Productive Procrastination

One of the unanticipated problems of the Information Age is that the more technology finds ways to save time, the more people will find ways to use it to waste time. The classic example is e-mail, which drastically cut down the time consumed by delivering inter-office memos that were rarely read in any case, leaving workers with more person-hours to spend on posting jokes to each other and finding the best online source for viagra and prozac.

I am in a similar situation at the moment. I have found out that my boss wants course outlines by Monday. I look at my web page for my new course and find that, although there is an alarming lack of academic content, there is a pretty picture for each week. I am particularly pleased at finding the pumpkin-carving scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to put on the week that contains Halloween. Assignments? Exams? Who needs them?

Why are action figures so bad?

While searching Google Images for pretty pictures to put on my course website (see previous post), I came up with a lot of pictures of action figures, mainly related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Without an exception, they sucked. I had a similar experience when I went shopping for Lord of the Rings figures.  The lack of resemblance between action figures and the characters they are supposed to represent is amazing. The Buffy figure doesn't look anything like Buffy, faith doesn't look like Faith, or even a human being, and so forth. The screenshots from the Buffy video game  that also turned up in my search looked more realistic.

This cannot simply be a technical problem. This is the twenty-first century. We have nanotechnology, ferchrissakes! Can it really be so hard to model a six-inch piece of plastic so that it looks something like a character on a TV series?

I just went off Live 8

I missed the embarrassing event because of bad BBC timing, but apparently Bill Gates was on stage at one of the Live 8 events.