'Pomposity is the enemy of everything, in my opinion'

I saw this recently when I was searching for something in old copies of the Department's various newspapers. Roald Dahl was one of my favourite authors when I was a kid, so I was rather pleased to find this in the papers. This interview was published in May 1989, about a year and a half before Dahl's death.

( Roald Dahl gives his young fans a bit of 'whizzpop' wisdom. )

The Week That Was

So, time for something resembling an actual update.

Not much has really been happening this week. We had a fire drill on Tuesday (cue people making personal calls in while nobody's inside), it proved so popular even the galahs decided to join us in the park! Well, they flew into the big tree we were hiding in the shade of - many thanks to the people who arrange these things for days when the mercury approaches the old century.

Got all the journals returned from binding put to rights, onto the catalogue and onto their shelves (ok, so they do look neater), and have been putting more stuff in boxes (while watching other things from the sidelines as people assume we have the same resources of one of the big universities).

Even did a spell on the switchboard, and ended up not so much pissed (although I did get a bit snippy beforehand, normally I'm in "MAGNETO SMASH!" mood) as just tired. Some of this time's classics were someone Who thought all the schools got all the same calculators from the same place, and someone who seemed to think that I'd obviously read the entire Curriculum and knew where the list of compulsory books were. A list would be nifty if it existed, but the things I've skimmed aren't that cut-and-dried.

I've caved in and ordered the Real Ghostbusters DVDs (and a couple of soundtracks for I impulse-shop) from Amazon. According to the order-page, it looks like they might even get here in the week that I'm on leave. I have *got* to stop editing the "Recommendations" page for my Amazon
account... it's almost as addictive as the Random Pairing Generator!

I picked up a trio of old Tales of the Teen Titans issues this week. Issues 46, 46 and 48 from late 1984, taking place right after (as in, next issue) the death of Terra in "The Judas Contract". The issues concern HIVE taking over Atlantis, and the Titans versus Recombatants, and included the scene once posted to scans_daily of Dick at Terry's stag night (the infamously classy affair), Gar getting a bit tired of the bad guys getting away with everything while the good guys have to hold back (among other things), and signs of Raven's increasing Dark Phoenix tendencies.