not.in.paris

I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I actually like this song.

I detest pretty much every song Panic have ever produced, but this one’s actually okay. Ugh…maybe  I have some kind of bizarre illness. If I start posting about how great My Chemical Romance are and how much I want to shag Gerad Way, just shoot me, mmkay?

Here’s Nine in the Afternoon:

And while we’re at it, here’s something else for you to enjoy: My Immortal, the worst piece of fanfiction ever written. Even if you’ve never read Harry Potter, you’ll get hysterics out of this.

On the subject of things that have gone viral, I currently have a video up on youtube of my model volcanic eruption that I did for a geography project. It’s currently averaging over 250 views a day and has 28,589 total views. =O

We went up to London today to see the Listening Post exhibition at the Science museum. Click here for more info.

The beginning of the exhibition, which is basically a history of communication, was interesting but not amazingly so. There were some very interesting bits that were done as if it was an exhibition in the 1920s, but other than that, it was nothing special.

The centrepiece of the exhibition though, the Listening Post, was quite honestly one of the most fascinating and moving things I have ever seen in my life.

That’s it. All those little screens have letters on. The sequence starts with just one in the middle coming on with one letter at a time, going through all the letters of the alphabet until it finds the right one, then the next letter doing that, then the next two, until there’s a 4-letter word. Then another word comes. Then another. Then they all start ticking over. They make a ticking sound as they do it. Then all the screens come into life, ticking over with words that people are saying. It’s incredible to watch. There’s English words, German words, Spanish words, normal words, real words, misspelt words…it’s amazing to watch.

After that (I think: I’m not entirely certain I have the order right) were people’s usernames that they use in the chat rooms. Some of them are read out by a computerised voice, and there’s hundreds of them going past. It was fascinating.

The best bit was the next bit, which was I am/I love. It picks out sentences beginning with ‘I am’ (or, if it’s doing the ‘I love’ one, sentences beginning with ‘I like’ or ‘I love’). They’re all read out and they all scroll past on the screens. It’s oddly emotional: I actually felt like bursting into tears. You know when you see some exhibitions, and you think ‘wow, think of the possibilities’, but you can’t quite feel as overawed as you should? You don’t feel like that with this. You feel so amazingly overawed that you can hardly handle it. You really do get the sensation of watching thousands of people talking, at home, in the office, in internet cafes…it’s incredible. It has to be seen to be described.

Then there was a part with just random sentences that seem to come across in waves. That’s hard to describe too. People were talking about everything…seriously, it’s incredible.

It was something that really, really made me think. If you have any chance at all of going to the exhibition, then do. It’s part of the permenant collection, so it’s not going away any time soon. It was one of the most beautiful, moving, emotional things I have ever seen. I cannot recommend it enough.

We also went over the road to the V&A, which is probably my favourite museum, to see the Mapping the Imagination exhibition. It was really interesting. There were loads of different maps, of real things and imaginary things and all sorts of things. It was a very small exhibition but nevertheless well worth seeing. One of my favourites was Jeremy Wood’s ‘All London Routes’. He tracked his journeys around London for 5 years using a GPS system and then made a map of them. Dark lines represent routes well-travelled and pale lines are less-travelled.  Here it is (though you can’t quite get the full effect without really seeing it):

And finally, one more from the exhibition. This is London’s Kerning, in which all the street names are made out of the letters (click here for a larger version):

Ugh. You would not believe how much my feet hurt right now. Anyway, all in good time…time to update on the last two days.

I had my music lesson yesterday, and my teacher gave me my grade 6 certificate and mark scheme. It seems I lost the marks I did in the pieces mostly because I was playing slightly sharp and because I didn’t have enough dynamics in the first movement of the Pepusch. And I’ve found out why she started writing almost immediately after I started playing the Gaubert: her first sentence was something like ‘You captured the mood and character immediately’! And I have a new piece for recorder to learn too - a Mexican hat dance on descant - so that’ll give me something to learn over the holidays.

I had a piano lesson, too, which is my first in 3 weeks and will be my only one for another 3. She said that the piece I’d learned (which was a stage 2 piece) was perfect! Lucky me. My friend missed her lesson, so she had to  come in mine. I wasn’t very pleased about that, because she’s very competitive and when we had lessons together I didn’t enjoy them much because of that, but because we’ve been having separate lessons, we’ve been learning different pieces, so it was actually okay. She gave an absolutely terrible rendition of the Moonlight Sonata. Ho hum…I do like that piece, but not when it’s played like that. It’s one of the very few pieces of Beethoven I like.

After my music lesson, I went ice skating with a bunch of friends. I’ve only been ice skating once before in my life, and I was undeniably the worst skater there! Ah well; it was still great fun. As with the last time I went, at the beginning I could hardly stay up and by the end I was skating pretty well. One of my friends dragged me right out into the middle and we did a couple of laps, which was awesome because there’s no way I’d have the confidence to go so far out on my own! I borrowed her skates and unfortunately it turned out they were rubbing really badly, even though I couldn’t feel it at all. I’m now wearing a plaster on each foot: there’s no skin on the inside of my right foot and there’s a huge blister on the side of my left big toe =[ Poor me. It was great fun, though, and hopefully we’re going to go again in the holidays.

I’m going to switch to a new entry now for today’s trip to London, in the interest of keeping things short and upping my viewings and such. Cheery-bye.

I got my grade 6 flute results back today! That’s helluva quick:  I only did the exam on the 14th and normally the results take 3 or 4 weeks to come back.

They only came through online, so I haven’t yet got my certificate or the mark sheet (which has all the examiner’s comments) but I do have my mark breakdown. Hopefully I’ll get my shiny new certificate at my lesson tomorrow!

I got:

26/30 on the Gaubert

26/30 on the Pepusch

27/30 on the Stokes

19/21 on my scales (god only knows how…)

17/21 on my sight reading (once again, she was marking the wrong exam)

13/18 on the aural (which is a whole mark clear of the pass mark! Considering my amazing crapness at aural, this is actually quite amazing)

For a total of…wait for it…drum roll please…128/150!

That’s a merit and only two marks off a distinction! =D

So yeah, I’m delighted about that.

Just another diamond day, just a blade of grass…ugh. Shuddup Vashti Bunyan, mmkay?

Had two friends over for the afternoon. It was a laugh. We rented a film (The Hoax) but it turned out to be crap (at least they thought so…I didn’t mind it) and my dad and I are going to finish it as soon as he’s caught up with me because he wants to see it and we gave up. We got takeaway pizza, we went out in the garden a lot even though it was cold and we ate lots of chocolate and crisps. Yeah, it was okay.

Washed my hair this morning. Not much else of interest.

Gosh my life is so exciting sometimes.

School tomorrow =[ I don’t want to do it, not after a lovely long weekend off. It’s too long until the holidays! And I have a geography test for which I haven’t revised. Hehe, at least I can get through it with correct grammar.

Ingredients

• 350g margarine

• 3 tablespoons golden syrup/black treacle/honey

• 175g sugar

• 250g oats

• 3 heaped teaspoons cocoa powder

1. Preheat oven to 140 degrees C.

2. Grease a 17×28cm tin.

3. Melt together butter, syrup and sugar in a saucepan. Don’t let them bubble.

4. In a separate bowl, mix together the oats and the cocoa powder.

5. Mix the two mixtures together.

6. Put the mixture into the tray and cook for 18-20 minutes.

7. Leave to cool.

8. Remove from the tin and cut up.

That’s the recipe I used to make my flapjack yesterday. It’s an absolutely divine recipe (well, okay, to be technically accurate, the flapjack it makes is divine, not the recipe itself) but the flapjack it makes (or rather, you make when you follow it) is very gooey. You might want to give it a go without quite so much margarine.

A minute ago, it was sunny. Then my mum came in and told me to look at the great big black cloud. We don’t normally get all obsessive about clouds, but seriously, this is a BIG black cloud.

And about three seconds afterwards, it started hailing. Hard. It went from being too sunny to have the curtain open to so dark we have to put the light on in seconds. Wow.

And now for what I actually wanted to write about.

We went to buy me a new mattress today. We found one quite quickly, which was good. It was the lay who helped us that intrigued me. She had really obviously dyed hair: brown and blonde.  She was probably in her late 40s or early 50s. The card reader wasn’t working and she picked up the phone to ask for someone called ‘little Davey’…it made me wonder who she is, outside of the shop. Does she like to work there? She was friendly but maybe she’s only working there to pass the time. Is she married? Does she have children? We were talking about mattress springs and she was saying about overweight people who expect their springs to last forever but then she said ‘you’re quite tiny, so it won’t matter’ and it made me wonder if she has kids just because of the way she said it. I don’t know what it was that made me wonder about her so much, but I did.

On the way out, I saw a man standing on the balcony of a red block of flats smoking a cigarette. It seemed significant but I don’t know why.

The mattress is a lot taller than my old one but a damnsight more comfortable.

This afternoon, I made myself feel very organised by striking loads of things off my to do list. My room is now shiningly spotless (though actually, that’s not particularly unusual, given that I’m a neat freak) and the only things left are to call the gym to see if there’s a class tomorrow (I did call but got an answering machine…bastards are probably shut for Good Friday) and to do my English projects.

All in all, a most satisfactory day.

I’m not quite sure how life is like flapjack, but I made chocolate flapjack in food tech today. It’s quite ridiculously gooey (I have a feeling that happened last time I cooked flapjack) but it tastes delicious. It’s in the fridge at the moment because it needs to set but I keep sneaking tiny little pieces. It looks like mice have been at it. Mm, yum yum.

I’m supposed to be doing geography homework at the moment. It was due in earlier today but I forgot to put it all together so I told my teacher a tale about why all our technology is broken at the moment and she said I could email it to her.

I stayed late tonight for F1. A bloke from the Navy came in to talk to us about aerodynamics. I can’t believe he actually did a degree in that stuff! It’s amazingly confusing. How I’m supposed to design a car that incorporates it all I really have no idea…

I’m sure life’s like flapjack, though.

It’s taken me a long ass time to update this thing…probably because I’ve been ridiculously busy. My life has entered one of those phases where I don’t have a free moment.

The time of year has come when all the extracurricular stuff starts, which means I’m now staying late every night at school and some nights staying late after the late buses have gone so that I can get something else in.  Every year I do this and then everyyear I promise myself that next year I’ll be a little more selective and then I end up doing it all anyway.

Good news: I made the F1 team! It’s a worldwide competition where teams compete to make the fastest miniature car and decorate it and produce portfolios and computer model is and stuff. Sounds lame, I know, but it’s actually really cool. My school’s pretty darn high up in the rankings (won’t say how high because then it’d be a matter of minutes to find out my school, but believe me, it’s high) so we have quite a lot to live up to. I’m one of the CAD people. Yay!

My music exam is on Friday. Grade 6 flute. Eek!

Yesterday we went to Poole to see a production of Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman by the RSC. It was really good. Well worth seeing. We were lucky to get tickets: it was a full house!

This afternoon, I’m going shopping with some friends to prepare some stuff for another friend’s birthday. Ho hum, such is life.