Bad hand, naughty hand!

From a (slightly edited) memo recently circulated by a manager in our college.


Dear all, could you let your staff know that **** ****** is on leave this week and that **** **** will be off for a couple of days at least as she has badly scolded her hand.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 5

I have two Spanish editions, one is a full text translation but uses the classic Tenniel illustrations. The other is altogether curiouser. It contains an extremely abridged version of the story with some very jolly cartoon like illustrations for younger children. It also contains a lot of children's activities: costume making, card making,collages, papercrafts and so on. For anyone who reads Spanish and wants it the details are "Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas" published by Paramon,1997. ISBN 84-342-2131-4.

The illustrator is Lluis Filella and here he shows Alice arriving at the bottom of her long fall and landing on a conveniently placed pile of leaves.

The perils of stereotyping

I was watching an item on television this morning about the London School of Economics' decision to stage a beauty pageant. In the studio there were two guests, both students of the college. One was one of the contestants, the other was a students' union representative opposed to the pageant. Both put their points of view clearly and articulately as you would expect from LSE students. I have no comment to make on whether or not beauty pageants are a good thing or whether or not they demean women in general and the contestants in particular, but I do like to see pomposity punctured. The anti student had made a number of points but then finished off by suggesting that one problem was that they create a western ideal of beauty and exclude people from other cultures.

"I haven't seen any Moslem women entering it," she said.

You can see what's coming can't you? The contestant, a pretty Asian girl, immediately responded with "Excuse me, I am a Moslem."

I do have some sympathy for her rather deflated opponent as, as a teacher of overseas students, I have in the past occasionally been guilty of assuming students either were or were not Moslem or Christian or whatever based on nothing more than their country of origin and their general appearance and attitudes. It's an easy trap to fall into but I think if I were going to fall into it, I'd rather it wasn't on national television.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 4

I often buy editions of Alice that are in languages that I cannot read. Frequently these editions use well know illustrations from British or American editions and just translate the text. Sometimes they use home-grown talent. It can be quite hard to find the names of the illustrators if everything on the cover is, say, in Japanese and the help of a native speaker needs to be sought.
The Russian edition that I have is, judging from the artist's name, one of the ones that uses Russian talent. He's called Boris Pushkarev, information obtained from the publisher when I bought it. Beyond that I can find nothing and again information about the artist would be greatly appreciated if anybody has any.

What I can say is that the illustrations are quirky and colourful and that I really like them. This one follows on from the previous one. Alice, crawling down the rabbit hole, suddenly finds herself falling vertically down a tunnel lined with all kinds of peculiar things.