RAG Week continues

I actually skived off my 9 o'clock lecture this morning, though I did have a bit of an excuse in that I was still feeling ill. I should probably have gone though. Instead I slept till 9.30 and then read another of the papers that were going to be presented today in bed. I'd originally wanted to help with the T-shirts again in the morning but would have had to not read one or both of the remaining papers if I had. I started the second paper in the bus on the way in and finished it over lunch in the Quad. Luckily I got through it in time to be only five minutes late to a protest I'd wanted to join, against the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The protest lasted half an hour, until the UGM, which this week was just entertainment for me- although there were a couple of motions I thought were good it was unlikely they would fall and anyway they were about wider issues in the world and thus although I supported them would probably not have that much impact (they mostly involved getting SU officials to write letters expressing disapproval of for example ASDA's use of sweatshops) by themselves (though possibly if every SU in the country passed a similar motion...) and therefore it didn't seem to matter too much if they didn't pass.

The feature of the UGM this week was the Director coming to speak to us. It seems that he has agreed to a wage for the cleaners that's higher enough for the Living Wage campaign to consider it good progress- they presented him with a silver broom (someone left R's lovely Golden Mop at home) rather than the bag of rubbish which they would have given him if they had thought he wasn't doing enough. He then made his speech, which wasn't that interesting, though I took issue with the part where he was implying the SU were unrealistic idealists for asking for a living wage for cleaners, higher pay for academics and more money for the SU while simultaneously opposing tuition (and top-up) fees which he said were necessary to pay for all that. I was sure someone had said once that LSE had a massive surplus last year, but didn't have the figures or the first hand evidence to challenge him about it when they took questions.

As we went into the UGM there were RAG donation buckets on the doors and collecting continued inside: the Director had agreed to match the collection with £100 donation of his own if we raised £100, and also to sing a song. We managed to get that much, and the song was quite entertaining though a little questionable in taste as it consisted of humourously insulting Scots, Irish and Welsh; it wasn't one I'd heard before and I wonder if maybe he'd written the words: if not he must have altered them because there was a reference to the Irishman as owning an oil corporation and that being why we 'gave him the bird', which of course was about Sutherland.

After the UGM we had Surveys and Experiment Design, which was good as always (and I managed to make a comment about a possible explaination for the findings of one of the papers, the reasons behind which the authors hadn't discussed, which the lecturer thought was an interesting idea that hadn't occurred to him). I then went to watch RAG Reels: eight short films made by LSE students in a competition organised for RAG Week by LooSE TV, on the theme 'A Helping Hand': as well as on the internet and in the Quad, and in a special screening at the finale at 6 this evening, these have been playing on a TV on Houghton St, and there are buckets on a table in front, one for each film, so you can vote for the one you like best by donating. I'd been meaning to see them since Tuesday, and finally made time. Some of the films were pretty bizarre, and a couple were hampered by the dialogue being pretty much inaudible when played on busy Houghton St, but most of them made inventive use of LSE as a location, and some were very good quality. Sadly the one with perhaps the most worthwhile concept, talking to a homeless man, turned out not to have anything very interesting to say and I ended up voting for two which while certainly bizarre were entertaining and well shot.

Later today: I'm just about to go off to a People and Planet meeting, and then I'm going to meet Ginger who's coming to stay the night- we have an evening of wine and DVDs planned!