Wednesday 13 February 2013

How to make someone fall in love with you in 29 steps.

More old books have gone!

In the same breath: I can't believe anyone wants all 29 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia has more information than all 29 volumes and it doesn't take up all that space on your wall. The teacher who took it told me that he was tired of looking things up on wikipedia and then printing them out. "It's just not the same," he said.

I have literally no idea how to react to that. I realise that paper copies of anything still hold a certain fascination for people; the debate and extended metaphor I got into with a friend of mine over on tumblr speaks volumes as to how passionately people feel about it. All the same, those 29 volumes weigh a huge amount, and he takes the bus to work. I'm struggling to work out how he's going to engineer getting them home. Maybe he'll take them one at a time, puzzling his fellow travelers, until one of them - who's had a quiet crush on him for a while - asks him about it. They talk, they make plans for coffee, they fall in love and out of it and finally get married.

And I probably won't get invited to the wedding, but that's life for you.

I've run out of things to do in my mediatheque as things are decided high above me, and so I've started making an inventory of our DVDs for the students who want to borrow them while they're in storage. So far I've found a ton that I really want to borrow. Oh, the glorious power. In any case, that's how my afternoon has been spent, broken up by lecturers coming in to see if there's anything of interest left on the shelves. A few more books went today, including a study guide to the GRE and a book about British motor cars. Last thing on the agenda today was a call from the (at least) trilingual marketing co-ordinator who wanted a second opinion on a student-targeted press release.

An early blog means I'm focussed on supper, which tonight is salmon with a creamy spinach, parsley and lemon sauce. The parsley is by accident; persil is a kind of laundry detergent in English but means parsley in French and, rather than admitting my mistake, I took the parsley and found the laundry detergent myself.

In the words of my ever-charming American friend Paula - so British it hurts. See also: British problems, real and terrifying situations natives of my little isle find themselves in every day.

I leave you with a surreal look at the most obnoxiously handsome French man I've ever seen, promoted to me by another American - my friend +Helen Alexis Yonov. Take a look.


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