Let’s hope it squishes him

Image: Archaeosoup

This made me laugh, so I thought that I’d share it. Interestingly, I shared that clip from Indiana Jones in the first Archaeology lesson I taught this week just gone, as a prime example of how said explorer is not an archaeologist. I mean, come on. We all know that archaeology is not like that, and that real archaeologists would have been more interested in the rolling ball scene in the inscriptions on the walls, in the way that the traps worked, in the poison used on the darts, in the construction techniques of the temple itself, and indeed everything else, with the gold statuette coming rather low down the list of informative and interesting things to look for and study. Also, there is no recording carried out of the findspot for the statuette either. All very infuriating.

The best (slightly late) birthday present possible: Life Update #9

Hello. I’ve been away from the blog for a bit, but there is quite a good reason for it. My birthday was on the 29th of last month, and two days later, on the evening of 31st, my wife gave birth to our third son. I meant to post at the start of the month, but with him being here, little sleep, the start of the new academic year and intermittent paternity leave, I haven’t really felt up to blogging. But yeah- he’s here, and absolutely, sublimely perfect. I’d forgotten just how small and delicate newborns are, but it is interesting just how quickly you adapt to handling them and how quickly you treat it as second nature. It all comes back to you, and after a day or so it felt like he had been here for months. We’ve now got his feeding sorted, and this is proving a lot easier than I’d expected it would be, and even the night-times are fairly straight forward now, as he is only waking up a few times at fairly set intervals, and doesn’t really cry that much. When he does, he’s quite quiet. To be fair, we probably couldn’t have asked for a better baby. Then again, I suppose we are slightly biased in thinking that he’s perfect. But hey. I love my children, and if I think that they are perfect, then they are. I wouldn’t change them for the world.

New Books: August

I mentioned in a previous post that I recently acquired several Penguin Modern Classics via a well-known internet auction site, and so here they are in all their shiny and much-anticipated glory:

• William S. Burroughs –  The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
• Albert Camus –  The Outsider
• Albert Camus –  The Fall
• Truman Capote –  Music for Chameleons
• Truman Capote –  Answered Prayers
• Hermann Hesse –  Steppenwolf
• Franz Kafka –  The Trial
• Franz Kafka –  The Castle

The reason that there is no price listed for any of them is because I had these for my birthday, even though I had picked them and knew they were coming (and didn’t bother receiving them wrapped in jazzy paper), and because I can’t remember the prices at any rate. However, I also got the book that I ranted a bit about in the aforementioned post:

• John Wyndham –  The Chrysalids

Here you can see a quite tatty and battered copy alongside the much cleaner edition that I was sent after complaining to the sender that it was not quite a ‘minor flaw’ afflicting it as they had suggested. The first one had been rather extensively water damaged, and was proving difficult to open effectively due to the crinkled pages.

Also, I picked this one up from a charity shop for 20p:

• Christopher Isherwood –  Goodbye to Berlin