Thursday 28 January 2010

Noam. Like Gnome but with a far more logical name.

Best photo I've seen all day.

Contrary to what these posts may suggest, I'm actually a pretty busy person. This results in a seriously uncool hourly structuring of my daily activities, despite only spending six hours a week in official university stuff.


Anyway, what this results in are minor celebrations when something I thought I had to do doesn't happen. Like, for example, the realisation I could register for the dentist over the phone, whilst checking my Facebook, rather than cycling a couple miles and filling in some forms. Lush.


The subsequent celebration of this extra hour and a half of my life has resulted in some voluntary self-education. It's something I've become especially keen on in 2010. Radio 4 is constantly muttering out of my battery-powered Roberts (it doesn't really do music any justice), and I pick up a newspaper most days, even if the sport section remains on the coffee table for the next week.


Therefore, when I heard about VBS's interview with Noam Chomsky, I got pretty mega-excited. Not least because he went from my mind's peripheral knowledge - I'd maybe be able to shove him in, not necessarily in the right place, in a pub quiz - to the central stuff a few days ago. Yes, Noam Chomsky is up there with Marmite, vintage floral denim and pumping up my bike tyres. A couple of linguistics kids were chatting about Chomsky, comparing him to the Einstein of the field, and then I found out that the guy who was the degree programme coordinator in my School of English and titles emails with 'BOLLOCKS, BOLLOCKS, BOLLOCKS' was his pupil at Harvard. That brings us a couple degrees of separation closer, anyway.


This is the interview, anyway, and it's really good. Get self-educating.

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