Further Distractions

Wedding photos are coming soon, promise. I haven't really had a day off since - we were in Wellington this weekend just gone so Mike could go to his hacker conference, and the one before was spent cleaning up the disaster zone the house had become and dealing with the sudden and tragic death of our car (the steering assembly was coming away from the chassis. WTF, WOF PEOPLE, YOU MISSED A POTENTIALLY FATAL DEFECT.)

We weren't going to get a new one, with the whole going-away-next-year plan, but Mike's parents seemed convinced we wouldn't cope without one and are lending us a cheap one they're going to use to teach Mike's little brother Steven to drive when we leave. It's a 1985 Holden Barina, which is both hilariously ancient and a Holden, which makes me feel dirty somehow, as I have only ever owned Japanese imports. Still, it goes, and we won't have to sell it if we leave the country, which is basically what we needed.

Right now I'm watching V, and being gobsmacked at the way it's every piece of wingnut conservative propaganda ever tied up with a neat little bow.

( Seriously: Universal Healthcare Is Bad For You )

So I was thinking about songs you play at your wedding (because my wedding is, holy crap, TOMORROW and we've had a last-minute signing song change because we realised 1:46 was not long enough) and I wondered: do any of you have songs you especially want to play at your wedding? If you are or have been married, did you play them?

Because there are lots of songs which I secretly think are romantic and sweet, but would die before playing at my wedding. In fact, that applies to most of the songs I think are romantic. Which has made choosing wedding music extremely difficult. Every song I think of, I then think "No, wait. It's all emotional. And embarrassing. I couldn't possibly be emotional and embarrassing at my wedding. That would be wrong."

Which may or may not give you some insight into my personality.

(For posterity: the song we are no longer playing is Bic Runga's When I See You Smile. Sorry, Bic, you should write longer songs. Or less depressing ones.)

In a change of pace, I am not posting to report some new wedding drama. By this point, everything is pretty much as ready as it's going to be. I've got the dress, we've had our last meeting with the celebrant, we've been to the venue, people are arriving on Thursday...at this point, I mostly just want to get to it so we can do this. In good news, the dress thing and the best woman thing seem to have been resolved successfully (new dress, best woman is scheduled to arrive on Friday sans partner but plus baby) and the celebrant let us vent for half an hour about everything, so we felt much better afterwards.

However, if I ever marry Mike again? We are totally eloping.

I also started my summer studentship today, which I think will be pretty successful; I like the guy who's supervising it, everyone was very nice, and the atmosphere seemed friendly. It's scheduled so I should be done with the lab stuff well before Christmas, which just leaves analysis and write-up. Of course, I'll also be job-hunting through January, and God knows how that's going to go. But I've got to get through summer first...

...and, also, holy crap, I'm getting married on Saturday.

We have borders along our driveway with a few straggling plants and lots of dead leaves from the overhanging trees. Regularly - and by this I mean pretty much every night - something has been digging around in them and getting leaves and dirt on the drive, which is annoying because then we have to sweep it off and it looks messy and it's just a hassle. I'd been blaming the neighbourhood cats, or hedgehogs, or something of this nature. Turns out I was wrong:

( These are the actual culprits )

You can see the evidence of their marauding at the top of the photo. They were pretty fearless, too - came all the way up the back to the garden and door, until I scared them off my newly-planted vegetable patch. Mike just managed to catch Tia before she really put the fear of Cat into them. If they dig up the vegetables, I might be inclined to let her have her way....

ALSO, I am officially done with university - at least the University of Canterbury! Cleared out my office and handed in my keys today. The three bound copies of my Honours project + PDF on CD (srsly. An entire CD for one half-meg PDF. I DON'T KNOW EITHER.) I don't get my marks in until the fourth of December, but apart from that, and the last two American uni apps, that's it - until and unless I start my PhD next August. It's a weird feeling; I've been a university student for five years. I have no idea how I'm going to handle not being one. (Of course, since Mike's doing his master's, I'm sure I'll be into uni often enough to see him - and that's going to be strange, too, visiting the place but not being part of it.)

I am highly unimpressed that my body has decided to pack it in and succumb to infection now, i.e., three weeks before Honours is due, five weeks before the wedding, at the point I most need to retain forward momentum. It was probably inevitable given that my supervisor, officemate, and partner have all been sick for the last week, but I was hoping by this point I'd escaped. And it's not quite enough illness to be bedridden, just enough to make me build up endless piles of tissues, max out the recommended daily dose of panadol, and have far more difficulty than I'd like concentrating.

OTOH: had first wedding dress fitting yesterday. I'm not sure whether to be happy or terrified.

I know Obama is the magic bringer of change and joy and happiness (and, no, seriously, he's at least vaguely liberal if you squint which is streets ahead of most of the US, and I have a lot of re) but - this? Really? Don't they normally wait until, e.g., people have been President for more than nine months?

Although apparently this means the Nobel committee are just as star-struck as the rest of the known world, which is...hilarious. And terrifying. And hilarious. And really quite terrifying.

I finally watched GI Joe last night, and I have three things to say. 

( Some spoilers within (if you care) )

I'm not sure if I'm more amused by the attempt at en garde or the lightsaber, but it's all so very geekily adorable.

So: in about half an hour I am leaving to get on a plane to go to Wellington to have THE MOST IMPORTANT INTERVIEW OF MY LIFE TO DATE. In which I have to give a three minute speech that I have not yet managed to give coherently in under, oooh, three minutes twenty.

Oh, hey, and then I get to go to a funeral. (Not like a huge thing, since it's a cousin who's had cancer for quite a while, but still. Funeral.)

Please let this all go well.

Good news: have been shortlisted for scholarship to go study in US, get to go to Wellington for interview (and see family). Officemate was also shortlisted, thus avoiding extreme office awkwardness. Other good news: have interview-type thing for summer studentship at hospital med school tomorrow. Would very much like to be gainfully employed over summer using my degree, so this is good.

Bad news: have to summarise in three minutes what I want to study, why I want to study in the US, and how it fits my broader career aspirations. Also, hopes of going to US in any sort of financial comfort depend on getting scholarship, so will be nervous wreck. Also, exams begin next Monday, so interview is smack bang in the middle of them. Stress.

*flails*

Because the National government hasn't done quite enough to annoy me lately, they're now talking about rezoning conservation land to allow mining.

Just - please tell me the public isn't going to roll over on this, as well. Not after the referendum. I don't think I could take it.

Frustration is: finding out that the posters you thought you'd had printed off safely on Friday afternoon both have major printing errors that mean they need to be re-done, only you have class all afternoon and one of them is due tomorrow morning at 10am, and yes, you can get them fixed, but it requires leaving behind the flash drive which has your Powerpoint presentation for this afternoon's class.

(Fine, yes, I should have checked them when I got them, but it was 3pm on a Friday afternoon, I was nipping out on a class coffee break to do it, and I had assumed that the people who design and print posters for a living might have bothered to check whether all four quadrants were printed at the same resolution. My mistake.)

Since he's already kissed Mike McRoberts and felt up Karl Urban, I have only one wish for this telethon: I want to see John Campbell pash an All Black. Too much to ask, you reckon?

I'm going to take a leaf out of labellementeuse's book and post a recipe, because I'd forgotten this one entirely until my mother had me cook it when I was up visiting, and it is just such an incredibly good way to use cabbage, which is otherwise one of those difficult vegetables - or I find it so.

( Chinese pork and cabbage (the only accurate part of that is cabbage ) )

Random actors keep appearing in really unexpected places tonight. First I noticed Christopher Eccleston (or his clone, possibly) in the GI Joe trailer. Because random green goo eating the Eiffel Tower wasn't enough of a draw already (major world monuments being destroyed = me watching a movie, basically. Sad but true.) And now I'm watching a dramatisation of the Apollo 11 mission, and James Masters is playing Buzz Aldrin. That would throw me out of the story enough if I'd just watched Buffy; as it is, I have always had a minor hero-worship thing for Buzz Aldrin (Only actual scientist on the mission! Punched a moon denialist in the face! Co-wrote a quite decent sci-fi novel! Generally awesome!) so seeing him being played by Marsters is severely screwing with my head. Weeeeeird.

Okay, this? This is not a great way to get revenge on your bank. This is being a dick to people who haven't done anything to you. Does this guy actually think the people who turned down his loan were put to any major difficulty because of this? No. No they weren't. The tellers were. And all the other people who wanted to take out money at that bank were. A whole lot of people who were uninvolved were dicked around. And the bank, dude, the bank is still not going to give you a loan. Because it didn't change anything about your credit status. And now you're whining on national TV about the temerity of the bank not having $200,000 in cash just because you wanted it then and there.

I hope it takes that guy a really long time to get the loan he wanted. A really, really long time.

This is quite possibly the best press release of all time. Because this is an issue we should all be very concerned about. Go and be amused. And reassured. Er, maybe.

If you need further persuasion, it includes the quote "We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission."

Went to see Transformers last night and was...I'd say disappointed, but all the reviews pretty much led me to expect what I got, so. Given that I really loved the first one, this was pretty much a total fail - too long, too many new marketing opportunities extraneous characters, too many dumb jokes. The actually *interesting* characters from the first movie, which actually had a pretty big cast (not that you'd know it from the marketing) were shoved aside in favour of stupid jokes. Given that the writers are the same people who did both the first Transformers and Star Trek, which were both exceptionally well-written, something obviously got very screwed up somewhere along the line. I'd love to know where.

Also, I'm pretty sure they broke an unwritten rule of present-day sci-fi by not only namechecking but showing the current President. Yeah, I was annoyed at the cheap straw-man shots at his policies, but also it just felt wrong; if you're going along with the idea that the current President is in office in your movie, then you imply, but you don't show (unless you're making something historical, in which case their identity is part of the point.) That, and it'll date the movie like nothing else. Not that the cheap swine-flu crack didn't do that.

So, in summary: lots of explosions, not enough to distract from the bad. The trailer for Sherlock Holmes, however, looked awesome. Robert Downey Jr! Jude Law! Vampires! Explosions! Sherlock Holmes! It's all terribly wrong, and I don't care!

One of the very few TV shows I *have* been watching recently is Coupling, a British show written by Steven Moffat (yes, the Doctor Who writer/new showrunner) which basically consists of six people sitting in a bar talking about their romantic and sex lives (usually more of the latter than the former.) It is possibly the best sitcom I have ever watched. Forget the possibly. It is. It's witty, well-acted (one of the male leads was Norrington in Pirates of the Caribbean - hah, that got your attention) and I can't drink tea while watching it because the odds I will spill boiling hot liquid on myself laughing are around 99%. Because Moffat wrote it, it's also packed with sci-fi references, which is the icing on the cake. It's a very delicious cake. Definitely chocolate. R-rated chocolate.

Now here's the thing: there was an American re-make, which bombed. I have heard reliably that in this re-make, they took out all the dirty jokes.

I don't get it.

There is no way it can be anything resembling the same show if the dirty jokes are gone. Like I said: it's six people sitting in a bar drinking and talking about their sex lives (and, yes, romance, but...mostly the sex part.) Remove the dirty jokes and you'd have six people sitting in a bar not talking. I'm serious. That would be the entire show. In which case I can understand why it bombed, but...why would you bother? Why would you bother remaking it for an American audience in the first place? Why?

So, anyway, that's my question for the day. Now, if you haven't seen this show, run, do not walk. Just make sure the kids are out of the room (on second thoughts, they won't get it, so don't worry too much) and you're not drinking any dangerous beverages while you watch. It'll be worth it.

So I was doing research for my vaccine biofarming poster today, and noticed that I will be citing Spok (2008) on regulatory frameworks and Kirk (2004) on risk assessment.

This amuses me unduly.