Walking around campus one sees the same kind of reaction I described during midterms, with students looking somewhat shellshocked… This afternoon I taught a review session to a group of students tha are normally lively, quick to repeat and catch on, and, well, normally they’re pretty good. Today it was like teaching a class of mannequins… waterlogged mannequins dredged up by drunken salvage boat pilots. I kept asking them why they were performing so badly all of a sudden, and at first I just got silly excuses like, “We studied this dialogue one month ago!” for something they’d studied a …

Racing against time, I managed to do that major restructuring of my archiving system today. I figured out a little last night but the bulk of the work was achieved this morning, to the sounds of Bj&ourml;rk, Tori Amos (only briefly), David Bowie, Medeski, Martin & Wood, and some Tuvan throat-singing rock music I downloaded. (More on that soon.) I am very pleased with myself, as the Departments are quite a lot more navigable now. There are several subdepartments for each department page, something that took a little thinking to get to work, but what was harder was getting the …

Something funny’s going on with my blog. I don’t quite understand why, though. Some category archives are loading funny some of the time. I’m not sure exactly why, though… I am guess it has to do with one of the changes I’ve made today, but I cannot imagine…. which. Except, of course, that it just came to me. Wow. Crazy. Maybe that’s it. We’ll see. It was missing </div> and </i> tags in the random quotes file. Of course.

When I got to the office this afternoon, I found a package from America. Adam mailed me the prize I won in his contest for the crazy little story I wrote about what his third nemesis would be. I wanted to put links for all that stuff, but Blogspot is cacked up again as usual, so it’ll have to wait. It’s a fine little book, the Hellboy RPG book that Adam sent me… if I can find some gamer geeks I shall have fun in the new year. Maybe that can be my English cafe activity: an RPG about psychic …

When I was reading Rob’s About Pip blog, I read something quite striking about entering history. He talks about having the feeling of entering history when he sees people interacting with his child, and though it’s a brief moment, it’s a striking on. He mentions, also, a book that I also recently read, loved, but failed to produce a review of: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. In that book there are many threads about ideas and concepts and meaning in history that are woven together, and right now I cannot be bothered to dig through and …

I’ve been adding banners to this site, steadily, and I just added a few more. But there’s so many that it takes a while for them to circulate enough to get the new ones seen. I think I may take some of the old ones out of circulation for a while so the new ones get seen, and then mix in the newer ones again… anyway, lemme know which banners you like! They’re like little sardonic “pieces” of experimentation for me: meme, image and text together. A kind of game to play with you, the Gentle Reader. I’ve also added …