argh.
monkeyboy has just received an unconditional offer from the University of Sussex to start the DPhil Social Anthropology course. application took something like 2 weeks to process.
meanwhile, the Cambridge application he posted in early February looks set to crystallise in the form of an offer... some time in the summer. maybe June.
argh. the choices in my head
By the way:
happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you.
you know who you are.
sorry about the low special effects budget: my advertising revenues were just slashed.
At the moment I'm reading a book [
I give you the author's bio, quoted from the translation I'm reading [the original is in French, though the writer was Polish]. I promise you, it's worth reading through til the end:
“Jan Potocki was born in Poland in 1761 in a very great aristocratic family, which owned vast estates. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the army and spent some time as a novice Knight of Malta. During his time he was an indefatigable traveller and travel-writer, an Egyptologist and pioneering ethnologist, an occultist and a historian of pre-Slavic peoples. He was a political activist and probably a freemason, although he seems to have espoused a bafflingly wide range of political causes, some of them patriotic. Among his other exploits were an ascent in a balloon over Warsaw with the aeronaut Blanchard and the provision of the first free press in the city.
Potocki was proficient in many languages, and his extensive travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus and China. He married twice (the first marriage ending in divorce) and had five children; scandalous rumours surrounded both of his marriages. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland, suffering from chronic ill health, melancholia and disillusionment. He committed suicide in 1815. Although the exact details of his end are uncertain, the most credible story is that he blew his brains out with a silver bullet, which was modelled from the knob of his sugar-bowl and first blessed by the castle chaplain.”
at long last, my father and I have finished the damned Nietzsche+economics essay we've been trying to get off the ground for two years. for the delectation of readers who have been following the tortuous path of the essay from its inception at the beginning of my previous journal (I know you people are out there...) I've included a sample, in the form of the third section, which is the one I wrote all by myself.
for context you'll have to buy the book 
mensch. the present situation is beyond comment. wholesale psychosis.
bush gestures and waves indignantly. "stop the killings" and "retreat from the occupied territories".
---- "but we're holding powell back til the end of the week, just to make sure you get the time to kill off some more palestinians first, and we don't have to be seen to act on you. secretly, we condone what you're doing you see. but we have to look indignant to keep the arabs on our side..."
is bush really going out on a limb to stop the israelis? if he is, sharon is really pushing it. though in the end uncle sambo wont lose any sleep over the incident, much more sinister, is the hypothesis that they're really in league. bush gestures in public, telling sharon he's pushing it. meanwhile, he delays action, delays powell, giving sharon ample time to put all the little palestinians in concentration camps.
which one assumes is his "final plan".
get rid of the stinky little original inhabitants to make space for the spatial expansion of the Chosen Race.
or a lebensraum agenda, as they used to call it.
meanwhile.
confined under house arrest in two windowless little rooms arafat must, presumably by telepathic command, "stop terrorist attacks" on israel.
as though he commands them in the first place.
the world is sick.
meanwhile, one third of Africa will die in the next 50 years of AIDS. pollution grows in proportion to the shrinkage of the rainforest. mountains of indestructible plastic grow and grow and grow. thousands of nuclear subs rot off the coast of novaya semjla, leaking perennial toxins into the sea.
nost likely, our future descendants will dig our smug, indifferent bodies from the grave, cut our dicks off and stick them in our mouths in gratitude for the mess we're leaving them. read the signs: "welcome to earth SUCKERS!!!".
giving birth today is beyond misanthropic. it should be prevented by law.
top american economists suggest that to sort out the world economy, poor countries should specialise where their comparative economic advantage lies, namely in the storage of toxic and radioactive waste.
seriously. most of 'em die young anyway, what have they got to lose?
[this is not a joke. someone actually said this.]
future archaeologists from space will marvel that the only traces left by the human race were a flag and a handful of golfballs on the moon, and a haunted planetful of radioactive dust.
just to let y'all know that I, the insurmountable, am still alive.
and kicking.