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.

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).

Summer is awesome!

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):

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.

I love it.

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:

Mmm. Pie.

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.

WordPress, we salute you.

Given the huge-assed nature of the screen we can spray out of the projector, the film choice was a toss-up between Aliens (one of my absolutely favorite movies of all time) and Children of Men (which most of us had not yet seen). We ended up choosing the latter, and saving the former for when we have some surround-sound action.

So CoM is a somewhat harrowing watching experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s pretty kick-arse, to use the technically correct critical language. Its also rammed full of sneaky highbrow type references, which most of us probably failed to pick up because the cultured parts of our minds have been corrupted by all the science we do daily.

I did manage to pick out a couple of the classical music references though, particularly the Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev violin concerto which get about half a minute of airtime when they run into the Russians in the refugee camp. Like I mentioned last week, when you know a piece of music well it really jumps all up in your grill. My non-classically inclined friends probably didn’t notice anything much about the music during those scenes, but for me it was like doing that snapping awake thing when you are falling asleep in a lecture. A bit of your brain goes from fuzzy to focused after a few familiar notes.

Oh yeah, it also had “Omgyjya Switch7″ by Aphex Twin. Extra awesome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you don’t fancy reading the whole wikipedia article, it’s basically a technique for multiplying a very small amount of DNA (which is what you tend to get from biological samples) into a very large amount of DNA. It uses something called Taq polymerase which is a special enzyme extracted from bacteria which live in thermal springs and can stand really high temperatures. Basically all you do is throw some in with your DNA and a bunch of bases, and keep heating it up and cooling it down. It’s amazingly simple and remarkably effective.

And a rather unexpected subject for a song.

Now we just need one about DNA helicase!

To celebrate this surprisingly pleasant start ot the semester, here are couple of our (me, girlfriend, friends) favorite absolutely non-classical, popular, four-on-the-floor, music videos.

The delightfully NES styled Move your Feet:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the delightfully slutty Perfect Exceeder:

Click here to view the embedded video.