It's Personal

---

To get into university, I need a write a "personal profile" - a description of myself that tells the admissions officer why I deserve a place on the course. This is a little odd, because all I actually need is:

(1) Qualifications that show I'm probably capable of grasping the subject matter. In this case, that's a degree in an unrelated subject. Why a degree in art (for which I have no ability at all) should prove I'm competent to study linguistics, I'm not sure, but there you go.

(2) The ability to speak and understand English. Though this criterion is, in my experience of academia, only applied to those who speak English as their native language, and waived for those who speak it as a poor second tongue.

This isn't Political-Correctness-Gone-Mad^(TM), it's business - overseas students pay up to three times as much as British nationals to sit in the same classrooms.

(3) Which brings us to the most important requirement, the ability to pay the course fees. Well, actually it's the ability to pay 25% of them before starting the course - in effect an entrance fee. I can delay the other 75%, but don't get awarded the degree until it's all paid.

Anyway, I do need to fill in a personal profile. It doesn't need to be accurate, and I doubt whether anyone will read it, but it's there.

I also need to find two "referees" - people prepared to write a paragraph or two, declaring that I'm fit to do the course. These statements also don't need to be accurate, and I doubt anyone will read them, but they need to exist. Presumably they prove that I know at least two literate people.

In short: To get into university, I need only money and a small amount of paperwork, the function of which is to pretend it isn't just about the money.

---

I've got four computers in my bedroom tonight.

One I spent the whole weekend repairing - I'd literally just got it to work when the internal power supply blew out. A new one could be a cheap as GBP5...if 150 Watt supplies hadn't ceased production five years ago.

One is an elderly 450MHz machine that's built like a battleship and correspondingly heavy. I de-mothballed it to serve as a temporary replacement for the one that blew up - until such time as someone has a measly GBP100 to spare for a shiny new one.

One is a 3GHz single-core affair, souped up with fancy sound and graphics cards, to be used for video editing and music. or it would be if it didn't show the blue screen of death every five minutes.

And then there's this here laptop, with semi-functional keyboard and intermittent wireless connection.

So, like Richard Moby Melville wrote, "Everything is Wrong". Though I think he had the global economic infrastructure in mind.

I thought of a word to describe someone who surrounds themselves with dysfunctional technology: Klapped-out-omaniac.

---

In three days I stand on a stage and sing - after three well regarded bands have already played, and to a crowd (well, audience) who will be quite drunk by then. Nervous, me? No!

At least I have a set worked out:

World U Want - My techno-ed up version of a trashy Devo song, rewritten to appeal to an audience of environmental campaigners.

Riverrun - A rap I wrote six years ago, just to see if I could write something where every line was a pop culture quotation - a song with, in a sense, absolutely nothing original in it. It may be slightly worrying that I've since written several such songs.

Army Dreamers - The best of my Kate Bush covers. And so I'm told the only one recognisable as one of her songs.

Friends of the Earth - Originally by Kamakura, it seemed appropriate.

Heretic - A series of biblical stories, shoehorned into rhyming trochaic tetrameter. Or "hip hop", if you prefer.

Half a Stone - Written for Songfight, rejigged as a big bombastic piece of mindless techno-rave that will hopefully constitute a "big finish".

Oh yes. In a moment of madness I offered to record all the sets. The organisers can't see how providing bands with recordings of their performance is a way of keeping them friendly. From which I cunningly deduce that they've never been in bands themselves.

---