Belly dancing and library orientation

I went to a belly-dancing class today, part of a three-part on-campus series of dance demonstrations/lessons that include the flamenco, belly dance, and tango. Yes, there were a lot of pretty girls there. Fortunately, my badminton-related ass strain has disappeared, so I was ready to shake my booty. It was a lot of fun! I even got to wear a fabric with bells and coins sewn into it and got to shake my ass in front of the whole audience! There was a lot of moving my neck, shoulders, waist, hips, knees, and of course, my buttocks. I'll definitely go to the tango demonstration/lesson next Tuesday. It's too bad I missed flamenco last week; I was getting off a plane at the time.

And yes, I did talk to one of the pretty girls. I asked her if she went to the flamenco lesson the week before, and she rudely said, "no," then continued dancing. I think she misunderstood, thinking that I recognised her from last week and mistaking her for someone else. Oh well, you can't win them all.


I went my third library orientation session in a week. Why didn't I go to these when I was at UBC? Though most functions of the library catalogues are quite user-friendly and straightforward, there are a lot of advanced functions available, as well as some potentially confusing terms. Well, I finally know what a "boolean operator" is, and I learned the important skill of "truncation", or typing "immigra*" in order to search for terms such "immigrants" and "immigration" in one search. This type of course should really be required by UBC. I know such courses exist, but no one knows about them, and even fewer people TAKE them. I've found HKU to be better than UBC at disseminating information. Every HKU student is assigned an email address, and receives 10-20 emails per day announcing events, promotions, seminars, and other announcements. Each such event is usually announced at least three times: the first time a month in advance so that students could mark their calendars, and the second and third times as reminders.

Again, I think such library orientation sessions should be mandatory at all universities. When I was a teaching assistant at UBC, I noticed that some of my third and fourth year students didn't know how to use the most basic library catalogue, let alone the advanced journal article search functions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that some students attempted to graduate from university by reading, in four years, the same amount that I would normally read in one semester. Well, I flunked at least one barely literate student. Oops, I'm getting off-topic.

I'd like to start reading for fun again. Perhaps I'll start with some bestsellers. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" sounds interesting, as does Thomas L. Friedman's "The World Is Flat". I read the NY Times book review every weekend, so I'll keep an eye out for interesting new books and will pray that the HKU library will buy them, haha. Does anyone have any interesting fiction to recommend? Geez, I'm still 1/3 through "Les Miserables" and about 30 pages into "Crime and Punishment". Spare me the French and Russian novels, and anything Victorian.