Since last night I have been feeling ‘under the weather’ (a fine phrase that captures the feeling of being lethargic and achy and having a low fever without being really sick) and so have taken a break from blogging. Hopefully I will feel ‘over the weather’ (a phrase that does not exist, as far as I know, but perhaps should) by tomorrow.
Roundabouts are rare in the US (where they are called traffic circles), with traffic authorities favoring stop signs instead. Last year, I wrote about the so-called ‘magic roundabout’ in Swindon, UK that contains seven roundabouts looks incredibly complicated but apparently moves traffic through it very quickly and efficiently. In that post, I provided the graphic below but it does not fully capture the experience.
A toddler gets locked inside a car with the key inside. Frantic onlookers try to indicate to him by gestures what he should do to unlock the door, so that they did not have to do something extreme like breaking a window which might have hurt the child with the shattered glass.
Following the spate of news stories about sexual assault that have taken place in hotel rooms, the Screen Actors Guild has called for an end to holding meetings in hotel rooms.
The Screen Actors Guild has called for an end to private meetings in “high-risk locations” in the wake of a string of sexual assault allegations in Hollywood.
Sag-Aftra, the labor union for actors in film and television, has issued a guideline calling on producers and executives to avoid arranging meetings in hotel rooms or private residences. The document notes that “misconduct … often occurs outside of the formal workplace setting”.
…In the unlikely event that the meeting cannot take place in a more open setting, the document suggests that a “support peer” be present.
I will be traveling tomorrow to attend the Secular Social Justice conference and during my spare time over the weekend will be visiting some friends in the Washington DC area so blogging will be sporadic to non-existent until Tuesday after my return.
Geoffrey Bawa was a renowned architect in Sri Lanka whose style spread beyond the island’s borders and influenced others in Asia. He would design homes that blended in with the lush tropical foliage. Perhaps his signature achievement was the home that he himself occupied at a place called Lunuganga (that translates as ‘salt river’) on the banks of a river near the southwestern coast of the island. He furnished it with works of art that reflected his eclectic tastes. You can see many photographs here and here. After his death in 2003, the house has been run by a trust set up by his friends. The gardens are open to the public and the buildings are part of a hotel.
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I am off to visit my grandson and so blogging will be sporadic for the next week.
I retired from Case Western Reserve University a little over two years ago. About a year after I left I got a phone call at home from the head of the computer’s security division, whom I know pretty well, to tell me that they were investigating the activities of a former student at the university who had infiltrated the computers of quite a few people. The investigators had determined that my work computer was one of those hacked.
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Can men and women just be close friends or is it inevitable that it will eventually end up in a sexual relationship or the two becoming estranged? This was, of course, the question that was central to the 1989 hit comedy film When Harry Met Sally and as I recall the answer given in the film was the former. But Johanna Leggatt argues that not only is a close non-sexual relationship possible, she feels that a desirable quality that she looks for in a man is that he have female friends.
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I love libraries. And I love librarians. They are the most knowledgeable and helpful of people as a class. They seem to get a real kick out of finding stuff for you.
Libraries have the problem of what to do about the increasing numbers of books and journals that they own. This problem is particularly acute for university libraries that do not, as a rule, throw old books and journals away or sell them because they are resources for research that a faculty member or student may need at some point, however rarely. In my own research, I have been very grateful to my university library because it has rare books on obscure topics published over a century ago that I suspect that are almost never checked out. And yet, there they are, just waiting for me.
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