Bringing on the trumpets

I woke up this morning, and decided I had to have “Bring on the trumpets!” as my message alert tone.

So, if you get the same funny cravings as me (I’m also eating a sausage and hash brown sandwich with chili flakes – maybe I’m pregnant?), you can download, with suitably high gain to be a loud ringtone but not stupidly distorted:

• Bring on the trumpets!
• Trumpets!

Did the Earth shake for you too, baby?

Another thing that caught my eye today – apparently, in a major paradigm shift in Earth Sciences, gayness causes earthquakes. From the article:

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Idea for a PhD – mapping earthquake distribution against world gayness? There is some ground for this, with San Francisco the world’s gayest city and the high frequency of earthquakes on the nearby San Andreas fault. However, one question remains unanswered – is it just sodomy in particular that causes earthquakes, or all forms of gay and lesbian activity?

Quoth the crow, ‘It’s my frigging nut!’

I’ve just spent a rather entertaining fifteen minutes stood in the rain watching a crow try to eat an acorn. Yes, I’m that sad

The weather’s rubbish. My project is rubbish (Yeah, it’s probably not. But that’s how I feel right now). My cooking is rubbish. Everything’s just a bit rubbish. So I do what any sensible person would do, and go for a walk to buy beans and bread for that traditional pick-me-up, beans on toast. Co-op don’t have bread – rubbish. The Shell garage doesn’t have bread or beans – also rubbish. So I have to walk all the way to Waitrose for extortionate bread and gold plated (hopefully, for the price) beans – extra rubbish. However I did run in to a new orange flavour Relentless (“the energy drink with a health warning”) which tastes slightly less artificial than the original and now has me buzzed up.

On the way back, I came across a crow hopping around in the middle of the road. It had an acorn in it’s mouth, so having nothing to do but get out of the rain, get changed out of my greens (Was supposed to be covering a rugby thing. Didn’t happen because of rain. Didn’t find out until I got there. Rubbish.) , warm up, eat beans on toast, do project, etc, etc, I decided to stop and watch.

Obviously, once I stopped and stood still, I became less of a threat and the crow started going about his business. Which was trying to break open the acorn. His plan was simple:

1. Place acorn in a puddle. Tap it with beak.
2. ???
3. Profit

This seemed to be particularly unsuccessful. However many times the crow picked up his acorn, walked across the road to the next puddle, dropped it in the puddle and pecked at it, the acorn didn’t appear to open. One of the major problems may have been all the people and cars and other scary things that were about – each time something moved nearby that was bigger than the bird, it would place the acorn in the dead centre of the puddle and retreat to the far side, dancing around the edge always keeping the car/oldfolk/kid-in-pushchair on the other side of the puddle, safely away on the far side of the vast expanse of water.

Then the crow hit on something. One car came a bit too close, to the crow grabbed his (I say his, might well have been a lady crow, I’ve no idea how to tell the difference) acorn and flew for the nearest high grown, a bus stop-signifying post that was recently bent out of shape by a council rubbish collecting lorry. Car safely away, and he jumped back off his post and swooped down towards the nearest puddle to continue his futile dunking and pecking routine. Then disaster! He lost his grip on the nut.

You could almost imagine what was going through the bird’s mind as he sat next to the acorn and looked quizzically at it. “Dang, dropped it. Hang on a tick! Hmm, looks a bit bent. Maybe this will do the trick?” Having tried in the puddle again for a couple of minutes, he went for another go at the throwing the thing at the ground trick.

Success! The crow swooped down upon his prize, and pecked away at those sweet, sweet innards. And I went home, strangely full of renewed vigour and hope for the future. Take a lesson from the crow. “Never give up, never surrender”

Accents

So I’m listening to the albumn Battle Metal by Turisas. Yes, it’s a band I heard at Download. Yes, I feel dirty. Real dirty. But I’ve managed to overcome the urge to headbang along, holding the devil symbol aloft in work so far.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make it this: For some reason, when they start getting all excited and screaming, these Finnish “folk metal” singers start coming out with a Scottish accent. I’ve never heard this before. Most countries tend to learn English with a bit of an American accent – after all, it is the most publicised version (the one that is spoken loudest and most arrogantly, anyway) of English. So it’s understandable that as they learn English, children (and to a lesser extend adults, though most European and beyond countries tend to teach English at school – can’t expect us Brits and Yanks to learn another language can you?!) will pick up the American accent strongest.

But SCOTTISH? Where the hell would you pick that up? Perhaps all Finnish people speak with a Scottish accent – I haven’t really had a long chat with a Finnish person where they got as screamy as the typical metal-head. Maybe I should – anyone know where I can find a Finnish rock fan? But really, it is quite incomprehensible.

Perhaps it’s just a side effect of being big, unkempt and ginger?

Touch typing and spelling

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been teaching myself to touch type, as it’s something I really should have been able to do a while ago given the amount I use computers (as opposed to my still pretty quick but not as fast as it could be pseudo-touch-typing with regular glances at the keyboard). This I’ve been doing by typing with my laptop keyboard, but looking at a separate monitor so I can’t glance at the keyboard at the same time.

As a result, my typing speed has increased dramatically. The only problem is now my inability to spell is creeping in – rather than concentrating on the spelling as I go along, I’m just typing the word in the same subconscious way as I would write it, the difference being that I know where the key is for a particular letter rather than what the particular squiggle looks like. So my spelling is becoming dire. So apologies for any horrible typos!

Thank Eris for spellcheckers

Lookalikes

Why have I never noticed this before?

I think we should be told!

Two questions…

Number 1: Is there some kind of Satanic ritual being performed in Cambridge? Over the past two days I have seen five people walking around with some kind of black mud/tar/oil/paint smeared in the centre of their forehead. If you ask me, it’s a little spooky.

Number 2: Is it a sign of madness that I draw little spirograph-esque images on my lecture notes? Doing some actual work in the library (yeah I know, a scientist in a library, imagine that) I have noticed that on ~80% of my notes, I have drawn a spirography image around the top hole punched in the paper. Perhaps I’m just a little bit insane. Wait a minute…