Time for a revolution

I’ve always thought that our way of telling time doesn’t fit our culture very well, particularly the way that a day officially begins at midnight. What sense does that make in a culture where people so often stay up beyond that time? Below is my idea for a better system.

Let the day be divided into four sections: morning (6:00am to midday), afternoon (midday to 6:00pm), evening (6:00pm to midnight) and night (midnight to 6:00am). It seems to me that these definitions are very similar to the way people already use these terms, but under my proposal it would be official.

Let night be known as post-evening and also as pre-morning, so that “post-evening Saturday” is synonymous with “pre-morning Sunday“. This should be thought of as analagous to the fact that in music, “C Sharp” is synonymous with “D Flat“. Thus the six hours from midnight to 6am would belong equally to both the day before and the day after, and during that period you could please yourself how to use the terms “yesterday” and “tomorrow” (just as people do now after midnight, but without the uneasy feeling of being technically incorrect).

Another news update

Enough events have accumulated in Real Life since the last time I wrote about them that it’s worth posting another summary.

Having enjoyed the two classes I did at the WEA last year, I recently booked for three more WEA classes. These are “Singing for Beginners“, “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas“, and “Drawing and Painting in the Botanic Gardens“. Unfortunately the third of these has been cancelled, so I will only be doing the first two.

The “Singing For Beginners” class has been going for two weeks so far (six to go). One of my main reasons for doing these courses is to meet people and hopefully make friends, and indeed I have established private communications with one other member of the class. The “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas” class starts on the 27th of May.

As for my recent kitchen renovation, I have now made a decision about what tiles I would like, so the next step is to make an appointment with the tiler.

My final piece of significant news is that I recently bought my first mobile phone. My parents have been bugging me for ages that I should get one (isn’t that traditionally supposed to happen the other way around?), and I also thought it might come in handy for taxis. I’ve been using it to send SMS messages mostly to my parents, and the phone also has video capacity but I’ve not used it. Getting the phone to connect to my computer via Bluetooth took several trips to the appropriate shops for assistance, but I got there in the end and I’ve chosen some wallpaper and ringtones. (Doesn’t work perfectly, though; an attempted upload fails about 50% of the time.)

Fiction on my bookshelf

I thought I’d write an overview of the works of fiction adorning my bookshelf - not a comprehensive list but a fairly good summary, using enough examples to represent the overall spectrum.

Rocky’s demon

One way to get ideas for things to blog about is to clean out old emails and newsgroup posts. I’ve recently cleaned out some stuff from about a year ago, including my contributions to a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett about Rocky Frisco’s music.

Food and drink in Australian English

In Lynne Murphy’s blog Seperated by a Common Language, she routinely discusses dialectal differences between British and American English. I recently left comments on a number of her posts from 2006 and 2007, in most cases adding an Australian point of view.

I’d like to take up some of the points I raised in those comments about Australian vocabulary, but for the time being I’ll only list the ones pertaining to food and drink. I’ll save some of the others for a sequel.

Weekend in Melbourne

I visited Melbourne for my cousin Laura’s 21st birthday party, which was celebrated on Saturday 3rd May.

My parents and I departed Friday morning by train. My sister couldn’t come with us because she is just starting another elective for her university medical course - this time on Aboriginal health for which she is spending a few weeks in Alice Springs. However, Rebecca did accompany us as far as the station.