95% content free meme

Stolen from Liam – because it’s not like I have anything more worthwhile to be doing on my day off…

1.Where did you take your profile pic?
Mark took it, not me. It was on the Arch & Anth lawn for the Sedgwick Club photo (I think) last year.

2.What exactly are you wearing right now?
Fuck all. Yes, seriously. Feast your mental eyes on that, internet.

3.What is your current problem?
Immediately, hunger. I have nothing sensible to eat, having just almost burnt the house down (slight exageration, but there was smoke) trying to toast waffles. On a more long term basis, lack of money. Not that I’m horribly poor (especially as my job is being extended for yet another month, yatta!) but because I want stuff.

4.What makes you happy most?
Tough questions. Lots of stuff! Hugs? Frivolously spending money before the buyer’s remorse kicks in? Feeling I’m actually making a difference at work? Drugs? I think we’ll go with the first suggestion.

5.What song are you listening to at the moment?
“Touch It/Technologic” from Alive 2007 by Daft Punk.

6.Any celeb you would marry?
Probably not. Don’t think I could stand any of them enough to marry them. Now random shags are another matter…

7.Name someone with the same birthday as you?
Philip K Dick (author of the book which kind of turned into the best film ever) was also born on the 16th December, but died before the particular 16th December I was born on.

8.Ever sang in front of a large audience?
Not intentionally. I do just randomly sing (badly), so have been busted in hospital wards/on the streets/driving round…

9. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
Richard once told me  I look like Chris O’Dowd. Other than that, I can’t recall anyone.

10.Do you watch Disney films?
Sometimes. Robin Hood is good (and was the inspiration for the Hamster Dance), and I’ll always have Dumbo as my introduction to good old fashioned “ho ho ho,  aren’t black people funny!” style racism. Then you’ve got the more modern, less Disneyish Disney films,  like The Incredibles (Mrs Incredible was HOT – though googling for a suitable pic has just Rule 34ed her) and Pirates of the Caribbean. And not forgetting the “too scary for kids” Touchstone Pictures efforts like Nightmare Before Christmas.

11. Do you speak any language?
English. Just about. I can understand and read French, but haven’t a hope in hell of speaking it.

12. Has anyone you’ve been really close with passed away?
Not recently. A few not so close family members, a couple of frequent fliers at work, but noone particularly close to me.

13. Whats your favourite band?
Eels, but it’s close. They get it for Electro-shock Blues, which is a stunning album.

14.What’s something that really annoys you?
Alan Carr. We got the fucking joke the first time you stood on stage and went “Guess what? I’m  GAY!”. Either come up with something new of jump in front of a train. Seriously, I despise the man more than anything else in the known universe.

Chapter 1:

1.Middle names:
Russell. I don’t often use it.

2.Nicknames:
Many and numerous. I have been known as a variety of animals (puppy, cat, gorilla, hippopotamus), though my favourite will always be “Big Plumms” (thanks Herb!)

3.Current location:
In front of a computer.

4.Eye color:
Brown.

Chapter 2:

1.Do you live with your parent(s)?
No.

2.Do you get along with your parent(s):
Yeah. Always good for a lift or some money

3.Do you have any Siblings?
Yes, one little brother called Liam. I was upset when he was born because I wanted a sister. Now I want him to man up

Chapter 3: Favorites

1. Ice Cream:
Chocolate. Is that my feminine side showing through?

2. Season:
Spring. It’s such a energising feeling after the dull crap of the winter.

3.Shampoo/conditioner:
Say no to sham poo. Demand real poo!

Chapter 4: Do You..

1.Dance in the shower?
I dance everywhere, baby! Including the most inappropriate places (caught myself dancing in resus the other day… :S)

2.Do you write on your hand?
At work, all the time. It has been known for my handover to consist of a glove. When not at work, I still do it when I can’t find a bit of paper and I need to note something down, but then I generally forget I wrote what I need to remember on the hand and wash it off.

3.Call people back?
Sometimes. If I actually want to speak to them, or it might be important, then yes. But some people just get ignored – if they really want me, they’ll phone again.

4.Believe in love:
Cop out answer…

5. Any bad habits?
Many. I do very bad things, and I do them very well. That and my coffee addiction.

Chapter 5: Have You..

1.Broken a bone:
Yes. Couple of toes, both radius, and a few ribs.

2.Sprained stuff:
All the time. When I was in secondary school, I used to sprain my ankle almost weekly trying to play rugby on frozen bumpy ground.  Awful, awful times.

3.Had physical therapy:
Giggity giggity goo!

4. Gotten stitches:
A couple of times. All for cuts to the face due to my own stupidity.

5.Taken painkillers:
Who hasn’t? Well, other than those homeopathy nutters.

6.Gone scuba diving or snorkeling:
A great regret of mine is that I haven’t. Did snorkelling lessons in a swimming pool, but have never got round to doing it. Was going to go diving in Florida, but then my Nana died and we had to cut short the trip

7. Been stung by a bee:
Now, but got pwned by some wasps after I stood on a next during fieldwork. Some of the buggers flew up my trouser leg, was not amused.

8.Thrown up at the dentist:
Nope. Passed out, but not thrown up.

9.Sworn in front of your parents:
Yep. And they’ve sworn in front of me, so we’re quits.

10. Had detention:
Several times. Mostly for not doing homework, but my favourite was for sitting in the lotus position in a design class.

Chaper 6: Who/What was the last

1.Movie(s):
I watched half of A Knight’s Tale last night, but fell asleep (not due to the film, which is very good, but because I was shattered). Last complete film I watched was Bicentennial Man, which I really enjoyed, more so that I thought I would, but then it’s a good take on Asimov’s books which I thoroughly enjoy anyways. Last film I saw at the cinema was Watchmen. Thought it could have been better, but it didn’t deserve the slating that it got from my companions. And yes, I have read the novels. Several years ago. I’m a trendsetter,  me.

2.Person to text you:
Jamie, regarding a tutoring job for me next year.

3.Person you called:
Cathy, as she is keeper of the AEDs and I want to steal a couple because yes, I’m super cool, so I’m spending my bank holiday Monday on duty. But it is autograss, which is hilarious fun just to sit and watch.

4.Person you hugged:
I hug everybody.

5.Person you tackled:
Odd question. I had a fight with my crewmate and his girlfriend over a mobile phone  (which I won, thank you very much), so that probably counts.

6. Person you talked to on MSN?
Most likely Sarah, because she’s somehow always on there whatever time of the day it is and always says hi.

7.Thing you touched
Excluding the computer? You don’t want to know… (By that I mean my coffee mug, but it’s funnier leaving it to your imagination).

8. Thing you ate?
Above mentioned heavily burnt waffles. Crunchy on the outside, frozen on the inside. Mmmm.

9.Thing you drank:
A big mug of coffee. My mug has Eeyore on the side of it.

10.Thing you said:
Not sure. I talk all the time, so I kind of drift in and out. It’ll have been to myself as I’ve been left to my own devices for over an hour now, but I can’t tell you what it was I’m afraid.

Chaper 7: Future

1. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
An overworked, underpaid, and generally annoying FY1. If the NHS hasn’t self destructed by then.

2. 10 years?
An overworked, underpaid, and generally annoying registrar.

3. In 50 years?
So I’ll be 74? Probably retired. Or dead, more likely.

4. Where do you hope to live?
Somewhere peaceful, but close enough to the city that I don’t get bored. There also has to be hills around.

5. Do you want to be famous?
Doesn’t everyone? But not really, fame would only go to my head and make me even more arrogant than I already am.

6. Do you want children? Or maybe animals?
Animals, yes. Husky! Children? Don’t really want to think about that at the moment. Kids in generally scare the crap out of me because they keep going wonky on me at work, but as for my own I’m far too young to be thinking about it yet.

7. Will you have plastic surgery?
Elective? No. I’m gorgeous as I am But if I was involved in some horrible disfiguring accident, then yes I would please.

The book meme

I’m bored, and this meme seems to be doing the rounds so why not…

The BBC figures most people will have on average read about 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘X‘ after those you have read. Tally your total below. Movies don’t count!

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6. The Bible X
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullmam X
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini X
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan X
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52. Dune – Frank Herbert X
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt X
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X
75. Ulysses – James Joyce X
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell X
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks X
94. Watership Down – Richard A/dams
95. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole X
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So if my counting is correct (and I wouldn’t bet on it), I’ve read 39 of those. Wow, I’m far more ignorant than I gave myself credit for!

My next album meme

Apparently, this is “a totally random way to make your new random band’s new random album cover”. A little schoolgirly in the description perhaps, but I had to try it.

1. Go to Wikipedia and click “random article” (done for you if you hit that link). The first article you get is the name of your band.
2. Next, head over to Random Quotes. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
3. Finally, visit Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days”.  The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

So apparently, my band Confocal Microscopy will soon be releasing their album “Have a pretty good time”, and it’ll look something like this (picture from here):

Coming soon, to any good record store? Oh wait, they've all closed...

Memetastic

Apparently, I’ve been tagged in a meme.

1. Five names you go by:

• Nick – an obvious derivative of “Nicholas”
• Plummer – again, another fairly obvious choice
• Rilla – so called by Ana, because apparently I look like a gorilla
• Monkey Boy – a regular one at work. Not sure why.
• Big Plumms – Herb’s fault, that one

2. Three things you are wearing right now:

• A pair of jeans. I tend to live in a single pair for about a week, then change them when they can stand up on their own accord
• A fleece. Today’s is my Caius fleece, but that’s just because it’s the first I could find.
• My tighty-whitey t-shirt. Actually my work Coolmax effort, but I couldn’t be arsed changing out of it.

3. Two things you want very badly at the moment:

• To know what the hell is going on with my job!
• My grad medicine interview to have been and gone, including them offering me a place and a large scholarship. A yacht would be an added bonus, but I’ll cope without.

4. Three people who will probably fill this out:

• Mr Rob has nothing better to do.
• Asp seems to spend most of his time wasting it on the internet, so may be tempted.
• GrumpyAmbulanceDriver might do it. Though he’ll probably ignore it.

5. Two things you did last night:

• Tried to sync my two Windows Mobile phones to each other. Thunderbird and BirdieSync seems to be the answer (Outlook was teh suck)
• Slept. Rather unsuccesfully (up at 0530!), but still managed a bit.

6. Two things you ate today:

• A giant sausage from a dodgy cornershop in Harrogate
• Home made sausage fajitas

7. Two people you last talked to on the phone:

• My boses’ boss, regarding what the hell is going on with my job
• The charge nurse on my ward at the hospital, trying to get time off to try and sort out the job mess

8. Two things you are going to do tomorrow:

• Go to Harrogate, and do some PTS stuff.
• Have a bath.

9. Two longest car rides:

• Leeds to Cornwall was pretty long
• The length of Florida, including being one of the last cars out of the Florida Keys due to fires cutting off both the access roads, to get back for my Nana’s funeral.

10. Two of your favourite beverages:

• Coke. But it’s so damned expensive, I’ll drink most supermarket “cola” as long as it contains sugar rather than any of this namby-pamby carcinogenic crap
• Most types of real ale will do. I’ll try anything once (except incest and folk dancing…)

Memes, and where I’ve gone wrong in life

Shamelessly stolen from Revelation, here’s a meme as I’m too lazy to write an update just yet…

My ideal jobs, according to a website

1. Mining Engineer
2. Explosives Specialist
3. Biomedical Engineer
4. Computer Engineer
5. Hairstylist
6. Physicist
7. Paramedic
8. Electrical Engineer
9. Astronomer
10. Petroleum Engineer
11. Electrical Engineering Tech
12. Electronics Engineering Tech
13. Avionics Tech
14. Geologist
15. Oceanographer
16. Cable Installer and Repairer
17. Chemical Engineer
18. Optometrist
19. Environmental Engineer
20. Dental Hygienist
21. Hydrologist / Hydrogeologist
22. Mechanical Engineer
23. Helicopter Pilot
24. Dentist
25. Orthodontist
26. Aerospace Engineer
27. Pest Controller
28. Biological Tech
29. Security Systems Technician
30. Film Processor
31. Vending Machine Servicer
32. Tow Truck Driver
33. Computer Support Person
34. Industrial Designer
35. Automotive Painter
36. Librarian
37. Chiropractor
38. Sign Maker
39. Electrician
40. Boilermaker

The big test of everything (damn you Bailey!)

Well that was a terrible use of 15 minute. And now I’m apparently an emo kid. It’s all Bailey’s fault…

 

The Everything Test

There are many different types of tests on the internet today. Personality tests, purity tests, stereotype tests, political tests. But now, there is one test to rule them all.

Traditionally, online tests would ask certain questions about your musical tastes or clothing for a stereotype, your experiences for a purity test, or deep questions for a personality test.We’re turning that upside down – all the questions affect all the results, and we’ve got some innovative results too! Enjoy

Personality You are more emotional than logical, more concerned about self than concerned about others, more atheist than religious, more loner than dependent, more lazy than workaholic, more rebel than traditional, more engineering mind than artistic mind, more cynical than idealist, more leader than follower, and more extroverted than introverted. As for specific personality traits, you are adventurious (100%), outgoing (100%), intellectual (81%), horny (67%).

Stereotypes Emo Kid 100% Punk Rock 93% Geek 65%

Life Experience Sex 35% Substances 38% Travel 21%

Politics Your political views would best be described as Socialist, whom you agree with around 100% of the time.

Socioeconomic Your attitude toward life best associates you with Upper Class. You make more than 36% of those who have taken this test, and 88% less than the U.S. average.

If your life was a movie, it would be rated PG-13. By the way, your hottness rank is 50%, hotter than 17% of other test takers.

TAKE THE TEST
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