Ireland! Ireland!

All things considered when it comes to rugby there are worse things to be than an Irish rugby fan. There are a number of teams who are far worse than Ireland's. In fact Ireland is considered to have one of the better rugby teams in the world. Yet for a team with such a good reputation, Ireland does not always deliver. Therefore you can imagine my delight when today the Irish rugby team beat Wales to win the Six Nations Grand Slam, their first such victory in 61 years.

Erin go bragh!

University education

One of the things that struck me when I came to study at the University of Toronto was just how many courses the Law Faculty offered. When I compared it to the number of courses on offer at Glasgow, it made Glasgow's offering seem paltry by comparison. Well at the University of Chicago they seem to have even more courses. In fact they have just introduced a new one, "Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates". This is an undergraduate anthropology course which promises to study early modern Caribbean pirates and modern day financial pirates like Bernie Madoff.

Hidden depths

I have seen the Wizard of Oz several times. I would not say that it is one of my favourite films but, hey, it's watchable. I was unaware, however, of the fact that a film is an economic parable. A high school teacher wrote a piece in 1964 which claimed that the Wizard of Oz was a parable about the economic troubles of the USA during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Not everyone agrees with this theory.

No surprise there, eh?

Manipulation

Today I was chatting with a friend who is training to be a medical professional. Her current rotation is psychiatry, and she remarked that students were not allowed to deal with borderline personality disorder cases because they are incredibly manipulative. I also discovered that the borderline cases have a whole team of doctors because they are so tiring.

The National Drink

Today is St Patrick's Day and almost everywhere you go you can see adverts for Guinness. The black stuff is considered Ireland's national drink. It is frequently referred to as a meal in a glass. That phrase has now been proven correct as a man has successfully lived off Guinness for a week. He only consumed between 4 and 10 pints of Guinness, a pint of milk, water, and a vitamin C supplement each day for a week. And he lost weight.

Though personally I could never give up potatoes.

Cleopatra

I am vaguely aware of the details of the story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. She was Egyptian, he was Roman, they met, fell in love, and somewhere along the line (near the end of the relationship I assume) she killed herself. Now some archeologists believe that they have found the tomb and skeleton of her sister, Princess Arsinoe. They are understandably very excited by the find and have announced to the world that she probably had an African mother.

Talk is cheap, paper is expensive

Last year I took an extra course in paleography and I noticed that a lot of the documents that I read had abbreviations. For example Edinburgh was usually rendered Ebr, while William became Wm and so on. Now, however, I have discovered the reason why, paper and ink were expensive. Due to the expense it made sense to sue abbreviations to save space and hence save money.

Much like we do in text messaging. Although I get free texts, so I can type properly if I so chose.