Originally this post was meant to be called: "Responsibility should be packaged free with power. It's just too bad that when I was handed out my "power" package responsibility cost extra and was optional. Or how I managed to achieve nothing over the whole break". However there's a word limit on the post title and why would you wanna put all you have to say in the title?
I had a mid-semester break that should have been called a week-off-three-weeks-away-from-the-exam. I had everything planned out before the break, sort of like a day to day timetable of what I will do everyday. As is often the case with plans I make, I don't stick to them. I think I have a motivation crisis or a serious problem with planned out plans. I can't get motivated to do anything these days except for spending a whole days on the net doing nothing and everything I planned I ended up not doing.
One thing I didn't manage to do during the break: study. So in other words, expect to see less blog posts during October and the start of November coz I have to make up for my lack of motivation & responsibility during the mid-semester break. Also, I think I need to tell the author of this book to include a chapter on me and a picture of me on the cover.
This is the reason why I didn't do anything for one whole week. Not this post, just the stuff I came across that I allowed myself to waste so much time on. So now I'm recommending a few movies and CDs so you all can waste your time on like me.
Movies:
Fracture. Really good legal thriller movie. I thought it was the best movie I saw during the break until I saw
Blood diamond. So freaking good. It has to be because I stayed up until 2.30 am today to finish watching it and I'm the type who goes to bed at 10.30 pm at the latest.
28 weeks later. Awesome sequel. I still like the first one but this is good
The good shepherd. So boring.
Transformers. The masterpiece for the ADHD generation. Translation from the "cryptic" one-liner review: plotless piece of CGI-laden shit. The CGI is beautiful but that's all.
Music (only the recommended stuff, no particular order, somewhat intelligible reviews will be posted after exams)
Why! Why! Why is it always the song that I hate that get stuck in my head? I thought avoiding radio and videohits would exorcise that goddamn "Umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh" song from my head, but no. Looks like everyone is doing a cover of that song somewhere.
The original video first. The song, albeit catchy and poppy, hurt my ears, the original video hurt my eyes, left a weird sour taste in my tongue, gave me a blocked nose for a week, and made me lose touch with reality for a week also. If I had a sixth sense I think I would have seen ghosts opening umbrellas and telling me "you can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh". Ok I'm exaggerating, the video and the song only annoyed me for a whole month of July, no biggie. Why? Watch the video and look out for:
full nudity with clever camera angles to make things G-rated
ridiculous dancing
ella, ella, eh, eh, eh
I thought that was bad, until I saw this cover by Amanda Palmer. Not really a cover though, only a lypsync cover which means, same vocal, different and much weirder dancing. Still hurts my eyes and ears. Now I can't say "Umbrella" without adding "ella, ella, eh, eh eh" at the end. I think I need to take a break from this post and go get myself a nutella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh sandwich. Moore ella, ella, eh, eh, eh when I return from my nutella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh break.
Ok, I'm back with another cover of the "you know what" song. I can't type out "you know what" because I would risk typing out the horrible ella, ella, eh, eh, eh again. Gee, I just did. Anyhow, here's a cover from Mandy Moore with completely different arrangement. No dancing (except for the original video being played in the background) and the song sounds better here. Better than the original but too slow.
This brings me to the last cover which was the cover that brought "you know what" back in my head. I got over "you know what" and I thought it was out of my system until I saw this Tegan and Sara cover of "you know what". No dancing, not even a video of someone else dancing in the background, thankfully. Best version of the horrible song. However, nothing can make me like that song, not even Tegan and Sara.
If you still haven't had enough of "you know what" covers, check out the short and bad quality recording of the Patrick Wolf's cover and even more covers on youtube.
============================================== On a not completely unrelated note, here's a video of Motion City Soundtrack covering a song from another band. Thankfully not "you know what". I've just recently gotten into the newest MCS album. I'd say it's a very good pop-punk record if I have to put it into a genre, I hate classifying genres. Usually I'll lump things into 2 boxes: I like and I don't like. See if you can find why it's not completely unrelated to this post.
===================================== So that's it, now I need to rewatch Cinderella, ella, ella, eh, eh eh while having my second nutella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh sandwich and then go study about those bacteria with flagella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh for microbiology. OK, I'll stop with the you-know-what.
Just an observation after looking at the search terms break down for last week. I won't bore you with all the actual terms that people have been searching (psst: you can read all about them on the "Weird shit people search for but get this site instead" box at the bottom of the page). Really I don't have anyone to blame but these people:
Google - for crawling through hundreds of thousands of blogs & sites each day and dutifully spit out links to sites that mention "pussy" somewhere.
Sick people - who go search for weird sick shit.
And last but not least the internet for uniting sick people and google together.
And possibly, remotely: myself for posting shits like this post and the "weird shit people search for but get this site instead" box.
However, in defence of the "Weird shit ..." box, some of the search terms are quite hilarious and I don't know how they could have gotten my page with those terms. My favourites include (don't laugh at me for the wrong spellings, those are all direct quotes):
Some wise person somewhere some time in the past had made a very good piece of advice: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched". It's one timeless piece of advice right? It can be applied anywhere, anytime and you don't even need to change anything. Just say that and you appear sophisticated or at the very least remotely well-versed in English idioms. A scenario first.
Student (busy setting up suction filter equipment at the start of the experiment)
Kindly instructor who happened to be well-versed in the English language: Why are you setting up suction filter? You haven't dissolve 4g of 4-methylaniline in 200 ml of water and concentrated hydrochloric acid, warm and stir the mixture using a hotplate stirrer to assist the dissolution process yet.
Student: Wouldn't it be faster if you just say "you haven't done steps 1 through to 4 yet, why are you setting up equipments for step 5"?
Kindly instructor who happened to be well-versed in the English language: Don't be pedantic and that is beside my point. My point is you don't know if you're gonna have any yield to start filtering. Don't count your chickens before they're hatched.
OK, OK, I know what you're thinking, that scenario is awfully staged and no one talks like that and that instructor sounds like he's got the whole second year medchem prac book memorised word by word (which is impossible). My point with the above scenario is to introduce you to the wonderful English phrase: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched". Why is that I wonder, why isn't it "don't count your children before they're born" or "don't count your sperms before they're ejaculated ejected"? Why chickens? Anyhow, the point of all the above ramblings is that I got myself into a situation, not a serious one but one nonetheless, which brought that saying into my mind.
I have 2 ipods, I like to consider them one and a quarter of an ipod rather than 2 ipods. One is new, which I bought 3 weeks before they released the new line of ipod and which I'm still pissed about. One is only a quarter of its former self due to 3 years of almost everyday use. I was thinking about bringing it into one of those ipod repair centres last week, I got a quote for a battery change and it's a hundred bucks to change the battery. That's almost a third of a new 80 gig ipod already, no way I'm gonna pay that. So the only other option is to buy replacement battery off eBay and do it myself.
The first part is easy. I ordered one 2 days ago, and went look around for guides on how to do it on the net. I found a bunch of guides, looked through them and got myself so excited about changing the battery that I went ahead to open my ipod up that day, without the new battery. Here are some pictures I took after open my ipod with a few pieces of metal lying around on my desk. The screwdrivers didn't help at all with removing the metal case because: a. they're tiny and they're supposed to be for those tiny screws b. they're dodgy Chinese fake screwdrivers. I used the 2 pieces of metal on the top left-ish of the picture to open it. If you're wondering what they are, they're some thing I got when I bought my cork board and they've been lying around on my desk. Seriously, I'm resourceful. Open an ipod up using cork board hanger, that's rated right up there with Jason Bourne's feats of stabbing secret agents with ballpoint pens and suffocate people with towel.
I needed the dodgy Chinese screwdrivers and metal bookmark to remove the battery. As of this moment the ipod is looking like the above picture and is lying in a drawer out of sight waiting for the battery, that should be arriving tomorrow or on Monday. It still works fine without a battery and with its internal organ on display like that once it's plugged in a power source so I think I haven't wrecked anything.
So the moral of the story, well, there isn't one but there will be if the battery I ordered is the wrong one, is that you should not open your ipod before you've received the replacement battery. See, I do have a point with that lame "don't count your chickens" dialogue.
I think I can safely say that I have a love hate relationship with James Blunt's music. I remember the first time I heard "You're Beautiful", it struck me as a very very normal song with a weird video clip and a male singer with a voice that unfortunately turned me off. The radio blasted that song for weeks and weeks on ends and somehow I liked it for a little while. Then his other singles got released and the radio dutifully blasted those for weeks on ends. That was when I stopped listening to radio. No it's not James Blunt's overexposed "talent" that stopped me from listening to the radio. It's what stopped me watching TV, ads. Blasted, freaking ads.
Anyhow, I digressed, I resisted listening to his debut album until the end of last year. "Resisted" is a bit overstated, more like assumed that his whole album would be just like his singles (which all sounded the same to me). When I finally listened to "Back to Bedlam" in its entirety, I was pleasantly surprised. The songs worked together in the whole album. I liked it last summer. I liked it until I overplayed that CD and I couldn't stand the voice of James Blunt. He's got the type of voice that makes you cringe at first then you get used to it and after a while it gives you indigestion.
When I heard that JB was gonna have a new album out 2 months ago I thought that I'd ignore it. But then all the mp3 blogs that I subscribe to went on a JB frenzy and posted links to his leaked album like crazy. So I downloaded one, it turned out to be a whole album of sample songs, i.e. all the songs are the length that they're supposed to be but they contain only the first few sentences of the songs played in a loop. Let me tell you, the first time I heard JB's voice after a 9 month JB mental break was quite overwhelming. I thought that I got the usual leaked stuff so I put it on half expecting that it was someone else's music (that's happened before), what I got was "Simona, you're getting older, your journey's been etched on your skin" repeated over and over and over again. At first I thought I was going crazy, then I thought that my computer's gone crazy. It turned out that every single song that I'd just downloaded was like that. I must say James Blunt's voice is quite vomit-inducing when it's being looped like that.
I finally got over the fear of downloading the damn sample version of his new album last week (I downloaded it 3 times before declaring that he's not worth my effort to find his album) and got a working version to see if it's any good. I've been listening for a whole week now, on and off, and I haven't had indigestion or nausea. Yet. (I'm close though).
It's not a bad album, it's just more of the same stuff JB has already put out on his last record, added a "shipload of drugs" and a shitload of personal problems. Nothing much stands out after a few time listening to this CD. What does it sound like? Well, it sounded like "Back To Bedlam, Again". I even think that's a better title than "All the lost souls". What's with this guy and lost souls and prophets and wisemen? Granted it's not morbid but it's just depressing. Would he be any better had he made the album on shitload of drugs rather than shipload of drugs? Nobody knows.
If you're one of those people that haven't had enough and still can't get enough of James Blunt after 2 or 3 years of "you're beautiful, you're beautiful, you're beautiful, it's true" then here's more of James Blunt for you. And I am glad that I have 2 ipods full of music to listen to rather than the radio.
So there you have it, I don't like this album. The songs aren't bad but they aren't good either. The title is depressing and what's is with the album art? I guess inventive person figured what's the point in putting only one picture of the artist on the front cover when you can put a thousand little pictures of him there. Don't like the cover either.
If I have to give a rating, it would be 2 out of 5. Not a good CD, don't buy it now, wait until it gets down to 10 bucks. Something worth buying: Ben Lee's new album "Ripe". It's a hundred time better than James Blunt's. And it has only one picture of Ben on the cover. That beats the thousand-picture "art" hands down.
And if you don't trust my not very objective review of this album, you can always check it out. It's floating on the net somewhere. I don't know where you can find it, don't ask me. All I can tell you is that it's not here or even here.
A rather late post, I was gonna post this 2 weeks ago but it sounded crappy typed out so I decided against it. Why post it now? Because I just feel like crappy something is better than nothing.
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One thing is for sure, when sex ed comes up anywhere it would bring the giggles with it. I guess it wouldn't bring the out loud giggles when it's a conference for serious looking health professionals. But for would-be health professionals it brought the giggles for a whole week.
The topic of the lecture was "risk reduction in STD" or something to that effect, trust academia to make anything sounds dry and boring. But the lecture turned out to be hilarious, some topics got covered:
how to put a condom on a banana (already covered in year 10 sex-ed and coutless youtube videos)
mucho masturbation
oral dams
some people have weird ideas for sex and very little sense of hygiene i.e. oral-anal sex.
Ok, seriously, those are not what was covered but thinking back on the lecture I can only remembered those and always use some sort of barrier or just avoid sex altogether.
For the rest of the week there's a whole lot of discussion about oral dams and sex related jokes which aren't very good and which I can't remember anyhow. The point of this post (since I haven't gotten to it yet and don't seem to be approaching it in my first draft for this post) is that there's no point in the post. Well except for wondering out loud why talks of sex bring out the giggles and this looks like a blatant attempt to attract perverts googling for anything that has "sex" in the search terms. Do check out the song at the end of the post though.
This post was originally titled "funny thing I said last week that appeared dumb in retrospect". It was titled that until I read Crazy lecture note doodler's comment on my last post.
The story first I guess, then things will hopefully be a bit clearer. So last Thursday I had a workshop for Pharmaceutics. The uni likes to call it a "workshop" but I call it a "whole-lot-of-confusion,-talk-and-a-tiny-bit-of-work-shop". And I think the tutors like to call those workshops "pain-in-the-ass-shops where nobody has the gut to yell out he correct answer even though it's obvious".
What happened last Thursday was we arrived early and there were about half of the workshop people there, we realised that the room we are scheduled to be in is tiny and we frowned. Then I, being my full of bright ideas self, suggested that we moved to bigger room. Here's how the whole conversation went.
ME (talking in normal, not very loud voice): How about moving to the bigger tute room?
CLASS: crickets chirping.
RANDOM GIRL SITTING NEXT TO ME (in a much louder voice): Let's move to the other room.
CLASS: crickets chirping again and then someone just started talking in Chinese in a voice louder than mine.
ME: Oh yeah, someone's translating it into Chinese.
INDIAN BREAD (to me): That's tight!
I was just trying to be funny. And apparently what came out of my mouth arrived in my friends' ears as something like "Someone translates it into Chinese". Hence the "tight" comment and hence the title of the post. Seriously, how hard is it to say "yes, let's" or "no, let's not because that room might have been booked already"? I'm just annoyed at people who just sit there and don't do anything.
I don't hate overseas students, I don't hate people, I just dislike people who annoy me or who give me a good reason to dislike them. I know I seemed to write about my annoyance at people who speak Chinese loudly (usually Chinese overseas students) in libraries quite often but that's because that happens to me lots of time but I also write, albeit less frequently, about assholes (usually random Caucasian) who piss me off on the train.
So to sum things up, I don't hate overseas students, I just hate anyone who pisses me off.
I know it's cruel to make fun of people who might or might not be well endowed in the department of using complicated machineries such as a computer but when you're bored you're just glad you have something to laugh about. So the story is I was in the library watching porn when this blonde walked in and sat in the computer terminal next to mine, wiggling the mouse for what seemed like five minutes before she figured out that the computer was turned off. That's the story.
Ok, seriously, I wasn't watching porn, I was reading about how different levels of agitation can increase dissolution time of drugs (seriously, that's just common sense, if you stir your coffee you're gonna dissolve the sugar you put in faster. What's the point of writing complicated paragraphs about common sense huh?). And it wasn't a blonde that walked in and sat next to me. It was an Asian girl and some of her Asian friends who, beside being so technologically challenged that they can't tell if a computer is on or off, talked like there's no tomorrow and they had to get anything and everything off their brain in loud voices in a foreign language.
I was not gonna post about something as trivial as people don't know how to turn on a computer but those girls pissed me off. I was already annoyed at a textbook for using a whole 2 paragraphs to talk about something they could have put into 2 sentences. Those girls are just the last straw. So there.
I'm trying to avoid the other D word because obviously I'm not depressed. I thought I was today and so when I typed this up I went looking for a depression pic and I found this. Obviously, I'm not THAT depressed. More like a sad mood swing brought about by the longest movie I've ever seen this year.
So you're probably wondering what the hell is with all the pictures lately. Well, I thought it would be cool to include pictures that relate remotely to my posts. For example, I was talking about being on a roll of brilliance the other day and I got a picture of rolls of sushi. See, that's pure "creative" brilliance right there on my part. Actually, the point of the pictures is to distract you away from the contents of the posts and to fill the page out, otherwise my blog looks dark and depressed.
Anyhow, I digressed. I used Google Images to find pictures so when I typed in "depression" I got a bunch of pictures of people in various "depressed" poses which made me feel depressed and I found a picture about the Great Depression. So there you have it, the story of the the above picture about depression but not really about depressed people.
Back to the reason I started this post at all. I was going about my usual Sunday things, you know things cool people like me do on Sunday, lie about reading artsy stuffs in The Sunday Age and discuss politics. Ok, I was studying which was why I got bored and hungry also at around 1 pm. One thing I've learned over the years about myself is that trying to study when you're bored AND hungry is a waste of time so I watched Zodiac (one my my end-of-month, taking-advantage-of-all-that-unused-download-allowance, spur-of-the-moment, illegal internet activites). I thought it would be a standard cool thriller; cops, serial thrillers, journalists, sounds like a good thriller before I watched it. It turned out to be a 150+ minute movie based on a real story. That was so freaking long. I don't know why I even sat through all that, but I did. It's not the movie that made me sad, it was my realisation that I had just spent almost 3 hours of my life watching a movie as inconsequential as that.
Well, the movie wasn't all that useless, at least now I have more reasons to be paranoid about crazy people killing other people randomly just for fun and attention.
The purpose of this post is to tell you, my readers that I'm on a roll of brilliance. Why?
I found the nine-letter word in today's Target without even trying (lucky I guess)
I finished today's Diabolical Sudoku (something I don't finish very often)
Pharmaceutics makes sense to me.
And I finally understand the lecture notes from the lecturer whose lecture notes have always been suggested/proven to be of canine descent.
How does that work you might ask me. Truthfully I don't know, lecture notes are objects, suggesting that they can bark/eat/shit/transmit rabies as canines can are quite impossible but then people doing pharmacy (me included) aren't very smart. All those brain cells are committed to memorise drug names, none left for logical thinking.
Anyway, back to me on a roll, let's see how far this "roll" is gonna last. I'm gonna attempt to read the lecture notes from a different lecturer whose notes can be said to be the male descendant of the previously mentioned canine.
Last week was an uneventful week, nothing much happened. My grandma got a stroke last week, was hospitalised and was released yesterday. Told you it was uneventful. Anyhow I volunteered to stay with her in the hospital for one night last Friday because she doesn't speak English. I didn't get to stay the whole night but with the little time spent there I observed one interesting trend. Nurses are obese. Or at least the nurses in the stroke ward in a-hospital-that-shall-remain-unnamed are obese. Don't these nurses look around? Fat, atheroscloris, ischaemic heart diseases, strokes? I thought working in a stroke ward might expose them to the possible consequences of being overweight. Hell, I was there for a few hours and I'm scared of what little fat I've accumulated already.
Bowling for soup - London bridge So much better than the Fergie version
Alanis Morissette - My humps Music: good Lyrics: awful Video: so bad it's good.
Interpol - Mammoth What the heck does this mean?
There are seven ancient porn shops along the road And seven aging daddies you may want to know.
Really good tune though
The New Pornographers - Sing me spanish techno (music vid of the week) Best music video I've seen in the last 2-3 months. If you're gonna watch one of these clips then watch this. I just love twists in music videos, give you some incentive to actually watch it.
Against Me! - Thrash Unreal I've been listening to New Wave obsessively this week. I thought it was OK last month when I did the review post but then Ben Lee went and did an acoustic cover of the whole album (which you can download for free from his blog) and I listened to New Wave a few more time and realised that it's good stuff. The covers are good too if you're into acoustic quiet songs.
That's all I feel at the moment I found out that there's a new lineup of iPod coming this month. I paid $349 for a 30 gig iPod a month ago and now I find out that I can get an 80 gig one with more than twice the playback time. Fuck!
If you haven't noticed yet, change of template yet again. You might think that nothing changed much but the experience resembled what you would feel sitting in a toilet after a week or more of taking Panadeine following wisdom teeth extraction (I was trying to figure a cooler way to say "pain in the ass" and I arrived at "pain in the rectum" or "bad case of constipation". I am just so original). For someone who doesn't know a whole lot about codes I'm doing OK.
Today's WTFs taken straight out of TheAge: Gay republicans. Is this some sort of oxymoron? This is from the article about a senator quitting over men's room sex scandal. So people really do hit on other people in the toilet, I thought that is some sort of porn myth.
Remind me why did the Korean missionaries go to Afghanistan in the first place? Because I thought that what missionaries do is try to convert other people to their religion right? What's the point of going to Afghanistan to convert people when there are still people in Korea that are not Christian?
There about 9 million Protestants and 5.5 million Catholics in this country of 49 million people.
Why go to a foreign country when there are 34.5 million people waiting to be converted at home? These missionaries are daft in more ways than one.
Awesome band names:
Holy Fuck. I'm being serious, there is a band called Holy Fuck and their music is really good, fits the name. If the goal of a band's name is to attract listeners then this is probably the best name ever. It worked on me, I checked out this band only on the merit of their awesome name. Is there a band called Holy Shit?
Streptococci in chains. A band name I thought up during a lecture. Does this name make you wanna go: "holy fuck, that is one bad name"?
Random microbiology fact: Streptococci are Gram positive cocci which are usually in chains.
So I've been suffering from blogger's block. Ok, I'm over-dramatising this, as if blogging is like writing a book, you're only writing about your life. Anyhow, I haven't been writing very regularly but still much more regular than when I study for exams. So today I decided to do a post one something. Here are my possible ideas:
A review of The Bourne Ultimatum
A post about The Boy Who Cried Overshot
A rambling about how Atheism is the new "in" thing
Link to the new Britney Spears' single
I thought that none of those would work out fine so I didn't write anything about them, but now that I've typed up the above list, some are quite good actually. Ok back to the point of this post. I was out of ideas (or so I thought), what do you do when you're out of ideas? You go to some random idea generator to generate um... ideas. That's what I did. I went to this site, I went in looking for ideas, I left without even an idea but with maybe some understanding why people like to throw their money into poker machines.
The first lot of randomly strung together words I got was: expensive temporary food. Huhm, this can work out, I can write about expensive food that only satisfy your hunger temporarily, you know those fancy restaurants that serve tiny morsels of food? I can write about that, in fact I think I just did. This would be the length of the post, this paragraph.
The second lot of words: exclusive tubular instrument. Yeah right, the only thing that's remotely tubular within my sight is a glue stick. Next.
That's when I got in a row: jewel encrusted inflatable toy, erotic holographic apparatus and medieval rural sex toy. Am I the only one who thinks that this "random" word generator is awfully randomly sexually oriented? That was when I thought to myself that it would be great if this generator can "randomly" generate the phrase "jewel encrusted erotic sex toy". I believed that it could so I embarked on clicking the shuffle button until I got the result I wanted. The closest I got to my goal was this.
It took ages and ages to finally arrive at the above phrase. But the result was sort of satisfying, which is why I said that I understand why people would want to gamble. Money falling out of a poker machine would probably be much more satisfying than getting a phrase that you want. After I got that I realized that you can choose the phrase yourself by clicking on the arrows
Originally this post was meant to be called: "Responsibility should be packaged free with power. It's just too bad that when I was handed out my "power" package responsibility cost extra and was optional. Or how I managed to achieve nothing over the whole break". However there's a word limit on the post title and why would you wanna put all you have to say in the title?
