Graham Robinson

Colleagues may have noticed yesterday’s publication by the Guardian of league tables for particular disciplines.

Particular congratulations go to Film Studies, who figure at the top of the table for Media, Communications and Librarianship. Southampton appears as third in Modern Languages, behind Oxford and Cambridge. Archaeology (10) and Music (14) also appear in the top twenty for their subject area.

Congratulations to all concerned.

Best

Mike

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Professor Michael Kelly
Head of School

1. Teeth roots are long
2. Dentists should not show you anything covered in blood
3. Local anaesthetic doesn’t last long
4. Neurophen is amazing
5. My mouth hurts

After my dentist trip was cancelled yesterday the drilling out of my upper left wisdom is in 30 minutes.

Not looking forward to it. The one up side of a Wednesday appointment was the 2 days off work, now I get my Saturday spoilt.

If you take the figures here, and presume that every copy was sold at £40, Grand Theft Auto made the UK government £6,482,000 in 5 days.

That’s 926,000 copies of GTA sold in the UK between April 29th and May 3rd times £40 times 0.175 (UK Tax rate).

There are a lot of things to complain about in this world. There are the easy ones like ‘why do dentists charge too much’ and ‘why haven’t I won the lottery yet’, and hard ones like ‘how do I complain that another blog I read is so very wrong without looking like an idiot’. We’ll start easy.

My dentist appointment is tomorrow, I have arranged for 2 days off work with some programming to do while I’m bored. I look forward to eating soup and dribbling out of the side of my mouth.

My entertainment this week has been from Grand Theft Auto 4. There’s only one thing better than playing this game and that’s reading about how much other people hate it. Apparently mothers against drunk drivers were the latest people to complain (an argument that is flawed mainly by the fact that drunk driving either a) gets you killed because you can’t drive straight or b) makes you take a taxi because you learnt quickly from option a)).

Also of interest was that someone got robbed queuing for the game (the person didn’t get the game and neither had played it, it wasn’t even out) and that children might get hold of the game. I don’t see them banning alcohol and cinema, so that argument is mute as far as I’m concerned.

My biggest scientific observation is that psychopaths are likely to buy the game, not that people who buy the game will become psychopaths.

The last thing that has bothered me recently is a blog by Amy’s Friend James.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/6epe8d and http://preview.tinyurl.com/6jj2u4

They are very good people and have strong religious views. Now I’m sure that they can write far better blog posts than I can on the subject of abortion, but lets just say that my opinion is the exact opposite of whatever they write.

I blog to you on behalf of Fr. Frank Pavone and Priests for Life. Fr. Pavone recently posted two videos on You Tube in which he describes and demonstrates the two most common abortion techniques, using the actual instruments of abortion and the words found in medical textbooks and court testimony.

I had the quite unfortunate pleasure of watching an abortian the other day. It was on a Channel 4 documentary that work recorded. It had strong warnings on the program but my job was to cut out all the adverts and put the video on the streaming server. I wasn’t expecting what I saw and I had strong words about warning people.

On the subject, however, I think that what I saw were cells. I also don’t like watching videos of liposuction, appendix removal, heart surgery, etc. All those are where a surgeon cuts away living cells from a human that has consented and has decided, correctly or incorrectly, that this was the road they wanted to go down. Nothing should remove a woman’s right to choose. Nothing.

Well obviously I’ve been playing with the site. Apparently this is a very popular theme but it has a lot of customisable options, making it perfect for me.

I might put my own picture back up or put something Lynmouth-y up to make it look nicer. I’ll decide later.

Got my bill for the dentists today. Of course the first half serves me right for not looking after my teeth as well as I could, but the second half is just blind bad luck.

Filling 1 - £70
Filling 2 - £70
Filling 3 - £50

Subtotal £190

Consultation with dental surgeon bloke - £30
X Ray - £5
Wisdom tooth removal (Surgical) - £250
Healthy-apart-from-the-wisdom-f***ing-it-up - £125

Subtotal £410

Total £600

Some flowers and herbs appearing in our place at the moment. Something cheery to better the mood.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediaguy/archives/date-posted/2008/04/23/