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Value for money?
Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | It isn’t philistinism to give students value for moneyThere’s a lot I would agree with here. Certainly Polly Toynbee is right to say that many students are treating their degree studies as a part time occupation. Where I would take issue with her is where she suggests that this means…
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Don’t dumb me down
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don’t dumb me down I love Ben Goldacre’s pieces in the Grauniad. Here he summarises what he’s been doing in his Bad Science column for the last couple of years. Always entertaining and, curiously, reassuring – as one of the Humanities graduates he mentions in the article, I would otherwise…
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The Bush family and Hurricane Katrina
Guardian Unlimited | Cartoons | 07.09.05: The Bush family and Hurricane KatrinaAs usual, Steve Bell gets to the point. This is after Barbara Bush’s brilliant insight that the people evacuated to Texas have actually been lucky: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is…
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Books
I’ve been tagged, from the film of the same name, to answer these questions. Here goes:1. Number of books I have owned: I really don’t know. In the room where I sit now, I estimate there are about 500 books. In the rest of the house posibly another 2000 or so. In my office, maybe…
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Wimmin Only
On Saturday, I browsed around a Liverpool bookshop. It’s a co-op, with a radical ethos, and “alternative” atmosphere. It has a table with a pile of petitions on it, and a very extensive Mind Body and Spirit section. You know the kind of thing. I was looking for a particular book in the fiction section,…
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One side can be wrong
Guardian Unlimited | Life | One side can be wrong …and further to the musings on religious belief below, let’s not forget that the Reverend Dubya, currently failing to organise a piss-up in a brewery, is also keen on the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution in America’s allegedly religion-free schools. Richard Dawkins…
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New Orleans
It’s difficult to believe the scenes we are witnessing on TV originate in the richest and most powerful country in the world. I noticed that at the time of declaring a state of emergency, the Louisiana governor advised the people to pray. Since that didn’t work, apparently, the anarchy is to be controlled by –…
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Bullshit generator
dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator This handy tool should be on the desktop of all in management. It will provide an instant important sounding but meaningless phrase to chuck into a meeting. Promotion beckons for all who use it, I’m sure…
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University of Bums on Seats
University of Bums on Seats – Welcome My boss sent me a link to this – she thought (rightly) I’d be amused. The trouble is, many of us who work in HE see this kind of thing as only marginally exaggerating current trends. There will come a point when this won’t look particularly like parody.
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The f word
BBC NEWS | England | Northamptonshire | School gives pupils f-word limitAnother brilliant educational initiative. I wonder where they got 5 as the limit? Is there a sliding scale of punishment? If you use the offending word 15 times in a lesson, do you get twice the detention you would have got if you’d used…