Dr Naomi Scott

Remember guys, @pcsunion.bsky.social staff at the BL are on strike for the next two weeks. Please don't cross the picket line to go to reading rooms, attend exhibitions or anything else. They've endured so much on low pay since the cyberattack in 2023 and the least we can do is have their backs now.

Trying to decipher the second word (after ἔπαινος) of the chapter title scribbled at the bottom of this page and srsly I hope he’s happy in hell.

A completely illegible Greek manuscript

I have *feelings* about the scribe who wrote Parisianus Grec. 2646. None of them good.

Probably not, since it’s a sort of encyclopaedia of everything! ‘Not my niche I’ll leave it to someone who knows more than me’ is not Pollux’s vibe 😂

The response of UK universities to this is, almost universally, to say "Tch, what can you do?"

Or in some cases, to very overtly decide that the thing to do is join in...

(Rhetorical question obvs, I’m from a family of Jewish communist immigrants, we’ll all be on the first plane out under a Lam regime)

Today I found myself surprised at how little Pollux has to say about the weather. Surprisingly little weather-content in the Onomasticon tbh. Do you think my feelings that there should be More Words For Rain makes me English enough for the Tories not to deport me as a threat to cultural coherence? 🤔

there is an æsthetics in all things

Pretty certain everyone involved (myself included) would be deported by Katie Lam.

To counter the right wing hysteria about London as some kind of dystopian crime hellscape, today on my rush hour tube train someone noticed my bag was open and passed the message up the carriage till it reached me. I love London fuck the Tories and their bananas nonsense about my city.

It is truly shocking that this so called growth government wants to shrink one of the country’s most successful sectors. Except it’s not because I have ceased to be surprised by the total failure (moral, strategic, ideological, bureaucratic… just in all the categories) of this utter shower of a govt

I am reading the Labour Education whitepaper and it is absolutely awful on universities. It's going to take a "10-minute read" of an article to set out why. But the "vision" set out in it for HE is frankly horrendous, and is remarkably anti-growth for a government so obsessed with it.

You cannot have a ‘university’ that isn’t wide-ranging and generalist. The whole point of a university is exactly that.

How does Bridget Phillipson expect us to deliver “the world-class education students expect if they are going to charge the maximum tuition fee” if we are not supported and funded to do the world-class research that backs up and advances that teaching, and which UK academics are also know for? #UKHE

1 Nurse: It’s become a real problem in this area 2 Nurse: We’ve seen the whole community lost to addiction 3 Show a building sign posted: Westminster ‘X’ Addiction Clinic With various Westminster people or looking at their phones outside it Nurse: Ministers, Spads, Researchers… 4 Nurse: Most mornings we’ll get a call about someone acting strangely [Nurse on phone taking a call] Ok - we’ll be right over 5 Nurse: We just have a gentle chat [Nurses approach a minister –Robert Jenrick? - standing in the Palace of Westminster Minister: I understand your concerns… 6 Nurse: Are you OK love? Minister: Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters 7 Nurse: That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian [Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters] Nurse 2: Give us your phone, love 8 Nurse: At the clinic we put them in a Grass-Touching Pod, with a real voter to talk to [We see them back at the clinic, holding the minister's head and pushing him into a glass isolation booth with a grass floor. And it is a baffled looking woman, on a chair, ready to talk to him.] 9 Minister: YOU MUST BE WORRIED ABOUT THE COMING CIVIL WAR [woman looks baffled] 10 woman: I just want a bus service Minister: LOOK AT MY FLAG [produces a St George's flag] [ends]

#Mood

I mentioned to an academic friend that I’d just come out of a committee meeting and she asked me if it’s a ‘having feelings’ committee or a ‘doing paperwork’ committee, and truly this is the greatest taxonomy of university administrative life I’ve ever heard, 10/10 no notes.

Yeah I know but I’m such a creature of habit I am basically going to live and die in My Seat 😬😂

I have a sneaking suspicion this is one of those things where the default body planned for is male! I (below average height woman) have to stand up to activate the sensor, whereas when there are taller people in here (eg average height men) their seated movements are high enough to set it off…..

Honestly though I suspect it’s just another of those small ways in which the people who design the space of universities don’t really understand the work that goes on in that space. (See also: shared offices).

Can I start some kind of petition to outlaw motion sensor lights in libraries? This is literally the place I come to sit still for hours on end. Maybe it’s a ploy to force scholars to get up and stretch every 30 minutes?

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Two pumpkins, one orange and very large, one a little smaller & mottled green and yellow, sit atop a baking tray, tops sliced off and placed as lids, ready for the oven.

<Insert your own seasonal Seneca joke here>

Aristophanes would have *thoughts* just saying

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

“Critical edition by Obbink”

This is all extremely cool THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

esp. given that the classical texts he cites would largely default to aor. as the standard inf. form! But honestly given I’m supposed to be writing about Pollux’s reception of Classical literature I 100% cannot spend weeks and weeks thinking about this 😬

I mean in lots of ways Pollux isn’t really that normative as an ‘atticist’ (but is he?) lexicographer! But then no one is ever normative once you start looking at them closely enough 😂 I’m very intrigued by his apparent preference for pres. over aor. inf. but…

This is brilliant thank you so so much!

And I’ll look up your work first thing on Monday of course!!