Nice present

Valentine's day, like other special days, tends to bring out the difference in male and female ideas of what makes a good present. Men have it much easier, since there are classic presents you can buy for your significant other, like jewelry and perfume (if your girlfriend is a geek, it's even easier - just go online and find out which peripheral is currently the hottest). Women tend to screw up. They buy ties, shirts or even, God help us, socks, forgetting the golden rule, as expressed in Coupling: "It's not genetically possible for men to have opinions about fabric."

A sign that my wife now understands me is that she didn't buy me any kind of textile product. Instead, she got me a four-foot-tall hand-blown (well, mouth-blown, I suppose) glass thing that might have been a vase if it were a quarter of the size, with Ottoman-style marbling. It's wonderful!

Those relatives on my maternal grandmothers' side who weren't agricultural labourers, were glass-blowers. I wish they could see this thing!

95 theses

Luther apparently got the idea for the Reformation while sitting on the toilet, then rushed out and posted his 95 theses to some church door. A few days ago I was also sitting on the toilet (for some time, since something had disagreed with me) when I got an idea for a thesis. Not 95 theses, mind, just one. I thought I'd do my PhD on a comparison of conceptual metaphor in Turkish and Indian mystical poetry. Problem is, I'd have to brush up my medieval Turkish and learn Sanskrit into the bargain.