Experiment IV

Sound is an interesting thing - it can provoke so many things depending on what mood or perhaps even what thoughts are in your mind at the time.
A few years ago, late one night I was watching a rendition of Tosca with Bryn Terfel as Scarpia, the villian of the piece. Well it was just sort of background noise until at the beginning of Act 2, when Bryn emerges onto the stage dressed all in white, singing of his intentions towards Tosca, and well, the sheer thrill that passed through my brain was completely unexpected and disappointingly not repeated upon repeat viewings - the next with a different cast, which I wasn't that surprised at not receiving the same aural thrill, then the same one with Bryn again, which I was quite disappointed at, having been waiting for the moment.
Well I had another moment tonight watching Good News Week - Ronan Keating was one of the guest stars and when it came to his turn to sing his team's song clue, after forgetting what song he was supposed to be singing, he came out with a very bluesy, jazzy torch version of Madonna's Like a Prayer (which I didn't recognise as such until he sang it again later in the show), but it was a real "Omigod mrrrowwrrr" moment - Paul McDermot (the host) described it as being like sexy honey, and that pretty much nails it. The thought that went through my head was "now I know what those girls have been going on about" (and yes it was just as good when he sang it again for longer).

The title of this post by the way is the title of a Kate Bush song - where a group of scientists are working for the military to come up with a weapon based on sound (which goes horribly awry).

Experiments!!!!

Yes finally some more experiments. I meant to update this blog ages ago with a couple of experiments, but never got around to it and one experiment was ruined by external forces. Not in my case the dreaded ethics committee, but something far worse, which has interfered with science experiments down through the ages.

Experiment Four - Fading Ink

In this case not trying to create tools for espionage or magic tricks, but seeing how lightfast a huge bottle of artists ink I bought actually was. Why?? Well because I bought it to do calligraphy on award scrolls for this group I'm in, and didn't notice until after I'd bought it that the label didn't actually say light fast. Water proof yes, lightfast no. So having dipped a disposable chopstick (yes a clean one) into it to see how thick it was and having made some scratchings on a piece of paper, I had a test subject ready to go. Fishing it out of my paper recycle "bin" the day after deciding on this experiment, I left it on the windowsill of my office in the full direct sunlight from 23 stories up with no other buildings in the way for most of the day.
It sat there for an indiscriminate amount of time, but no longer than a month, before I noticed it wasn't there anymore - the blinking cleaner had cleaned it away!! Arrrrrgghlllle!!! And it's winter now, so there is a distinct lack of strong sunlight. So that experiment has gone on hold for a while.

Experiment Five - Skin bleaching

Somehow, I don't know how - as I wear high necked clothes for most occasions, I developed a large brown blotch in my cleavage, right smack in the middle of the canyon. As I have very pale skin, it's kind of noticable and to my mind kind of disfiguring. So I figured I'd have a go at varoius kinds of traditional skin bleaching methods. Well two. Buttermilk (mentioned in Gone with the Wind as the only thing that Mammy was able to get rid of Scarlet's freckles from having gone without her parasol at Saratoga, with) and lemon juice. I was going to take photos and put them up here, but that was not to be.
Not having buttermilk, but there being a stray lemon in the fridge I started with the lemon jiuce and with just a couple of drops applied each night after my bath, the splodge was gone in three days. Yes that's right dear readers - three days. So don't go paying tons of money to get blemishes lazered off - just rub in some lemon juice.

Been away

Yes it's time for the sundry, no not sundry - repetitious, noo, common, well not really the word I wanted, but I'll go with that for now, excuses for why the blog hasn't been updated for a while. Not that anyone actually reads this blog anyway. Maybe I should put a counter on, that would be an experiment after all.
It seems that most of my friends whose blogs I was reading have stopped blogging/LJing as well. Perhaps it's the end of the fad. Mmm maybe not.

most unread books - apparently

Instructions: These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina -Not sure, have definitely seen the TV version though
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose - possibly, seen the movie
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey *
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities* - Love the movie with Dirk Bogarde
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
--Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West--
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch - loved the TV series with Rufus Sewell - hell I'll admit it - loved Rufus Sewell
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo - arrgh the pathos! This is probably the only book I prefer the movie version to.
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility - possibly, possibly
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbevilles
Oliver Twist* - both abridged & full versions
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune - seen the movie
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere - seen the TV series this novelises
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter - my best friend at high school read this, does that count?
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - never finished as was at somone else's house when I started reading this
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion - and seen the TV series
Northanger Abbey - and seen the TV series
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit - loved the puppet show
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers - and all the sequels, but the last one was diasappointing, and not forgetting all the movie variations. Which reminds me: the black and white silent TV series - very very good

So how did I do? 25/106 Definitely read (23.6%). add in the unsures (3) and the one which was a TV series first, gives us 29/106 or 27.4%. So perhaps some more reading to do. Though there must also be a reason why people don't read these books. Perhaps because they're illiterate drudges, perhaps the books are boring.

Love movie tie-ins

mmmmm caaaaake

When I went on an extended trip, a while back, I took photos of some of the unusual/special foods I ate along the way. So when I saw the link to this quiz I just had to take it.

You Are an Ice Cream Cake

Surprising, unique, and high maintenance. You're one of a kind, and you don't want anyone to forget it. You're fun in small doses, but it's easy for people to overdose on you!

What Kind of Cake Are You?

Sucrose

You know, as much as people love to carpet American films for their sacchrine endings, I think there really is something to be said and praised about them.

Last night I watched this rather depressing Greek film called The King. It ended with the main character (Vangelis) hanging himself in a Police station, after finishing a chess king for his friend the local (corrupt) police chief. Why was he in the police custody? Well unfortunately he didn't have much control on his temper, and in the culmination of the persecution arising from typical small town bloody mindedness where they are jealous/afraid of any new person, in which, after failing in an attempt at getting him thrown out of town through legal means (which only succeeds in him having to undergo psychiatric evaluation) and whilst he is out of town on said evaluation, they destroy the bridge that he has repaired, trash his house (which is his dead grandfather's house which he has been repairing) and slaughter the wild goat that he has adopted, and throw it down his well. Not to mention trashing his bicycle which was left in the town square. He takes the bicycle fairly well, but when he gets back to his house and sees this, he goes beserk running back into town. He goes into the cafe where they all hang out and starts to lay into them, however the mob take him outside where they proceed to beat him up. However when the slightly more sympathetic young man who runs the cafe tries to stop them, he accidently gets stabbed in the stomach by Vangelis.
Then when the Police chief and Vangelis' girlfriend come to the local cemetary to bury him, the local community are all there blocking the way and the local patriarch shuts and locks the gate. As they drive away, it starts to rain (which apparently it hasn't for a long time) and all the towns people are rejoicing. The movie ends as they bury him at his house, with his girlfiend and the police chief standing in the rain.

That's it. No justice. The cowards and bastards feel justified in what they've done. Now I know that happens everyday. Our world isn't a fair place, but we "know" this man, after all we've just spent two hours getting to know him, to feel for him and he dies and there is no justice? We hate this when it happens to real people, especially when it's people we know. It's the sort of thing that starts vigilantism and blood feuds. So why is it any less real that we would want a happy ending for someone that we've come to know and like (which any good film maker can do).

So here's for a little bit of sweetness in the world, for people being happy and for us being happy for them. To quote from The Happiness patrol (but without the menace) - person 1: I'm glad you're happy Person 2: I'm happy you're glad.

Entropy

It's my birthday! Tra la la
Entropy is gradually increasing in my body until all it's constituent atoms will be scattered to the winds and eaten by the worms. So even though I didn't go out on Ilkey Moor bah 'tat, you will still all eventually have eat-ine me.

Currently the entropy is residing in my ankle, hopefully it can be persuaded to go away soon. Just as long as there aren't any bearded mean in velvet suits lurking around.

Stereotypes (Holy epic backstory!)

One of the guys that's in the cubicle next to mine, was trying to inform one of the girls in my cubicle about the hygiene standards of gamers stereotypes and finding himself failing, turned to me to try and help him elucidate to her about this stereotype.

But you know, I've never come across this stereotype in my brief fling with gaming. In my view, they've pretty much just been average university kids, if the kind of dorky ones. But if you like to indulge in stereotypes, or have a love of irony and satire, check this out. And no, you don't have to be a gamer to find it funny. Truuuust me. Or use this one if you're the kind of person who likes to begin at the beginning.

Drifting

We are indeed drifting into the arena of the MadScientist.

Which movie was this quote from?

Get your own quotes:

And on that note, here are a couple of my favourite Mad Scientists.

My first MS crush:

Graham Garden

Anywhere, any time, the creme de la creme of Mad Scientists, who else could have invented the 27 room house in a two room flat or the pop put wardrobe that knew exactly how to dress you for the occasion?

My second favourite MS (and how can you not like this crazy old codger?): Professor Hubert J Farnsworth

Though denied his true birthright of a Nobel Prize, the inventor of the smell-o-scope (amongst other maaaaad inventions) is the only Mad Scientist brave enough to wear the daring fashion ensemble of lab coat and fluffy backless bedroom slippers.

More silly what are test results

Your Hair Should Be White

Classy, stylish, and eloquent. You've got a way about you that floors everyone you meet.

What's" Your Funky Inner Hair Color?

I always knew I was a bit bolshy...

And here's the proof:

You are a Social Liberal (80% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (16% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test

Spitzer

No it's not a dog, or a disgusting person, but a telescope. The Spitzer is essentially an infrared version of the Hubble Space Telescope and at the moment is being used to study the Andromeda Galaxy. It has produced this absolutely beautiful image:



It has also helped astronomers discover that a smaller galaxy - Messier 32 (being the 32nd object that French astronomer Charles Messier catalouged in his 1774 work listing 45 deep space objects) has punched a hole in Andromeda's disk of spiral arms.

Shiiiny

I'm about to go into shiny overload I think.

I'm heading off to a bead and gem show tomorrow - must withdraw lots of cash. I could put it on my credit card, but all vendors might not have that facility. Safer to go with the cash I think.

Word of the day - ignominy

Onhnhnhhh...

You know it really hurts when you fall out of your tower. Oh god my entire body hurts. I just want to whimper and go back to bed.

(pathethic whimpering sounds echo down the stair well)

The Big One

Now you might have heard me say, despite the baying of the mob, that this Blog was an experiment in itself and I would reveal all later. Well now's the time.

Think about how well you know your friends. Really, what do you know about them? And now think, how well do your friends really know you?

Well that's what this blog is all about - its raison detre. Will my friends be able to realise that it's me - without any prompts such as location, or a name, or links to anywhere extremely specific or indeed even knowing that I had a blog?

Now I told my boyfriend the day after I had started this blog, that I had indeed started a blog. He demanded why I hadn't sent him the link so he could read it. So I told him that that would be defeating the purpose of the blog. Well he took that as a challenge and went looking. He couldn't find anything. So I went looking myself, and I found something.

Blogger's search engine is PATHETIC!!! I don't think I can reiterate that enough by mere pixels on a screen.

Even armed with my knowledge of words that should have brought my page up. Nothing. Well not quite nothing. In fact, lot and lots more than nothing. However my blog was nowhere to be seen before I gave up amongst all the duplicate returns. So I gave in and sent my boyfriend the URL. He then tried typing in my exact words into the search engine and he also got a whole load of nothing.

So armed with this he challenged me with the validity of my experimental conditions. Why did I think my friends could find me? Well the main reason is that some of them have blogs on Blogspot (which is why I chose it in the first place I guess, being too lazy to look for another blog host). Also it seems to be a common symptom amongst the blog addicted that they either have time to update their blog or to read everyone else's blogs, but not both. Which to me suggests that they do a whole lot of reading. Now considering that it's not as if they have a bazillion and one links on their blogs to other blogs (and live journals), it means that they must do a lot of blog surfing. So it's statistically possible that they might find me in amongst the forest. Or someone they read finds me and so they follow the new link/recommendation. And hopefully I'll be far enough into the positive W scale of blogs that they'll come back for more and something might just niggle their brain enough that think you know, that sounds awfully like....

And really I'm not that bothered if they don't, I'm not that fussed on blogs. Really the only reason that I caved and created it was because of an event that occurred a few weekends back.

The Sliding W scale

In my cursory examinations of blogs **beep beep beep HUGE GENERALISATION WARNING** they tend to be either witty or whiny.

So I've invented my own sliding scale for blog description. The unit of the scale is the W. Witty blogs are at the positive end of the scale and whiny blogs are at the negative end.

I intend this blog to remain firmly in the positive end of the spectrum. I may occasionally descend towards the negative end, but promise that it will not affect normal transmission for long. Unless I can be witty at the expense of what I'm whining about. Hmmm that has distinct possibilities.

One marrrgghhh

Just for good measarrrgghh!!

Matey!!! I'll make this blighted program walk the plank and go on a trip to Davy Jones' locker.

It it, it is, a wonderful thing to be a pirate King!! farewell Mateys- enjoy tarrrking like a pi-rayte for the rest of the day or tomorrow if ye be on the other side of this here plan-ate. I'm off to feed me parrot.

Tab (Arrggghh!!)

No not the softdrink, but rather how to indent my paragraphs. When I looked at my post about Hypatia after posting it, it was just one huge lump of text (no wonder Blogger say to use short posts). I'll ask ***** about how to do html indents. Might have to send a query to Blogger about it. I wonder if they have Tab functionality in Blogger Beta?
I'll do that tomorrow. Will go and do a soothing crossword now.

Now the justify buttons have disappeared. Grrrr argghh. And just because it's international Talk like a Pirate day - Shiver meee timberrrs!!!! Arrr!

Finally

Well after much to-ing and fro-ing I finally worked out how to set the default text colour to the colour I wanted, so that I wouldn't have to remember to select the colour each time.
Also found a picture for my profile - it's a sketch of Hypatia of Alexandria from a wall sized icon currently being painted on a church wall somewhere. Why Hypatia? Well Hypatia was a 4th century Greek philospher. What a female philosopher? Impossible? No siree. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, philosopher and last director of the Library of Alexandria.

Here's what Socrates Scholasticus (a contemporary) had to say about her: ...Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.

So why haven't we heard of her? Well unfortunately Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob. She was a pagan and a good friend of the Governor of Alexandria, Orestes, who had fallen out with the bishop of Alexandria, Cyril. Somehow the idea got about that it was Hypatia (who was about 60) that was stopping a rapprochement, so a mob led by a lector pulled her from her carrying chair, took her to a church, stripped her naked and cut her flesh off with tiles. They then took her remains to Cinaron and burnt them. No one was ever held responsible for what happened to her. Later Christian writers of course then suggested that she was a witch and that her hold over Orestes and in fact the rift itself, had been caused by black magic, because that must be the only way that a woman could have any sway over a man.

I coloured the sketch in Paint and it doesn't look so great in the sidebar (it's fine it you click on it to enlarge it). So I might replace it with another image. But it'll do for now.