Wonder if they'll give me a job?
My friend said that it was like watching people marooned on a desert island doing their best to re-create Radio 4
Beautiful.
Anything related to Alain de Botton repells me. He just seems like a charlatan.
As for a "university of life," a friend of mine who happens to be beautiful, charming and cultured enough to have dated multiple celebrities just drops by Columbia and NYU when she feels like auditing a course on philosophy, religion, etc., etc. This probably isn't a universal option.
Was just coming here to post 2. I'm still laughing.
3.2: My mom does that at the University of Tel Aviv. She's probably not as beautiful, charming or cultured (by the way, since when does one need to be cultured to date celebrities?) as Flippanter's friend, but she makes up for it by being a senior citizen.
Notoriously, there was a guy at the U of C, I believe a retired doctor or lawyer, who would just go to whatever classes he felt like, with a bunch of books in Tower Records bags, and tape the proceedings; often he'd fall asleep. He seemed to be on pretty good terms with the professors; once one of them couldn't remember something and asked him, starting the question, "Elliot, you know everything, …".
He was not beautiful or charming.
Beautiful and charming aside, one must swipe and otherwise show ID to get into NYU buildings and the security guards are pretty hysterical about it. One could count on swanning past them some of the time, I guess.
9: I was forced to kick him out of a class once. I was mortified.
10.2: What did he do?
If I had to guess, I would guess that it was a small summer session class which was supposed to be kept small.
As usual, Ben is correct! It was summer session and the handful of other folks in the Greek class were paying a lot of money to be there. The prof. who made me turn him away said, "You know he has a ton of money, right?"
7: Well, it can't hurt, I guess. I'm sure I'd cringe at the dropping of some names but hers have always been most respectable.
'It makes a change from going to the theatre,' one said.
I want that person's problems.
I am probably being dense, there is no way that a point of irony could be overlooked by Brits, but:
Maybe a money-saving way of implementing this idea in the 21st century would be a free-form blog. Prattle and exchanges of information, ideas, and most importantly attitudes could alternate unpredictably to avoid the dreariness of a syllabus. Hitting on the other participants would take extra work, but I guess that would be part of the appeal. Also, no need to dress up.
A friend and I have talked semi-jokingly about teaching a free university class about contemporary Mpls. urban geography and underground history. The prerequisite would be a seminar called "How To Ride The Bus Without Embarrassing Yourself Or Others."
18. When I passed the link to Heebie, I mentioned that I thought the commentariat had missed a good business opportunity.
20: !!!!
I added that quote in, right after initially posting it. And saved. And went to the Unfogged front page and verified that it appeared.
And then I forgot to double-check that it might disappear, as my corrections always do. Which I just realized, with frustration, in seeing your comment.
My friend said that it was like watching people marooned on a desert island doing their best to re-create Radio 4
Explanation? I seem to recall Radio 4 being associated with tedious dramas that boil down to modern-day morality plays, but who knows.
Radio 4 = middle brow culture. Main news, political comment, plus "magazine" programmes, plus occasional comedy. And the tedious dramas. And The Archers. The soundtrack to the white collar breakfast and dinner across a nation, speaking not blatant lies to a million kitchens.
But whose audience thinks of themselves as highbrow, if they'd thought about things in such American terms and also a bit fogey. Radio 4 is basically Stephen Fry if he was a radio channel, only done by people not quite Stephen Fry.
It's where you find all the comedians just before they get their big break on one of the comedy panel shows on BBC2.
Yes, Radio 4 comedy panel shows can be very funny, but much of their comedy output has quite poor quality control, and the same applies to the middle-brow magazine programmes. It doesn't help that Bragg, Andrew Marr, and Jenni Murray are all _really_ annoying.
The acting on Radio 4 drama is often really 'special' [in the wee short yellow bus sense of special].
Perhaps I am getting older, but I am finding Lord Bragg less annoying these days, not least because he is now doing more episodes of "In Our Time" on cultural and historial subjects where he has at least some familiarity with what he's talking about, and less breathless fellating of middle-ranking scientists for explaining some sub-O-level point.
Marr, on the other hand, never fails to enrage.
re: 26
Bragg often has excellent guests, but I still think he often interrupts too much, or jumps in to ask a question, not because the listener isn't going to get something, but because he wants to demonstrate that _he_ gets it. He's definitely the best of the three, though.
I was enraged by Murray's interview of Gareth Pierce a while back, where Murray's questioning was relentlessly focused on the personal -- 'how did it make you feel to see yourself portrayed in film by Emma Thompson?', etc. -- when Pierce clearly wanted, very strongly, to talk about ethical beliefs, the rights of individuals, principles of law, and so on. It's not like Pierce has ever wanted interest in herself, for herself. Even when talking about her cases all Murray kept turning it relentlessly back to personal advantage, as if the only lens one can look at something through is the lens of personal, narrow self-interest, and any other principle is incomprehensible.
25: I'm convinced Radio 4 drama producers all African accents sound like the worst kind of stereotypical Nigerian. And that the audience gets confused is something is set outside of Europe without having some sort of "ethnic" scene setting music.
Marr is more annoying on telly than on the Radio; Murray is largely confined to Woman's Hour which leaves Bragg as the more irritating of the three.
I still want "Sailing By" played at my funeral though.
23: I guess that I'll have to embrace how throughly middle-brow I am. I liked Start the Week quite a bit. In Our Time too. The latter probably is the radio version of this business.
Okay, I can agree that "Woman's Hour" is dreadful. I never heard Melvyn Bragg host "Start the Week," and I can't remember whether I prefer Marr's tenure as host to Jeremy Paxman's.
I have noticed Bragg doing some annoying interviews, and I think the science stuff is not so great, but I enjoy the theology programs and there was one on the Bhagavad Gita that was kind of interesting.
As for Marr, I only listen to Start the Week and don't see him elsewhere. It may be that the other annoying behaviors bleed into others' impressions of him so that they can't enjoy the other stuff.
Finally, let me say that you people don't understand how dreadful NPR is.
I kind of enjoy The Food Programme too. Finally, and I know that this sounds damning (it isn't meant to!), but I find listening to Gardener's Question Time relaxing. I don't even garden, but it's sort of soothing and helps me fall asleep.
29. There's nothing wrong with enjoying Start the Week - it's quite fun. But it isn't designed to emulate the iuniversity experience. Personally, the most intellectually stimulating thing I encounter most of the time is here.
31: Oh, I didn't think it was like university. The conversation seemed to have shifted to a general attack on Radio 4 and all things middle-brow. I suppose that I'm sensitive to the term "middle brow." (Perhaps I should embrace it?)
I suppose that I'm sensitive to the term "middle brow." (Perhaps I should embrace it?)
Artisinally hand-raised brow.
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So, er, a candidate for the international liaison officer in Antipodean Social Democratic Party (Youth Wing) just sent the mailing list an email bragging about how they went to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on a ten day visit to promote friendly relations, where they met ``Director of the Committee for Relations with Foreign Countries, Ry/u S/ung K/im'' as well as the ``Secretary-General of the K/orea-A/ustralia F/riendship & C/ultural Society, H/wang S/ung C/hol''.
This feels very odd.
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35. is very odd. It reminds me of people like Beatrice Webb and Charlotte Despard going to the USSR at the height of the Stalin made famine and thinking how wonderful it all was.
Except they had the excuse that they didn't have the experience of people like Beatrice Webb and Charlotte Despard to learn from.
re: 36
And I'd guess reliable evidence of the state of things for those worst off during the USSR famine [in the Ukraine, and elsewhere] wasn't as widely available then as the same information re: DPRK is now.
They haven't a hope in hell of winning anything & are as far as I can tell basically wasting everyone's time, but on the other hand, wtf?
What are they politically, anyway? Is this a bizarro Stalinist rump or something like the SPGB?
The party's the major NZ centre-left party, & I have no idea about this guy's politics beyond the fact that he likes to holiday in the DPRK. That's what's so bizarre; I'd understand if we were the Stalinists or summat, but no, this is the equivalent of the UKLP or the ALP, and this guy's running on the pro-juche platform. WTF?
(The position he's running for is basically set up to help our people to go to IUSY events and get trashed and sleep with foreign career-oriented social democrats.)
41. Well that sounds a worthy cause. But as your attorney, I'd advise against getting trashed and sleeping with delegates from the DPRK. I'd also advise voting against this nutter.
Maybe he's playing along with the regime so he can make another weird subversive documentary.
Hell, to be honest, at the moment if I was giving advice I'd be advising against getting trashed with the delegates from the French Socialists!
(Mind you, not that long ago, we had an wee problem with our (male) whip after a night on the town ended up with a (male) first year uni student fleeing the house of the deputy leader (where the whip flatted) naked at three in the morning & going to the police. So really, we probably shouldn't be throwing stones.)
Whips are to some peoples' taste and not others. There are web sites and clubs.
I hope he's no longer in post.
Is this basically a student government position? Because student government could really use a bit more Juche.
"We shall make glorious people's repairs to the fourth floor vending machines, partisans!"