Rats and the Ratrace, North Korea and Socialists

[tcpip]

In an amusing case of life imitating art, rodents of unusual size have appeared recently in Cornwall, Iran, Sweden, and Liverpool (with either bigger ones predicted). All this reminds me of Bansky's display at the Natural History Museum, which came with the slogan Our Time Will Come. "You can laugh now ... but one day they may be in charge.". Assisting the process for our new rodent overloards, dropped off an aging (almost 90 in rat years now) Lucky at the vet this morning to have a tumour removed.

In the actual rat-race (which notably and ironically, rats don't participate in), work has been exceedingly good this week. Following the well-received MPI training course, we've received a petition (no less!) from researchers who were sufficiently interested to want an additional workshop to further develop their code. This also follows on some expressions of interest from a radiotherapy group, an international campus in Vietnam, and some bushfire and geospatial people. I've had a paw in each of these activities, and it must be said I'm feeling more positive about the workplace than I have for many months - and this is despite some of the usual hiccups, such one researcher filling a storage disk with their data and bringing down the logins for others users. As imajica_lj put it, "science didn't happen today".

This Saturday, after the LUV meeting on GNOME3, the Isocracy network is holding a meeting at the New International Bookstore on Human Rights and International Relations with an eye-witness guest speaker who is doing his thesis on the effectiveness of various diplomatic maneuvers. In a substantially more democratic and civil version of politics that describes itself as socialist, went to a well-attended a meeting for Labor's Socialist Left on Sunday. There's a vacancy for their policy convenor (which I used to do for the Pledge group for several years) and I've offered my services. They should know that I'll do this job very well, but having some years of not being deeply involved may act against me.

Comments

[iris]

Ah yes, the old 'it's not what you know, it's who you know.' Regardless, best of luck! I hope they accept your offer.

[tcpip]

Oh, they know me alright :)

[ratfan.livejournal.com]

Best of luck to Lucky; I know how nerve racking this is for you as well.

[Re Banksy!] Who says they're not already in charge? Who gets up and goes to work to make money to buy those lovely meal ingredients while some other someones go back to bed?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm usually OK with rodent surgery. It's out of my hands, quite literally.

And yes, the little critters seem to have someone else doing the racing around for them.

[delphipsmith]

ROUSes FTW!! And they didn't even cause the Black Plague, either.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, that is a new one to me. I had oft heard rodent defenders point out that it wasn't the rats, but rather the fleas (and ergo rats minus fleas are fine). But this is the first time I've seen an argument that it wasn't the fleas either, nor even bubonic plague.

However, on the other hand, with a little bit of further research it does seem that the evidence does seem to favour the plague and fleas hypothesis.

I'd like to know what Milan and Cracow did to avoid an outbreak.