The Hat says...

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest".
Haha, sweet! ravenclaw, house of excellence and bein' hawt!

Ride to ruin, and the world's sweetening

OK.

Everything I have ever achieved in life has just been overshadowed.

Dyspepsilicious!

Dear readers,

Today, advertsing totally worked on me!
I was cycling up to Nanpantan, feeling all slithy, when I saw a crushed Pepsi cup in the gutter. "You know what, self" I said to my self "I DO want a Pepsi."

It has been a year or two since I had one, and the taste has two associations for me.
1) The Wetherspoons chain of pubs
2) The Carribean.

I have also discovered that it is suprisingly difficult to carry a pepsi on a bike without making it go all crazy. "Suprising" that is, because I presumably manage to keep the vibration from doing the same thing to my brain. (Side-note: As a philosophical materalist, I believe the human soul to be a thin, excitable cola-like substance.)

I just got a letter addressed to "Mr. Nathan Hill, AMInstP". I hope it isn't trouble.

The latest headlines

TIme Magazine follows where I lead. Bran Report sets sights on other mainstream media. Getting lazy and just plugging someone else's work is the new journalism. Stocks up, shares down.

Recommendin'

And while I'm not entertaining you, why not try out Achewood? The current storyline has reached the point where two cartoon cats and a stuffed bear are contemplating the ethics of revenge (in a very... applied sense. If Garfield had gone this way, the LA Times would have dropped it earlier but us edgy internet types would still love it.

Cheers

These few weeks are going to be spotty as far as bloggin' is concerned. You see, as much as I like writing outraged missives about pronouns or the East Midlands, my real job is to know whether Cadmium Telluride is better than Amorphous Silicon (it totally is). In two weeks I have to proove my worth in the only way I know how: by playing a three-hour written version of Just A Minute.

I just want to say that while I'm busily trying to remember if the Betz limit applies to water turbines, I am also really glad that the comments field has become a value-add. Please, please keep commenting on my works throughout my life. Your wit reflects well on me.

Peace.

Mars and Venus

So, lately I have been wondering about something. For years I've described myself as a feminist, in the why-the-hell-wouldn't-you-be sense that (I would hope) almost everyone is.

I am, however, dead against certain other forms of feminism. There seem to be a few voices in the world that, I am convinced, are being paid off by time-travelling Edwardian misogynists. Whereas the good ol' boys of the Industrial Revolution held that science and technology were male concerns that women's brains were unsuited to, these difference feminists hold that science and engineering and critical thinking and all rational thought are the product of the male mind: alien, and perhaps harmful to women.

What I find interesting, though, is where the idea of the male gender has gone. I kind of liked the old ideal of manhood back around the eighteenth century or so- proud, rational and sanguine. It's a pretty poor description for any human being, but a pretty good ideal for everyone, I reckon. What we have now is, if you'll excuse me a moment while I destroy any claims to classiness I may have had up to this point, exemplified in recent James Bond films. No, really. To be a man now is to be aggressive, forthright, and a little bit stupid. Masculinity is associated with a joie-de-vivre bordering on childishness. It's being a 'bloke'. There's a curious sense of inferiority to women. There's a defeatism that set in about the time that someone realised that while women's brains are blasted with hormones every month or so, ours are soggy with testosterone from the age of thirteen until we kill ourselves fishing with dynamite. There's an idea that we're good for opening jars and such, and that's about it.

It's all in good fun and might even be progress if it weren't for the whole discrepencies-in-earnings and thats-womans-work kind of things that still go on. Me, I'm going to keep on trying to be John-Stuart Mill, and anyone's welcome to come along.