Revolutionary Rants

I am just off for an interview, so this is just a brief post. Only a few weeks ago I was complaining about how Christmas is beginning to be led up to in mind October, but at the moment I am being annoyed by another trans-Atlantic annoyance.

No, not George Bush Jr (although that is annoying, but currently very amusing – finger’s crossed for the fall of Cheney!): Hallowe’en.

What has happened to the occasional showing of ‘The Wicker Man’ and a possible quick apple bob?! Now, Hallowe’en is like Valentine’s Day – a month long marketing spend-feast… The poor old Pagans must be very annoyed as well; imagine the out cry if the West decided to make a jokey replica or, say (another current festival of a more ‘minor’ religion) Diwali? We seem to forget in all the Satanic images of goats skulls and fires that Paganism was and is a religion. Oh well, that’s besides the point; what really pisses me off is the fact that because America goes overboard with flipping Hallowe’en, now we do!

I remember as a kid Hallowe’en being a small thing and the big celebration being November the 5th – now we have fireworks going off from October 5th! Why?!

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I think John Rawls wrote his ‘Theory of Justice’ absolutely intending it that no one should be able to understand it. Well, not that necessarily, I can understand it, it is just he writes things in such a way that he says what he could have said in 3 pages he stretches out to around 30-50 pages… Reading this book makes you feel psychically exhausted.

So, yeah, things are going well at York. We are all getting more settled and starting to think about essay titles more than how to find our building!

With bird flu looming it is a bit scary round campus as all the lakes are filled with many forms of bird-life: ducks, swans, sea gulls, herons. We’ll all be dead in a week if it hits England!

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OK, this is hugely random, but I promised a friend I would put a picture of the glorious Central Services Building at the University of Huddersfield on my blog. So, here it is!

Oh, and don’t ask me what Pires was doing… The world has gone mad. And so will I if I have to read much more of Locke’s ‘Tracts’…

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Sorry! Yes, I know, no posts for ages. I feel very guilty. I do have an excuse, this week I have to try and get my head in to reading Rawl’s Theory of Justice properly so that I can enter the debates on minutiae within its covers (the whole department at York seems obsessed with Rawls, but I have never covered his work in any depth), and on a more interesting note I have to do a presentation on Locke’s Two Tracts on Government. I haven’t read those, either, and cunningly they are opposite to most of Locke’s work and ideas and are looking not at government but at relgious magistrates…

So, I spent all day yesterday doing that; until I went out for a couple of pints. So, yes, posting is at a minimum.

Manchester City today, Henry is back, thank f**k.

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I have been pretty quiet on the posting front for the last few days, and this is because I have been up in York quite a lot, beginning my Masters course.

Apart from arriving rather late on the Wednesday things have gone well, and most people I’ve chatted to seem nice. The course looks very intensive (as you’d expect), but it will be so good to be back learning and doing something! I am currently reading through Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ and I will have to do a lot of reading on Alistair MacIntyre. All good then!

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Things are quiet, but good, here in West Yorkshire. For one thing, we are having a surprisingly dry Autumn so far. I absolutely love autumn, even when it has – as it has this year – whole days of grey when the sun doesn’t bother to fight back the low hanging clouds. It is my favourite season, by far. It is just so crisp, it isn’t even to do with the leafs or the trees, it is just crisp weather, and crisp changing feeling in the atmosphere.

Perhaps because I love autumn so much, I find it even more distressing that people – or rather corporations – seem to make to want it Christmas time already.

I hate this phenomenon, it is not Christmas until December 25th, and, OK, so for a couple of weeks before that I concede it is nice – especially if you have little people in your household – to get ready for it, putting up your tree and so on, I even concede that you should maybe think of looking for presents for people now (and avoid the ultimate hell of the Xmas rush), but it just spoils the excitement of Christmas to hype it up a this point of the year.

Perhaps I should start a petition to have Christmas banned until December?!

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As many of you will know, I enjoy a murder mystery, and one featuring Robert Carlyle sounded even better. Sadly, this was not the case.

The last couple of nights we have tuned in to ITV to see one of their big autumn drama season (which have all, so far, been bloody dreadful – next week looks even worse, can you imagine the outcome of Ray ‘I’m a hard nut, me’ Winston and Suranne ‘weird name but I used to be in ‘Corrie’, me’ Jones in a whodunit called ‘Vincent’?! I dread to think) excited at the casting of Carlyle as a – wait for it – moody detective (instead of his usual moody psycho or stripper), but we were very much disappointed with the end result. Carlyle was good, in a limited role of looking moody and occasionally losing his blob, as was Daniel Mays in an even more limited role of eating and being nicer than Carlyle to people, but the whole thing was a convoluted (for no reason) pile of tosh!
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