Faire Les Pillages!

aesthetistician @ 2009-11-28T21:47:00

2009-11-28T21:47:38Z

First up! A box-type thing. I tried to make these units into polyhedra, but they were grieviously fiddly to assemble and unstable once you got them together. They work a bit better as a box.

Rainbow hexagonal box

(Not a great picture. It looks more rainbow-y in real life.) Might be a nice gift box for something small.

Twelve units on the left, thirty units on the right

Both of these units are okay on aesthetic grounds, but they don't happily make anything other than those polyhedra, which bothers me because I love flexibility. Next!.

Twelve, twelve, six and twelve

The two on top are minor variations of the same thing. Reasonably stable, constrained to cubic vertices, I prefer the one on the right, but they aren't really my cup of tea. That green thing under them is pretty, I think, but that seems to be the only form of it that works. And the twelve-unit one lurking darkly in the corner is from years ago and is time-consuming and tricky to fold. It does have a satisfyingly complicated texture, though, and probably deserves a better photo. Next!

Thirty, twelve and twenty four

Now we're starting to get somewhere. Simple enough to fold, only a little inclined to fall apart, and fairly flexible. They like making things with triangular faces best, but they'll take other arrangements too. The only complaint I really have is that the triangular peaks are free to flop around and look messy. Next!

Twenty four, twelve and thirty

Oh, now we are getting somewhere! These are easy as pie to fold and assemble, and stable to boot. That red and white one there is a stellated cuboctahedron, which looks exactly like an octahedron with a smaller pyramid on each face. The smooth, clean lines here appeal to me. The simplicity makes me suspect that they must have been discovered already by someone else.

So there we are. If you fancy a diagram or crease pattern for anything, just yell!

aesthetistician @ 2009-11-10T09:51:00

2009-11-10T09:56:47Z

Considering that there are nice comfortable benches just around the corner, and a computer lab next door, I have to wonder why my doorstep is the place of choice for students to work on their projects. I don't have a doormat, but there are three of them sitting on the floor where one would be if I had one. I almost stood on them just now.

Seriously. What is up with this? It's about the third time this semester.

I am made of alphabet!

2009-10-22T11:58:42Z

Ankles. Have not been sprained in some years now. Have I just jinxed it, do you think?
Bitten lips.
Chipped tooth (one).
Distracted air.
Exceptional omelette-making skills.
Face. I know most people have one of those, but I couldn't think of anything else for F.
Grey eyes.
Head. Usually located in clouds.
Innocent expression. Misleading.
Joints. Make popping sounds. Jack tells me this has something to do with synovial fluid.
Knobbly knees. Probably not much more knobbly than anyone else's. Knees just knobble.
Long arms.
Metabolism. Somewhat speedy.
Nails - my right little finger's nail is squashed and funny. My brother dropped a brick on it when we were babies (he didn't mean to!)
Opposable thumbs. Always handy to have!
Pigment in a blob on one shoulder blade. I like it a lot. Other people don't seem to notice it, though. Or maybe they don't know I like it and are too polite to comment?
Quiet unless provoked.
Right-handedness.
Skin which is soft, by and large.
Tiny earlobes. Hardly there at all.
Un-curlable tongue.
Vision: good, in defiance of genetics.
Wispy hair.
Xylem - well, not really, but if I was a tree I would have some. Not many body parts begin with X, people!
Youthful air. May be wearing off. Haven't been asked for ID in, oh, months now.
Zombie food. Aren't we all?

This might be a nice meme.

Chocolate inventory

2009-09-26T21:52:11Z

Every now and then, Roscoe makes me organise all of the chocolate into boxes. (Yes, plural). Then he berates me for keeping what he considers to be unnecessary amounts of chocolate on hand. "Chocolate," I tell him, "is like books. You do not want to wait until you run out before you buy more. It's important to have some in reserve."
"This," he says wearily, "is why the place is full of chocolate and books, isn't it?"
He has a point. I cannot, however, interpret "full of chocolate and books" as a negative.

Herewith, a breakdown:

275g dark, with chilli
250g dark, with mint
125g dark, with orange and almond
100g fairtrade dark
125g 60% cocoa
225g 70% cocoa
125g 81%cocoa
100g fairtrade milk
200g fairtrade milk with rose
200g milk with coffee-flavour crunchy bits
125g milk with caramel crunchy bits
300g white
plus some bags of chocolate chips, and escaped shards and squares from other bars, totalling 815g or thereabouts.

By my count, that is just shy of three kilograms of chocolate. Dear reader, do I have a problem? Or do I have the solution to every problem?

aesthetistician @ 2009-09-14T15:01:00

2009-09-14T14:22:52Z

The thing about Picross is that on large grids, you tend to spend a lot of time making trivial-but-important fills before you get into genuine brain-teasing territory. The risk of getting a single cell filled wrongly in all that is higher than I would like - most of the grids I end up spoiling are down to a single, simple, instance of miscounting in the early stages.

So naturally, I set myself a challenge: write a program to take care of the preliminary count-and-fill operations, presenting the user with a nice grid all ready for the genuine-puzzling phase. Because I am a crazy masochist, and because I want to become familiar with it and this seemed like a good exercise, I used R.

It could stand some improvement, there is no doubt about that. But it works! And it is at this point that I realise it is entirely useless. Why is this? Because the only way of getting the clues into the thing is to type them in, one by one. This is neither fast nor error-proof, which rather defeats the entire point of the thing.

If anyone knows a nice neat way (or even an awkward messy way) of automatically extracting the clues from the puzzle, please do tell me.

aesthetistician @ 2009-08-13T20:30:00

2009-08-13T19:36:48Z

*ring ring*

"Hello, this is me speaking"

"Hello, I got your number from [name deleted], who is -- actually, I don't know who he is. But he gave me your number!"

Well, I don't know who that person is either. Whoever he is, he apparently knows who I am, and is giving out my contact information without revealing his own identity. That seems like a skill I could use. Maybe I should ask him to teach me, if I could find out who he is...

Technical terminology

2009-06-25T14:50:12Z

I have four brothers. To people who do not know their names, or have better things to do than remmber the names of my siblings, they are called "My older brother", "My younger brother", "My little brother", and "My baby brother". Never mind that they are all bigger than me, or that the one designated "Little" is the largest of the lot.

If four, rather than three, were younger than me, what would they be called?

aesthetistician @ 2009-05-19T14:35:00

2009-05-19T13:43:00Z

It wasn't raining at 13.59 today, when I left my office on a quest for chips. I'd've taken my coat, if it was raining, but it wasn't raining.

Until I left the building at 14.01, at which point it was raining like rain was going out of fashion. By the time I was enchipped and back at my desk (some five minutes later, incidentally) I seemed to have been entered in an impromptu one-woman wet tee-shirt competition. Hoorah, says I, everyone now knows I am wearing a very old, frayed, stained, greying white cotton sports bra. I ooze style, me.

It's okay, though. I have spare tracksuit bottoms, socks, and teeshirt in my office, kept there in case of short-notice trampoline sessions. All I have to do is change. Now, I've learned my lesson as far as stripping in the office goes, so off I toddle to the bathroom.

I pee. I remove my jeans. I remove my tee-shirt. I seize my bundle of replacement clothing and watch the only dry socks in my possession fly into the toilet.

Ew.

I clearly can't leave them there, though. The cleaners should only have to deal with so much. I did the dance of grab-them-by-the-dry bit and then stood, in my underwear, holding my dripping socks, and wondered what to do. I like these socks, but I do not want to place urine-soaked socks in my bag, on my desk, or indeed anywhere close to me. Equally, I do not want to drip pee all over the bathroom bin. What's a girl to do?

I wrapped them in toilet paper. When they resembled a gargantuan and frankly rather terrifying tampon, I put them in the bin.

My feet are still wet.

I'm not amused.

Fire and flood and mayhem, oh my

2009-04-25T16:26:59Z

(I lied about the fire)

I had a plan for my Saturday. It wasn't terribly exciting: let the Curtain Guy in to install our curtains, make cheesecake (and fudge), and photograph the latest origami yokes.

Everything was on track until about noon, when I left George (who stayed over last night) under orders to listen out for Curtain Guy and took the rubbish down to the rubbish area in the car park.

The basement carpark.

The very flooded basement carpark.

We have a storage facility full of stuff in this flooded basement carpark.

I returned and apprised George of the fact that our storage was flooded. He went out to the local shops to buy a torch (because the storage unit has no lights) and flip-flops (because he did not want to soak his boots). I stayed behind and made phone calls. To the emergency contact people, who told me the situation had been reported, and to Curtain Guy to push back our curtain date. Curtain Guy seemed to have quite forgotten he was supposed to be seeing us between eleven and one. He couldn't, he said, fit us in that afternoon, only in the morning. I suppressed the urge to point out that he had quite blatantly not appeared yet - it was about a quarter to one by now - and promised to call when we knew who would be around during the week.

George came back. We ventured to the basement and gazed upon a very wet storage unit. The bags of fabric I keep around for sewing and patching? Soaked. Assorted electronic doohickeys? Soaked. Boxes of papers? Soaked. That included the only copy I have of my thesis, which upset me rather.*

We ferried everything we could out onto dry land. Then we ferried it into the lift. Then we hauled it into the apartment. The kitchen, having the most drip-resistant floor, looks like a refugee camp for suitcases and plastic crates. All the neighbours we met along the way were outwardly shocked to hear that we had a real love flood, and probably quite delighted really. There's nothing like a good disaster to get people bonding with one another!

Next I did what I had known all along I would have to do - I called my father and asked for sandbags. He duly appeared with bags, sand, a torch and some wellies. And some orange Bourneville, which was much appreciated. And I sandbagged the door and baled. And baled. And baled some more. And then it was too shallow to bale easily, so I used a dustpan to scoop water into a bucket and then flung the bucket out the door and admired the ripples - it was, admittedly, all very pretty - and scooped and emptied and scooped and emptied until two things happened. The first was that the place contained something more like a giant puddle than a biblical flood. The second was that I was soaked, freezing, and entirely sick of scooping.

So I went upstairs and drank orange sherry. I only bought it because it sounded interesting and the bottle was very pretty, but it's damn tasty and it warms one right up and after another glass or two I'll get to drunken baking, so we may actually get the fire part after all.

*I do still have it in electronic form - but in the exhausted, overcaffeinated day I finally finished the thing, I printed three copies - two for grading by the university and one for me. To keep around, to prove that I did it. It wasn't really a very good thesis, but dammit, it was mine. A lesson in why one should not get too attached to Things?

Beautiful

2009-04-02T09:43:42Z

I have just had a lovely encounter. I was taking the lift down to get coffee, and just before the doors shut a tall, very attractive woman stepped in. We stood in silence for a few moments, and then she asked "What do you think?". I smiled and asked of what, and she said "Just, in general".

I wanetd to reply that I was thinking right then that her hair was beautiful, but - damnable cultural conditioning! - I mumbled something silly about how I had slept really well and was feeling great.

I love when people surprise you like that.

On a mysterious point of etiquette

2009-02-03T11:26:19Z

I am reading L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between and enjoying it. But this sentence gave me pause:

The men walked about to eat their porridge. This, Marcus told me, was de rigueur; only cads ate their porridge sitting down. I roamed about with mine, fearful of spilling it.

Wait, what?

The formalities of a summer house-party are well observed in this book, so I trust that in Norfolk in the early nineteen-hundreds, at least, gentlemen did indeed walk around the room while eating porridge. But was one permitted to stand still instead of perambulating? It is implied that ladies were exempt. If so, did they abstain from porridge completely or did they eat sitting down? How widespread was this practice? How long did it last? Would it have applied to other cereals, had they been available?

P. G. Wodehouse is my other source of Posh British Minutiae, but I don't recall him mentioning what people did when eating porridge. Was this because Wooster did not, in fact, take his bowl for a stroll? Or was Wodehouse assuming his readers knew how to deal with formal porridge situations?

I'm totally mystified. Answers on a postcard, please.

Stegosauri everywhere!

2009-01-19T23:13:01Z

These are surprisingly quick and easy to fold. They are also sort of the inverse of Tom Hull's PHiZZ units - they are happiest making polyhedra with triangular faces and vertices of order 5 or 6. They lock together in a nicely rigid sort of way.

An icosahedron, and a buckyball. It isn't completely obvious here, but the purple edges of the buckyball are the edges of a dodecahedron.

But wait! There's more!

With thanks to mizzpyx for turning the PDF's into images.

aesthetistician @ 2009-01-15T13:43:00

2009-01-15T14:32:19Z

George called me up last night to ask if I had heard about the Czech EU Art Drama. I had not, so he told me all about it and I laughed and laughed and laughed. Then he told me that many member states were outraged, disgusted, furious, and generally quite upset and I was a bit surprised. Surely it's a joke, I said, he is taking the piss. Do Eurocrats really take themselves that seriously?

He asked if I would feel the same way had Ireland been represented by a toilet. The delighted squawk of mirth I emitted was probably answer enough. That would be hilarious, I said.

Some of the outrage seems to arise from the fact that these were not made by artists from each member state. The proposition "It is okay to compare Bulgaria to a toilet provided you hold a Bulgarian passport" strikes me as flawed. It's funny anyway, or else it's not. Given that you do not personally know the individual who is making a joke, should your response to the joke be informed by some other facts about them?

I don't know. Maybe I am, as is sometimes claimed, from the moon and defective in the head. Maybe all right-thinking people should be offended to bits. But given that national stereotypes do exist, for better or worse, I am quite happy for them to be a source of amusement.

Flickr Oddness

2008-12-26T13:19:24Z

Whenever I sign in to Flickr, I enter my username and password and click sign in. I'm then presented with a page titled "You're all signed in!" but giving me the message "Bonk! You'll have to head back to the Flickr home page to continue". I return to the home page as directed and click the "Sign in" link. Returning to the login page, my username is already entered, I enter my password, and everything is fine.

But does anyone know why it makes me sign in twice? It's a little annoying, more because of the puzzle than the inconvenience.

Applied Maths

2008-11-17T00:17:39Z

This is a problem I've been kicking around for a while. You have a cone of known radius and height. You also have a toroidal spring (imagine a slinky with its ends joined together) of known length, mass and coefficient of elasticity. You place the spring over the point of the cone. What happens?

On the one hand, the spring wants to move downwards, because of gravity. On the other hand, it wants to stretch as little as possible, and the further down it falls the more stretched it will be. At what point does the spring come to rest?

(We can pretend that there's no friction between the cone and the slinky).

In other news, the Trampoline Intervarsities was marvelous fun. I moved up a level, doing advanced for the first time, and to my surprise and delight did not make a dead idiot of myself (an alive idiot, perhaps). I fell on the final somersault of one routine (you do two), but that was still more moves than I had expected to finish. mizzpyx did splendidly as well, in her very first competition.

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aesthetistician @ 2008-11-05T11:11:00

2008-11-05T11:22:20Z

Last night - or so my memory tells me - I went to bed at around 1. At half-past four I woke up, disoriented and confused. I went downstairs for some water, and rosceau followed me. "Obama's president," he said, lifting me off my feet. Not in an especially excited way, just the way that tall people sometimes pick up small people. (I get that a lot.)

"Oh," I said blearily, "that's nice." Then I went back to bed, and tossed and turned and tried to get back to sleep and eventually got out of bed again. There was nothing entertaining in the bathroom and nothing interesting in the kitchen. So I went to work early, and supervised an in-class lab test. The students were being horribly disruptive, and in the end I had to throw several of them out so that the others could work. They continued to shout and possibly fight in the corridor, but at this point there was nothing I could do except hope Services would deal with them and try to keep the remaining students at their work. Which might or might not have been successful, but at that point my alarm clock woke me and I realised that I had been dreaming about not being able to sleep and going to work early.

So what I wonder is this. Did I wake up, go back to sleep, and dream about not being able to go back to sleep? Or did I dream about waking up, trying to go back to sleep, etcetera?

Campbeds, Costumes, Cavan and Consternation.

2008-10-23T10:04:58Z

Consummatum est. It was not, overall, a pleasant experience. Hugs gratefully received.

However. That is now in the past, and tomorrow I am heading off to the wilds of Cavan with the trampoline club. Because I do not like sleeping on the floor, I want to bring some sort of sleeping apparatus. Here's where it gets tricky: my parents have plenty of camping equipment in the attic, but I do not, at the present moment, feel like asking to borrow it. Aldi are selling this inflatable number, if I can get there before they close tonight. And if they have any left at this time.

Another thing that would be handy in Cavan is a Hallowe'en costume. Here, my mind is an absolute blank. Please, people, suggest something. Bonus points if it can be constructed from the fine merchandise of Mr. Tesco and Mr. Penneys. Even more bonus point sif it can be constructed of common household materials.

Lastly, I have a burn upon the hand. It is not a large burn, but we had no small plasters, so the back of my right hand is quite engulfed in bandage. It ain't as bad as it looks, I promise.

In which plans are planned

2008-10-14T13:33:38Z

I'm going to America! I'll be visiting George in New York in November, from Friday the 7th until the evening of Wednesday the 12th. (This brilliant plan will mean that I flop into Dublin airport early on Thursday, go to work, attempt to learn an advanced routine at training on Thursday evening, and head off for the trampoline intervarsities on Friday. If you find my dead body on Sunday, be so kind as to perform a quick reanimation ritual on it?)

Anyway, suggestions for what to do with myself while in the bright lights of the city are actively sought. Museums and art galleries are especially welcome.

aesthetistician @ 2008-10-04T11:15:00

2008-10-04T10:49:47Z

Last June, my uncle Ian married his fiancee Rachel. Now, the general idea of wedding presents is that the happy couple receive all the stuff they'll need for their home. But after a certain age, you tend to have enough toasters and facecloths and things, and anyway they're both at the stage where they'd rather have less clutter than more. So I designed these units, called them Rachelian units, and presented them with their very own origami. They were gracious enough to say they liked it very much. They're rather fun, actually - quick and easy to fold, fairly easy to assemble, and stable in all sorts of combinations. *EDIT: The origami, that is. While my relations are undoubtedly fun, I do not know how stable they are in a human pyramid, nor how easily you could induce them to try*

Rachelian Units

24 units on the left, 12 units on the right. They're hanging from my ceiling, if you were wondering why they appear to be levitating.

I've a feeling I was trying to do something completely different when these turned up. But I can't now remember what, and they're kind of fun, so here you go.

No name yet - suggestions are welcome.

That green one on the right is twelve units. I don't know what it is. After looking at it for a bit, I concluded "It's a rhombicuboctahedron!" (Incidentally, this is not a good thing to announce suddenly, in public, if you are troubled by receiving strange looks. I'm only saying). It actually isn't one, anyway - there are those teeny edges. I'm just going with "Something that has octahedral symmetry" until I can find one of the group theorists at work and interrogate them.

The one in the middle is made of thirty units, and acts dodecahedral enough for me to just call it a dodecahedron. They're both made from A7 paper, but they don't need to be - any rectangle of around that dimension works okay. The green one is assembled inside-out: I like the way it looks, but it's less stable and monstrously irritating to put together.

The thing on the left, by the way, is a very slight variation on Rachelian units. Only one crease is changed, but the look is quite different.

aesthetistician @ 2008-09-03T10:32:00

2008-09-03T10:54:21Z

Eight years ago, I told my parents that I was gay. It was, to put it mildly, not the most popular announcement of the year. In my grimmer moments, I have wondered whether telling them that I was going to devote my life to training ninja koala bears to mug little old ladies might have gone down better. Part of the truce that was settled on (and by truce I mean I would've agreed to almost anything. I am terrible at negotiation) was that I would agree to keep the whole subject entirely secret from my immediate and extended family. It seemed that that would be easy enough to do. It's not like my romantic life is so hugely important that it has to be talked about much anyway. Actually, my romantic life is purely theoretical. There isn't a lot of it to talk about.

But that is the problem - it isn't a big deal. If it was something I'm normally secretive about, then keeping off the subject would be simple. But it isn't, and so in family situations a little part of me is watching, double-checking what I say. Because this isn't a secret at all, it would be so easy to let something slip. That makes it difficult to relax. It makes it difficult to just enjoy someone's company, and it really doesn't make for sparkling conversation. So I don't have a close relationship with my extended family, not like when we were all small cousins together. And I don't have much relationship with my brothers, though they all seem quite close to each other. That seems like a sad thing to be missing out on.

I didn't want to give my parents the promise I did. I didn't like making it and I never wanted to keep it. But I did make it, and I'm not going to break it. So it seems thoroughly obvious that I should raise this subject with them and renegotiate terms. But I'm afraid, afraid of conflict and of hurting and being hurt and of losing all the small, fragile relationship we have now. There's a lot to lose, and a lot to gain, and one thing I am not even slightly good at is being brave.

Grownup

2008-08-06T18:50:16Z

I am sitting in my silk nightdress in the early evening. With one hand I am drawing an enormous hexagonal labyrinth; with the other I am eating dinner, which is an unadorned block of cranberry Wensleydale, straight from the knife.

I thought, when I was small, that grownups got away with this kind of thing all the time. Now I suspect they mostly don't, but perhaps they should.

Pi Day 2008

2008-06-25T10:13:24Z

Pi Day! 22/07, for anyone who missed it last time around, is Pi Day. (Some say that it is Pi Approximation Day, with March 14th being Pi Day. This only works in American date notation, and also if you pretend that 3.14 is a closer approximation that 22/07).

Anyway, since July 22nd is a Tuesday, the great pie-eating should take place on either the previous or the next weekend. So please tell me which one you'd like better, and then keep that date free.

Gingerbread Companion Cube

2008-06-05T12:25:44Z

Gingerbread architecture. Maligned by the brothers Grimm as a cynical child-harvesting technique. Ignored by Frank Lloyd Wright. Still a perfectly valid construction method, in my book.

I began with a double-batch of standard gingerbread dough. (I made a double batch because I didn't know how much I'd need. Exactly half, as it turned out. So you need about as much as makes 36 biscuits). Also 6 McVities Jamaica ginger cakes, chosen for their superior stackability. Standing on the sidelines were some ready-to-roll icing, some honey, and pink and grey food colouring.

I made some templates from baking paper: squares, angled corner pieces, circles, and a heart.

I rolled out the dough and - you guessed it - cut out the shapes. That's five squares and 20 corners. It took several rotations to bake them all.

When the biscuity building blocks were cool, I mixed up some grey icing and rolled it out nice and thin. (Q: Didn't you get all sticky? A: Yes, yes I did). Then I cut out a square, and cut a circle from the middle of the square, and tried to lift the result off the microwave door. The door in question, by the way, was not actually attached to a microwave at the time.

It stuck. Then it stretched. Then it fell apart.

I repeated the previous operation with a sheet of baking parchment on the door. Success! I was able to spread a little honey on the biscuit, glue down the icing, and only then peel off the baking parchment.

Next I mixed up some lighter grey icing and noticed that rolling the stuff out on baking parchment effectively eliminated colour cross-contamination. Hurrah! I used the same templates as before to cut corner pieces and stuck them to the biscuit corner pieces with more honey.

More of that useful edible cement, honey, secured the corners onto the square faces.

Next I rolled out more of the pale grey icing and cut five circles. They went into the circular holes, and a little squidging and patting persuaded them to fit neatly.

Now for some pale pink icing and the heart template. And more honey. By the way, if you decide to warm the honey in the microwave to make it more spreadable, and if your pastry brush has plastic bristles, remember not to melt the bush, kay? I mention this only in passing and in no way because I had a bowl of very hot honey and molten plastic. Because I'd never be that silly.

Now, it clearly has to be weighted. That's where the ginger cakes come in. Six of them stack up into a neat cube. Just ignore the miscellaneous chaos in the background; it's all clean mess, I promise.

Now I met the first real problem: my plan had been to attach the biscuit faces directly to the cake with wet icing, but I seemed to have made a critical error in measurement. It was going to have to be old-fashioned gingerbread house construction techniques, with plenty of icing along the joins and a dollop of optimism.

By some miracle, it seemed to work. Although I messed up the orientation of the hearts. Mea culpa, guys.

You'll notice a certain house-of-cards quality to the way it stays together. Will the top go on?

It will! Really, though, it would have been better just to measure properly in the first place. Now it just wants a little tidying up around the joins.

And there it is. As loving and delicious as anything Aperture Science could produce.

A few more pictures on Flickr, including a ~~lava lamp~~ Aperture Science Hand-Held Portal Device.

Some non sequiteurs for the diversion of the reader

2008-05-29T11:27:30Z

I don't know the current estimate of the proportion of Americans who can't find Iraq on a map. There are lots of different estimates anyway, and they're all meant to make you gasp a bit and then feel pleasantly superior.

You know what? I couldn't find Iraq (or most other places, for that matter) on a map if someone covered up the text and took away the index. I know how to read a map precisely because I don't want to memorise which squiggly outline is which country. I am with Richard Feynman when it comes to maps of cats - it's better to understand than to remember. Let's all be careful to distinguish between stupidity and ignorance. One is much easier to remedy than the other.

It turns out that sometimes that mainstay of fiction - babies swapped at birth - does happen. But look there, near the end, where the lawyer says "It is much more than just psychological damage". That's a very tantalising thing to say, if you're not going to explain why. I'm not downplaying the very real psychological trauma this woman has suffered, obviously - but the man has stated that she's also suffered some other trauma as a result. Physical? Material? Perhaps her biological family were far wealthier than her legal parents, and she's missed out on a lot of privileges? We're getting into the realm of the philosophical here, but isn't that awfully close to saying "I think that little girl should have suffered this deprivation instead of me"? Is that a fair thing to say - is the wealth of one's parents in fact one's birthright? Does anyone have some train tracks, a bridge and a fat man?

Of course, it could simply be that "more than psychological damage" is media-speak for "really serious psychological damage". Which I hope is not the case, because it would seem to trivialise mental trauma in a way that makes me quite uncomfortable, and not just for semantic reasons.

George has been gently suggesting - as is his wont, from time to time - that I try my hand at the art of looking pretty. I have attempted this, on occasion, but it becomes obvious that the cost, in terms of time and effort and mental exertion (to say nothing of the loss of pockets) vastly outweighs the rather nebulous benefits. Firstly, it doesn't seem to yield much in the way of payback, although fishnets do allow one to play a rather nice ballistics game if there are any daisies around. But knowing I look nice, even if I remember the fact, doesn't do a lot for my mood either way. It's like knowing that it's a beautiful sunny day in Osaka; nice for them, but kind of irrelevant. And it doesn't last. I take shortcuts over a fence or two, and then a muddy puppy makes friends with my knees (canines of all ages seem to find my legs irresistible. At least someone does), and my hair gets bundled back out of my face so I can read in comfort, and then as a kind of coup de grace I spill coffee all over myself.

Last night I cleaned my bedroom (anyone who can do origami should have far less trouble getting a sheet onto a bed, is all I can say), and karma rewarded me with Hodges-Figgis book vouchers. They expire on the 31st, and now I have exactly the right number to get my €10 discount. Hurrah! I think that makes me happier than if I had one stamp more than I needed. It feels more fatalistic, this way.

aesthetistician @ 2008-05-06T15:02:00

2008-05-06T14:21:50Z

Some days the contrast is enormous, don't you think? 24 hours ago I was playing frisbee with a plastic picnic plate and clambering over fences with brighteyed crazy girls. I was soaking up sun with all the skin I could bare and breathing the smell of my own warm hair and letting the housework go to hell.

Today I'm working sensibly in jeans and a cotton tee-shirt, because my office knows nothing about the weather outside. I'm scrabbling at webdesign and the small formatting issues are looming huge and trivial. I'm fighting the urge to fling these exam papers to the winds instead of correcting them. I'm listening to Ash, because that is the soundtrack of studying in the tempting, maddening beginning of summer.

EDIT: Why does Restless have a sad face? I don't think of restlessness as particularly disagreeable. It's better than feeling inert, at any rate.