So it goes

My friend Preston wrote to me the other day. I met Preston when I was traveling in Germany. He was waiting for the same night bus to Hannover, and his German was infinitely better than mine. Preston is talented, ambitious and hysterically funny.

Anyway, here’s what he said:

“Could I trouble you for… continue reading »

The Business Idea Competition launches on the first of October. It was high time for some new marketing materials.

Here’s the general theme I made for this year’s University of Edinburgh round, thanks to a very helpful Photoshop tutorial website.

Watch for more details about the competition soon!

On Wednesday, the Guardian posted about a Buckingham University vice-chancellor who claimed female students were perks of an academic’s job.

The man in question, Terence Kealey, wrote:

“Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? Enjoy her! She’s a perk.” continue reading »

Halfway through the week. The University is a place of surreal, barely controlled madness.

Bumper cars roared around the central square yesterday, while people in gorilla suits handed out cotton candy and Welcome to Edinburgh! guides. New students canvassed the campus frantically trying to find out where to sign up for courses, where to get their student cards and where to go for the induction events. The Societies Fair was a heaving mass of people. The stuffy hall was filled to the brim with students, society barkers, cheap freebies and the sound of the bongo society drumming away. continue reading »

Freshers’ Week is back. Seventeen and 18-year old students are descending on the campus from all directions. New post-graduates are mingling in the student bars. And we’re madly trying to print fliers and get our website up to date.

I’m at work early this morning to pick up 500 fliers that we’re hoping to hand out over the next couple of days. We’re giving out a couple of modest cash prizes to induce students to register with our new website, and we’re trying to sign up at least 300 new students to our mailing list. All told, it would be excellent if we could reach 2000 incoming students this week. continue reading »

I made my second batch of jam-on-the-hob today. Last time was strawberries, this time plums. I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s three reasons:

• it’s super easy (three ingredients)
• it’s at least as cheap as buying jam from the store
• unless you’re buying Fraser Doherty’s SuperJam, your homemade jam will be ten times better than anything else. continue reading »

It’s an unconvincing cover for a food superhero: crunchy brown granules of soy, resembling nothing so much as Grape Nuts. It’s name—textured vegetable protein, or TVP—is all Communist-style function, not superhero-style glamour. But TVP is still a hero to me.

Here’s why: TVP makes some of my favourite meat-centred meals vegetarian, which means that I can eat them again. As a (mostly) vegetarian, I don’t miss meat, but I do miss spaghetti, pasta casseroles, and my Mom’s turkey chili. continue reading »

The police called me at work again this week to give me an update on my stolen bike: they’ve learned nothing. The officer I spoke to was extremely kind, calling me three or four times in a row because we couldn’t manage to get a clear connection. They had captured a few bike thieves, he said, but none of them were connected to my bike.

I guess that’s case closed. I don’t mind too much. My new bike has been excellent (another thanks to Teresa and Raymond for my new wheels!), and the training keeps advancing. We’re now running more than 15 km/week, and my training log says I’ve clocked nearly 200 cycling miles in the past two months. continue reading »

First things first: British film-making adventurers have discovered the world’s smallest parrot in Papua New Guinea. The buff-faced pygmy parrot is roughly the size of a hummingbird, and substantially smaller than many of the insects it cohabitates with. Brilliant.

In other news, how about this: let’s remove all the heels from sliced bread and donate them to charity. I’m not suggesting some sort of grainy guerrilla act, so don’t barge into your local supermarket and start sorting slices. But what if heels could be separated from the loaves during the packaging process, and re-routed to people in need? continue reading »