Tin Drummer is Minor League Genius, Major League Twat*

Well here are the scores at 12 March 2009:

Maths A Level Module Pure Core 1: 3% - 97%: TD

Maths A Level Module Statistics 1: 14% - 86%: TD

Well I guess I have outwitted the maths A Level papers by massive margins and I am currently (by 1.5%) on course for an A* in the full A Level.

To my mind this is *extremely* cool and I am well chuffed.

If this makes me an extremist then so be it.



*One has to make any genuine boast appear ironic, doesn't one, or one will seem to be, er, unseemly. After all, this is Britain. Britain.

You Who Know All The Arn-sers

Well, goodbye Mrs S:

You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -

You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.

Goodbye Mrs S.

You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.

Goodbye Mrs S.

You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.

You really did have all the answers, for a while.

If life is subtraction, you are the difference.

And the difference is?

A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.

Goodbye Mrs S.

TD Rants about Education

Over at t'other place. Not quite sure it makes sense, but then I was a bit pissed when I wrote it. I think the main thrust - a bizarre emphasis on a wholly unnatural and often inappropriate concept of understanding in mathematics teaching - holds, mind.

Maths Is a Piece of Piss

I say this only because i am a vaguely competent AS Level Maths student whose tutor thinks he is doing really well. I say it also only because I am a braggart who has had little to brag about in recent years and so it gives him immense pleasure to complete the square.

Unfortunately I don't see myself as being a completed square but merely as a weird polynomial with a constant of -42. Or it might be -94. I think that my curves, which are unnatural and unattractive, must be governed by a strange combination of powers of x, where x more or less equals "Stella & crisps". Indeed I am P(Stella) for all possible values of Stella.

You don't want to know my remainder, you really don't. Probably I am (x+Stella)(x+crisps)(x+whisky)(2x+5Stella) or something like that.

I guess I don't factorise.

TD Completes MPC1

Well I may well be a dickhead, a twat, an idiot, an arse and as bald as a coot who's had all his feathers shaved off, but I have finally finished the first module of A Level Maths & Stats.

I don't know where I stand on the dumbing down debate; all I can say is that in 1994 I did not have a fucking clue and today I do have a clue. I just don't get it, is all.

That must mean standards are slipping.*


* As my wonderful late uncle said when I told him I had been accepted by Oxford. We don't really do self-esteem in our family.


By the way the number of WRONG ANSWERS in the HEINEMANN ADVANCING MATHS FOR AQA C1 AND C2 book is truly OUTRAGEOUS. And it is not just me who says this, but my official tutor, and my unofficial tutor, with whom I share most Tuesday lunchbreaks.

Twats. Can't you even proofread? Jesus, I am a Catholic and even I can proofread.

Learning a New Vocabulary

The vocabulary of being single has always fascinated me: from a distance of course. I have always enjoyed watching people flirt, snog and pair off (I'm _not_ saying that i am obsessed with porn, by the way) - but I have never had a clue how to do it myself. Now I find myself again at the point at which I need to understand this grammar, this linguistics - but haven't a clue.

For example.

Today on a course I meet a very nice woman, who wears no jewellery. In my pisspoor vocab banks I assume this means something. Accordingly I flirt with her, laugh and enjoy her company: she seems to like me, and asks about other stuff about me. Later our eyes meet across the crowded room, three times (c. star struck lovers of various kinds) - and afterwards, her first two words?

"My" and, appallingly, shockingly, "boyfriend."

Fucking hell. I see no way I could have predicted this, unless I was reading the grammar entirely mistakenly; unless I was giving wholly wrong values for x. So what was the problem? Was the equation quadratic, instead of linear? Did I screw up the manipulation of negative numbers?

What had she been saying, and how? Had she, indeed, been saying anything at all?

I vaguely remember all this from the 24 years before - and now I find myself exactly where I was then. What are people saying and what does it mean when they touch you, or doesn't mean, or would mean if you wanted it to mean, or might mean if you were also thinking that it meant, or could mean if you made it mean that?

I am told, by certain of my friends, that "men" apparently do, regularly, seduce "women" (I am told that there are various other permutations but I have no idea about these at all): how do they do it? What do they have to be to do it?

If we took x as being "a man, of variously unattractive appearance" and y as being "a woman, of uncertain, even irrelevant appearance" then how do we make x=y?

As I see it, it works something like this:

(x+k)(x+m)=y

where k=appropriate conversation
and m=appropriate twinkles in eyes.

But if I reckon it correctly, this gives

x2 + kx + xm + km = y

which is fair enough, except that I simply cannot provide km. And as for x2, that is just bloody awful.

If you suggested that the equation needed a further variable, ie p, where p="looks"*, then it might look something like this:

p(x+k)(x+m) =y

which I simply cannot provide at all, I am afraid. Ie - the equation holds true for x=0 and only x=0.


*=and where "looks" are defined as: not being a slob, not being bald, not being short, not being a bit boss-eyed, not having sloping shoulders and not walking funny.

I started this pile of old horseshit by talking about grammar and ended with equations. This reflects my utter disenchantment with the eternally ambivalent world of the humanities, and my wish that I was good at something real, something either true or not true, ie maths.

Fuck me I need a drink. But it's late and I've got work tomorrow. Damn. Piss and wind. Bollocks.