The Capacious Pantaloons

Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate, stored his whole inventory in his mighty pantaloons. They were capacious as well as stylish, and no-one ever questioned it. Indeed, once he stored a monkey and a mechanical banana picker in that manner and lived to tell the tale! Hang on, was the mechanical banana picker a 'Star Trek' reference? Only personally understood now decades later? 'Monkey Island' surely does have more facets than I thought.

It's nice to think about 'Monkey Island', a very restful thing, especially after an interview experience. I can't imagine ever being happy with such an experience, but at least this last was an improvement. The banana picker was left at home, and no-one noted the continuity contradiction in my talk, so it went off well. Even the question I blanked and couldn't answer in the interview didn't feel so bad, although it was probably vital in retrospect. It was about outreach, which is increasingly important to universities now, and vitally so. We need more people in Sciences especially, and exciting them in greater numbers and earlier is one of the most important things we can do. Mathematics is the key to practically everything that will assail us as a species in the near future.

Now, with the interview done, and holiday extracts completed, it feels like the whole holiday disruption is over and the world is spinning back up to speed. I suspect that other people don't get affected for this long, even with complicating interviews and being stranded in the wilds of the country. Normal is what is needed now, 'Sapphire And Steel' notwithstanding. Oh, 'Sapphire And Steel', the strangest series that just landed on my doormat. The first episode was so unusual that it has immediately jumped up to the top of my queue of things to watch urgently. It is fascinating, especially in tandem with 'A Connecticut Yankee In New York', which has finally broken to the top of the reading pile. Oh, that reading pile, that just won't shrink! (Actually there are two reading piles, one fiction and one non-fiction, and things are finally moving in both after a long time of stagnation. The four volume 'Journey to the West' is like to be there a long time yet, though!)

Yes, it's all settling down and now my worry is that it settling down while being unemployed is perhaps not the best of things. Any ambivalence about the nature of work and the job does very quickly get subverted by needing money to live and buy things like new books. Oh, how nice it would be to have a second living author to read! I need more books for these pantaloons! Oh, these are definitely the worries of someone with too little to do. It might be time to write another story...

O.