More Luminox notes

The story has already been mentioned on the journals of narahttbbs and dreiviertel, but must be recorded here for completeness. During my perambulation around Luminox on Thursday night, I saw and heard a young woman - 5ft10in or so, bouncily waved blonde hair, white jumper, a bit of black eyeliner and blusher - tell friends that "I don't know anything about Oxfordshire a thousand years ago, as Oriel was only founded in the fourteenth century." So Oxonian, and so college-centred, a statement I have not heard in a long time; it's the sort of thing which annoyed me when I was an undergraduate but where I now have enough distance to find it amusing.

Otherwise I forgot to mention the theme of industry throughout the installation, connecting fire as a primal, universal force (as seen in the sphere outside the New Bodleian) through the fiery symbol-inscribed pipes outside Blackwell's, to the engine chimneys exhaling smoke before they explode briefly with dragonsbreath flame. With the pendulum and water-engine Luminox depicts modern Oxfordshire as technological but (together with the 'scientific' symbols on the pipes) locates modern technological achievement as part of the same process of ingenuity as fire-making and forge-building.