Bile and Vitriol

On Friday I received a letter from the Arts and Humanities Research Council about my application for PhD funding. The letter informed me that my application had not been considered because the AHRC had not received a form from the University updating them of my MA progress. I am thus coldly furious at present because filling in the forms and completing my side of the application took a great deal of my time and effort and significantly affected how much I could put into my MA coursework. It was also enormously stressful.

I'm not completely fucked as far as funding goes - I still have the offer of a funded studentship from the University - but that pays about three grand less than a successful application would. That's not to say I'd have been successful, but having the chance to at least be in the competition would have been nice.

Anyway - before I begin screaming angrily at people I have contacted the postgraduate admin person explained what's happened and asked for an explanation. I am willing to accept: lost in the post; life threatening illness; family emergency; and bereavement as excuses. Anything else may well result in an enormous bout of deliberate offensiveness. I suspect that they will try to tell me it's my fault somehow.

Via ed_fortune:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, add an strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.

Personal note - some of these books are shit, others I would have read and definitely wished I hadn't. Clearly, being in the top 100 is no indication of quality (mind you - I had a thoroughly bad time reading many books that are widely regarded as classics).
 

Ahoy there maties - she be finished; now with brass fittings, linseed-treated wood, a catch; and secret pirate false bottom (total cost: approx £18):



You can tell from the backdrop that the kids have yet to start using the damned thing to store their toys!

Found a large wooden box in a junk shop for a fiver today. Bargain. I snapped it up for the kids to use as a treasure/tidying chest for their bedroom. I was feeling creative and have always fancied having a bash at pokerwork so I got the kids to chose a theme (they picked 'pirates' without hesitation) and we found a nice picture that they liked. Some time later I have discovered that a soldering iron makes a pretty excellent tool for making a boring wooden box pretty cool. More work to do treating the wood and adding some fittings, bit I'm very pleased with the results of my work.

This is the chest lid part way through the process.




And this is the finished image (it's about 10" across):

Kittens - I do not find them cute at all, oh no. Will we be adopting them and their mum into our family? Almost certainly - I am of course opposed to having this terrible (and endearingly fluffy) drain on our finances.

I came home yesterday to find that we appear to have caught a nasty dose of cats. A stray, abandoned we think by our former neighbours (from hell) has had kittens outside our back door. She and her three kittens have take up residence under the coal scuttle. Tam and the boys are rather taken with them; I remain completely unaffected by their amazing fluffy cuteness. Honest. Pictures when they venture out.

I finally signed up for a mobile phone contract last month - I've been using a pay-as-you-go sim card that a mate gave me a decade ago and finally lost patience with not owning my own number. Now I own a shiny Samsung Soul, which is lovely and very, very useful; I am most pleased with it. However, last weekend I lost the headphones for it, which given that they do not have a standard line-out jack and act as the aerial for the phone's radio was a real pain. The fact that I couldn't track down a replacement online was also a pain. I phoned Samsung and asked to buy one from them - they said no, they would instead send me one for free. Now that's customer service.

Spent a very pleasant weekend at the Bristol Vegan Fair. Last night we lay in our Youth Hostel bunks  watching the sun go down and drinking Westons Cider whilst just outside Aswad were playing live on the waterfront.  Sadly we only  stayed the one night and so missed out on Bad Manners who are probably working their way through their set right now.

Last night I took my South American culinary adventure a little further and made Tamales. Despite having to use maize meal instead of masa harina and bamboo leaves instead of corn husks they seemed to work pretty well - though my filling needs work. They turned out to be possibly one of the most filling foods I've made - no wonder the Aztecs took them as rations when going to war. I may well pre-make a batch or two and take them camping with me.

With a 'Hi Hi Ho' and a 'Hi Hi Hey'. Pirates are all we can be.

Indeed.

Please god let there be some Ninjas later on.

Spent Saturday digging at our allotment. Spent most of Sunday in bed feeling utterly spaced-out, slightly dizzy and somewhat nauseous. Better now, but most of day wasted so many potatoes did not get planted and I missed a post-election do for a neighbouring party in Altringham.

My days are being spent electioneering and my nights reading Levinas. I'm not sure which is the greater slog.

I have a speech to write on Lib Dem policy for a university debating society. I'm their guest (obviously they couldn't find anyone important) tonight. I'm struggling to motivate myself. Speech writing is tedious.

Woo Hoo. I've been off work (allegedly on holiday, but with elections looming it's a relief to be back behind my desk) and so didn't make it to a presentation about my faculty's reorganisation plans. The rest of the admin staff got to watch the presentation and then were handed envelopes at the end telling them whether their jobs still existed. I've got my letter now and can happily confirm that I am not unemployed! Strangely, the wait for this has been the least stressful thing going on in my life recently.

I've just returned from the vet, where I was with my poor cat Parsley while the vet administered the injection that killed him. His kidneys had packed in.

God gods - I have 90+ pages of guidance on filling in 50+ pages of forms for the PhD research council funding application. I have to collect referees, and send forms hither and thither to previous institutions where I've studied. It all has to be done and dusted by 1st May, which just so happens to be our wedding anniversary (when we annually renew our vows), the date of the local elections and just a week before I have 6000 words worth of assignments due in. I love this time of year, really I do. At least work's quiet.

...when Foucault makes clear and compelling sense.

Three great websites posted to celebrate World Book Day:

* http://www.greenmetropolis.com
* http://www.bookcrossing.com
* http://www.gutenberg.org

The Lib Dems are twenty years old today.

The Home Secretary has announced that she wants police to be allowed to confiscate people’s assets when they are arrested.

Labour has said that drug dealers should have their assets removed until they have proven that they are ‘completely innocent’. How does the law determine that someone is a drug dealer? The answer is that they are arrested, charged, tried and convicted. Things like evidence, the rule of law, due process, a judge and jury are needed. But Labour thinks little things like these are a terrible inconvenience and should be done a way with. Instead, they think that people should be regarded as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and that the police should mete out summary justice.

Under current legislation cash can already be taken, and even if a person is acquitted their assets can be taken on little more than reasonable grounds for suspicion.

If you think this will only be applied to suspected drug dealers then think again. It’s a hallmark of this government that bills introduced with assurances that they were very limited in scope or would only be used in very specific ways have quickly expanded to cover all sorts of other areas. Labour’s approach to law and order bears all the attributes of a steady march towards a police state.

Anyone care to guess why Labour has announced this illiberal attack on Habeus Corpus and the Magna Carta? Let me give you a clue - it’s so they can summarily declare that anyone who objects to it is a friend of the drug dealer and ’soft on crime’. Another case of making up a policy purely for the purposes of election slogans.

Edit: I've just spotted that Labour announced these plans last March under Blair too. What is it with this continued re-announcement of policies? Anyone would think that they simply have a raft of headline grabbing policies to announce each year in the run-up to elections. One wonders if how many ever become law (the re-announcement of Crossrail every year for over ten years is a classic example).