Glorious little things

If you know me at all, you'll be aware that I really dislike the winter. It's not the cold - I've always preferred the cold to the hot weather. It's not the approach of Christmas with its little stresses, or the fact that none of my shoes are appropriate for rain and snow.

It's all about the daylight. When it goes away, each day shorter than the last, it makes me very, very unhappy. My whole family does it.

So we have to look to the little things that make it all a little better. I'll admit, that is usually food for me. Often, it's also the little achievements or things I've been able to make for myself that help things along. Once in a while those categories overlap. For example; my potatoes!


Over the summer, I discovered a couple of potatoes in the back of the cupboard which had begun to grow. They had inch-long shoots coming out of every eye. Normally you'd just bin them, but I thought it could hardly do any harm, and tossed the into a pot full of compost. And then forgot about them.

This weekend, I headed home. On Sunday, my boyfriend and I popped out to the shop. When we returned, mum called me out to the kitchen and handed me my pot. Most of the compost had been scooped out, leaving this collection of lovely - if muddy potatoes!

I made these. And now, I'm going to make them dinner.

This time, honest!

So, ALL of Staffordshire Uni's second-year journalism students are doing a web-based journalism module. Most of them are doing it this semester, but us broadcasters won't start til after Christmas. At least part of it (I'm fuzzy on the details, maybe someone will tell me) is assessed on a blog, so we're dusting the cobwebs off this baby and I'm going to try and get in the habit of writing here regularly!

I'll probably stick with the general theme of ramblings, ranting, and sharing things I think are awesome but this may change after Christmas when they tell us exactly what they want. In the meantime, I hope you continue to read!

...

okay, I'll make sure there's more of a point to this.
I was in court today! As an observer only I'll be glad to report. As part of our law module this term we're learning about court reporting, so the morning was spent at Fenton Magistrates' Court hearing all about driving offences, shoplifting and assaulted policemen. It was genuinely fascinating!

We saw preliminary hearings for a man accused of burglary, and a couple on a charge of racially aggravated threatening behaviour, a slightly confused man who couldn't decide if he'd stolen a joint of gammon and two other hearings;

The first was the driving offence. Despite his solicitor's best efforts the defendant left the court with two prison officers for a five month sentence. To be fair, the man had been banned from driving three times already. Still, our law lecturer Dr Gubbins had started off pitying the guy, then - as soon as he clocked the prison officers, he started rubbing his hands in glee and saying - loudly enough for the poor bloke to hear - 'He's going down!'

Special bloke that Gubstep...

Custard, Banana, Mustard, Yellow

It seems there is a problem in and around Staffordshire University. The evidence is right there, in the car parks of its Leek Road campus.

We have an epidemic of yellow cars. Today, there were at least five yellow cars parked up, and in a 20 minute walk to and from the supermarket last night, I saw eight. one of them, was a mini.
now, you might not have noticed. As a student, and a childish one at that, myself and some of my friends have started playing the 'yellow car/ mini' game, last seen in about 2005, and gleefully hitting one another when one of these vehicles appears. the minis have been dropped mostly because there are so damn many of them.

so, the reasons for this rash of yellow? are more cars available in the colour? is it just the student population, trying very hard to be different?
Or is it more sinister, is society becoming more cynical to the point where drivers enjoy driving around their little custard-coloured Fiat and watching 14-year-olds punch each other?

either that or it's an ultimately doomed attempt to brighten up the rougher parts of a city with serious problems.

Things that happened on 15th April...

From a quick survey of the internet, it seems that the 15th April was a date when an afwul lot of things happened. There are a surprising number of notable events, births and deaths so I'll just offer a selection:
1755: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary is published. While far fromthe first dictionary ofEnglish, it is seen as being the first to offer a comprehensive view of English as it was used. It took nine years to complete, and Johnson was paid 1,500 guineas - roughly equivalent to £230,000 today.
1912: at 2:20am the Titanic finally sank after hitting an iceberg nearly three hours before. 1,517 people died.
1923: insulin becomes widely available for the treatment of diabetes
1945: Liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 50-60,000 prisoners were found and liberated. They had been living with some 13,000 unburied bodies. Liberators described the day as the most horrifying of their lives. Many of the prisoners were dying - starving and sick, the Allied troops were hindered intheir efforts to help them by the SS officers who sabotaged water tanks before they left. Nearly 14,000 prisoners died after liberation - having been too far gone to save.
1989: The Hillsborough Disaster. 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death when a stand at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough stadium collapsed.

Obviously, it has not been a good day. Actually today of course, the grounding of all flights in the country because of a volcanic eruption putting tonnes of ash into the atmosphere.

What happened today?

Since being unemployed (my boss at the pub having stopped giving me any hours three weeks ago) and separated from one's friends by their universities leaves one very little to talk about, I'm going to start writing posts inspired by things that happened 'on this date in history'. Today is the ninth of April, and here are some things that happened on that date:
1860 - The oldest audible recording of a human voice is made. 150 years ago, a man sang 'Au Clair de la Lune' into a machine called a phonoautograph, which transcribed the sounds onto a sheet of glass covered in lamp-black.
To be fair, I'm not sure it counts as such, since at the time, people used these things to look at a sound - rather like the oscilloscopes we had in science lessons - rather than to be able to listen back to it later on. There was no way to turn the phonoautogram made by the machine back into sound. of course, computers have now made it possible to transfer the 'recordings' back into something you can hear. It sounds like the singer was in a high wind at the time but it's definitely a human voice, from more than a century ago.

in 1867, the USA bought Alaska from the Russians. This caused Sarah Palin.

then in both world wars there were battles going on, including the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1945, there were the funerals of Martin Luther King (1968) and the Queen mother (2002) and Georgia claimed independence from the Soviet union in 1991

Today, we have electioneering, some protesters in Thailand invading a TV station and for me, preparations for the third annual spring picnic which is on Sunday

Adventures in studentland: Oxford

This weekend, I was away from home, visiting my dear friend Chloe who is at Oxford, doing Russian (we're all very proud of her). Chloe's the first person to put up with me invading their new world, and she was very gracious about it.
Oxford is a lovely place, though really quite odd - everyone there is a student or a tourist. On a Saturday in Cheltenham there are schoolkids in every direction and I think I saw four in Oxford. It's a strange one, but being with a student - mine's at New College and very proud of it - you get to see stuff the tourists don't, like the cloisters (featured in Harry Potter) at night.
As I expected, my favourite thing about the visit was getting to meet Chloe's new friends, and try to assess how they reacted to our dearest Lysha, who visited before Christmas.
I got to meet most of the gang, particularly her boyfriend - she did well - and they're a really great bunch. I wouldn't blame her if she suddenly ditched the school friends. I went in with the warning that they'd all been given the impression that I was... eccentric (apparently it was something to do with drownings) but I was welcomed, and had a damn good time. We went to see a show (the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan society's production of Ruddigore) which was fun, do a movie night and eat ice-cream (while bewildering one of her neighbours).
It was a wrench to come home really, but I have an invite to come back in the spring or summer and I am so taking her up on it.

The next adventure in studentland will probably be with Lysha and/or Martin after Easter.

Plot? who cares about a plot?

because in many ways it doesn't matter so long as it's gorgeous. Same goes for comprehensibility.

I'm talking about films obviously, in TV and books, it's rather more difficult to get away with - though not always.

So yeah, I went with a few friends a short while ago to see Avatar, reportedly the most expensive film ever made. You can see where the money was spent, it is one of the most visually stunning films I've seen, and worth the ticket price. We saw it in 2D, because so many of my friends are students now, and appropriately hard-up, and I can't see any room for the 3D version to increase it's visual impact. It is beautiful.

However, and I'm pretty sure you saw this one coming, it's not a terribly original story. Boy meets girl, who starts off hating him, grows to like him, then hates him again because he's betrayed her family, but is eventually won over by a grand gesture. Only difference being that he's a man in an alien suit. Oh, and the main villain can hold his breath for minutes at a time, so he doesn't suffocate in the planet's toxic atmosphere.

I liked it, overall. The shortcomings (preposterous villains, hideous choice of typeface for the subtitles etc.) are effectively glossed over by the way it looks, and, lets be quite fair, we don't always want to be challenged or forced to think by a film, do we.