My blog rate is a reflection of my worth as a human being

I haven't blogged since Thursday. To use a common colloquialism, I suck.

Right now, I'm torn between staying here and making good on my promise to blog every so often, or going home to sit by the phone.

On Friday I phoned the Oxfam central library, essentially saying "Giss a job, I don't want payin". Of course, if you phone somewhere at 4.45 on a Friday, they're likely to say "We'll call you back", and that's what they did. So far, they haven't. I don't think I'm going to be home in time to reasonably phone them up again, since I seem pretty much glued to this here keyboard. I'm more or less waiting to see what they say before I book trains back home to Devon, so hopefully I'll have an aye or nay before too long. You know what, I'm going to call them on the mobile now.
(log out, sound of retreating footsteps)
(sound of returning footsteps)
OK, so I didn't actually call them. I decided it'd be more sensible to do it first thing tomorrow. That way it won't be just as they're putting away the tickets, or whatever, and if neccesary I can bus up there and talk to someone face to face.

What I've mostly been doing on the internet is a long story. Well, not very long... OK: Radio 4 recently played episode one of The Silver Pigs, a detective novel set in Ancient Rome. If that interests you and you're reading this within a day or two of me writing it, you can probably find it in Real Time stream here. We were all set up to tape it off the radio, new cassette in the machine, record button dusted down... but then we forgot. No seriously, that's it: we just went out of the house and forgot all about it. Housemate Jenny, who's read the books in any case, was the most interested, and has since enlisted me to try to get it by covert computer-type manipulations. I'd have managed it too, if it wasn't for that pesky .ram format... I neither have, nor want Real Player, and I want to dowload, not stream. I paid my license fee, damn it. So tell you what, if any of my thousands upon thousands of readers happened to tape it, send an e-mail my way. I'll make it worth your while.

The way I'd make it worth your while is probably by sending you a book. As regular readers will know, I like giving away books. On the old reading front, things have pretty quiet lately. I had a mammoth session of Civilisation III, you see. I love that game. Anyone who thinks computer games are causing intelectual decline in the nations' youth ought to see me play Civ III, proudly extending my empires' infrastructure, and agonising over whether to prioritise the research into Musical theory or ways of making a practical printing press. But anyway, the upshot of this is that at two in the morning a few nights ago the Scottish empire managed to put a man in space, and I realised I hadn't read a book for weeks.

I have just checked my post, and in that was a copy of New Internationalist. NI is a left-wing, anti-Bush, Shouldn't-we-do-something-about-Africa kind of magazine, and I recently decided to sign up for the special introductory offer. As part of that, I have their "No-nonsense guide to World History". This slim volume looks to be right up my street: Educational in a vaugely subversive way, global flavoured, and just a hint of witty. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The radio is playing Legal Man. This is Belle and Sebastian pretending that they're not Belle and Sebastian. It's very odd. Apparently Beowulf confuses Anglo-Saxon scholars because it's not overly battle-based, saint-orientated, or a a bit of the Old Testement retold to appeal to Anglo-Saxons i.e. more monsters. That is, it's not like every other bit of extant Anglo-Saxon storytelling. Future music scholars will be equally confused by Legal Man, you mark my words.

What was I saying?

What is this life if full of stress, we have no freedom to digress?

Oh yeah, I'd make it worth your while if you send me The Silver Pigs, recorded off radio Four. Totally worth it.

The other way I might reward any home-tapers out there is by sending you Fair Trade chocolate. Right now I'm carrying something like £20-worth of it around with me. Partly this is because I'm going to put a whole load in the cupboard to see me through the long easter holiday, but mostly it's because I'm planning to give a load away in my JCR to mark the end of FairTrade fortnight. At the minute this looks most likely to be on Friday afternoon, after my last tute of the term. I'm going to collar a few friends to sit around and look approachable with me while we sip tea and eat hundreds of bits of chocolate. Maybe I'll get hold of a few dozen fairtrade leaflets and so on to hand out.

But right now, I think it's time to go and think happy thoughts about Phasors.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It's not as exciting as it sounds. Krypton sounds exciting, but it's a colourless, tasteless gas mostly notable for the fact that it never reacts with anything. In fact, it never really does anything at all except sink slowly through air and put out fires. Similarly, in this context phasors are a mathematical technique for dealing with wave inteference patterns. They're quite satisfying to work with, but they're not in the least bit cool or exciting.

Sigh.

Song in my head: The REM version of "Wichita Lineman"