(no subject)

Work was one of the purest forms of evil yesterday (it's my catch phrase today.  Just you wait.).  The 20 and 40 meg Powerpoint files that I made now get broken back down into chapter files. This is easy, just time consuming--each chapter has about 60 image slides and 20 map slides.  The interesting part of it was that this history book was constructed in blocks of time, not blocks of space, as I was taught.  We learned europe from say, 500 BCE to 1500 CE, and then Asia, and then Africa.  Which was all well and good, but it means my mind's timelines for each area are isolated.  This book does things like, up to 500 BCE over the whole world, and then 500 BCE to 500 CE, so the timelines are linked--of course the africans had chinese pottery in their tombs, as the silk road was established by that time--stuff like that.  It's also a slightly disturbing process at the same time.  For example, this picture scared me the first time I saw it, and still does, really. 

And I'd forgotten what an ugly war WW1 was.  I don't think any of them are pretty, mind you, and maybe it's just that I've read more things set in that time than anything else, but gah.  Nash, Menin Road, is another image that I came across.  This used to be a forest, that's what the tall black things were--trees.  I just remember all the nastiest descriptions in the books I've read--everyone was still learning how to kill most effectively, and either over did it or didn't quite do a good enough job.  I don't know if WW2 was better or worse, perhaps it's like the difference between the first child and all subsequent ones--they no longer felt it was necessary to record the details and minutia. 

(no subject)

So yesterday, walking home, I managed to be walking on the wrong side of the walk three times--you know, where you end up doing that dodging on-coming pedestrian thing back and forth until someone gives up? Three times. And I was on the right side of the walk, I think. At least, i only had to dodge the three of them. but it was odd. I felt suddenly like I got out of the wrong side of my bed, or something

Oh, the wrongness of this sentence: "After some hesitation the Communist government crushed the student leaders and their supporters with tanks and executions, reaffirming its harsh, authoritarian character." Oh, the wrongness. No mixing literal and figurative images in a text book. Bad person who wrote this. Bad!

And oddly enough, I'm feeling an urge to read non-fiction, something I haven't been interested in since, well, since college, I guess. But the Prague spring really appealed to me when I studied it the first time, and even more so when I realised that my mom was my age when it happened (well, my age when I learned about it). One of her boyfriends in college actually spent his Career Development spring quarter in Prague that year. It's...it's almost thinking about a story, but not quite, and for a time like that, I need to actually do research, so I'll be looking up options on the Boston library site.