Professor Daly and Professor Mutalib

I'm sorry my last post was boring. I suppose writing about how little there is to do isn't a good subject. I guess it was just a product of the Sunday blues - you know, work to do, school tomorrow, don't stay up late, that sort of thing. Monday has come, and I have a lot to do. You know how that is too.

I'm currently registered for three classes: Politics of Heritage, Eastern Political Thought, and Complexity. The problems are that the Complexity class is only offered second term (why did they enroll me in it then??) and that my request for four economics courses is still "pending." I submitted the request last Tuesday. I just talked to the department and they don't seem too concerned - and if they're not, then I suppose I have no reason to be. NUS has more leeway to get students registered for classes than U of O because they have an 18 week term instead of a 10 week term. Already I like the 18 week term more.

My class "Politics of Heritage" is taught by a research anthropologist/archeologist who was just converted this term to teaching. So he knows even less than I do. The lecture for that class is Monday at 10am - he emailed out the reading assignment the same Monday at 1am. He's from New York, and has an annoying habit of referring to "us Americans" and "the American students." He also uses America a lot in his lectures. Today we talked about how landscapes can have functional, symbolic, and evocative roles, after which he showed several example landscapes - we looked at small town America, the American west, and the LA freeway - diversity came from the shots of Western Europe. In his class, it's difficult to escape America. But he's a very smart guy with a lot of field experience, and he wants to take the class on a department-subsidized trip to Cambodia, so I can forgive the American twist.

On the other hand, the professor of my Eastern Political Thought class is very qualified. He is the department head and has been teaching for 30 years at many distinguished universities. The first half of the class looks at Islamic political thought, then later we look at Hindu political thought. Because the term is so long here, the time we spend on each is about equivalent to one U of O term. I think I can learn a lot from this class, even thought it will be less exciting than the Heritage class.

It's rained here every day for the past week. It rains in the morning - sometime before noon - and then clears up for the afternoon. The weather is very manageable because the rain cools everything down and drops the humidity. Today it was probably only 70 in the shade. Many of the rooms are so air conditioned ("air-con'd") that I get cold in jeans and a t-shirt.

Here's the picture for the day:

I found this in a junk/antique shop in Chinatown. It's a light and generator for an old bike - I think it's the same one that came with the Jaguar. The light had the two bulbs that we couldn't figure out how they worked and it looked all wired together. I didn't buy it though...I needed money to spend on the shirt.