Christmas

Auughhh. Stuffed.

Also, in the Christmas gift exchange my family does (this is the third year already!) I got a Gingerdead Man! Actually it's just a non-evil Gingerbread Man decoration, but a paint job will fix that ;) It's hanging on the tree now, but after we take it down, it's got a spot on my wall with its name on it.

I bought the movie like a year ago in the supermarket. It cost thirty pesos! A rat's ass costs more than that!

Just imagine him holding a knife. Cute.

It's prompted me to seek out B movies and watch them as a holiday project. I probably won't manage very many, because they are funny, but they're also bad, so it gets a bit tiring if you try to watch more than a few at a time. Also, they can be a bit hard to find, although luckily, once you find them, they're usually dirt cheap.

I don't really ever publish these things...

...but I'll make a vague-ish exception here.

Making me wish I'd never been born won't make me respect you, and will certainly not make me want to do what you want me to. Nor will it make me feel bad that I didn't.

Duh.

Ho-hum

You know, I've only written once this month. Well, I've written three posts, but only published one of them. The other two are meant to be seen only by two eyes, and they're both firmly lodged in my head (and will hopefully remain so for much time to come).

Sometimes I get obsessed with one type of food for weeks –my sister does it, too– and eat it like sixty times a day. At one point it was jocoque, a really tasty spread derived from milk. We'd spread it on everything (well, toast and rice cakes. With jam, or honey, or tomato, or by itself, or with carrots... oh, carrots! That's another one). And now, for me, it's oatmeal. I have a big jar of ground-up oats, and use them to make porridge and eat it like twice a day. Yum.

Feet

Backstory: Last night I went to a Christmas party with my old classmates from secondary school (well, about 40% of them, anyway). Several of us slept over. It was a very cold night, and there was a blanket shortage.

So I've been lying on a carpet for about an hour, hitting up the Internetz, thinking about how the carpet smells like feet. Odd, actually, because when I duck my head and take a sniff it just smells like carpet. Just now, though, I realized that what smells weird is my jacket, which I tossed at an ex-classmate last night when he was complaining about how cold it with the intention that he'd shut up and let me sleep.

Apparently it was his feet that were cold. Damn dude.

Get it? It's a wishbone, or whatever the correct anatomical term is (Google says furcula, "little fork"...um, yeah...). When you unzip it, you're snapping it in half! HA! It's totally appropriate for turkey-laden festivities, but you know what other animals have had wishbones? Dinosaurs! Specifically, theropods. And you know what that means... T-REXES!!!!!

Elephants, The Lord of the Rings

For my Physics final, I'm doing a project with my team (I'm using "team" loosely here. There four of us, of whom only two are doing actual work and stuff) about elephantine seismic communication (it's pretty cool. In a nutshell, the idea is that elephants thump the ground so that other elephants can hear them and thump back, and they can chat about things). There's this one woman, Caitlin O'Connell, who's THE elephant communication researcher. She pretty much discovered this method of communication the year I was born and has been working on it ever since.

So anyway, I was reading a preview of her book about elephants on Google Books, and she's making an analogy between seismic communication in elephants and the way people put their ears on the ground to hear things (awkward position, by the way, and what if an ant gets in your ear? That almost happend to me today as I lay on the grass at school), and then she adds,

Or, for Lord of the Rings fans, Aragorn putting his head to the rock to listen for the distant thumping feet of the fearsome Urukai as they bore Merry and Pippin away to Isengard.

Wow! How did she know?? That totally struck home; that's exactly what I've been envisioning for the past month whenever I think about this elephant project. And then the bit where Aragorn (or was it Gimli?) says, "Legolas, what do your elf-eyes see?" and then Legolas stands on a boulder or something in his leggings and looks sexily across the plains.

I love Legolas.

The book is The elephant's secret sense: the hidden life of the wild herds of Africa

By Caitlin O'Connell

Ritter

It's the end of semester, so I don't have time to write much of a blog post (I do, however, have ample National Geographic browsing time. Such is life).

There's a woman at the Science Faculty who sells candy (well, there's two candy ladies, but I only like one of them, even if her bubble gum is more expensive). But it's not just ordinary candy! I mean, some of it is ordinary, but she always has cool imported candy, which is why I've dubbed her Exotic Candy Lady. ECL has supplied me throughout the semester with cool stuff like a Giant Reese's Cup and a Reese's Crispy Crunch Bar, and also has things like Wonka Jelly Donutz*, Pop Rocks Chocolate Bars, SweeTarts, Ritter Sport chocolate bars (!), etc.

I never bought a Ritter Sport because I'm not exactly rolling in money over here, but today she had some mini Ritter Sports. I was really happy, because:

a) CHOC OLATE!

b) mini candy!

c) CHOCOLATE!

d) it's cheap!

e) CHOCOLATE!

f) ...chocolate!

So I bought two, and I worked it out just now: they were a better deal than a bigger bar; 22% cheaper, in fact (no, I'm not a dork for having worked that out. *Shoves glasses up nose*). Did Exotic Candy Lady steal a shipment of these or something? And if so, does she have a son I can marry?

Whatever, I'm stocking up tomorrow. If I buy them by sending my friends to fetch 'em, she'll HAVE to restock, right? Otherwise she'll know it's just me buying them all. Because as it is, she already knows that I get all excited over her candy, mainly Reese's products and chocolate (she gives me little discounts sometimes on clearance chocolate. Just another reason to like her). And I've only had the valor to eat one of my little chocs, because what if they're all gone by tomorrow?! NOOOOOOO!

*Which never appealed to me, but I've just found out via googling that they're CHOCOLATE! Drat. I passed on those for like 2 months and now she'll probably never re-stock them, because they were slow sellers.

Life in images

The Prokaryotes lab at school has a fridge where we toss all the cultures we won't use anymore, and they'll dunked in chlorine or something at the end of the semester. I like this fridge because, even though it reeks (badly, and you kind of don't want to inhale all the stuff that's been sitting there for months), it has these totally awesome red bags that have the biohazard symbol on them and say "Danger, biological waste" or something to that effect. Those bags are freaking cool.

Last week I found a little family of threads hanging out in my lab coat pocket, so I cut them off and wrapped them around my finger. They looked like a little old guy, so I drew a face on my finger. See? He has a little beard and cute, tufty old-guy hair.

I went to the Geology museum on Sunday with my Philosophy and History of Biology (mouthful) class. Our museum guide was totally cool. Firstly, he had a really long ponytail. Also, on top of his blue museum T-shirt, he had one of those green vests with all the pockets on it, and they were full of rocks which he kept pulling out to show us. On top of that he was wearing this big, black overcoat and a matching black fedora hat (he looked a bit lumpy from the rocks, at certain angles). While he spoke, he kept on taking his hat off, twirling it around, and putting it on all the rocks. And then he'd pick them up and sort of cradle them. The coolest thing of all, though, was his velociraptor necklace.

It's pictured on a bit of a boring-shaped rock here, but it stood atop amorphous ones, too.