Budapest, Saturday afternoon. Bodyworlds, which exams prevented me from seeing in London, has spawned copycats, such as Bodies. I imagine the original to be a lot more artistic and somehow more neatly executed, but maybe they just have better lighting and more expensive photographers doing their promotional stuff.

But it was wicked to see all the muscley bits and a diaphragm, an omentum and so on. And foetuses in jars at a load of gestative stages (digestation = twins?), which look shockingly like they might grow up to be humans... Arteries are much thinner than I had thought. Through Galen's broken foot I came across Jonathan Monks' uncanny ability to suggest what is wrong with you and how to fix yourself: pain in the calf? Press here in the armpit and see how that feels, etc. Then you look at these long nerves and multilapping muscles and begin to see how it all might work.

When the proud fennel citadel finally weakens and falls:

Knees and a nose, a nose and knees

Bodies tells us that there are arteries not far behind.

And I suppose I should also feature the proud fennel citadel in its glory days, but I don't seem to have that picture here sad face

Currently reading: Antal Szerb's short story about a king, Oliver VII. I like his style. I understand that none of the several people (minimum) to whom I recommended The Pendragon Legend has dropped by number 88 to pick it up. What a waste! Still, it will sit and wait, books are nice like that. Not like blogs.

audiences

(because i'm feeling lazy, perhaps, and becuase i reckon people don't read comments on several day old posts, this was a comment responding to this on an earlier post)

Goosey, I find your example very odd - what's strange about fans at a gig raising their arms and cheering for the band on stage? I'm well up for making people consider their actions in a different light, martian's-eye views and all. (Although it seems a little risky when those in question aren't just cheering but are pushing you toward stardom!) When at rallies, I feel a bit uncomfortable looking at people chant about whatever they chant about. Or rather, the most striking aspect is always the similarity between war-stopping or World Bank bashing protests and rallies on other, mutually exclusive activities, NF or whatever, football chants, the bits in church services where everyone mumbles the same thing. They all have something sinister and disappointing about them. In true bio-structuralist form(!), I guess it says that people and social organisms are very similar undearneath, only distinguished by the window-dressing of allegiances or agendas.

Audiences are oppressive, and they have codes of behaviour. Seeing Wynton Marsalis at the Royal Albert Hall was (great, but also) very frustrating: an RAH audience Does Not move. At all. the very occasional nodding head, and goodness knows how many tensed up buttocks and silenced hips dying to show that they can hear the music.

The time I most hated audiences was at the end of "Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder", a dance piece by Yasmeen Godder. She is an Israeli choreographer and this piece had a major theme of the suffereing and humiliation of life with checkpoints. Of course it was much deeper than that, with a lot of references to pain within individual relatinoships as well as the larger scale, and all delivered with maybe the most precise, smooth dancing I have ever seen. In short, both form and content were captivating and moving. It ended with a woman crying-scraming very loud and hysterically with her boyfriend dying in her arms. A very strong climax, the stage dark apart from the two of them, all other dancers gone - it was 'over', except that she was continuing this incredible grief. In that moment, there was no wronger audience reaction than to start clapping and whistling. We should have all left quietly, or what. But they clapped and cheered and I couldn't fathom that we had just spent an hour watching the same thing. Maybe I'm snobbishly projecting, but pretty much everyone else had missed the point.

Green blues

Our office received a 'Green office award' from the UNDP administrator some time, last year or this. I just did a study on the tap in the bathroom near my office. This tap is left running, as the only way to turn it off is to do yourself an injury. Once I managed to get it down to maybe two drips a second, causing greater physical pain than the soul-pain of leaving it running. The people who mostly use that bathroom are the security guards and the woman who mans reception, and me. It isn't laziness, it's simply unreasonable to expect anyone to turn that tap off. I mentioned it to the building manager several weeks ago (he of the fridge). Apparently, taps are difficult to replace and expensive. He is pathetic. I wonder whether it was also him who decided the best place for a fire escape is out the back of the stairs...

Anyway, now the Green Office Team (which I guess doesn't include him) knows that we are wasting about 730 litres of water a day, and have agreed to do something about it. In an email.

That's the fuel capacity of a Panzer tank, or (more relevantly?) the average annual drinking-water intake of a Canadian.

Further to Geneva, some photos

On offer at the Red Cross museum, which is an alright museum, but their mazelike layout is a bit effective. At the beginning they have a section about protecting life, with extracts from various ancient cultural-religious texts purporting to support the idea of humanity in warfare. However, at least in the case of the extracts from Sun Tzu and the Hadith, they say 'treat prisoners well, as they will then be more effective slave labour.' This lays the basis for humanitarian law...

Over at the museum of human perfection, they had pretty things to entice the eye.

Even Geneva has panelaky

Public art by the Palace of the Nations

Heaven's Gate

They take their food seriously (it seems, though I didn't eat particularly well).
They even fly-post invitations to cutlery events:

from the cote du rhone

It's all over, and I am back in Pressburg. We stumbled across a horse race this afternoon. Ilona bet on Senita, who came first. My Kragulec came fourth. In no particular order:

Geneva has a big fountain in its lake, which has been running for a hundred something years and which is a very pleasant feature. Like many lovely things, it started life as a mistake.

Attending a technical UN conference was predictably an experience which broadened my mind. Maybe not in ways I would have expected - by far the most attractive aspect was the jolly academic cameraderie of the demographic experts, which maybe bodes well since I will study Demography and Health in the autumn. The subtitle of the Generations and Gender Programme conference was "Towards Policies Based on Better Knowledge", but there was a lot on knowledge and not so much on policy. Their potential to come across as a navel-gazing group with no values was tempered by the impassioned call during the closing session from the very impressive John Hobcraft for the scientific community to remember their role as providing a basis for valuable social policy making; given the large-scale disinterest of the policy community, they could be forgiven for treating the event as a chance merely to talk among themselves, but thankfully this closing comment and that from the UNECE's director or general secretary, following that from the UNFPA representative, suggested that the estrangement of the policy and data aspects of the conference might be addressed in the design of future events.

My presentation went okay. The previous midnight, at home, it went better, but no matter. I learned a great deal in the process (this has to happen in a real forum because I failed to get involved in a debating group at university - word to anyone in the position not to make that mistake), not least that I may fluster myself by trying to respond to the chair's joke in his introduction. But maybe a bit of humour is worth a bit of fluster. In all, the attempt to get policy makers to include young people in developing policy which targets them fell a little foul of the aforementioned lack of interest from the national delegates (although the woman from the Council of Europe was sincerely interested and had some good ideas). Which means if anything happens in the continuing saga of UNFPA's youth policy review, it will probably be led from the international technical support side rather than the national

All the above is academic though, as I am embarking someday soon on a new life as a particle physicist - the proper tour of CERN wasn't even available, but the standing exhibition was enough. The joys of maths and the immensity of scale (large and small), the beauty of the precision of the engineering, the sound of cow-bells clanging in the field opposite Site B. And the distance (measured, of course, in light years) from the frustrations of trying to make social policy. So yes, any day now...

Any suggestions welcome as to how a prospective country director for Amnesty International could propose to spend 4000 euros on a one-year project. It seems rather a little to me...

Photos soon.

At the CERN bus stop

Uncompromisingly stood up; headache moved in to stay.


"Are you a particle physicist?"
"Yes."

And so on - all woes forgotten, headache marginalised for a while, he was even interested in youth policy. The only thing missing was the Higgs boson.

And later, lost on my way in the dark to my host's home, I got a ride in a 2CV. What a way for things to work out.

This was quite amusing, if disappointing in answering its question at 2:58 and in this post and comments.

I was also delighted to remember about Jen's (sadly radical) blog,
which is not so frequently updated but well worth a read, especially if you are too attached to all that gender rubbish you were socialised into.

Hello chickens. I've been a bit absent recently, but here is a little hello. I should currently be teaching in Pov. Bys, but yesterday being a public holiday, there was nobody to pick me up, so instead I am making good use of mild grammatical mistakes to make this interview look more authentic.

Absence has been mostly due to my upcoming presentation at this conference. I am quite excited, not least by going to the Palace des Nations, built for the League of Nations. (No spurious conclusions need be drawn, thanks.) But also nervous - first real presentation ever, of the UNFPA youth policy review process which took me all over Europe last year. But seven minutes is quite a comfy time, and I have a couple of supportive colleagues. Needless to say, I'll be sitting at the 'experts' table.

Apart from ours, the rest of the presentations are from Generations and Gender Project researchers, presenting research from that project. Ours is a 'policy statement' by UNFPA, whatever that means - I think the ultimate purpose is to tell the government people that they don't have to wait for the results of longitudinal studies in order to start responding to their worries.

So if anyone fancies a glass of Swiss milk lemonade next wekk, I'll be around.

This is the report everyone's talking about*
* in Turkey

Good luck to Evan Harris and crew. How's it looking? Question: would it be a good compromise to accept a reduction to 22 weeks of the on-demand limit in return for making abortion properly available on demand and get rid of the doctor-permission nonsense? Early abortion is after all the best way of reducing late...

That's all. That and the observation that in/prior to homo sapiens hardwiring phase, surely individual volition against the group interests was punished by natural selection? From where do we get this imaginative love of freedom?

Two messages from yesterday's bike ride

Ondrejský cintorín

Stromp Gyurláné's grave is whiter than the rest, and newer-looking, perhaps for having spent less time alive, and thus being newer-looking, him- or herself, than the other being laid to rest.

Died the same year as did all hopes that the Great War would be an aberration, as did Laura Marcis-Oehring, eighteen years after her husband - which sounds unfair, and is, but not as you might expect; he first cried when Cardigan fought Nicolas the first, she only when Alexander the second had expired.

They both lost to Bertá, who in a faultless show of gratitude sniffed puberty, understood and left. Once unhearable, better unseen: she got the third-place inscription, despite winning.

the slovak for boris is boris

why i really love wikipedia today. worried your letter will go astray? unsure what's the slovak for sweden? ding! brilliant. took me a minute though - lesson learned: wikipedia first, always.

in other news, new mayor for "a city whose energy conquered the world". his name day is october 14. convincing win. awful speech. bleugh. it's nice, though strangely unfulfilling, being somewhere i feel no responsibility for the state of politics.

punk + tincture = puncture

I give a wrong time, stop a traffic line...

6.40 Wake up; snooze
6.45 X calls from Budapest, having missed the bus to Bratislava for the flight to Rome. Y in flurry of internet action
7.00 Z gets up; breakfast consists of coffee, X's notorious unreliability and a piece of grandma's cherry cake. High point.
7.10 Plan finalised for X's journey, train to Mosonmagyarovar, Y to pick up by car
7.26 Y and Z begin driving to the train station, for my journey to teach these kids English
7.28 Puncture highly evident, car pulled over
7.31 Taxi called to take Z to the station. Jack and handle removed from boot of Renault
7.32 Cousin Y phoned in request for help; Y's foot holds jack while Z jacks
7.34 Jack handle tool/Z's strength woefully inadequate for removing lug nuts
7.37 Heels being kicked, humming
7.40 Taxi arrives too late to be worth it
7.43 Decision that taxi not needed; driver demands waiting fee, Z shouts at driver, Y pays half fee; Y and Z's chances of ever getting home at 3am again reduced by 35%
7.45 Z asks deaf man in parked van for an alternative to his crappy tool. Jesus to the rescue, dressed thus
7.47 Wheel off; at station, train leaves
7.49 Spare tyre on; helpful man's friend arrives, Jesus tool returned in nick of time
7.50 Tory leader David Cameron wants to prove to people that the Tories can make the changes they want to see
7.51 Cousin arrives in vulgar giant BMW with unknown companion in passenger seat
7.53 Cousin departs; punctured tyre back in boot, wits gathered

and all before I am usually even up. Yikes.