And they actually pay me to do this ...

Now lessons have finished, we're all working away on our courses for the next semester. As I mentioned before, we base all our first-year courses around a theme, the idea being that students learn academic skills through studying a subject, rather than through a series of unrelated exercises (long-term solri-fans will remember my "Matrix" and "Warriors" courses). This time round, my course is to be entitled "Monsters Among Us", and is an examination of vampires, zombies, werewolves and other human-monster transformations. I'm planning to look at it from the viewpoints of anthropology (How did these myths arise?), psychology (Why do we like them?) and media/cultural studies (What messages do they give?).

I've just finished The Philosophy of Horror, which is good old-fashioned analytic philosophy based around questions like how we can be firghtened by things that we know don't exist, and am now starting The Beast Within: a history of the werewolf. I can't believe that I'm being paid to read this stuff! I can even watch my Buffy DVD's and count it as work. Sometimes you've just got to love academia.

Till Rage

I recently found that my local newspaper in England, The Shropshire Star, has an RSS feed, so in addition to my usual diet of international and tech news, I can now learn about bicycle thieves in Ludlow, drunken hooligans in Clungunford, , or plans to expand the Secret Hills visitors centre. The latest article features a new phenomenon: till rage:

An angry customer swore at staff in a Shropshire supermarket and smashed a jar of pickled onions after someone else was served before him, police said today.
The incident happened at Aldi in Oswestry when the man, in his mid 40s, accused a shopper of queue jumping.
Constable Scott Harrower said: "He swore at staff and threw a jar of pickled onions in the air which then smashed on the floor."
Police are appealing for witnesses to the incident at around 1.15pm on June 13.
The man was described as white, about 5ft 7ins with greyish hair and a beard.

Too damned right - pickled onions should not go unavenged.

Words I have recently added to my spellchecker's dictionary

• eupatheia
• sophos
• Chrysippus
• Umbria
• XML