Wednesday, May 24, 2006

I'm almost sympathetic, but not quite

In a city with a relatively limited change in seasons, I've found the best way to tell that spring has arrived is the sudden increase in middle-aged people taking photos of the University library. That's because it's graduation time. A chance for proud parents to exact revenge for the near-bankruptcy that educating their offspring has reduced them to by witnessing that most brutal of archaic rituals, The Graduation Ceremony.

Under any other circumstances, the usual response to having completed four years of dull, passionless but fairly unchallenging lectures is to go to the pub, round up a few slappers and then move on with life. In academia though, we like to celebrate by making everyone sit through one last excruciatingly tedious lecture given by some preposterous old bore with one foot in the grave and a catheter stashed under his robes (it's always a male). He'll probably harp on about 'coming of age', 'preparation for the years ahead' and something about 'lifelong bonds of friendship'. I suspect that they all use exactly the same speach, but nobody's noticed because nobody ever listens.

Here at A Well Known Public University in Southern California this is all done outside, in the searing heat of LA in June, whilst wearing a long, flowing polyester sack. Do you honestly think Anne Bancroft would have gone anywhere near Dustin Hoffman's stench if he'd been wearing nylon robe and mortar board for three hours? I don't. To add to the insult, the Alumni Society are no doubt on hand to sign people up so that in the unlikely event that they make anything of their lives, the University can beg them for cash in twenty years time. I'm almost tempted to feel sorry for the graduates, but then it says something that after four years of higher education they can't present their parents with a cogent argument for non-attendance.

Most of the other US Universities have already finished, because they're on semesters whereas we're on UK style academic calender. We have three ten-week terms a year, so we call it 'the quarter system'. I have no idea why.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Your research is no more interesting than anyone else's

I've just got back from yet another conference, one more opportunity for the silverbacks to have a jolly at the taxpayer's expense, and I have to say it was most extraordinarily tedious. Scientific meetings are a bit like visiting the Nile valley. To outsiders it sounds very glamorous, travelling to far off places trying to decipher the hidden messages of ancient relics (be they pyramids or elder faculty). For a week or so it is all very exciting, especially the drinking and the attempts by female PhD students to secure funding horizontally, as it were. Sooner or later though, you realise that once you've seen one hieroglyph you've seen them all, just as one old relic's analysis of the Larsen B ice shelf is just the same as another's.

What makes these events particularly galling is the poor punctuality demonstrated by some of the more enthusiastic members of the scientific community. Typically, each speaker is allocated 12-20 minutes (plus five minutes for questions/physical assaults, depending on whose theory one has just disproved). Twenty minutes to me means just that - twenty minutes. It doesn't mean thirty minutes, and it most certainly does not mean forty six minutes and twenty two seconds. I don't care that you've spent the last thirty six months at a computer churning through your data and have become completely obsessed by it. I don't care if you do (mistakenly) believe that your findings are widely significant. If you can't summarise it to an expert audience in 20 minutes, then it's probably not worth explaining. The golden rule here is to remember, no matter how important your work is to you personally, it's no more interesting than anybody else's.

At the last meeting one enthusiastic post doc rambled on for so long that we had to miss one of the coffee breaks. There go his chances of ever making faculty. By lunchtime, some of the older members of the audience had fallen into a diabetic coma, whilst the research assistants were running amok through the building throwing delegate packs at each other due to caffeine withdrawal. Conference organisers have a habit of remembering these things. What's needed is the judicious use of a stopwatch and a gong by the chair. Anyone who hasn't reached their conclusions by the end of their allocated time gets brutally and unforgettably silenced. I don't pay registration fees of up to $100 to miss out on free coffee and biscuits.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

It's time we brought the sexual impropriety back to British politics

In the image conscious world of west LA, it's not unusual to hear of men spending inordinate amounts of money on treatments for hair loss. There's no excuse. A man with that sort of cash to throw away on charlatans and quacks must presumably have some kind of professional occupation, and the very onset of alopecia indicates that they're old enough to know better. Lib. Dem MP Mark Oaten has gone even further though, and actually had the temerity to blame his decision to repeatedly stick his cock up a rent boy on his receding hairline. If he really needs the presence of a 20 year old man to get his jollies then that's his own business (and presumably his wife's as well), but he should at least show the courage not to blame his peccadilloes on an aging scalp.

On the other hand, the still excellently hirsute John Prescott is being hounded by the police for nothing more outrageous than shagging his secretary in the office. Shagging one's secretary has always been part and parcel of European politics, an expected privilege in the same ilk as tipping a waiter. Frankly, a drop in the ocean compared to the coke-snorting, auto-erotic asphyxiative antics of his Tory predeccessors. I'd certainly rather he was shafting his secretary than shafting my rights as a British citizen like the rest of the sexless 'New Labour' regime (for example trying to make me carry an i.d. card and then selling the data to foreign governments).

It's time we brought the sexual impropriety back to British politics, more poontang than policies I say. You only need to look at the White House to see what can happen when you only vote for people with morality.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Why oh why do people insist on doing the conger when drunk?

They say that travel broadens the mind and challenges our preconceptions. Normally, I would not even consider reiterating anything that the common herd say, gaping-mouthed, Da-Vinci Code-reading cretins that they are, but in this case there may be some merit in the view. I have just returned from Brazil, where many of my own preconceptions have been challenged. For example, the high-speed ducking and weaving of Sao Paulo traffic has challenged some of my more rigidly held beliefs about volume and mass, not to say mortality. One can see where Ayrton Senna's pedigree was honed. Similarly, I had also held the belief that to aquire the best women a man had to be good-looking, 'sensitive' (whatever that means), moneyed and with at least some prospects. Not so in Brazil, where it's commonplace to see really world-class quim, all firm thighs and pouting breasts, on the arm of a hopeless loser with no cash and only barely above single-celled organisms on the evolutionary scale. John Prescott clearly knows what I'm talking about.

One question has been plaguing my thoughts though - why the hell have the Mediterranean cultures failed to exorcise 'the conger' from their cultural repertoire. We were invited to a banquet in Brazil, followed by 'music and dancing'. Pretty much what I expected, a dark-skinned filly in a slinky dress belting out a couple of renditions of 'The Girl from Ipanema', followed by the old farts of climate science attempting salsa-dancing with their wives. That was until the cultured-but-sensual rhythm was broken by some young buck of a PhD student, from Argentina I believe (I didn't know places like Argentina even had Universities) rushed onto the dance-floor and commenced some monstrous motion that looked like a cross between the conger and the chicken dance. Worse yet, rather than spurning him for the dysmotive imbecile that he clearly was, the S. Americans all joined in! Chileans, Brazilians, Venezuelans - they all ran around the dance floor holding each others arses whooping like the audience of a Jerry Springer show.

It's not only the S. Americans - I've seen similar behaviours adopted by other latin-influenced cultures. The Spanish, the French, even the Italians have been seen performing this classless embarassment. The Saxon cultures don't do it - can you imagine a German performing the chicken dance? They don't do it in Asia either - when a Japanese businessman feels the need to humiliate himself he goes to a karaoke bar and tries to get his drunk secretary to dress up as a schoolgirl. Admittedly, Boris Yeltsin was seen doing something fairly similar, but I think that was an aberration brought on by Chernobyl and vodka. I can't imagine Vladimir Putin doing the chicken dance, he seems more like a tango-man to me.