Weil mein Körper hasst mich.

Soo, I went over to Pris' today. Great fun. I ended up being late because of well(*gag*)-timed dentist/orthodontist appointments (fluoride is tasty! *gack*), although I'm kinda glad I missed most of the winceworthy (if that wasn't a word, it is now) adaptation of Twelfth Night they were watching. After lunch and a lengthy session of truth or dare (and me meeting Milo), we hung out a bit before everyone had to go home.

(I was going to put this at the end of the post, but I don't want it to be the last thing mentioned, so...) That said, I also managed to lock my knee again. Sad thing is, all I was doing was rocking back and forth on a swing chair (while my back, neck and hair were being attacked by Milo) and swinging (can't think of a better word, but it wasn't as vigorous nor energetic as the connotation) my leg from right to left.

Quick (ok, not so quick) backstory: back at the beginning of 2006, I was down on one knee, securing a jump ball in basketball, and while twisting, did something to my right knee which led me to be unable to extend it fully due to a pain barrier. After an hour, it was gone, but a few iterations of this later, it refused to unlock. Went to "emergency" (I swear, it should be called 'priority') at Westmead (Children's) Hospital and had the knee manipulated back to normal under general anaesthesia. This happened one more time, and the third time, the doctors decided to do an arthroscopy (insertion of a camera) to figure out what was wrong. They found an enlarged tissue (I recall being told and seeing it written as the 'plika', a tissue of no use that some people lack completely, but Wikipedia has nothing matching that spelling, nor description, so it gets relegated to brackets), trimmed it down, and sent me home. It locked twice in the following nine months. The orthopaedic doctors were stumped (moreso because when the leg was healthy, I could hop on it), and figured that I should just try to let it unlock naturally (it did, with the help[?] of acupuncture); this is a tad over nine months since the last locking.

Hopefully that didn't read like a rant, I'm frankly over it, and am somewhat accustomed to having to use crutches, and waste energy keeping one leg at 90°. Seriously.

Hmm, also, it seems that I am allergic to some dogs. ¬¬

In other news,"Out of the great book of fairytales" by naio ssaion (fourth song in the player on their Myspace. Yes, this band is so obscure, the track isn't on Youtube) is a great song. While it doesn't make me want to dance around giggling like an idiot while a smiling man in a white suit throws confetti on me, it's still delightfully random. If you've read the lyrics and disagree, I hereby dub thee "not human". While I'm on the topic of naio ssaion, it saddened me to find out that of the nine tracks not in the player of their Myspace, eight were rubbish, and the other was an instrumental (albeit a good one. It's awesome to find a band with a full-time violinist).

Also on the topic of music, I've been addicted to Apocalyptica's Ruska (from their eponymous album) lately. To my shock, my brother likes the track, too! As I type, Hell is still recovering from the Great Freezing. I guess I should also clarify (for my [∏i — ℮i] readers whose names do not start with 'P' and end in 'riscilla') that contrary to what this post implied, most of Apocalyptica's stuff is instrumental, and thus lacking profanity.

Lacuna Coil's been growing on me, too. It sounded very generic upon my first listen a few months ago, but I'm coming to like some songs. Although most of it still sounds pretty generic to me. I'm especially digging Within me from their latest album, Karmacode, though. Might want to note that the video's pretty boring; it takes away from the song, in my opinion. (Like one Lithium, by Evanescence. Ugh.) Fragments of faith (crappy Sailor Moon AMV alert!) has been for me another demonstration as to how songs can be more interesting if you don't know the lyrics. Not because they suck (although they're not stellar), but because it's easier to mishear the melody as something cooler if you don't know them. Although I'm not entirely sure what's so cool about the misheard version, now, to be honest. First line of the chorus, to the words 'Can you feel it?'. Not that my misheard version fit that at all.


Also on the topic of mishearing lyrics, the chorus of Leaves' Eyes' Norwegian lovesong has the following lyrics:

Between the bluebells
Sits a girl with blond braids
A blue-eyed angel
With strawberry cheeks

I managed to mishear the last quoted line as 'strawberry cheese'. Wooo. I have cheescake cravings now...

Final music thing - Nightwish is releasing The Islander as their latest single. Great song, great MV. Despite the reservations one person seems to have against the woodwind instrument that plays at the beginning. *ahem*

New link to the right - a blog called Indexed on which Jessica Hagy posts amusing graphs and diagrams. Maths nerdiness helpful, but not mandatory. Here are some examples of what's posted. Also comic-related, Peanuts.com recently had an amusing wordless comic up from the archives.

Also comic-related, there were a couple of amusing wallpapers posted in the thread over on the xkcd fora. You'll need to see this before you'll find this one funny/awesome, and here's the other one.

And, to wrap up a loooooooong (-cat is looooong) blagging, two (related) amusing chatlogs. Lots of music references in the first, so lots of [editors notes], too.
(Seriously, sorry about the length. I wanted to finish posting before today, so that I didn't need to recount going over to Pris' in addition to the rest of the week, but I wasn't in the mood to blog.)

// Session Start: Sunday, 23 March 2008 //

(8:42 PM) priscilla: aaron is lecturing me again
(8:43 PM) Barnabas : har
(8:44 PM) Barnabas : what does he say about the heart of everything [song]? that it's unnaturally low-pitched?
[Within Temptation. Aaron has previously complained that Tarja Turunen sings 'unnaturally high'.]
(8:44 PM) priscilla: he hasn't heard it yet
(8:44 PM) priscilla: i was listening to The Dream [Leaves' Eyes. ]
(8:44 PM) priscilla: it got to the growling [see above link, 3:12 or so]
(8:44 PM) Barnabas : thought so
(8:44 PM) Barnabas : cue master passion greed!
[Nightwish. A step down from their usual stuff, with blasphemy and profanity, but the point is, it's a heavy song with screaming.]
(8:44 PM) priscilla: Aaron throws down his headphones and turns pleading i'm-scared voice in pris's direction:
(8:44 PM) priscilla: can you PLEASE not listen to that type of stuff?!
(8:45 PM) Barnabas : or the dark passion play section of the poet and the pendulum
[Nightwish. Blasphemy here to ruin an otherwise good song, but again, used as an example of a heavy song with screaming.]
(8:45 PM) Barnabas : what else?
(8:45 PM) priscilla: i actually think he'd tolerate DPP more than LE
[DPP: Dark passion play, Nightwish's latest album. LE - Leaves' Eyes.]
(8:45 PM) Barnabas : oh, chasing the dragon [Epica. ]
(8:45 PM) Barnabas : the obessive devotion [Epica. Album cover used for the 'video' probably NSFW.]
(8:45 PM) priscilla: oh yeah, he got annoyed at me for that one too
(8:45 PM) Barnabas : XD
(8:45 PM) priscilla: ALL epica >_>
(8:46 PM) Barnabas : never enough only has background grunts [Epica. Video probably NSFW.]
(8:47 PM) priscilla: the point is that its there at all
(8:47 PM) Barnabas : but they actually add to the song!
(8:48 PM) priscilla: i agree, but the other half of the room doesn't
(8:49 PM) Barnabas : heh heh
(8:49 PM) Barnabas : hmm
(8:49 PM) Barnabas : you should download some mastodon just to traumatise him
[Mastodon, death metal. Sample: NSFW.]
(8:49 PM) priscilla: is that some creeepy haunt-my-dreams stuff?
(8:50 PM) Barnabas : no, it's heavier screamo
(8:51 PM) priscilla: honey, its gonna traumatise ME
(8:53 PM) Barnabas : ... call me that again and I'll find a way to get it into your ears |:
(8:53 PM) priscilla: well, at least that word slightly traumastise you =D
(8:54 PM) priscilla: honey

// Session Start: Monday, 14 April 2008 //

(4:37 PM) Barnabas : ... why do I have TWO pencil sharpeners in my pencilcase?
(4:37 PM) Barnabas : wait, one came from the pencil shavings box
(4:37 PM) Barnabas : nvm
(4:37 PM) priscilla: i don't even use normal pencils o_O
(4:38 PM) priscilla: juuuust my trusty mechanical pencils and no colours
(4:38 PM) Barnabas : I still have my assorted graphite pencils, but seeing as I don't draw . . . they'll live at home as of now
(4:39 PM) Barnabas : ... I just tried to type /next instead of alt+space "in" enter
(4:39 PM) priscilla: ouch D=
(4:39 PM) priscilla: and, don't you need them in geo tho?
(4:40 PM) Barnabas : nope
(4:40 PM) Barnabas : pacer's enough
(4:40 PM) priscilla: i read that as the mechanism that keeps the heart beating "pacer" rather than the mechanical "pacer"
(4:41 PM) Barnabas : they're called "pacemakers", hon /bemused
(4:41 PM) priscilla: yeah, but i never ever - ARRGHH you CALLED ME THAT
(4:41 PM) Barnabas : revenge is sweet
(4:42 PM) Barnabas : and this is going in my blag
(4:42 PM) priscilla: /stab

Albtraum einer Woche

Bleagh. Allow me to join the masses in saying that I am over school. It's kinda bugging me that most people are saying "yay holidays" at the moment while I'm thinking to myself, "crap, only two weeks to catch up as much as possible on my notes and get fieldwork done and complete prac writeups and get drafts of those all-important hand-in-or-you-fail essays". C'est la vie, I guess.

Notwithstanding the title of this post (damn, that word use looks wrong), which does sum up my week, there isn't much to say about it being a nightmare; it's just a bunch of assignments and late nights. (4am sleep to wake up at 6am kinda sucks, and is, incidentally, why I fell asleep this afternoon and am still awake now, at 4am again.) Thank God for coffee; I'd've had nothing in on time this week had I not had that amount of caffeine. At least there's holidays now, giving me no excuse for late nights, nor late mornings.

In OTHER, important (read: non-school) news... not much either. There's a few more bands on the right, but nothing earth-shattering, in my opinion. I did quickly mod minimalistunes (Avedesk) so I could tell what was playing when using MS Word's side-by-side view. Bit clumsy, but was happy with the result (white progress bar on the top's a bit hard to see) so I bunged one together for my regular window format (the bar can be clicked through, but it's a bit counterintuitive as a result). Coupled with the best app I could find to read song lyrics out of the file, rather than from an online database, as all the widgets seem to want to do [/rant], and another app that lets Launchy control iTunes and display information, it's pretty useful. (For the record, Lauri Ylönen's voice annoys the hell outta me, but Bittersweet has great album art, and is well-composed, so instrumental version for the win.)

Two quick things to wrap up. One, spellcheckers are stupid. STUPID. And two:
(Schrödinger says there was no hidden text until you moused over. I typed this up before realising I'd stolen it from http://xkcd.com/45/)

Choice quotes from Biology (now with 20% more bonus asides)

Ich schwöre euch, dass ich nicht faul war, sondern ich habe zu viel Hausaufgaben. Wirklich! (Funny that I learned the verb [jemandem schwören] from, and will forever associate it with, a recording of one of Hitler's speeches.)

I don't have much time, so I thought I just might post some golden moments from school. Well, biology; that class rocks.

 Wednesday two weeks ago, we had an old exam paper to do on ecology, and it had this gem of a question: "Describe the benefits of great tits on dates." Confused/shocked/disgusted? Read this before going on. Yes, there's a dubious URL, there's no nudity, I swear. (By chance, that was posted the following Saturday. Talk about great timing.) Anyway, I *still* can't see the actual meaning of the question. Makes me wonder if the person setting the paper was just high (and watching porn?) when writing it. Heh.

 We were talking about DNA replication today (helicase / RNA polymerase / DNA polymerase III / DNA polymerase I / DNA ligase / blaaagh) and we ("we" being both students and teacher) took issue with the textbook stating that DNA polymerase III added short strands of complementary DNA to the RNA primer (if you don't get this, you don't need to). "Short"? Way to quantify your statements. Anyway, the guy sitting next to me, James, suggested it was "about *this* [indicates with hands] long. Not to scale."

 Also today, our teacher, who shall be referred to as Joe (bleheheheh) mused that he'd need to write up a blurb for something or other, and James just randomly started singing. Whee.

One other note, after putting off listening to them for close to three years, I had a listen to Apocalyptica, and was pleasantly surprised to know that they played more than Metallica covers. (Forgive me! I'd only heard of them from a friend, and I gather he only knew about their covers at the time.) Anyway, awesome music. Awesome awesome awesome. I hastily gave my 'cello teacher a CD with Farewell (see below) on it, and she said it was ok to play in 'cello ensemble. Which is especially awesome, seeing as said ensemble has lately been a monotony of easy pieces. (That said, Farewell is nice and high in the treble clef. Practice time!) Pity I only discovered Apocalyptica this year; we could've played so many pieces. A few (well, not just a few) pieces that would be well worth listening to, if you (O great population of readers, who may or may not be greater in number than the number of celli I have every played) follow in the form of Youtube links, listed in order of awesomeness.

 Farewell
 Conclusion
 Faraway
 Ruska
 Hope
 Peace
 Somewhere around nothing
 Hall of the Mountain King (Grieg)
 Stroke

A note for anyone who wants to look for more of their pieces, though - the lead single off their most recent album has a blasphemous title, and their second single, as well as many of their other songs, contains profanity. Just a heads up. (EDIT: Most of their pieces are instrumentals, though, and thus don't contain profanity.)

Und jetzt verschwinde ich. Wenn ich nächste Woche nicht schreibe, dürfen ihr mich ertränken. Oder mich im Brand stecken. Oder mich erdrosseln. Weil es nicht passieren werde!

[random postscript] If my memory serves me correctly, I've played on six celli total. A quarter-size in the classes that were compulsory in year two, another quarter-size when I had private tuition in grades three and four, another quarter-size when picking the cello up again in year six (yeah, I was a tiny kid), a three-quarter size in year seven, and full size in tenth grade (I'm not a tiny kid any more, but I'm still bottom of average. If only I didn't care about my height...bleh). All these celli were/are (I'm using the last one at the moment) rentals from school, by the way. Aaand, deserving of its own sentence, the cello which my parents, who spoil me, bought for me last year. Yay for random asides. [/random postscript]