I am not sure how many of you pay attention to the titles of my rants. They may seem a little arbitrary, but I assure you, they are not. (from now on) they will be quotes, song lines, bits said in the newspapers, and so on, and all will be relevant in some way (albeit sometimes rather tenuously) to the post as a whole. Brownie points and my eternal admiration to the first person(s) who can tell me what the connection is, and where the title came from. Just to keep you on your toes, you understand 😀
Some rules: The quotes might be from films, tv shows, songs, books, newspaper articles, interviews, or whatever else takes my fancy. I might paraphrase, but the essential meaning of the quote will remain unchanged. And that is it – enjoy!

And back to our regularly scheduled programming:
I don’t have any one particular burning issue to share with you today, rather this will be a rag-tag assortment of the things I have noted down this week as worthy of being shared.

I’m not sure where along the way context became so important to me, but it is. I used to be able to read a book without a care as to what the author’s background was. I would just enjoy the story, taking it more or less at face value. Now, not so much. I think living with a historian might have had something to do with it, but over the past year or so, I have come to the conclusion that to get the most out of a book it is important to understand the socio-political currents that might have influenced a given author. This holds particularly true, I feel, for science fiction. If you don’t understand Cold War history, then Ben Bova’s books such as Peacekeepers and Mars make no sense with their continual references to Russo-American tension, and their prevailing sense of nuclear dread. Nor do the fears of alien invasion, segregated space settlements, and computers the size of rooms running on punched cards, make as much sense as they should in John Wyndham’s brilliant works. I will even admit that Clive Cussler’s abysmal pieces of trash are slightly more understandable/forgivable if placed firmly in the context of when they were written. I suppose that in 1973 it was marginally more acceptable for female characters to be card-board cutouts, and for Dirk Pitt to say to a traumatised female victim (who has just survived one assassination attempt, and who has no reason to suppose that this tall dangerous looking adventurer who just happens to be in the same remote location as she is, isn’t planning another) “Just think of me as Rhett Butler coming to rescue you”… *

My point being? Context is important. (Six years of being immersed in archaeological practice & theory might also play a slight role in this belief). As you learn more from the Parthenon Marbles when they are viewed together with the whole Parthenon, Stonehenge when you view the entire landscape of the Salisbury Plains, or items in a museum when you know where they came from, so you can understand the written word better if you understand the time in which is what written. To this end, I even went out and purchased a modern history booked entitled The World Since 1945 yesterday. I only spent £3 on it at the local Oxfam, because I am not so dedicated to the above philosophy that I will shell out vast sums on it, or take a degree in modern history, but I do believe in it enough to try and fill in the many gaps left in my knowledge by my overly focused history education. You can still enjoy science fiction, and other genres, if you know diddly-squat about history/current events, but I do think it is possible to get added layers of enjoyment if you look into the context some as well.

Enough of that rant. What else did I want to share? And what made me snigger this week? *consults the assorted scraps of paper and post-it notes scattering her desk*

1. My favourite pair of shoes (picked up for $7 in New York last summer) finally bit the dust this week. Definitely the bargain of the millennium so far, I wore them almost constantly since I got them (which would explain the terrible state they were in when I finally threw them away), and never a blister did they cause. I wish them much happiness in the great shoe-rack in the sky.
2. Bar larger breasts, I am basically the same size I was at prep-school. This rather depressing fact came clear to me when I needed a jumper the other day, found an old school one lurking at the bottom of the drawer, tried it on, and found it still fits. Part of this is surely due to my mother buying clothes I would “grow into”, but unless she thought I would swell to the size of an elephant at the age of 12, it was never more than one size too big. What is worse, when wearing the jumper, if I had seen me at the supermarket, I wouldn’t have served me alcohol, as I looked about 13. Being 5′ 2″ I can live with. Still looking like I did at the start of secondary school when I am now near to finishing Grad-school, isn’t so good.
3. Unpopped popcorn kernels – ubiquitous at the bottom of any popcorn serving – are the result of leaky kernels which prevent the build up of moisture pressure, researchers at Purdue University found. Apparently.
4. That very British item, the umbrella, is a talisman against rain. I needed to go down town yesterday for assorted bits and pieces. When I looked out of the window it was raining, and was showing no signs of stopping. Now, rather oddly for someone who has lived in Rain Central (aka the UK) her entire life, I only own one waterproof item – a ski jacket – which is entirely too warm to wear on a mild spring day. So I bully Jo into lending me her umbrella, thereby cruelly forcing her to remain indoors till I return, get out of the house, only to find that it has stopped raining. Bone dry for the entire time I was shopping. Good, yes, for there are few things I hate more than shopping in the rain, but bad also because I had to remember not to leave Jo’s umbrella in a shop somewhere (it has been known to happen). You can guarantee that if I hadn’t taken the umbrella, it would have rained solidly.
5. Why don’t I own an umbrella of my own? I used to keep a large golfing umbrella in the car to get me from the car-park into work, but that is too big to take shopping. The span of it is over a metre, and when you are a short-arse like me, the pointy bits are nicely on throat/eye level of most other people. I would hate to be arrested for carrying a dangerous weapon. My last normal umbrella got run over by a transit van a couple of years back (long story) and I’ve never gotten around to replacing it. Anyway, normally it is lovely and sunny when I leave the house, so I think that an umbrella/waterproof of some description isn’t needed, then it tips it down whenever I am a good half-hour walk away from any form of shelter. C’est la vie.
6. “I mean, I am English, so I’m going to probably be asked to play English people quite a lot” – Jack Davenport, Interview with Empire Online.
7. “The movie was the kind of thing beloved by bored teenagers and recreational drug users, two occasionally overlapping demographics” – NYT on the original Amityville Horror
8. And finally, this is what we do on our days off, and also the reason I will be going to the gym every single day this week. Chocolate Fudge Cake: cake by Jo, icing by Cas. One, Two & Three.

* Yes, I caved, and got another Clive Cussler novel (Treasure as an audio-book) cheap from a charity shop. It’s like watching a car-crash – you know you shouldn’t, but it so awful you can’t look away. That, and it gives me something to laugh at. But Oh my God! he is a bad author! And Dirk Pitt is an aging lothario who picks women up like my favourite jacket picks up lint!

For no reason other than I really really want to,

*goes for a quick lie down*

Not only are penguins evil, they are sneaky to boot. One managed to escape the list!
The Penguin from Batman.
How could I forget him!

(thanks to Jo for reminding me 🙂 )

So perhaps I am a little penguin-obsessed at the moment, but I do believe that they are evil. I don’t hate them – I save my hatred for slugs – in fact I rather like the critters, but they are evil. The evidence:

• The evil penguin in the Wallace & Grommit animations
• The psychotic penguins in Madagascar (up and coming, watch the trailers here to see what I mean: Trailer 1, Trailer 2
• The penguins with hammers in Honda’s recent ‘Hate Something, Change Something’ add. I won’t put in a link, because even I am not evil enough to spread that song about again…
• The penguins at the zoo: Back in february (if you can remember back that far) I told you about my trip to the Zoo, which had been a cheer-up trip with Farv to make up for a dead car. Anyway, whilst I was there, I had to go and have a look at the penguins. I took photographic evidence of their evilness…
  conferring, ‘quick, they’re looking’, all innocence, and then I saw this…

Yep, evil. Very, very evil.

Anything else? Um… No, actually, not tonight. Splitting headache, knackered due to the Flat Alarm getting up at 7am every day for the past week, one more proposal to write, and about as much desire to do that as I have to french kiss a slug. Also, my legs hurt like anything after a particularly hard session at the gym. New pb on the X-trainer though. So now, if you will excuse me, this is Cas signing off for the night.

I’m not sure what to say now! Three comments about being funny and/or witty and I am starting to feel the pressure. Then again, as you are basically all laughing AT me and my misfortunes, so long as bad things keep happening, this blog will keep making you all laugh… Which, when I pause to think on it, is probably even less reassuring :S Worry not, normally service will resume shortly I am sure, and I will go back to being the dull and normal Claire you all know and love.

Either way, what new is there in the world of Cas that I would like to share? Hmmm.

I spent the last three days dealing with the aftermath of the Great Flood of 2005 and trying to teach my mother how to use a computer. For yes, she is finally on the verge of joining the information age. As a family we were lucky, we had one of the first pc’s, and it has been an unbroken love affair ever since. I still have vivid memories of paying my brother 50p a time for lessons in dos and then C. From the very beginning he enjoyed mucking around with the hard code to make something new, whilst I preferred to take existing software and apply that in new and interesting ways. I may have fought the inevitable in the middle with that abortive attempt to get into vet school, but the lure of computers is clearly too strong. And now it has snaggled my mother as well. She fought a good fight (her glazed look at the Sunday dinner table as the rest of us discussed computers was a joy to behold and a mainstay of my childhood) but the time has come for her to wave the white flag and come over to the dark side. We got her a MacMini for her birthday and this entailed a quick dash back home to get it set up this week.

(The train journey down was fine, though it made me miss the car all the more; the journey back was horrible and worthy of an entire post all to itself.)

The Mini is a wonderfully cute and shiny little toy! So tiny! But so easy to set up – I was quietly dreading it but I am not lying when I say it took longer to dismantle the old pc than it did to set up the Mac. I checked: 20 minutes of swearing and cursing untangling the pc from its assorted rat’s nest of wires; 5 minutes to plug the Mini into the assorted bits (5 wires only, 2 of them keyboard and mouse, 1 the modem cord), to boot it up, and to enter all the details, and all without a single swear word uttered! I admit there was a bit of minor cursing when it came to trying to connect to the internet the first time, but that was because I had transposed a couple of digits in the number, doh! And then spend the next seven hours writing a ‘how to’ guide for my Mum. You don’t realise how complicated, and how much like a foreign language computing is, until you are trying to teach a total beginner. By total, I mean TOTAL. Previous experience with PC’s or Macs: Zip, nada, rien. We managed to fit in a few lessons before I had to leave on Saturday afternoon, and I know she will get it, but I did chicken out and tell her to do a course at the local college: I am a totally PANTS teacher!

Other than that, the few days were uneventful. Got my hair cut at my favourite hairdressers back in Wells. Why, you may ask, do I have to go home for a haircut? Surely, you live in a city, there must be one nearer you could use?! You would think so, wouldn’t you, but you would be wrong. There is a dearth of affordable, good, hairdressers in Soton. I’ve known people who’ve lived here for five years and more, who still take the two hour journey back to their home town to get a trim. The relationship between a girl, her hair, and her hairdresser is an odd one. I finally found someone who I like, and more importantly TRUST, to cut my hair nicely (and not to break the bank in the process), and that is worth the trip back home. Just that the last few time’s I’ve booked an appointment to go home, something’s gone wrong. The car crash back at the start of February, the Flood this time… Third time is the charm? Which reminds me, I have finally heard back from the Insurance company, and they say they will give me more money for the car! Colour me rather surprised. Now I have to decide whether or not it is worth getting a new (new to me that is) car whilst living in a city. It is rather decadent to keep a car just to go to the supermarket once a week, and back to Somerset once every few months.

The Orange 241 film this week was Sahara. To quote, “fun, silly, and a semi-naked Matthew McConaughey. What more could you ask for?” The Sahara review. Apparently we’ve seen upwards of 20 films so far this year. And that isn’t counting the dvd’s and movies on TV. Ouch!

Lastly, look, no OED! Dad came through with a fantastic computer stand: Shiny new stand. Far superior to what I was expecting! Major *huggles* to Farv for providing me with total ergonomic goodness for my computing experience. (Stand, keyboard, typing chair, lack of RSI, all courtesy of the parental unit.)

That is all I have to say, because I really really should be writing proposals. Not as much fun as this I am sure, but this isn’t getting me a masters degree. Toodles.