Filed under: anarchism, culture, literature, people I'd like to meet, philosophy, russia, science, trivia
February 17, 2008 • 6:45 pm 0
Today I was through in Glasgow for a Killy reunion. It was fun to meet all these people that I hadn’t been at school with, although it transpired that I’d tried to teach some of their offspring. One lady there was a member of another of Edinburgh’s Buddhist sanghas and she’d just been visiting the Portobello Priory (which is where I attend) last Friday. Another nice thing this same lady told me was that she’d given a eulogy at the Scottish Parliament for a recently deceased, long-standing member of the Edinburgh Buddhist scene. So this was an ex-Killy kid addressing the Scottish Parliament—which was one of John A’s great dreams (a Scottish Parliament that is).
I’ve not been through in Glasgow for a while and about the only place I always must visit when I do go through is Borders bookstore (to be American). However I defy anyone to go into that shop and not buy something (it’s much nicer than their Edinburgh shop), and today for me was no exception.
Leafing through one of my purchases on the train home I came across the following:
On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.”
Yes that’s you (and me:)
I think that this is the plaque referred to:
Filed under: books, education, misc, science, scotland, today, trivia
February 10, 2008 • 9:06 pm 0
At one point last week I had to describe myself via the intial letters of my name (it was an icebreaker at a training session at work). I thought of gowk turniphead. I actually came out with grumpy taciturn when my turn came as it would take too long to explain what I was getting at. What was I getting at? A gowk is a fool, or perhaps an idiot. Idiot is an interesting word, and from my reading of G I realised that I might qualify as a true idiot—one who knows that he knows nothing. As I say when the time came I bottled out of getting into such philosophical waters, but it did strike me that there was a certain amount of truth in that description. I really am such an idiot:)
Filed under: trivia
December 17, 2007 • 8:23 pm 0
People I’ve seen today
In Jenners to buy some chocs as Xmas gifts. I was served by a Chinese woman, possibly Japanese, who was wearing a name tag which informed me her name was Mei. I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask her about her name although I was interested.
On the 31 bus there was a woman reading Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs Dalloway. A few stops later a much younger woman was seated beside her who was busy with her mobile phone, making great use of her opposable thumb. Reading doesn’t seem the correct verb to use in connection with the mobile phone, it’s too frantic an activity.
Nothing odd about seeing someone working their mobile as they make their way home on the bus. After yesterday’s entry on Perec’s thoughts about reading on the bus it did strike me as odd to see someone on a LothianBuses bus reading literature.
