Back to school on Monday. I have begun the difficult process of re-acclimatisation. You can’t rush these things.

I have started by going to my office and looking at all the paper. Then I have gently progressed to organising the paper in simple-minded ways. I have folders. Some of the paper is in the folders.

It is good for the paper to be in the folders. It is good for the paper that is old exams to be in the folder with “exam papers” written on it, and for the paper that is ideas for things to teach about geometry to be in the folder with “geometry” written on it, and for the paper that is really most of the paper when it comes down to it to be in the bin.

Now I have filled the bin completely. No further filling of the bin is possible. There is still much paper that is not in folders and not in the bin, but no more work can be done today.

It’s important to start the year by reminding yourself what teaching is really all about.

Karen has moved into the Yellow Room, formerly the Music Room, and before that Brett’s Room, and before that The Library, or The Lego Room. She seems pleased with it.

Approval has been granted by the esteemed Committee of the University of Canterbury Comedy Club to proceed with a production of my play Green Room, sometime in May.

Karen’s done an excellent job preparing the proposal and a budget. She’ll be directing, and I’ll be assistant-directing and on-the-fly script editing during some workshop sessions. We’ll be running for eight shows over two weeks, with two complete casts – one of experienced comedy actors and one of understudies who’ll be guaranteed some yet-to-be-determined amount of real stage time.

Karen also stuck into her proposal a bit about how I’d be publishing the play later on, and how prestigious it would look for the book to have “First performed by the University of Canterbury Comedy Club in 2004″ in the front. I hadn’t thought of publishing, but now it seems like it’d be a shame not to, somewhere down the track.

Between them, the countries that will national elections in 2004 make up nearly half the population of the planet. India, the EU, the USA, Indonesia, Russia, Iran, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Malaysia, the Philippines and Australia all have various kinds of elections at the national level, among many others.

NASA have released an extraordinary high-res Quicktime VR panorama from Mars. I could stare at it for hours. It’s like the Viking pictures from the seventies, but stepped up a couple of notches into hyper-reality.

The other day I was looking in Roget’s Thesaurus for synonyms for “handsome”, in order to settle a discussion over whether there was a better word than “cute” to use in a particular piece of writing. That matter was never decisively concluded, because I was distracted by the word “spruce”.

I like this word very much.

I aspire to be spruce.

I would like for someone to look at me and say “That guy, he’s spruce. Totally spruce.”

According to the Oxford, it traces at least back to the 1500s and is perhaps connected people who wear jerkins made of spruce leather. It’s also the source of the phrase “spruced up”. But I think it merits wider use in its own right.

Rumour has it that George W. Bush is going to make some announcement in the next wee while about starting manned space programs to the moon and Mars. Not that there’s any coherent plan for either of those things, nor any likelihood of the US Congress being willing to pay for them. But for some reason it is newsworthy that he might maybe be about to announce it.

Just like his father did. That didn’t work out so well either.

It’d be nice to think that the USA was prepared to do more in space than footle around in archaic space shuttles and pour buckets of cash into a useless junkheap of a space station from which all the potentially useful components were stripped before construction began. They do make fine unmanned space probes, but not nearly enough of them.

Every now and then I make some minimal effort to get the gist of post-modernism. Or deconstruction, or post-structuralism, or whatever it is. The fact that I don’t understand the distinction between these terms, if there is any, is indicative of the extent of my progress. Otherwise intelligent people seem to be interested in this stuff, so it seems like there must be something in it.

But trying to read the stuff is like trying to read Ministry of Education documents (and I suspect this is not a coincidence). Each individual sentence has some minimal meaning, but any given paragraph doesn’t seem to say anything at all. It feels like you are not supposed to actually read for meaning, but for a sort of general vibe. And if you ever get to an actual point, it seems to be a trivial one like “different cultures are different” or “people sometimes say things they don’t mean” or “powerful people have more opportunities to express their views”.

It may be a significant clue that I also don’t understand the obsession post-modernists seem to have with Madonna. She just doesn’t seem to be very interesting to me. She sings boring, insipid music and she’s perpetually five to ten years behind the times in any kind of style I can see.

This article seems to confirm my worst suspicions about postmodernism. Is it fair?

One who makes fricassees is known as a fricasseer.

As near as I can tell, Benjamin Disraeli made this up so that he could say fricassee more often.

Alice in Videoland has a website. And, dangerously, they now rent videos by courier.