Three Thoughts for a Thursday

Random Notes & Errata

Some buses in Glasgow are quieter than others. The quietest ones are those playing film trailers.

It’s not the weirdest idea in the world; after all planes routinely show exciting films meant to allow you to forget that you’re floating thousands of miles in the air, sealed into a metal tube, breathing recycled air and at any moment might fall to your fiery death. It’s a bit stranger showing them in buses, however. For one thing, the motor noise is so loud you can’t actually hear the movie trailer, unless it’s blaring. If it’s blaring, then it’s distorted, and you can’t hear it anyway, and most of the time you’re on and off in a very few minutes anyway.

What’s really odd is most everyone pays rapt attention to the screen regardless.

Probably there’s no spitting on those buses.

Another wafting strand of ephemera going through our brains…

At home, we wash out our zip-top bags. Friends of ours used to run them through their dishwasher, before they got a new one that would probably liquefy them. Zip top bags are plastic, thus inherently reusable. We’re good ecologically minded people, and this seems right, right?

In Glasgow, this is not only right but required. Three or four times now, we’ve shared baked goodies with friends… and had them return to us washed zip-top bags.

The first two times, we just thought … I don’t know, that it was a peculiarity of the persons involved. The third time, someone returned the bag and said, “I wanted to make sure and get your good bag back to you.”

Though no one we know in California does this (although those disposable plastic tubs always get returned somehow), it’s very nice indeed, because zip-top bags of the brand and size — and the thickness we have — are expensive and hard to find. It always feels like a little extra care from friends to return them so nice and clean…

It’s All About the Attitude

Us: Isn’t this quad nice? This is really and truly the most gorgeous spot on campus.

Her: We’ll have to enjoy the green of the grass now, because in a few weeks, ice and rain will kill it, and the trees will be bundles of wretched twigs, and it will be sleeting and freezing.

Ah, we love our fellow students at the University!

Choral Society has resumed, and our usual gang of snarky, wisecracking optimists is together again. The soprano contingent is snickering their way through the high notes — or choking, and leaving the room to cough. The tenors are lost, and shaking their heads in disgust. To add to the fun, our conductor this term, the amazing Bach scholar, John Butt, is certifiable, and spends most of the time with the entire two hundred plus of us in stitches. He has a fast-paced delivery and a very strange mind, like most comedians. We’re glad to be back singing.

Already, T. is despairing of her German pronunciation — she is TRULY bad at it, and wonders how her parents living in Stuttgart for almost three years could have come down to her forgetting that a “w” is pronounced as a “v.” Possibly the fact that they moved before she was born could be blamed…

There is hope, however. The University offers Languages at Lunchtime, and the twice-a-week courses offered are Arabic, Czech, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak and Spanish. The same course offered in the evening features Dutch and Urdu. We plan to take something; Mandarin is highest in the running, followed now by German, but it’s all up in the air ’til next week.

Bonus thought: D. came home from the university and was wandering around, snapping photographs. To his surprise, he ran into his advisor near the library up the road. His advisor has an office on the top floor of the library, which means that D. will be able to meet with him close to home.

The upshot of that, of course, is that D. now has two books to read as homework before the seminars in his department have even started.

School is now in session.

– D & T

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