'. It took me a while to realise he was referring to the movie with Ian McKellen set in a fascist 1930's England. Also funnily enough, I'm currently reading Orwell - The Observer Years. He's such a good writer, but it's also fascinating to read his reports about what was happening 'on the ground' in Paris and Germany at the end of the war.
I followed two meetings of academics in Senate House with yet another meeting with Griselda, working on getting a partner/'angel' sorted for The Lecture List, which is doing great but really needs to find a partner now. (Any offers?)
I then fitted in a quick bit of work in Borders (just managing on the way to pick up a double bass book for Kiloh from a nice man in Denmark Street who was trying to lock up but took the trouble to get me the book before he did) and then I went to meet Ohna who had spent the day waiting for a meeting that still hasn't happened.
We thought we must have good karma when we managed to get the lucky window seat in the Dog and Duck, but this morning began with tax disasters and now my bike has a puncture and a broken rack.
OK, that should keep you going. Back to work.
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PS Please, someone, find a home for Robbie in Oxford. I can't bear what that bus trip is doing to him.
Had a good session at woodcraft on British Sign Language
I can now sign the alphabet, ask for chocolate, tell you my name and ask you yours, ask if you want help and apologise for not being a signer.
I think the grownups' favourite sign was the one where you turn a key in your neck to tell people to turn their voices off.
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In case any linguabloggers are interested, here are some links that students in my classes are looking at just now:
Voices is a bbc project mapping the accents and dialects in the UK. It also has some good links and individual pages on things like isn't innit ungrammatical?
Students are looking at the Voices project to see to what extent it's scientific and how useful the data might be.
Then there's Philip Pullman's article giving his opinion on the research suggesting that teaching grammar doesn't help children to improve their writing. He expresses his view really strongly but it's all a very complicated debate and I'm sure it's not as clearcut as he thinks it is.
These are news stories mentioning the research he's talking about:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1393672,00.html
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1393206,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4185507.stm
And this is a teacher, Andrew Cunningham, disagreeing:
http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/story.jsp?story=604889
One thing worth noticing is that Pullman refers to the research but Cunningham doesn't.
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Phone call at 2.20pm:
'Hello, is that Billy?''Yes'
'This is Anna. We're sitting in class. You're supposed to be teaching us just now?'
Yes, I'd got the time wrong and was sitting in my office discussing an MA application with another student. I'm impressed that the students had the initiative to chase me up. And I enjoyed the round of applause when I finally showed up.
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