Reading broadens the mind... sometimes

It's quite impressive to be able to say in evening French class that the last book you read was Thucydides' 'History of the Peloponnesian War' (or 'Histoire du Guerre Peloponnesienne', to make my best stab at it.) But it's less impressive to realise that would've been my answer if you'd asked six months ago, too. I can't remember when I last read anything that wasn't a textbook or a case study.

My blog generates some rather unusual AdWords combinations

Hmmmm... an ad asking worriedly if I drink too much wine... followed by another offering to sell me more of it... then a note on the effects of alcohol. At least after I'm done drinking, I'll be able to generate huge web traffic!

That was an alarmingly large baked potato I had in the Arts Centre this lunchtime

There's nothing like a mile in the pool after a few hours in the lecture hall, but when I got out I was HUNGRY, and thanks to an overrun it was too late to head to University House. Pity, since Mondays is often a lasagne verde day and the cooking down there is surprisingly good for what's basically a student canteen.)

My backup option was the Arts Centre. There's always a few baked spuds left, and whoa, the one I had was HUGE. It was like eating a carbo-loaded rugby ball. Not the best thing to eat at lunchtime when the afternoon's going to be a manic rush of assignments and presentation prep bracketed by runs to the laundrette; even now, 4 hours later, I can feel its starchy vastness sitting in my stomach as if I'd swallowed it whole. Man, that was one HUGE potato. And as for the helping of cottage cheese - let's not go there. It's almost enough to put me off dinner, but for some reason I'm feeling in dire need of protein...

Sometimes I surprise even myself

A manic weekend. 12 straight hours trying to get to grips with Corporate Finance (or at least catch up on my lecture notes), a visit from non-university people to campus, snatch an afternoon tea with The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and ... in barely more than two hours, whomp up a creative concept for a European client that's so brilliant I'm almost in shock.

From a simple phoned-in brief about 4 audiences spanning 3 constituencies and an array of proposed touchpoints and outcomes, I've cooked up an 11-touch sequential marketing programme with a unifying idea connected by web page support, 33% one-to-one messaging and two-thirds word-of-mouth driven by a clever concept unconnected to, but riffing on, the commercial goal of the campaign. It'll build an audience for my client's product and get them talking about it for under £20K spread over nine months.

I may be no great shakes when it comes to strategy or finance; for proof of that, all I need to do is look around me on the MBA course. But as a plain-vanilla, no-tricks no excuses, sod-busting shit-kicking cap-wearing card-carrying copywriter - someone who dream up ideas for communication and just executes, executes, executes - I'm so good it's kind of scary.

Beating alcohol (senseless)

I wish I had an addictive personality.

To any creative, alcohol is more a professional tool than a personal vice; campaigns get greater after a bottle of Rioja, headlines and copy flow more freely. There's scientific backing for the process, too: alcohol is a depressant, but the first thing it depresses is your inhibitions, allowing creativity to flood and the essential stuff of Big Ideas to make it onto an A3 pad in Magic Marker.

But at Christmas I decided to cut down my alcohol intake, and that was that. It wasn't even difficult. I cut down to a glass a night and none midweek, and that was ALL. I wish it'd been harder.

Hey, I'm not going to bill anything in January, anyway. Sobriety rules!

The fat of the land

I'm fascinated by Carl Warner's tabletop landscapes. Wonder if he actually eats them afterwards? Carl is here, although his website doesn't measure up to his talent, being the usual horrible Flash-infested wankfest common to visual creatives.

The is NOT campaign

Here's the idea: for the next month, whenever you update your Facebook 'is box', update it with something you're NOT doing.

"Chris is NOT updating his blog when he should be studying."

"Chris is NOT munching his way through a gallon of Ben & Jerries after midnight."

"Chris is NOT entertaining anyone surnamed Portman, Moss or Sharapova back at his place tonight."

You get the idea. Try it for a day or two and see if it catches on.

The mask begins to slip

A man walks into a doctor's surgery. He's not old, but his face is a mask of anguish and the set of his shoulders weary. He's carrying all the troubles of the world.

"Doctor, I need help. I used to love the world and all the people in it; now I feel nothing except worry and frustration. Please, please, give me something to end this pain."

The doctor thinks a moment. Then, tearing a handbill off his noticeboard: "The solution is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him perform. That will cheer you up."

The man bursts into tears.

"But doctor... I am Pagliacci."

Tonight's star billing, "Management Accounting", is brought to you by...

... a medley of Pink Floyd, Psychedelic Furs, and Procol Harum. I sort of like things that exploded into smithereens years before (even) I was born, and anyway, I need something reasonably mellow when I'm catching up on textbooks. Chapters 9-12 are on the cards and I'm hoping to get through before midnight.

What the hell is with the Warwick MBA, anyway? Relaxation is a luxury, sleep a decadence. This term contains fewer courses (for most people) and fewer projects (for most people) so should be a breeze compared to Term 1. But I, of course, am not Most People, so I'm awake until all hours cramming my skull with equations and context.

Back to the books...

Creativity vs. hard work

The Japanese turns his head quizzically and states, "Ah, these creative things, I find so hard. I wish I could learn to do such things."

What the FUCK?

I'm trying to revise something titled 'Specification Variable Estimation in Regression Analysis', spanning two textbooks, two modules, and about four cups of coffee. I've got a reasonable head for figures but this stuff is unaccountably HARD.

The Japanese, however - who finds this stuff 'easy' - is pointing towards a crop of campaigns in the corner that took less than two hours to conceive, write, and design. It's one of the simplest advertising campaigns I've ever written.

How the FUCK could anyone find this stuff hard? It's just words and pictures, arranged in a certain way, optimised to sync with enough nuances of human communication to make it likely to provoke some sort of response, cocktailed with a sizeable bullshit factor.

Hell, unlike maths, it doesn't need to be anywhere near exact; you just have to be able to argue it out artfully. (What, exactly, would happen if you wrote 'The answer may vary by up to 100% due to the fallibility of the human condition' on a Corporate Finance exam paper?)

Mathematics isn't part of normal human experience; beautiful it may be (I've read a fair bit of string theory and the geometry of physics is awe-inspiring) but it takes serious sweat to understand the numbers behind nature. And in some ways, the closer it gets to everyday experience (Management Accounting and Corporate Finance) representing it as numbers seems ever more artificial. How the FUCK can anyone find this stuff easy?

And how can anyone find creativity hard?

Where did the day go?

Ha ha. I thought at the start of term that with FOUR afternoons a week unscheduled things might be a litttle less hectic. Yeah, right.

A lecture finished at 1pm, then a brief interview upstairs, then some errands 'downtown' (central campus) involving dry cleaning and juggling cash between bank accounts ready for the huge-ass fee debit this week, a snatched baked potato at the Arts Centre and last week's Economist devoured for lunch. Then home, a conf call scheduled in, laundry wet and dry parts straddling the call, all of which works with only a small hint to my client that she's called while I was leaving the campus launderette. Work sheets printed for tomorrow's marathon lecture day, today's notes filed into a sequence that'll make sense when I write up my flashcards, and OH HELL IT'S PAST SIX PM. Where did the day GO?!!

At least the laundry contains another of those amusing Warwick University Accommodation signs. You've got to laugh, haven't you.

In the mood for action

Out on the road, getting a few two-legged kloms in since the pool's closed today, just me and Nikeplus. And thinking.

Much as I'm enjoying my time at Warwick, I am looking forward to getting back to London. The bright lights, the thronging crowds, the galleries and museums and architecture. Even the Tube; I still get a buzz out of taking a train through the Earth's crust. Not because it's better, but because it has action. Excitement, adventure, really wild things, 24-by-7-by-363*. I love London precisely because you can't get used to it.

Life isn't fun unless it resembles a movie script starring you. Every passing vehicle should hint at the possibility of dark secrets inside (even if you know they're Russians). Every door without a brassplate should hide billions in wealth (think of those anonymous offices in Mayfair.) After dark should be full of delectable pleasures in still-smoky underground dens, dawn light tinted with both regret of the previous day and hope for the forthcoming one. Life should be a riot of conflicting emotions, intense experiences to cut that searing pain of mere existence that never goes away.

I've joined the Skydiving Club and I'm doing my first solo jumps in March. Jumping out of a moving aeroplane at 4,000 feet will take the edge off, but a tightly-governed thrill ride isn't the same as being in a theatre of action, where anything could happen and it's up to you to survive and thrive.

As HC said, life should contain constant action. Inside my head I'm an action hero, even if it's limited to pacing campus after dark, wearing black trenches, and leaping the desks instead of going round them. Action. I need action.

(Aside: I'm seriously disappointed that nobody has replied to my class spam asking my MBA cohort to join me at 4000 feet. There are at least two guys apart from me fitting the action hero sensibility - Si***** and Io*** and you KNOW who they are - but neither has responded.)

If I walk down the street and only three or four bullets get fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake.

But skydiving will assuage the emptiness a little. And it's surprisingly cheap. "Subsequent jumps are cheap" (hopefully that's not because second jumps are 'subsidised' by people who paid for a second jump but, er, didn't quite excel on their first.) Although it's wrapped up the cotton wool of British Health & Safety: why, for example, do you have to wear a crash helmet? If at the end of a 4000ft fall your head's pointing downwards, you've got certain issues a fibreglass hat isn't going to fix.) Skydiving has some action, but it isn't Action.

So that's why I think that after I graduate, I will return to London, even though my shoebox of a house down there could be exchanged for something detached with four bedrooms up here. London means Action. And without action, you're already dead - you just haven't stopped moving yet.



(*363 because the trains stop Dec 24 and 25 and nothing happens.)

The MBA Sleeper's Guide

"So you've embarked on an MBA programme at Warwick Business School? Well done! The Warwick MBA is your key to a happier life, a higher salary, lots of international friends, and more sexual frisson than you can shake a stick at. But there's one essential skill you'll need to survive, and that's SLEEPING IN UNUSUAL PLACES.

You don't get much time for slumber on the MBA; comfortable room or not, you will NOT spend much time in your bed this year. Beds are for reading up on the next day's lectures and for doubling as surrogate deskspace, not for getting shut-eye. In addition, take a close look at those blankets. There's a reason the smart kids bring their own duvets; own-brand Warwick bedding resembles 18th-century Prussian Army surplus.

So you need to find alternative venues for sleeping - and artful ways of arranging your schedule to do it. By far the most convenient place to sleep is the MBA lecture hall itself, but this is fraught with danger. There are three attitudes to adopt if you go down this route.

Best is to sit at the back, where the comforting hum of chatter will ensure a pleasant hour of slumber with low risk of the lecturer noticing. If you don't bag one of the highly-prized back row seats, try the middle rows, but NOT near the doors: people needing the toilet will be endlessly crashing through the exits. Try to maintain an upright posture and you stand a fair chance of dozing for up to five minutes undisturbed. Beware, however: several of your cohort enjoy using digicams; your slumbering visage WILL be on Facebook before the day's out.

For the really brave, the front row beckons. You'll be noticed, but front-row people get plaudits for keenness, so the lecturer may let sleeping students lie (and you'll avoid the 'Nemotocam'.) At least one person in the 07 cohort just doesn't give a damn and sleeps for approximately 2.5 hours of each 3.5 hour lecture.

However, outside the politically-charged environment of the lecture hall, numerous other business school locales offer creative sleeping possibilities. The MBA coffee lounge is fairly private, but all the chairs are upright; you could move a few tables together, but space-starved MBA candidates may start using your body as a worksurface. Better to go for one of the sofas at the Radcliffe end of the building; it's public and full of much younger people than you, but since you're old enough to pass for a lecturer you will not be disturbed.

The absolute gold standard, of course, is the circular meeting room over the main entrance, but for obvious reasons it's usually locked. Staff need somewhere to sleep too.

If you can bag one alone, Syndicate rooms are an excellent choice. The doors are lockable, the chairs are soft, and best of all, if you're in there people will think you're actually working! These qualities, however, mean you can't count on a syndicate room being available more than a few times a week. Wednesday mornings are best since that's the lecture everyone feels able to skip, so many MBA participants won't be in school.

There are other possibilities. Like a good hotel, WBS is full of little-known nooks not normally on student itineraries. There's a cleaner's storeroom west of the entrance; a warm IT office eastwards, and the smaller staff corridors upstairs are regularly deserted for hours at a time. If you're REALLY nice to the coffee break caterer, she might let you crash in the back of the serving area for an hour or too. And if you're simply too tired to get creative, there are always the soft options: trekking over to the library or Learning Grid usually yields half a sofa, and best of all there'll be books to cover your face with!

In emergencies, there are a few - a very few - other possibilities. The upper-floor lecture halls at the back end are quieter and there are a few sofas; also, strategic use of coathooks can, with effort, enable a few minutes of 'straphanging' slumber. It may even be possible to bag a complete lecture hall of your own, and simply lie behind a table. In this situation, scatter a few textbooks around you as if you fell over; when disturbed, simply rub your head, gesture at the table edge, and say 'Ow!' with a pained wince. Complete the deception by asking the person who disturbed you for a glass of water.

I wish you all the best with your studies. And... sweet dreams!"

The day it rained forever

It's been raining at Warwick University since Thursday.

I've been back at 'school' a few months now, but tonight really felt like it. Because it was my first session in the Humanities building, one of the original University buildings from the 60s. It was so like going to comprehensive school in the 80s I almost shivered with the naughtiness of it. The same pale cream crumbling paint layered ten coats deep over sills and windowframes, cheap green paper towels in the toilets, overcooked radiators blasting dry eco-unfriendliness, and blackboards. Yes, proper blackboards with real chalk.

And the smell. Magnified by the rain, the smell is everywhere. The smell of teenagers: cheap perfume, stale sweat, boiled cabbage, free-range hormones and old socks. The Humanities Block is a proper Skool. The Business School's beautifully geometric building is so fit-for-purpose it just couldn't be any better: a song of cool lines and orderly corridors, and being in this other building reminds me that most people in British education don't have it so good.

It was fun, though (the French class I sort of missed last week) and added to the sheer weirdness of being a university student in my 30s. I hope I have a few more weird experiences like this before September comes.

Five forces forced in within five days

Ha ha, just a few days after I blog about it,today's Strategic Advantage lecture was about Porter's Five Forces! These Warwick programme directors are FAST to react. (!)

Down and dirty in the SU

I don't quite 'get' Warwick's Student Union.

At any one time, half the bars and kitchens are either closed or devoid of customers. And the opening times seem fairly random, too. For instance, there's a paid-entrance party on at 11pm, so the whole downstairs area shuts down at 10pm and everyone has to leave and come back again.

The crowds seem equally elusive. I've walked through here on Friday evenings and the place is packed; other times, like this Friday, it's practically empty. Us postgrads obviously don't have that finely-tuned undergrad sense of where the Happenings are. Nine bars and six restaurants at the last count, yet it's always odds on the place you're heading for will be shuttered.

Tonight it's a party to welcome the new crop of exchange MBAs from Mannheim, and they're a little... different to the last lot. Man, these guys are TALL. It's like talking to trees. And not just the guys: the girls are so statuesque I half expected modelling agents to be scouting the joint.

Seeing their heads jutting above the less-lofty Warwickers make it look as if the entire cohort has been transplanted into Sherwood Forest, and the illusion's even more appropriate when you consider the rainstorm outside is somehow penetrating the ground floor of this 3-storey building... via the roof. (Makes me wonder what this dripping water went through to get here.)

We enjoy a 'few' beers, and end the evening upstairs in The Graduate pub. The appalling weather has created some interesting olfactory effects, and the floor - let's just say it has noticeable adhesive qualities. But there's still time and room to chat to our new colleagues, about their motivations, their dreams, their hopes for the future. (Actually, those involve beer too.)

What exactly happened in New Hampshire?

Hitting CostGouger earlier I passed a 'lary of newspapers proclaiming Barack victor in the second American primary. Yet tonight it seems Hillary won. What's wrong with this picture?

Hillary would've been my choice: I go for grizzled and experienced over youth and hope. I mean, putting up with Bill is qualification enough to run a country. If she's indeed pulled it off after the dip in Iowa, it's a good sign: the race continues, neither candidate building up too much momentum.

But was this like the 2000 US election as televised on UK screens - I went to bed depressed thinking Bush had won it, only to wake up in the false dawn of hope as Al Gore (rightly) disputed the result? 2004 was at least foregone: Bush's gang fiddled the result so obviously it's breataking how few newspapers followed the story.

(There are very few real journalists left in the USA. Look at the actual results across districts with fewer TV crews in place Ohio and Florida, and it's statistically impossible that Bush actually won: the Diebold machines were tampered with beyond any shadow of a doubt. Yet no mainstream media bothered to publish it.)

But with the latest report at 8.30pm UK time, it seems Hillary won New Hampshire, which means Obama's broken: he won't survive this for long. The next president of the USA may well be a woman. And a woman, even more than hope, is what America needs today.

Porter's five WHATs?

What, exactly, does Warwick Business School have against Michael Porter?

The guy who kicked off management consultancy is a core part of approximately 4,999 of the world's 5,000 MBA schools. Except, it seems, Warwick's.

There has been NO SESSION about Michael Porter; his five forces have been mentioned in passing maybe twice. Yet every single lecture, there's at least one comment about him and his work - especially as it relates to us.

"You MBA students can doubtless talk about Porter's Five Forces until the cows come home..."

"Now, remind me what Porter's Five Forces are?"

"Obviously you'll have covered Porter's Five Forces in depth during the first term..."

We haven't 'done' Porter AT ALL. I'm not sure we need to - any more than elementary school kids need to read Euclid - since the principles are now so embedded in business strategy the actual originator has perhaps become obsolete - but damnit, if they think we should study Michael Porter, they should bloody well say so. Porter's not even on the reading list. Nor is his most famous work in the bookshop.

Here's my theory: this is the one area of joined-up education where the programme directors don't talk to each other. They're all taking it for granted. All the lecturers think every other lecturer is overdosing on Michael Porter, and don't bother putting him in their own lectures.

The net result: not a single lecturer is teaching Michael Porter, and we know him by reputation alone. Unless - and this is a long shot given the workload - we like, y'know, actually read his book on our own initiative or something. Dear me.

Vive la France!

I would like, if I may, to take you... on... a strange journey.

A journey of a compulsory MBA evening language class. Held outside the warm womblike environment of our beloved business school, of cool corridors and sensible layouts. Into, so to speak, foreign territory.

I'd thought the class was in the b-school itself; the room designation (B*.**) was in the business school's logical room format. You never get lost in the Modernist cubes and circles of WBS; just aim down a corridor and count along. Sadly, the rest of the campus isn't like that; an American pal had pre-warned me about Humanities, but I'd brushed away her warnings without a care.

Merde!

The journey starts with that worst of all B-movie decisions: to split up. Two African girls of the quartet gathered in the lobby have an errand to run, so I pair up with K** and depart speaking the Line You Must Never Say in a Horror Movie:

"We'll meet you over there!"

After all, the actual venue is mere minutes away, in the next building or so, according to our vague directions. How hard can it be to find it?

8 buildings, 22 doors, and 57 corridors later, we make a terrible discovery... of which more later.

OK, OK, so it wasn't really 57 corridors we explored trying to find a blasted French class. (It couldn't have been more than 52.) But know this: we spent nearly a WHOLE HOUR traipsing around campus trying to find mythical room B*.**. This is how it went.

Our journey begins in the Ramphal quadrangle I know well: it's a shortcut to parts of central campus. We don't start getting nervous until we've tried all four entrances and NO ONE knows of any room starting with B. We leave. And re-enter through another door. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This building is built like Meccano: about 12 interconnected long arms with relatively few connecting doors between wings, and it's a bit too easy to get disoriented. The Lurking Horror comes to mind again.

OK, tramp down University Road, enter the Library, sort of, which we do several times over the next hour since our first set of directions start there. Of course, being an individual room buried in a building, the French room IS NOT A PART OF THE LANGUAGE CENTRE so everyone we ask about Languages directs us THERE instead.

The Language Centre is a strange kind of place, more like a 'proper' University: peeling paint and faded brickwork, back to the last great wave of British college-building in the 60s. And, of course, it's not where we're supposed to be. There's a 67, a 52, but nothing with f***ing B*.** in the title. Will our heroes make it out alive? Tune in next week!

At this point, K** is starting to believe my claims about being bad at directions.

We leave and re-orient within Ramphal. My phone rings anonymously. It's B***, one of the African girls supposedly bringing up the rear, in reality now far ahead of us. "We're in the Business School Lounge. Bye!"

What the FUCK are they doing in the Business School Lounge? That's where we've just come from!!! Oh well, one problem at a time.

We try the Library again, but entering through an upper floor this time. Well, it's in the right place, damnit; can it really be so wrong to trust a map?

I call another known participant of the class. Oooops; a slurred voice comes online: she's sick in bed and I've woken her up. Is there ANYTHING else I can do tonight to piss off African women?!!!

Momentarily, we consider the Chemistry building, but that'd be one mix-up too many; it might prove explosive; something just smells bad about that decision. (OK, enough chemistry jokes already.)

Our search pattern has now broadened - from rooms, to corridors, now it's just buildings where the rooms have a B in the title. We attempt Psychology ("Where Reason and Intelligence are Found" - not tonight they're bloody not!) and then think better of it.

Everyone knows Social Science is easy, so we head into there. It turns out to be a morass of abstruse corners and impenetrable labyrinths. We re-emerge into the cold night air some time later with relief.

We then plunge into various Humanities blocks. Now I have an American friend who knows these corridors well, and she'd warned me it's like a rabbit warren in there; stupidly I'd failed to heed her warnings. Actually, rabbit warren is kind of polite. It's like a fucking termite mound!

K** asks a passing undergrad. We're ready to believe she knows where the French lessons are, given that she's wearing a sweatshirt with an Eiffel Tower logo. (OK, at this stage we're clutching at straws... we've asked some 5 extremely polite people yet not one has really been able to help.)

And then we have a brainwave. A map taped to a door on an upper floor shows a room - several corridors away - one pre-decimal-point digit removed from the one we want. We reason, if we can find THAT room and then find some stairs leading down, the room we want will logically be directly below it.

A final push along 6 corridors and a flight of stairs. And, unbelievably, it works. *.32... *.33... *.39... We stumble upon room B*.**. An hour late.

Where there's a sign on the door: "MBA French class, this room was pre-booked so we have moved to A*.**."

Which is where we started our journey, 50 minutes previously. Back at the Business School.

In a sense, I've been right all along. But for entirely the wrong reason.

It's now 55 minutes after the class began.

Sacre bleu!

When we emerge via a nearby door at the end of the corridor - which we'd approached from a totally different direction - we learn that, indeed, it's quite close to the Business School, although through shortcuts of gates and paths rather than along the main campus thoroughfares.

At which point, we collapse in laughter and decide, in true French style, to say "f**k it" and go for a glass of wine instead.

Vive la France!

The things they say in the Learning Grid

For a top-flight educational aid, some of the little signs and notices in Warwick University's Learning Grid are a bit ambiguous.

What, for example, is implied by

"Student Advisors are here to help you with anything."

Really? Anything? (All right - find me a girlfriend!) And the followup advice to 'look for the blue T shirts' didn't help either, since there was a pile of them near the entry turnstile and their conversation wasn't up to much.

"Please eat hot food in the atrium."

As if we had no choice. ("Man, I'm gonna have to leave this atrium! One more mouthful and I'll burst!")

"There's no such thing as a stupid question in the Grid."

Now there's a red-rag-to-a-bull question. "Excuse me, why does Superman wear his underpants over his tights?")

I love the Learning Grid.

Barack blindsides a victory

Wow, Obama won! Yet the US press doesn't seem to be treating it as a major upset; it looks like Hillary is carrying on.

The question is now, are we seeing a cementing of support for the second black president? (Bill Clinton, obviously, was the first.) Or just a first rush of love? My feeling, unfortunately, is the latter. Unlike Hillary, Barack doesn't have much depth or experience; he's an instant-water-added celebrity, more a reality TV participant than an enduring star. He's going to crash and burn in the next two months, as caucus after caucus falls to Hillary. But this isn't negative; it's great to have real competition in a US political race.

Putting on weight

I'm getting seriously chunky here at Warwick.

Okay, so post-Christmas isn't the ideal time to wonder about flab content, but I weigh in at 76kg at present. My 'natural' weight's a bit suboptimally skinny, at about 71kg. (I'm sort of an ectomorphic mesomorph, far from the classic Anglo-Saxon dumpy endomorph so common in Britain.) But triathon-induced muscle mass holds me around 74kg in normal times, which is about right for my height: a lean mean machine. (In my mind anyway.)

But for most of Term 1 I didn't spend much time in the gym, which means my recent gains are due to something altogether softer and gooeyer than muscle: we're talking FAT. I'm carrying around 40 hamburger patties that shouldn't be there. I'm back in the pool a lot, so should convert that 4kg into muscle during Term 2, but right now the flab's having a 'moment'.

I wonder if the campus medical room offers liposuction?!

I think that I shall never see, a life so lovely as a tea... cher

What a life it is to be an academic.

I've been in a university environment over three months now, and I can safely say there's a reason so many lecturers seem so happy. I mean, compared to the hardscrabble, living-on-the-edge, risk-filled rollercoaster of private business, being an academic is one seriously cushy number. Sometimes I feel like one of HG Wells' Morlocks accidentally emerging from his hellish subterreanea and glimpsing the verdant paradise above.

First off, academic life is fun. Just imagine the work environment of the average don. You spend time either with people who defer to your superior knowledge (students) or who share your interests (departmental colleagues.) Being an academic is like one long Sunday afternoon in the park with friends.

You get financial security too. Maybe the salaries aren't great, but plenty of academics do private consulting at high rates - and additionally, as civil servants, many academics get an index-linked pension: the gold-plated sort that pays out an ever-increasing, inflation-proof amount without you having to pay in increasing sums. Someone recently calculated that the average private sector manager would need to build up a pension pot of ONE MILLION POUNDS to enjoy the same payouts as the equivalent civil servant. Being an academic means never having to worry about your dotage.

You get a great living environment. Lots of academics live in subsidised housing, some right here on campus: the dreamy, intellectual atmosphere of the ivory towers, combined with annual influxes of young people to keep your ideas fresh. Academics get everything but free backrubs from naked maidens, and I'm pretty sure even that's on offer in the Humanities block. (How come the OB guys always seem such happy souls?)

And the work itself? Well, given that academics always note their 'research interests' on their CVs, isn't that a bit like... 'doing what you enjoy'? Your job involves reading and writing about the stuff you like the most? Does that even qualify as a job? Either way, being an academic offers a great working life.

Of course, you're allowed eccentricities as an academic that the private sector wouldn't let your feet touch the ground for. The scruffiest jeans and jumpers, and barely decipherable handwriting? And some of these eccentricities cost the taxpayer serious money. At Warwick, the maths guys came out in open rebellion some years back, about... the whiteboards in the Maths Department. (They liked blackboards and chalk.) At huge expense, the whiteboards were replaced with blackboards, just to satisfy a bunch of numbers freaks' fits of pique. Being an academic lets you do your own thing, all the time.

Furthermore, under the UK's RAE grading system, you only have a 'performance review' every FIVE years, and even then it's based on just your best FOUR pieces of work. Four pieces?!! In five years?! You could just spend six months producing four really good bits, then goof off for nearly half a decade. Unlike the private sector - with its quarterly earnings requirements, its downsizing habits and its dog-eat-dog culture - being an academic lets you thumb your nose at performance standards.

Oh, what a life is it to be an academic!

Whooo hay Uncle Sam

I love American electoral politics.

Iowa's Republicans and Democrats vote for their candidates tomorrow, earlier than ever before - thanks, I think, to a Constitutional edict (they put this stuff in Constitutions? That's worse than the EU) that Iowa must vote first. Thanks to various other States moving their dates back (NEEENNEERRR Iowa!) Iowa's had to backpedal almost as far as it can go, to Jan 3.

So what's going to happen tomorrow?

Well, it'd be MAJOR if Hillary missed out for the Dems. She's leading by 20 points in most polls. Such a divisive figure, but a misunderstood character. (Most complex situations have simple explanations: to learn why Hillary can't keep Bill's hands off interns, just look at her medical history. She and Bill have had physical - not psychological - problems having sex since the earliest days of their marriage; I'll bet Bill's appetite for a 'type of sex' not involving vaginas stems from this.) She's confident, forthright, smart, and has the most intelligent ex-president in the USA's short history backing her up.

So Hillary's my man. Bill was once called 'the best Republican president the USA's ever had', and similarly, 'the first Black president.' Hillary walks the same line. Genuinely unprejudiced and hardassed, she's just the leader America needs to heal the vast chasm between it and the 97% of humans who aren't American.

Strangely, though, I quite like Barack too. A lightweight yet to be tested beyond the soundbite - but: a foreign-raised, mixed-race under-50 in the Oval Office? Think of the possibilities! This guy could talk to ANYONE, do ANYTHING, not bound by policy or reputation. No dirt on him whatsoever. A Will Smith of politics: he'll get the vote of EVERY black in America, with massive crossover appeal too. Whereas Hillary would heal America's rift with the world, Barack would heal the divisions within America itself. And that's a blockbuster.

And as a bonus - what would be the calming effect on the Middle East, of having a US president whose middle name is Hussein?

The Republican race is closer: Guiliani seems ahead, but only by a percentage point or two, and that's too close to call. Guiliani would be a pretty good president (even if we're not measuring against W, surely America's worst president ever) but let's face it - ANYONE looks good next to the current White House.

And it's not as if Iowa is a killer. If Hillary loses, she's the only one who'd withdraw: the race remains open even among other Iowa losers. And if Obama wins tomorrow - unlikely but possible - he's then a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, and the Dems can concentrate on pushing his good points all the way to November. Not a bad outcome even if the upset happens.

Of course, there's one other oddity: the Iowa pushback means that American politics is now nothing to do with public policy, and everything to do with election tactics, with the campaign already on the road and continuing for the whole year.

First post!

First post of 2008, and it's about Hugh McLeod's social objects. A social object is anything at the epicentre of a social activity - a bowling date, a love of Star Wars, a new baby, and so on. It's a more important bit of thinking than you might imagine. After all, what is Facebook but an infrastructure for social objects?