Dream diary...

There were two apparently unrelated plot threads, one of which I've lost completely. But the other one...

Queen Elizabeth went to Parliament one day and announced a series of reforms to the monarchy, most notably that the succession would no longer pass from parent to child but rather, upon the death of the monarch, to a randomly chosen citizen of the United Kingdom (within limits of age, sanity, etc.) The next day, she died, and the newspapers started running stories headlined "Meet the new King and Queen", with a photo of a middle-class 40-ish couple in business suits sitting at a table in the window of a restaurant, talking to one another. The news media had also apparently picked a random song from their personal music library, which turned out to be the Ars Subtilior piece "Puis que je sui fumeux" as recorded by Ensemble P.A.N, and declared it to be the couple's theme song; suddenly this bizarre, haunting, late-14th-century tune was in the Top 40 on the radio.

Workshop Over

I just spent nine hours a day, for the past 4-1/2 days, leading a workshop on how to teach beginning computer programming. Working nine hours a day isn't a big deal, but being basically "on stage" for nine hours a day (and then spending a few hours in the evening preparing the next day's talk and slides) can get wearing. Over now. Time to move on to the next crisis. :-)