There is no team like the best team

[austin_dern]

The Faculty Games, too, seemed like a good idea at first. Something, though, happened at the first day of tennis matches, apparently a disputed referee call; and since then my e-mail has exploded in suggestions about what to do about it, how to reschedule events, and how to modify the rules so that ... I don't know what problem, exactly, is supposed to be avoided but it seems to have something to do with the rules letting people play several matches -- intended to help smaller departments put together a team -- being used to let larger teams play only the strong players.

So far, near as I can figure (everything's written in Middling Bureaucratic, so I could decipher it, if my interest overcame the stopping potential), none of this affects me, but I have the dread fear the rules about teams are going to be applied to my sport. (As the tallest guy in Singapore I'm in charge of basketball.) Given the pace of (inexplicably doubled) e-mails maybe it would have been better to have given certificates to all four teams and not just gold, silver, and bronze certificates to the top three.

Trivia: The Greenwich meridian was made the worldwide standard prime meridian following an international conference in Washington, DC, in 1884. (Previously countries used their own choices -- typically national capitals -- as prime meridians.) Source: Mathematics in Civilization, H L Resnikoff and R O Wells Jr.

Currently Reading: The Green Millennium, Fritz Leiber. I love the notion of telepathic thought-entities living in symbiosis with kitty cats, exchanging feelings of security and peace to pet ``owners'' in trade for good care of the pet bodies. What the cats think of it seems to go unmentioned.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Speaking of the prime meridian, amidst importing all the zoo and travel footage (including the Singapore Zoo, with many lovely and worthwhile raccoons), I also happened upon my visit thereto: it's marked clearly on the ground, alongside a clock displaying UTC to a thousandth of a second. The observatory's exhibits are well worth seeing, too, with artefacts including the winner of a royal challenge to craft an accurate clock suitable for seafaring use, thereby permitting accurate calculation of longitude - a revolutionary device.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The raccoons are still really quite lovably cute, although I got to them yesterday just after the feeding time, so they were mostly licking up a few fragments of fruits left over.

The Greenwich Observatory is one of the places I really do want to get; for some reason my brain found time zones endlessly interesting when I was a kid, and I'm not fully recovered yet. The problem of time and longitude still excites me.

Dear Pen Pal...

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

o/` You'll never believe what happened to me at the baseball game... o/`

Re: Dear Pen Pal...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's hard to believe what happened to me at the baseball game ...