holiday shopping

Tomorrow, me & O are off to pick up C, then on to NE Scotland for a half term post exam holiday. I have been working on holiday preparations, today I went into Waterstones for an OS map and emerged with:

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski
A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Putin by Robert Service
- I've read a bit about Russia, including Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum (fascinating but harrowing) and I've read Imperium before but I can't find my copy (Ryszard Kapuscinski is one of my favourite writers); currently I'm working my way through Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky
- hurrah hurrah for a new V.I. Warshawski novel

OS Map of our holiday area
- it is very strange going to Abroad and finding out they don't have a national ordnance survey and no official national OS maps.

Top Trumps Sharks
the Puffin Monster Joke Book
- Hopefully these will keep O amused for part of the long car drives ahead (we also have a travel Guess Who? set yay). He has just discovered Top Trumps at his mate's house and came back raving about. I used to love Top Trumps too.

Now the only things I need (which I will hopefully be able to get when we get there) are a book of local walks and a book about the local geology.

I am told some people think you have to buy clothes and have your hair done and stuff in preparation for holidays but that is just wrong. The most important thing is to make sure your holiday reading is sorted. Then your holiday listening. Everything else takes care of itself.

getting angry

Now my exam is out of the way¹ I can lift my head back out of my books and look around. And risk getting angry about stuff I read in the papers. Like all this cr@p about veils and crosses. Obviously as a card-carrying atheist I think no-one should get themselves up in a religious stylee. However to focus the debate so narrowly is to entirely miss the big picture. Only the tiniest fraction of British Muslim women wear the veil; if the 'Muslim community' is isolated from the 'main stream', lets think a tiny bit about who is isolating whom? Who is it who moves out when Asian people move into an area? Who is it who don't want to send their kids to schools with significant numbers of non-white pupils? White people that's who. And while we're at it, who's radicalising who? All this cr@p in the papers lately is making me angry as feck and I'm a white British atheist. If I was remotely of the Islamic persuasion I would, these days, only go out wearing a full veil and one of these t-shirts and carrying a copy of The Chemistry Of Explosives under my arm.

Oh and don't get me started on Madonna ...






1. Trying not to think about it now, too late to worry about what I wrote, gotta wait 2 months for the results waaaahaaaaahhhaaaaahahahahahahah

questions questions

Have I had my blood test results? Yesh and both glucose and cholesterol were normal. Which is thanks entirely to a fluke of my excellent genetic inheritance - someome with my appalling diet thoroughly deserves diabetes and heart disease.

How long have I been belly dancing? I started going about two and a half years ago, becuase I needed to do some weight-bearing excercise and it beats the cr@p out of aerobics classes.



How is the rate of an S_N1 reaction affected by (i)the nucleophilicity of the nucleophile, and (ii)the structure of the substrate? waah I dunno help I have an exam on this stuff in less than one week




Diet what diet?