Lazy sow

This weekend was spectacularly unproductive. I worked some on my proposal – but so little! I’m de-motivated until I hear from the ex-advisor, which I’d better soon because last week he did an interview series on Canada which I know full well was informed by my thesis. Mostly I slept because the heat has been turning my head. I don’t like excessive heat – it was actually pleasant to me when I opened the roof door today and found crappy cool rain. My cat was relieved too. She, when it’s hot, loves to be brushed down with water. I thought cats hated water, but there you go. It makes her coat look a treat.

And I kept reading the Economy of Cities. Jane Jacobs has a great style: you can tell someone told her to explain her idea so that the dumbest person reading could understand (which is probably me, during a heatwave), and she’ll introduce paragraphs with sentences like “Here is another example of what I mean, included because I like it.” What she liked, in that case, was how the industry of fire-carrying probably spawned the industry of pottery. Containers for holding fire were often clay-lined, and when they were old enough and the rushes binding them up for carrying fell off, the fired clay would be pretty from the rush-prints.

It isn’t academic writing because of all the visible personal enthusiasm and involvement in her own ideas, but has a lovely academic clarity. I’d love to write like Jane Jacobs. I wouldn’t mind thinking like her, either. She’s full of pertinent ideas and evaluations that don’t come off as too loaded or bandwagon-y. There was just a great bit where she lay into Adam Smith and Karl Marx in the same sentence for relying too much on accepted wisdoms instead of truths. So nice! So lateral! I hope when I get old and wandering in my mind, I can still wander laterally.

I hate being at work today. Our Montréal contact is an irredeemable stupid lazy jerk of a bitch. In September a good quarter of my insistence on a healthy raise will be having had to work with her. Anyways, to cheer me (and you if necessary) up, here's the bassist from Megababe, the first act we saw during NXNE. If you look at the picture full size, you can see an image of her in the view screen of one of the legion of creepy filming fanboys. YECH. So don't look at it full size.

Also, when I saw this, I laughed out loud - the milking bit especially. I know it looks good, but RUN ladies, RUN! Those beautiful, milk-fed lickable exteriors, calm demeanours and fuckable smiles hide depths of madness that makes football hooliganism look like a mild-mannered discussion of whether Tom Selleck's political views are Libertarian or Conservative. But have I downloaded the spot? Yes. Yes, I have.