(no subject)

I am feeling so old.

It's Orientation week.

And I've just discovered that "mature" age students are aged 23 and above.

I feel *so* old. I finished high school before most of these first years started preps *sigh*.

Monash's O-week is very different to how I remember Melbourne's being. Much less alcohol, much more emphasis on departmental 'academic' activities. Like enrolling for tutes and meeting lecturers and things.

I went to lots of departmental activities during my O-week at Melbourne, especially the ones involving alcohol. Some of them were even for departments I was studying in. I also went to a lot of non-departmental activities, mostly involving pubs and occasionally involving crawls. Some of these (again) were even organised by societies of faculties I was studying with.

At least today there was the Clubs and Societies doing things, and it started to look vaguely like what I think O-weeks should look like rather than being a mostly deserted campus with groups of confused looking students wandering around helplessly looking for lecture theatre S4.

I had part one of the mouse course yesterday, and that made me feel ancient. The majority of people there are either just starting Honours (ages 21-22) or just starting PhDs (22-23). Some of them talked throughout all the lectures. I couldn't hear. I was the nerdy old person sitting up the front because they'd forgotten their glasses and couldn't see the slides otherwise (forget the overheads, I couldn't even tell if there was anything up there without glasses on) complaining about the noise because I can't focus on the lecturer's voice with the background murmur.

Mice. Bleh. Rats. Bleh. Rabbits. Bleh. Sheep look more interesting, but I don't think I'll be working with them. (Hopefully of course we'll employ an animal tech before the plants need to be started and I won't work with them at all.)

Bleh.

Pilgerism

Last weekend we went to the Melbourne Museum.

Inside, there was an exhibition of photos put together by John Pilger, with captions from him.

Most of them were interesting, in a disturbing kind of way.

Some were funny.

Some - particularly the ones out of Cambodia in the late 1980s - made you want to weep.

But then we got to the "Vietnam 1968" bit of the exhibition and discovered that, according to John Pilger at least, "Vietnam had no drug problems until the arrival of the US forces" and "Most Vietnamese fighting in the Tet Offensive were from South Vietnam" and "Most Vietnamese - both North and South - welcomed Ho Chi Minh as a saviour".

My favourite though was a picture of South Vietnamese soldiers in a "drug treatment camp". Obviously welcoming their saviour. With open arms. For several years. Under compulsion.

Hm.

After that, of course, we tended to take all information given in the captions with a rather large grain of salt. Occasionally we ignored the captions altogether and just looked at the photos.
But in order to appreciate news photos you need the information of who, what, where, when, why.

The photo of the child running from napalm in Vietnam can be taken alone, but is more powerful if you know what she's running from (bushfire? earthquake? village fire?) and the context in which the shot was taken.

Which is probably why I got so annoyed with Pilger.