The reason I was put up for another two nights in Zagreb after the Networked Learning conference was so I could come to give this lecture at the University. A few more people did arrive by the time I started… so hopefully my hosts thought the bother was worth it. I enjoyed it, anyway. Home tomorrow.
Off I go again, to a country I have visited once before, though the city will be new to me. Where? Well, you can find out tomorrow. Look up from the Grain Loft bar in Terminal 1 of MAN and one will see the abstract view shown here, it’s not about travelling, it’s just a combination of shapes that I find interesting. It wasn’t an exciting flight…
Joe must have a maths test coming up… equations like these have started appearing around the house.
Although the photos don’t reflect this I have spent all the working week in Manchester thus far. Today’s fun was one of those events which someone else decided was terribly important. No offence to John, this speaker, who did a good job (and here makes his BIG point) but the detached look on the faces of one or two of my colleagues probably reflected my own, all things considered.
Went with other family members for my first ever ‘Escape Room’ experience. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, which is fair enough, but here are the preliminaries… To oil rusty brains on a Sunday morning, we were given some toys and puzzles to play with. Not that it helped us escape in the 1-hour time limit. Another fifteen minutes, perhaps.
I guess by now the Rubik’s Cube is a very familiar icon. I did solve it once, you know. At school; I have witnesses. Only once, though. (I knew how to do two-thirds of it; one time, the remaining third just magically fell into place.)
I once started digging over a neglected patch of weeds in our allotment and a few weeks later was still going, pulling out all sorts of junk including an old oil drum and substantial remnants of what, thirty years before, had probably been a greenhouse. It was a pain in the arse, but nevertheless I did wonder what I was going to find, so it had a strange fascination to it. A dead body, I was expecting at one point.
Imagine then the feelings of the guys who in 1974 started digging a well a few miles from Xi’an, in China, and uncovered the first inklings of the massive army of thousands of life-size clay figures that we now call the Terracotta Warriors. Forty-four years later, they’re still digging and still pulling them out. Seven of the figures are currently off on a world tour, and presently displayed in an exhibition in the World Museum, Liverpool. It’s their individuality that impresses — and yet, it was probably easier for the makers to construct them all different rather than all the same, as each was made individually, not mass-produced in a mold. They don’t do much, of course — but they were worth seeing. At least, it gives you an insight into just how megalomaniac were ancient rulers like Emperor Qin.
2017-18 is my thirteenth academic year at the University of Manchester, meaning that today was the 39th opening day of a term there. Samuel Alexander has seen more than me, certainly as a bust in the foyer of his eponymous building: but according to his memorial he did 31 years as a functioning professor (of Philosophy) so I’ll catch him up in, er…. 2036.
I might be off work but there’s still lots of terribly important jobs to do around the house. Like deal with the chaos that the 300 or so DVDs and VHS tapes have descended into down the years. Two hours saw it done, with only one major ‘collapse’ moment. Here, inspect a couple of the Ms…
It’s student video-making season: Sissi (bottom left) becomes the latest to come to my office and point a camera at me for sundry purposes. While she reviewed her footage, I became intrigued by her tripod. This is an inanimate object with a secret inner life if ever there was one. People go to certain clubs dressed like this.
Great night out, thanks again to the wife and Red Helen for the music. Terrible photography, but that’s 10.40pm on a Friday night for you.
Being 42 