#5 "Had a darn good title forgot to write it down", or "Paranoia will destroy ya"
#5 “Had a darn good title, forgot to write it down[1]” or “Paranoia will destroy ya[2]”
The last several weeks (since I finished and posted blog 4) have of course delivered more of the multi-levelled (international, national and local) sh*t show. In fact, I have decided that politicians and University leaders throughout the UK have discovered this blog and are using it as a sort of neoliberal template of incompetence (Hence, paranoia will destroy ya). It’s like a Black Mirror version of the film Groundhog Day[3] (especially for the people who paid attention when Morpheus told us about our suspicions about all not being right in the world.[4] )
Trump and his evil and incompetent proteges have been shooting themselves and each other in the foot, knee, groin and face over tariffs, deporting people to camps in El Salvador, ignoring or misunderstanding court orders and, at time of writing, messing up the Pentagon and pissing off ex-employees. Wait! UPDATE. Musk says Trump is a paedophile. No sh*t Sherlock Holmes. That guy is a genius? Please. UPDATE o the UPDATE: Let’s send the National Guard and the Army to California where they have been “rioting for days[5]”. Let’s join Israel in bombing Iran! This section on the latest horrors is like one of my academic papers; I can never finish the discussion (blog) because another new paper (outrage) just came out (has occurred). I will break this cycle before blog #6, I promise!
In the UK, Reform is polling second in Wales, and the Labour government silence to an increasing number of drowning universities continues apace. UPDATE: No, it’s worse than that: after council election losses to Reform (Nigel Farage’s latest political party), Starmer’s “strategists” (I snorted my half-finished pint of rioja when I wrote this) have accelerated their Vichy-like appeasement of the xenophobic English mob by threatening to make it even more difficult for non-British students to come here to spend their money (I mean study at one of our finest institutions)[6]. And they are now muting a tax on fees that Universities collect from non-British students[7]. (An analogy escapes me here. This will be the prototype analogy in future for incompetent, paradoxical, cut-off-nose-to-spite-my-face knuckle-walking governance). UPDATE to the UPDATE: Just as bad in some ways, they are softening the ground for universities failing in the shockingly near future by saying crap like “greedy overpaid VC’s have not spent wisely”[8].
Don’t get me wrong, many VCs are overpaid (they seem much of a muchness, see for example https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/lancaster-university-cut-one-five-academic-jobs) but this is small financial beans in the financial volcano being hit by comets and asteroids, and an obvious symptom of neoliberal disease; their vanity projects followed low interest rates and the removal of English university student caps in 2015 (“I must recruit more students for the greater glory of me, I mean my beloved university!”). And has it been wise to spend money and take on debt for physical infrastructure? Debatable at best. At worst, don’t you remember what you were like when you visited candidate universities when you were 18? Did you care about how shiny the new library looked? See figure 1.
Fig 1. The Sir Duncan Rice library at the University of Aberdeen. It was, and probably still is, quite shiny. Sir Duncan was a charming fellow, hired from New York University to try and foster a “rich alumni who promise endowment American style culture”. He took to his task, by largely delegating everything academic to other people (don't get me started on his curriculum reform project). I suspect that he got 50 million in promises. I also suspect that the university spent 50 million on the library. I also suspect that lots of those promised endowments came before the financial crash of 2009. Join the dots, dear readers. Does this get you a knighthood in some countries?[9] Slanderous, I know, but I don’t work there anymore. Meanwhile, at an open day, I would have run away from Aberdeen because it looks a lot like a Borg cube. Good thing that prospective students no longer have the attention spans to watch whole episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This figure caption is way too long it will never get past the editor. (Wait, this is *still* a figure caption?).
Locally, we wait in my department to hear who stays and who goes, and given the depth of cuts, many of us are not sure which alternative will actually be the worst. Given the surviving members of the herd will get new duties dumped on them in late August for end September, one wonders[10]. Some of the “paranoia will destroy ya” is deeply personal in the current circumstances. I am still cycling though the Kubler Ross stages (anger of course remains magnetic for me 
I have two sorts of alternative plans for this instalment, but one is just too time consuming and soul destroying. The other I have forgotten by this stage, but I will try to come up with something before the end of the blog. I had thought I would go back through many of these old government reports and white papers produced by folk like Dearing and so on, uncovering, hidden in plain sight, the neoliberal conspiracy to destroy the UK university system emerging from the capitalist cancer that has spawned it. Think Indiana Jones #6, where Indy has developed a Canadian accent and dodgy arthritic ankles. Or, for my younger readers, Amazon Prime’s “The Fountain of Youth”, where the actor from Jack Ryan and Natalie Portman....actually, no, really, do not think of this movie. (Ms. Portman, did some Hayden Christianson germs get into you way back when you made “The Phantom Menace”? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?).
Sadly there is too much of this stuff to read without losing the will to live. For example, the Robbins report 1963: Aims and purposes of higher education. Or the 1985 Green Paper, The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s, which stressed the need for ‘a distinct emphasis on technological vocational courses”. Higher education is about job training. This is the Jarrett report and is available here: https://www.education-uk.org/documents/jarratt1985/index.html#05.
So plan number one has evolved. Let's riff a bit on two ideas[12] that come out of these old and ominous conversations that were had about UK universities way back in the days when I had a mullet, and people thought a little more deeply about what universities should and should not be. By the way, John Warner, who writes about teaching people to write, says this about blogs: “So I examined the blogs I was reading and came to recognize how they worked. Many were similar to essays with which I was more comfortable, but the blog entries often raised as many questions as they offered answers. Ideas were allowed to be provisional, floating something out there as a trial balloon rather than a finished product. The style could be as informal as I wished, and more importantly, I recognized that blog posts could go live to an audience with a considerably lower level of polish than something you might find in a professionally published book. I didn’t have to spend days polishing the writing. As long as the ideas were clear, some infelicitous sentences could slip through” (Warner, 2017, pp. 174-175). [13]
Where were we? Oh yes higher education is all about jobs/the economy is worth a mention here (read OMG ground zero, 300 Spartans, line in the sand, red line, academics). One wonders where the doe-eyed liberals were back then, not screaming that “we aren’t all polytechnics!”. In the xenophobic times that we live in, no one seems very bothered about the wealth creation that follows from having lots of people move here to Britain to study. Folks forget it’s not just juicy tuition fees, but NHS surcharges, visa costs and all of those normal expenditures on things like rent, food, coffee, entertainment and so on. Universities, according to two recent reports, are effectively an export industry worth in excess of 40 billion. Makes steel look small beans really[14]. But no, we mean jobs for graduates of course!
“Destination” information (universities as vocational travel agents, if you will) has not just crept into some of the lead tables run by these for-profit protection rackets like the Good University Guide, the government itself is banging on about “Mickey Mouse” degrees in “Indiana Jones Studies” at Poeppelton University. How will this get you a job? I am sure media studies courses that include cinematography must have some Indiana Jones content, or maybe even an optional module on the “Fast and the Furious” series. I haven’t found one yet, just in case I have some new opportunities provided by our local restructuring. If I do, let us hope they have a distance learning option (I would not have to bring all of that cash from home in Wales to that local economy of that university that runs the course now, would I?)
Why an Indiana Jones analogy here? A better one might be a comparative literature course example, which sadly is unlikely to produce another Margaret Atwood or JK Rowling, people who probably bring considerable value into their local economies, whatever their politics. I have a 50-year old memory that comes to mind here. I did an optional course in Junior High School on “Contemporary Literature” or “The Novel”[15]. What our teacher did is had us start with a Harlequin Romance, then we moved to a Louis L’Amour Western, and so on, finishing off with whatever she thought was a good example of “higher” fiction that a bunch of 15 year olds could handle without exploding in a ball of contradictory hormores and Piagetian formal operational thinking. Lord knows what the peak of this Darwinian analogy might have been back then (Steinbeck? Hemingway?). I remember the bottom of the list, first because the then to be deduced theme from the L’Amour novel was “A man’s godda do, what a man’s godda do”. See Figure 2. This is quite easy to remember, is it not?
I do not remember the main theme of the Harelquin romance, so why do I remember it, the other anchor at the bottom of the literary pile? Well, how could I forget when it fell out of my school bag in front of some attractive and sophisticated young ladies from the year above me on the school stairs, and embarrassed to say the least, trying to convey, pink faced (Gammon-coloured, effectively—different mechanism) that “No, no, its not mine, REALLY, it’s for a CLASS!!!!!”.[16]
Remarkably, while looking for a UK equivalent for Harlequin, and perhaps a cover image of a 1980s example, I discovered that Harlequin still exists. I suspect that their main theme may have not have changed all that much in 50 years, but perhaps might be somewhat less implicit:
Fig 2. Who came blame Felicity Jones, or anyone else for that matter, about wanting a little mindless escapism after another day in UK academia? is that a young Melania Trump depicted in the top one? The one on the bottom gives me a creepy Russell Brand vibe (but bad can be good, so some colleagues tell me).
Why this literary aside within an aside on the cinematic, let alone scholarly worthiness of the Indiana Jones series, or perhaps at more of a stretch, “The Fast and the Furious” movies? Are they worthy of study?
Figure 3. Why might you have a taught Masters in Indiana Jones studies? I asked a colleague, Mull Pullins (not his real name) why we might have a Masters in Indiana Jones studies: He answered without skipping a beat, “Because now more than ever we need to know how to punch Nazis”. It sounds even better if you imagine it in a Kiwi accent (not his real accent).
Anyway, we shall come back to my fantasy Indiana Jones MSc course in a moment (if I can come up with a non-cheesy “in praise of culture for its’ own sake paragraph), but more about those reports which have somehow led successive governments to the current mess of higher education.
My next theme is related to the job-training idea above. Hansard reports on a discussion in the Lords about the 1985 report I just mentioned: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1985/may/21/higher-education-green-paper; The quotable quote is this: “This is not because the Government places a low value on the general cultural benefits of education and research or on study of the humanities. The reason is simply that, unless the country's economic performance improves, we shall be even less able than now to afford many of the things we value most—including education for pleasure and general culture and the financing of scholarship and research as an end in itself.” - Baroness Cox.
This is an interesting one, which rarely enters any of these discussions since the 1980s. We can no longer “afford” the “luxury” of education for the sake of education, scholarship for the sake of scholarship. This idea is worthy of a bit of thinking about why “we” are poorer now than we have been in the past, and fiscal belt tightening is just a necessary evil of the world as it now is. This conclusion gives me another “Neo from the Matrix” moment, that vague emotional itch that is impossible to scratch. Are “we” the species, or “we” the Europeans, or “we” the British, poorer now, so we have to tighten our belts and lose some of the luxuries like an intellectual world supported by the state? Is there less resource to go around, so don’t spend it on things that are frivolous like culture, the arts, history, anthropology, etc.? Sociology and psychology, you can still have a little bit of resource, but please make sure you demonstrate and provide an evidence-based account of how this work is going to drive the British economy or eliminate poverty or some similarly circumscribed and realistic goal. “Save Canada”, Jody Culham! (see forthcoming footnote, this is an anticipatory kind of gag).
In this kind of protestant, work-ethic driven world, doing things for intrinsic pleasure as individual people is a question of your personal priorities, your own business, but perhaps most importantly, your own ability to “resource” them. The rest of us have to keep working super hard, to produce even more improved electric air fresheners and the like. By all means Sam, take your daughters to the British Museum (don’t be seduced by the whole Elgin Marbles stick, they are a bit young for that) but do you really expect the taxpayer of 15 years from now to subsidise them to study Art History at university??
I do wonder about publicly-funded “entertainment” such as the BBC or CBC in this kind of context, but that might be a whole other blog. Do these right-wing types hate public broadcasting not just for its not right-of-centre content, or do they hate the very idea that we as a society might want to fund something for everybody, like the ability to lose oneself at the end of the day in your favourite sitcom or reality TV show?
Actually, they probably do hate the idea of paying for something for everybody, don’t they? Some of the “government is bad, the private sector is good" proponents are just social Darwinist liars who don’t want to, as corporations, or individuals, or even as a class, to pay any (certainly not any more) tax. Many republican politicians and their sponsors probably fall into this sort of group. They are liars because they know that the big, beautiful bill, or Brexit, or tax cuts (for the wealthy in fine print), or letting non-domiciled people avoid taxes, will not help the economy, or those of us lower down the economic food chain, one iota. These people know that trickle-down economics is a joke. They know they are lying when the think tanks they sponsor push this fairy story out to the public: “If you tax corporations/the wealthy/the upper class, well they will all leave and as it is obvious, those clever cookies are the ones who generate all of the ideas and expertise that generates wealth”.
These social Darwinist liar right wingers understand “the “market”. As corporations competing with one another, each trying to keep their multinational shareholders happy, it is their solemn duty to do as little as possible for their workforce (who made bad choices, or their parents or grandparents made bad choices) to maximise their profits. If you don’t, your competitor will. And the environment? That’s someone else’s problem. If I don’t lower our costs by dumping waste into the rivers my competitors will, and I will be out of my “highly stressful” but appropriately-compensated CEO job. If we don’t get the cheapest possible energy for our factories, well, the competitors will.
But others, often others who are not as well off as the wealthy knee deep in the trough, are not in on the fairytale, but have been slowly, slowly seduced by it, nevertheless. The American dream is real. Anyone can become president, they just have to really really want it and work very very very hard. Governments are bad because they curtail my freedom. Welfare is full of cheaters; they should be made to work, like I do. The poor (I am not poor!) deserve to be poor because of their choices; when they make better choices (and work hard of course; this Protestant thing, Jesus, I really need to read Thomas Payne or Jefferson or some of these other tax dodgers to get why this is so ingrained in American DNA) they won’t need our help. In fact by helping them you are stifling them, denying them the freedom of paid employment and the self-satisfaction of making it on their own!
To summarise this over-simplistic dichotomy which my social science chums would find shockingly naïve, right wing people come on two basic flavours: evil, or ignorant. The extension of this evil or ignorant logic seems to me to get rid of any sort of social and medical safety net, and let people fend for themselves. Why should the state support the deadbeat Dad’s many children by several different wives? If he can’t afford to have children, he shouldn’t have them. As crass as this may sound to you bleeding heart lefties reading this, the debate in Britain right now seems to be “well, OK, we will provide your family with some minimal support for two children, but after that, you are on your own". Of course, what this really means is that those poor unfortunate innocent children are (largely) on their own.
David, I was asking myself at this moment, because that first large glass of rioja was almost finished, and I would have preferred the second one in front of some BBC drama that came to mind while writing the previous section, what does any of this have to do with universities, boyo? Remember Felicity from a long-ago blog, studying Chaucer’s middle period for the sheer joy of it, the analysis, the discourse, the back and forth debate with her nemesis from that US university who denies the very existence of Chaucer’s middle period? That is expensive stuff, if we multiply this work package and all of its' associated costs by many thousands of other such projects that clearly are not contributing to the economy or medicine or technology or engineering? I may have mentioned my colleague from Canada doing superlative work on parietal lobe mechanisms of sensorimotor control. At the end of a fascinating seminar she discussed the translational aspects of her work with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “Save Canada” part of her research grants to Canadian funders such as NSERC (Canada’s equivalent to our BBSRC).
Of course, rather than confronting these crude attacks on scholarship head on for their evil neoliberal underpinnings, instead, in STEM subjects like mine, we make ourselves apologists for non-translational academic work. “Well”, we bluster, "you cannot know what blue skies work might lead to in some future universe, like Teflon for example! Developed for the space race but now we have all these (actually not very effective) non-stick pans"!
I used to tell this story to undergraduates as my go to example of how pure science is good, because it could one day lead to something “productive”. A few years after moving to St Andrews, a letter (yes I know this was a while ago) arrived from Joe Pelizzari, a grad school pal of mine who was still working back in Canada. As I remember (all is not well with my memory though see blog#1), it was a very short handwritten note and a newspaper clipping, mentioning how Teflon was invented in the 1930s by a chemist working for DuPont, and whose use in cookery predated NASA’s space program. Joe said something like “David, I always thought that that story you told undergraduate students about Teflon sounded fishy. Regards, Joe”.[17]
You have already heard my story about the EU spending billions, landing an unmanned craft on a comet to discover what the dust is made of (answer, the dust we know about from spectroscopy thank you very much), and of course a story about Velcro and the space race, which is, alas, also just a story. The moral of this story about stories? We need to research our pure is good and might be translatable one day story. Or maybe we should drop it completely. If I was a non-Stem person I might be able to do a much more credible job of saying scholarship of almost any sort is probably worth doing, translatable one day or not[18].
Meanwhile, in one of these meetings I was listening to on your behalf, dear reader (now will be discussed in blog #6; my brother at least would be relieved to know if he has made it this far), a panel member (a young Tory I suspect) asked about “value for money” 
But this is a trick. Pick an extreme single case as a means to discredit research in general that is not subject to some sort of supraordinate neoliberal oversight, because if we leave you academics to your own devices you will get into all sorts of shenanigans at the taxpayers’ expense, and we can’t have that, no m’aam. It is no different, rhetorically speaking, than right wing foreign-owned newspapers searching far and wide for examples of poor practice to discredit anything that they do not like, including socialised medicine, government, or the EU. Ask the average punter about EU subsidies to Wales before they voted for Brexit [20], and they will be clueless. But if you mention a tampon tax or bent bananas, well, their faces will turn gammon pink with their outrage.
“Accountability/value for money”, ideas that I introduced in earlier blogs, have raised their ugly heads again. Next time, I will be summarising two recent expert panel presentations, where some very senior academics bend the knee to this most neoliberal of constructs. Maybe I can lighten that one up a bit by actually finding that picture of me with a mullet. Meanwhile, the bottle’s empty; did Patricia take the last of my rioja?
Further reading:
Sadly dear readers I have failed to find a course somewhere that offers a module or an MSc/ MA on the Indiana Jones films (I think there might be a market here, should I tell my CEO?). There are loads of papers that exploit this overlearned action-adventure token though, for example:
Bintliff, J. (1993). Why Indiana Jones is smarter than the post‐processualists. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 26(2), 91-100. (I don’t even understand the title. Those social science non-STEM types are sometimes a little too smart for their own good. I do, however, love the idea that there is a journal called Norwegian Archeological Review: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/sarc20)
Aronstein, S. (1995). " Not Exactly a Knight": Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the" Indiana Jones" Trilogy. Cinema Journal, 34(4), 3-30.
Biber, K. (1995). The Emperor's New Clones: Indiana Jones and Masculinity in Reagan's America. Australasian Journal of American Studies, 14(2), 67-86.
There is, much to my annoyance, a book on the Fast and the Furious: https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5397259#page=70
E.g. Feasey, R. (2023). " I never want to lose a fight": masculinity, machismo and high-octane action in the'Fast & Furious' franchise. Full-Throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious, 157.
Raphael, J., & Lam, C. (2023). The on-and off-screen bromances of Fast & Furious. Full-Throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious, 175.
Old colleagues of mine from Aberdeen took me to one of these films, and I had to be repeatedly shushed given my constant complaints. It’s fair to say I did not get these movies. Maybe I needed a few glasses of rioja?
I have, in my usual ten minutes in Google scholar way (ChapGPT for oldies) tried to find some readable reads on the intrinsic value of cinematography, art, history, music, literature etc. I did find this:
In Boxall, P. (2015). The value of the novel. Cambridge University Press.
Decolonising (be careful how you spell that) the mind sounds like a good idea, but I am not sure that this is kind of analysis is what we STEM types are looking for. I did read in a newspaper a few months ago something along the lines of “what are we living for, if not music, art, literature, culture?” which sort of hit the nail on the head but I will keep digging on your behalf.
John Warner, the chap who has given me permission to digress in this blog (see above) has an interesting book about writing and AI:
Warner, J. (2025). More than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. Basic Books, ISBN-139781541605503
….but I am still reading his earlier book on teaching people who to write (“PEOPLE WHO CAN’T DO, TEACH!”, who once said this?). I was close: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” This was said by George Bernard Shaw in his 1905 stage play Man and Superman. Over a century later, and the derogatory phrase often thrown at educators in a disparaging way stubbornly persists”.
Is stubbornly persist a split infinitive? Asking for a friend.
From https://www.ethicssage.com/2023/04/those-who-can-do-those-who-cant-teach.html
Warner, J. (2018). Why they can't write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities. JHU Press.
[1] Trying to get the syllables to fit to “I’ve had the same jeans on, for four days now”. You have to speed up “forgot to” and slow down “write it down”. There is no reason for these musical asides, but I feel they have been underused since Blog #1. It’s a better song that I remember, actually. We have talked about my memory already, haven’t we?
[2] I thought this was from a Kinks song but it is actually from some band called the Assembly: I think I misremembered the Kinks lyric as I don’t remember this Assembly song. It is kind of catchy though. I am digressing already and haven’t even got past the title.
[3] Watching this film in a freezing cold flat, jet-lagged, with a premade chicken Kiev and a bottle of Scotch, after a 40-hour journey from Canada and no sleep, is definitely the way to go. Speaking for a friend.
[4] Are these attempts to link to past content working? Probably not, as I suggest to new readers to try a blog entry or two armed with a large glass of rioja (or equivalent). Not good for memory consolidation. Speaking for another friend.
[5] “…after three days of rioting in Los Angeles” was the exact quote used on BBC News on Monday 09 June, after a few days of what look like fairly minor disturbances where Californians, who sound like our kind of people, objected to masked vigilantes kidnapping people off of the streets. You cannot make this stuff up, as I keep saying.
[6] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/press/labour-signals-more-restrictive-approach-to-work-visas-family-and-settlement/
[7] https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-mps-sound-alarm-new-international-student-rules. This one says that some University leaders think this might exacerbate our financial woes? Ya think? No wonder that we pay these people in management the big bucks. More on how people keep asking dumb questions that we already know the answers to in blog #6.
[8] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labour-name-and-shame-universities-over-vice-chancellor-pay-and-poor-student-outcomes. Even the schmucks at the Guardian are falling for this bait-and-switch: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/11/university-vice-chancellors-are-paid-far-more-than-public-sector-peers
[9] Well, yes. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/3118/
[10] There is an academic hari-kari joke to be made here, but this would only be understood by my siblings (Careys, by birth), one of whom has told me that these blogs are way too long so I doubt he will make it this far in blog 5.
[11] This is Anger from the “Inside-out” films.
[12] It’s really only one idea.
[13] He is American, hence recognize. He missed a hypen, can you spot it, Carey ex-students? “Provisional ideas”, well yes, I FEEL SEEN; style can be informal (OMG John YOU HAVE NO IDEA BOYO). And, I googled it for you: infelicitous
ɪnfɪˈlɪsɪtəs
adjective
unfortunate; inappropriate.his illustration is singularly infelicitous.
[14] For my slow but steadily growing non-Brit readership, the government have spend 500 million to bale out out the last steel production facility at Scunthorpe. 2700 employees were in scope; compared with more than 5000 in 100 British universities now in financial trouble at time of writing. See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/university-bailouts-needed-5000-jobs-axed-ucu-tells-labour?utm_source=academic-website&utm_medium=link-embed&utm_campaign=news (this is dated now) and https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/. Scunthorpe and steel making of course create knock on jobs for their local communities, but do they compare to that 40 billion I mentioned coming in from our sector? Strangely enough “we have had enough of experts” and money for “male masturbating masters students” (Colourless green ideas sleep furiously moment in this blog) don’t seem to hold the public’s affection like a working person’s industry does. Maybe we need Bruce Springsteen to write a song about us?
[15] You don’t really expect me to remember a course title from 50 years ago, given what you know about my memory, do you? As you are about to read (I am assuming someone actually goes to the footnotes when they each appear), I only remember this much because of a salient fact about course content which will be apparent in approximately 4 sentences…
[16] My reaction was probably made even worse by me having just finished the Louis L’Amour novel. I was 15 or 16, about 120 pounds soaking wet, but a “man’s godda do….”. The scars are still with me. Wearing pink shirts as a badge of my metrosexuality is just an act by adult me. (My missus says wearing pastels in my case is misleading. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE MEANS).
[17] I have only one other story about Joe. We played in an intramural football team. I was on the sidelines (not unusual) and Joe was playing in defence. A long ball came in and Joe did not head it out of the penalty box. Instead he let it bounce and then was in a world of trouble when the other team’s striker arrived at pace. “Joe, head the f**king ball!” I screamed, anticipating being a pushy parent at my son’s football matches 40 years in the future. “David, I hear you”, he shouted back, “but I’ve read a Norwegian study about long term consequences of soccer ball heading for cognitive functioning”, as he dribbled deftly out of harm’s way and cleared the ball out of the danger area (He may have sent me a clipping from a newspaper on this too, but I prefer the Teflon study). By the way, I think of this little story every time someone seems to (re-)discover that heading the ball a lot might not be good for you. No offense to at least one of my readers!
[18] Of course I have ever reviewed one of your scientific papers, you might wonder about the sincerity of this utterance.
[19] Sadly google docs does not allow emojis in the footnotes. It was a better joke when he was here.
[20] This one could be a blog on its own (e.g. https://www.gov.wales/written-statement-loss-funding-wales-result-uk-governments-arrangements-replacement-eu-funding). Shame Brexit voting Welsh people cannot actually read anything longer than those short paragraphs they use in the Sun or the Daily Mail. More recently, as if Labour are actually having a laugh at Wales’ expense, structural funds supposedly earmarked for Wales are going to be subsidising improved train services between…Cambridge and Oxford. Read that again, out loud. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20xdwr5gw1o
A mutual acquaintance of our put the true cost of the Borg Building at well north of £50M. It is a truly ghastly structure (and I can usually something good to say about modern architecture). BTW we in our Northern Powerhouse (c) are going through some astounding dumbing down in our teaching provision. Stuff I used to teach freshers is now in final year options. Areas that gave my Northern Powerhouse (c) an international reputation for excellence now have two hours devoted to them in the entire 3 year degree programme. This is all in the service of ‘efficiency’. Baby… bath-water…
ReplyDeleteAdd various letters like ‘s’ and words like ‘find’ to fill in the gaps above.
DeleteI liked it on the inside! (Although it had just opened the summer I was leaving and one wondered if the architect had though about noise with that very open interior core). As I mention, Labour seem to be softening the public up a bit for some individual Unis failing by talking about greedy VCs and vanity projects. I think that this is disingenuous at worst or naïve at best. And don't be too critical of that lack of polish on a blog comment LOL. "Resistance is futile!"
ReplyDeleteBy the way, in case any of the four of you whop read this blog do not notice, calling the American founding fathers a bunch of Protestant tax dodgers is *genius*. Came up with that in the middle of the first glass of rioja.
ReplyDeleteand the Harlequin romance story IS TRUE.
ReplyDelete