Category: General

Red Bed Green Dead

I promised you… a golden ring? No, thesis material and I am the first to admit that I have not given unto you.

It’s all my fault; editing the current chapter has been a bit of a chore and I’m not sure what to give out and what to bury with the rest of my philosophical corpses.

But no matter; Ian Wishart has written a book ((Which has received good reviews from Vincent Gray and Bob Carter, which must mean something to someone.)) and someone has taken time out to read it. Not me; I wasted too much time on ‘Eve’s Bite’ to want to devote another afternoon to a Wishart ‘thriller’. But the fine people over at Hot Topic have done the job for me.

Still, I’m going to have to read at least a section of it if this section of the review is to be believed:

Having disposed of the science, he moves on to consider why this great propaganda coup has been undertaken. Turns out it’s all the fault of an evil cabal of child-eating greens, supported by mega-rich capitalists (George Soros gets a chapter to himself) who are intent on imposing socialism on the world through the UN. So all the world’s climate scientists, save a brave few supported by the downtrodden fossil fuel companies of the world, are complicit in a global conspiracy to impose socialism and world government.

Right, back to work. I promise to give you stuff to read soon. Gods above and below, I’m beginning to treat you people like my supervisors.

05/04/2009

No real content, but wow, the presentation

The world must know:

The Most Exciting (and not really appropriate) Website Intro Ever ((Not really. But today, yes.))

04/22/2009

I’m all-a-twitter

Astute readers of the blog will have noticed a new item in my sidebar: “HORansome’s ‘All-a-Twitter'” which, for even more astute readers, will indicate that I have signed up with Twitter ((Yet I continue to avoid Facebook like the plague; what is up with that?)). If you twitter, or tweet, or whatever, why not follow me in my endeavours. I’m hoping to use Twitter for more than just my ‘witty’ asides; it’s probably a better system for detailing the boring minutiae of my thesis-writing.

Me on Twitter

04/14/2009

Me and Tame Iti

It turns out that if you do an image search for me on the rarely used Altavista.com search engine you get me, Tame Iti and something else.

Conspiracy? Probably…

04/10/2009

On Vice-Chancellors

Stuart McCutcheon, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland, `brief CV’ on the University of Auckland’s website gives his qualifications as:

Professor McCutcheon completed his Bachelors degree with first class honours at Massey University in 1976, and was then appointed to the position of lecturer while undertaking a PhD in metabolic physiology.

Metabolic physiology? I had been told it was a PhD on the actual freezing to death of new-born lambs. Luckily, the rumour, such as it was, seems like it might well be right; witness the Massey University library’s catalogue:

A study of some factors affecting the resistance of newborn lambs to cold-stress with particular reference to starvation and exposure mortality : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Animal Science at Massey University / Stuart Norman McCutcheon

I pass this one because I’ve been telling people that the rumour was that the Vice-Chancellor had the makings of ‘evil’ genius and it seems that, in our agriculturally-inclined country, that he does, in fact, have the makings.

04/10/2009

Holiday!

I’m away for the next few days, having a holiday in the country and appearing as a guest star (of sorts) in a pub quiz. I was going to leave you with pithy thesis materials but instead I thought I might share with you the wonders of my phone’s peculiar and almost useless technology, word-predictive texting.

Most phones today have predictive texting; you start inputing a word and the phone tries to guess which word it is you want. My phone has an added feature; it will also try to predict the next word for you as well. This hardly ever works, but it does have a certain charm; if you let it predict one word it will quite happily try to predict the next word and so on until such time it completes a sentence or ends up repeating itself ad nauseam.

I often just start off a message to see where my phone will take it. Here are four of my favourites. I only chose the first word; the rest is all due to the ‘geniuses’ at Sony Ericsson.

This morning? Not convinced by the zombie apocalypse.

Rally to Wellington on the machine. Homeward bound.

Can book. Cool. You tried the other slot? Strange. Are we might also occupy and that’s a wrap, Mr. Cato.

You due to bother with my washing?

It’s not art but I know what I like.

See you on the other side of Easter.

04/07/2009