This is turning out to be a real shocker of a work-filled week. We have grant high-rankers visiting lab, two presentations on completely unfamiliar topics to prepare for our impending lab “retreat”, a post-doc visit, a girlfriend visit to integrate in between all the work responsibilities, and a bunch more extra stuff as not very tasty gravy. The mood at work was lightened a little after the discovery of yet another viral marketing device by a biological instrumentation company:
Which is Eppendorf’s cunningly crafted response to the previous (and funnier) effort by Bio-Rad:
Hopefully this is becoming a permanent trend and we can make all future lab purchasing decisions based on the quality of the latest comedy music video.
A quite literal pain the ass. I had an antibiotic shot in my rear end today. What prompted this travesty? Last Friday I was scratching at a mosquito bite on my ankle, absentmindedly, as I sat doing diligent work at my desk. On Friday evening my whole foot started feeling sore, as though I had twisted it (which — despite being drunk and stealing free quarter chickens and horrible beer from the campus alumni parties — I am 99% sure I did not actually do). On Saturday it started swelling up. By Sunday evening my entire foot was swollen and red and painful.
So today the health service decided to put me on a course of antibiotics, which started out with a huge frickin’ injection in the arse. Additionally I got to have a booster tetanus jab in the arm — which admittedly was mollified by the provision of a Tweety-Bird band-aid. So now I have a sore foot (with a huge purple Sharpie outline so they can track the size), a sore butt, a sore arm, a tweety bird band-aid, and I have to take 12 tablets a day (antibiotic, antihistamine, ibuprofen). And it’s almost 100F here, with no air conditioner. AND I’m stuck wondering where the bite came from (which of course prompts me to immediately think of large hairy spiders waiting for me in my bed).
I’ve been conditioned to believe that human beings have been conditioned to believe there’s beauty in symmetry…
If anyone knows where that lyric comes from I’ll be very, very surprised (and impressed, but mostly surprised), partly because I can’t remember the exact album location myself. I’m not mentally or physically warmed up enough to go dredging through the acres of archived CDs (long live the MP3) hibernating in the upper aerie of my cupboard to work it out. Buuut… it was either a track by this guy or one of his associates:
This is particularly relevant to the topics on this blog because I hold these people responsible for prepping me into my classical music acceptance phase. This is because I absolutely *hated* one of their albums (the self-titled cLOUDDEAD, if you are interested). Initially anyway. I couldn’t stand it. I only bought it because a lot of the recommendations for new music which suited my taste were extracted from internet reviews that mentioned other groups I already owned — and this being the heady late nineties meant that the reviews frequently did not come with samples of the music, so it was all bought sound unheard.
I credit this with preparing me for classical because after initially dismissing this music, it later became my absolutely favorite album ever. I don’t think there are any blatantly obvious similarities in the musical style, it’s more an attitude issue. It brought right forward to the forefront that I could form an incredibly deep bond with music which not only didn’t make sense on initial listenings, but which actively turned me off.
As it turned out I had to pretty much rerealize this process when coming to classical, but I am pretty positive that this trial run primed certain mental circuits
PS – Ahhh, I remembered where that track came from, it was actually on “In The Shadow Of The Living Room” by Reaching Quiet. Here’s probably my favorite track from that album (in which almost all of the tracks are under 2 minutes):
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They mostly used broken instruments to make the album, and apparently their sequencer also could not function for longer than a few minutes, hence the short length of the tracks.
There’s been less than lots of updates here this week, due in significant part to g’s shortly pending department to NYC. This weekend is the move away from the apartment here, and next weekend is the move into Manhattan. Unsurprisingly this means that things are a little lively at the moment. Additionally I’ve been in a bit of classical downturn at the moment, these things go in phases.
Instead, the music colonizing my player has been Mr Scruff, an old favorite:
He was one of the guys I listened primarily to before switching over to almost exclusively classical music. It’s nice to have a bit of a resurgence. The boundaries between musical styles are completely artificial anyway, and there is something constraining and unpleasant about claiming I feel like listening to classical music or non-classical music. It’s all highly-stylized waves of compressed air, in the end.
I’ll leave you with another summery piece of Mr. Scruff, with an actual video this time:
Well looky here… I’ve caved to the all of the peer pressure and fallen in with the coolkids in the website redesign crowd. Hopefully everything is basically working as it should be and it isn’t all about to fall apart, unlike my very classy 1995 Civic. It’s fuel efficient though.
The car. Not the website. Wait, actually that is too.
It’s nice that these modern times it’s about infinity times easier to do a website overhaul than it was in the early pioneer days, when all a man had to get by were his wits and a battered copy of MS Notepad.
