During my half-hour lunch at Staples today, the general manager of the store told me about how he trained as an electrical engineer and how the choice to go into retail was a terrible one. He meant to do so only temporarily, but after five years found that he couldn’t get out of it. Learning this put a new spin on the mildly tragic story of the Staples managers, for whom those fluorescent aisles represent a big chunk of the future, rather than a nasty short-term hurdle.
Tonight, I am meeting Tristan for what will almost surely be the last time before his departure. I hope that he enjoys being a grad student at York. I am sure we will remain in contact, by various electronic means – just as I expect to remain part of the electronic diaspora of friends I have been developing. Along with Tristan, it looks as though I will be meeting Alison and possibly Meaghan Beattie as well.
Both during the time from now until I catch my bus and during the time after I hang out with friends, I will be working to finish the first real version of the NASCA report. Fernando and I put in a good five and a half hours of reviewing last night: over rounds of coffee at Tim Horton’s. Bits of the paper have been greatly expanded while others have been melded into more appropriate language. Overall, the project is becoming more exciting as the report takes on a form closer and closer to that which it will finally possess.
PS. To clarify briefly for those who want to know precisely what is going on with the blog at the moment: the nine hundred or so entries from the past few years are gone for the indefinite future. The present form of the blog might be an intermediary one between the demise of the old blog and the creation of a distinctive Oxford era blog, or I might just choose to carry on with this URL and layout once I get there.
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,–
Which, like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,–
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate’ by his side come hot from Hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.