Laziness

An article in the Vrij Nederland that I bought to read on the flight back to Edinburgh earlier this month, complains about how people nowadays seem to have forgotten how to be lazy. Holidays have become thrill-seeking expeditions and of course we need to take our mobiles to keep in touch with our work. Well, the author of that article can be proud of me: I did close to nothing today. Once I start writing it down it’ll seem like quite a bit, but it feels like a very lazy day.

Reading
The case studies in Fishman’s Reversing language shift were pretty useless, so more than some superficial skimming I didn’t have to do. This saved time. I have also decided that the shift away from Channel Island French is too late to be one of my case studies. It’s a pity, since no one has every heard of Channel Island French and therefore it is inherently cool, but I have enough possible case studies in France and Britain as it is so I’m not too bothered. I also went to the library to take out more books. I may need to start using that office I’ve been allocated cause there isn’t much room for more books in my room.

Single-itis
A related thought as I walked out of the library: why do all the cute ones smoke?

Measurements
According to a 2000 stocktake, New Scotland has 800 meters of clingfilm in storage. What they planned to do with it when they purchased it, I have no idea, and I’m quite curious as to how much is left five years later. To put things in perspective, this is half a mile of clingfilm. Which is four furlongs. Some odd people measure speed in furlongs per fortnight.

A.F. and I also worked out that there are 546 and 7/8 mites to a drachm. The decimal system may make a lot more sense – at least the interdependency between different units –, but imperial measurements definitely are more fun.