cool hand luke - i like paul newman more than steve mcqueen

the town - sometimes the boston accents slipped. not as good as was hyped

cloudy with a chance of meatballs - surprisingly better than i expected as a non-pixar effort

the sun also rises (re-read) - i still can't figure out if brett is her first name or maiden name.

the creamsickle - i'm going to read another book and then re-read it straight away. kinda messy but good.

bits

oh yes this week i made like a cultured person and went to the theatre to see iv. 'true west'. it was hilarious and disturbing and all that good stuff. the american accents only slipped occasionally.

i also realise i failed to review lxv. 'the book of other people', ed. zadie smith. i liked this a lot, a good anthology is enjoyable to read.

i finally dumped my phone photos so here is some fancy advertising:

written evidence of my insect nature, march-nov '10 (and terrible prescription-style handwriting)

oh look i lied again.

whereupon lied = forgot.

lxiii. let the great world spin, colum mccann
well i saw the doco 'man on wire' and have to say i much preferred that. yes, there were some good parts but overall i felt like it all fit together way too nicely in the same way that 'crash' the movie did.

lxiv. this side of brightness, colum mccann
a bit waffly and somewhat predictable, non-epic family epic.

therefore unlikely to read any more colum mccann in the near future.

nothing witty here

sorry for the slight hiatus.

i read a bunch of medical memoir type books, not worth reviewing. i saw and re-saw a bunch of movies also not really worth reviewing, including toy story 3, baby mama, easy a. ok i take it back.

xxx. easy a - it is rather sad when a movie which has received 'good' reviews turns out so average. it was like a montage.

xxxi. despicable me - only good for the fluffy unicorns and minions.

xxxii. scott pilgrim etc etc - man! another well-received movie falling in a splatter. no reasoning behind anything means no meaning.

xxxiii. please give - this was good. it is typical that i would like this. weird and extremely awkward.

xxxiv. the runaways - this was also surprisingly good. even better with commentary, fucking hilarious to hear dakota fanning, kristen stewart and joan jett shoot the shit.

i also watched top chef: just desserts! i kinda sorta want to be a pastry chef. without all the work.

abode of despair

erk, i finished reading the most depressing 'classic' book ever today, lx. the house of mirth, edith wharton. i thought it would be a social lesson of the times in that jane austen-ish way, but no. tragedy not without comedy but definitely without a happy ending. to quote jfranz, 'the heroine of House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is one of the great characters in American literature, a pretty and smart but impecunious New York society woman who can't quite pull the trigger on marrying for money. Wharton's love for Lily is equal to the cruelty that Wharton's story relentlessly inflicts on her; and so we recognize our entire selves in her.'

also i read the entire thing in ebook on my phone, which was terribly disconcerting, because when i reached the second last page i had no clue that it was the end! i literally spluttered out loud. it might as well have been chapter 4 of book II or that swirly bruise on jupiter, that's how much i've realised progression through a book's thickness means to me.

books books the musical

lvi. inferno, eileen myles
i need to read it again, a poet's novel is not really meant for reading quickly. that said, piss and fruit, shit.

lvii. death in the afternoon, ernest hemingway
i guess bill bryson possibly got his modus operandi from this book. technical details, aficionado stuff, random dialogue, bull fighting.

lviii. squirrel seeks chipmunk, david sedaris
aesop's fables of prejudice and bigotry, more like. pretty awesome. i wish they were more in-depth but maybe that would be impossible.

lix. a fraction of the whole, steve toltz
i was initially very hesitant about this book due to its immense size and therefore hopeless portability. but it was probably the fastest 700 pages i have ever read. rollicking plot. simple words. sure, a good australian novel, but perhaps not a booker prize shortlist.

nanowrimo fat fail

yeah, already given up. so far i have written 3083 words out of an expected 8333. so you can see how well that's going. i'll keep writing but i don't expect to reach the target. quantity over quality is bullshit and really screwing with my brain, i can't do it. plus why bother when there's this for inspiration:
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/11/02/nanowrimo/index.html

lvi. life and times of the thunderbolt kid, bill bryson. one-word review: ehh. memoirs by those who have not been fucked up are boring.

right this second i am peeved about trackwork on my line this weekend, when i have to work at 8.30am tomorrow, suck. does not help that i had a relatively but not catastrophically shit day at work, but i was due for one. things have gone swimmingly for too long, and i was just thinking yesterday that i hadn't had any problems in a while. bam, and the dirt is gone.

saving my words for nanowrimo, t-2 days. need as many of them as i can get.

/o\

liii. to have and have not, ernest hemingway
after the last relative disappointment of 'a farewell to arms' this was relatively pleasant to read, harry morgan is a hard-ass! wonder if dexter's dad was named after him, unlikely. my only quibble was the long irrelevant passage at about the 3/4 point about a side character i didn't care for.

liv. freedom, jonathan franzen
hmm. given the unsullied wall-to-wall positive reception i had relatively high hopes and pre-ordered (!!) this book. an unprecedented move for me. then just before i started reading the news came out that the UK first edition was in fact an early proof. my copy is one of these. anyway, it seemed promising at the beginning. until the characters were exposed for their true natures. in contrast to the corrections, where there was sympathy to be felt towards each character's situation, there was none to be had here because each person's unlikeable properties were inherently due to their rebelling against their parents and therefore enmeshed in their personality. i was equally frustrated but where there was something to identify with in each of the Lamberts, the Berglunds were all the types of people that i don't like much. i am wondering now if it is because i don't identify with so many intrinsically american themes, you know the ones which are caricatures - rednecks, petty suburban revenge, etc - but which are relatable if you know people like that. which i don't.

i also did not much care for the 'theme' of 'freedom' which was rather heavy-handed at times - oh ho ho so many types of 'freedom' and how restrictive they can be oh ho ho.

in any case the point of this is that i am now curious to read the final proof edition to see if it is any better. i in fact sent off my title page to harpercollins to redeem my new copy. like a true pedant i copied my incised page and taped in the photocopy. sooo when i get the final proof print i guess i will read it again. and compare.

lv. ah sweet mysteries of life, roald dahl
this was ok, now i want to read danny the champion of the world again.

\o/

in the last 4 days i have for the very first time been parasailing, camel riding, shark and sting-ray petting and deep sea fishing. ev and i had a break up in port stephens and it was pretty awesome to just have fun and not work. fish-wise i caught 2 pretty big sergeant bakers, 3 small yellowtails and a pike.

before that i read lii. the man who loved children, christina stead. it was every bit as creepy as the title suggests, though in a disgusting abusive cult of personality way. i guess the power of the writing is in how getting sucked into this strange unpleasant family life and then thinking about it!! by the end some events which seem crazy and impossible at first, pretty much HAVE to happen for there to be any sort of redress of justice. impressive but disturbing.

back to regularly scheduled entertainment reviews

xxviii. the disappearance of alice creed - very interesting! definitely not what it appears to be at first. i saw it at lunchtime on a monday with 2 other people in the cinema.

vi. washington, OAF - went with my sister who professed to be an earlier fan than me. went to the all ages show which was probably a good move in hindsight because the first performance of the day tends to be better? in any case it was very impressive! fantastic voice!

xlviii. the disappointment artist, jonathan lethem - i kinda skimmed this, i am finding that essays are not the most interesting form of writing unless they have an interesting central theme
xlix. and the heart says whatever, emily gould - i really enjoyed this! obviously i am in the right demographic. the cover was annoying though because the cardboard was trimmed short of the rest of the book's edge and therefore difficult to flick pages properly.
l. all the sad young litereary men, keith gessen - i won't say 'never' but i have rarely been so annoyed at a book and its characters and yet kept reading it. clearly this was the aim and that was achieved.
li. changing my mind, zadie smith - most of these essays were enjoyable! for some reason i couldn't get into the ones where she writes about other books or writers, most likely because i haven't read them and they require actual understanding of the discussed material.

think of it as a social experiment

and go!

.

it's so weird to listen to my mum talk with her friend on the phone about said friend's divorce proceedings with my dad in the same room.

in other news i worked like a full 10.5hr day today for the first day in many, many, many moons possibly more than 12. therefore current nagging headache.

in the last 2 days i have been listening to a lot of megan washington, mainly because of the great similarity between her chord progressions and that 'for the beauty of the earth' hymn, specifically in 'little women' featuring kirsten dunst, and yes, winona ryder, i am very predictable.

oh oh last night i saw 22iii. 'august: osage county' and my reaction and review is as follows: holy shit! such manipulation. brilliant acting. we were sitting a little too far for my poor eyesight to distinguish facial features but my hunch that george clooney's older sister in 'up in the air' played one of the main roles turned out to be correct.

summer will be in a couple of months. this is a portable watermelon cooler:

only in japan.

sugar spell it out!!

i don't know whether it's because i am an asshole or actually growing up, or most likely monumentally un-self-aware, but i am sick of reading females-in-their-twenties internet speak which waffles about 'feelings' (as opposed to 'thoughts') and wallows in selfish passive-aggressive pleading and hyperbole. a taste of the phrases which i am beginning to hate:

-'is this a thing?' / '[insert action/newly coined terminology], it's a thing' - like what does that even mean?!? if you want to say that something is beginning to have meaning for you, come right out and say it.

-similarly, '[action] is a thing that happens [somewhere]' - you could take out the 2nd to 5th words and it would have the same meaning. why the waffling? i really don't understand, don't want to either.

-'so there's that' / '[insert general statement, usually in melancholic tone], so.' - SO.. WHAT? SO YOU ARE SAD, SO YOU WANT SYMPATHY, WHAAAT? usually these statements follow so-called first world problems such as minor injuries, biopsychosocial or otherwise. sidenote, you know what my version of a first-world problem is? when 90% of people who use electric toothbrushes have gingival recession.

-'what am i supposed to do now.' - or other similar statement, note, no, it is not a question because there is no question mark. this is a statement of weak futility and/or 'ambivalence' as defined by winona ryder in girl interrupted, which is to say, that you actually don't care and are therefore being 'ironic'.

-'shaking and crying' - again, i understand you are experiencing emotions, but i believe that you are curled up in a wet vibrating ball just as much as i believe you really laugh audibly when you LOL. again, mostly due to 'irony' because these emotions usually follow something terribly mundane, though you are trying to explain that it actually means a lot to you!

-'clean [or other verb] all the things!!' - a la hyperbole and a half. it got old very quickly. just like 'i want to go to there.' oh har har i don't even watch 30 rock and i am happy for you that you can share your knowledge that this is where the phrase originated.

-linking to your own blog post via twitter, via quoting yourself or summing up your point with another femotion waffle. i mean, sure, self-promotion, i too can quote tegan and sara.

so ultimately my conclusion is that with the advent of twitter and facebook status updates people try to be funny all the time and really they should stop. either you are funny, or you can use one of the above tropes to appear 'ironic', or something, upon which occurrence i proceed to rip you a new one, in my mind.

p.s. i momentarily considered linking to this on my twitter but that would be way too passive-aggressive not to mention unspeakably hypocritical, ho ho ho.

p.p.s. i am fully aware that i am being harsh and mean but these are not really 'judgements' (which i am trying to give up in general) when the inherent uncertain tone leaves them open to interpretation and critical analysis, right? THE PERSON WHO READS THE TEXT IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

resophnotes.exe

well, my life as it was previously known on the computer has been changed monumentally by this app, because it makes perfect sense that apps as they are on portable interfaces should be retrocoded for real computers. not that i do anything on my computer that i couldn't do on my phone, except for using a keyboard, which incidentally does not have inherent predictive-text abilities, for which something has probably already been developed in the interest of speed though not necessarily the typing skills of the general population. basically what i am saying is that auto-save is the answer to my incipient short-term memory problems for which i suspect the internet is to blame.

therefore, some notes:

- i watched the 2nd season of 'united states of tara' and 50% of my thoughts were unwillingly taken up by the fascinating depth of toni collette's eye sockets. 25% went towards the utter boringness of the titular personality, and the remainder to the kate and marshall snark which saved the entire show.

- i quit my shitty job and am looking forward to 5 weeks of holiday. two thirds of that statement are partially untrue.

- someone drove into 'my' car last week and it is currently being fixed, i may go crazy if we don't get it back soon

- my creativity has been snuffed over the years by the striving for academic excellence with which i am still somewhat stuck. why else would i be planning to read and summarise 'dentistry for the child and adolescent' in the next 5 weeks. hopefully in approximately 4-5 years this will be out of my system. in any case i am currently blaming the academic system, from high school up. and therefore i am fully aware of the irony of taking on a weird 'writing' job in order to force myself to be 'creative', when the job consists of creating material with which others teach high school students how to give the system what it wants, in order to get into med school. and then here i am blogging to avoid 'working'.

- '"I love rutabaga," Gary said inconceivably.'
by which that sentence encapsulates the frustration inherent in re-reading 'the corrections' and identifying with everyone. i am unspeakably excited about reading 'freedom' which has been given a critical reception in print and online media like none other that i can remember.

- also read xlvii. taking pictures, anne enright
which i have mostly forgotten, they were short stories mostly about women and then mostly about their relationships with others, mostly men

- 'we are very rare, and we are mostly men'
i recently re-watched girl, interrupted which was a definitive movie for me, and not unexpectedly but still a little sadly it was a lot more melodramatic than i remembered. anyway it was still good, kinda mostly

- i saw xxvi. salt
and xxvii. date night
neither of which i care to go into much, except that angelina replaced tom cruise whose dental midlines are extremely non-coincident and who i don't want to google image search to find out in exactly which direction they are skewed

- robyn!! i've had 'hang with me' on repeat for like 4 days. i guess i appreciate the distinct lack or at least undetectable presence of auto-tune.

- watermelon brain

i mean who comes up with this shit? i am jealous of that person.

i read a lot a lot

first things first.

now on to the books, some of which i finished before my last reviews but i forgot.

xliv. the dangerous summer, ernest hemingway

non-fiction about a legendary bullfighting rivalry during one summer in spain. man, hemingway can make anything sound good, even animal torture. i went so far as to watch youtube videos of antonio ordonez and luis miguel dominguin, and my conclusion can only be that his descriptions and stylish stylish bullfighting pictures far outweigh the actual spectacle.

xlv. survivor, chuck palahniuk

i haven't read chuck palahniuk in a long time, mainly because i loved fight club and then everything else i tried after that (guts, choke) was just a bit too much gross in relation to concept. but survivor was good, i'm not surprised now that it was his next book after fight club. nice concept, still some outlandish assumptions, but made me think.

xlvi. the girl with the dragon tattoo, stieg larsson

well a friend gave this to me for my birthday (in april) which just goes to show how many books i have lined up to read. i was a little skeptical going into it given the huge popularity, obviously, and because i'd flicked through previously in a book store and not been impressed with the writing. now that i've read it the sheer force of story overcomes any misplaced qualms i had. basically i had a european, faintly german voice reading it in my head, which definitely helps with the setting. phrasing and idioms have that kind of fluent european english squareness, like colonel hans landa.

just had a thought that scrolling on touchscreens vs mouse wheels is not really intuitive because they work in opposite directions. on a mouse you scroll down but on a touchscreen you flick upwards. maybe it's me though, i also have occasional lapses regarding water taps and tofflemires.

not material things

19xliii. shantaram, gregory david roberts
this book is around 900 pages and took me since approximately May to read, mainly because of its poor portability. i will admit also that it didn't make very good bedtime reading because i'd get sucked in and then get inadequate sleep. i think the reason for so many pages is that there are so many words used to describe something or a conversation, just a lot of writing to get through. but i would qualify it as good writing about india, which doesn't happen easily.

22ii. wicked, capitol theatre sydney
a little backstory, my sister loves wicked. she went to see it with her friends a few months ago and since then hasn't stopped singing (slight exaggeration). so since i missed out on seeing the show with Team Ice Cream she has been trying to get me to go before it ends in september. anyway turns out there is a lottery before every show for $30 front row tickets! which we won yesterday, for the saturday matinee. no on in my family ever wins anything lottery-related except for my dad, and sure enough he won it for us.
so it was a great show! our fears of only seeing legs or up-costume were unfounded.

hmm so this 101 list is pretty much the only reason why i blog... except for this one:

i should just start a watermelon-themed tumblr.

these are things i have acquired

48vii-xi. yep, actually buying music in the form of CDs. white chalk had 3 copies of the front cover, separate pages. somewhere along the line i also got 2 alicia keys albums.

40. then i got this which i have not actually paid any money for yet:

so pretty! so customisable! i spent a solid 6 hrs before going to work on the first day i got it, downloading apps, swishing between the 7 home screens, setting allllll my preferences which i love doing. being a mobile internet noob i managed to use 80% of my 500mb/month on the 1st day, whoops. then i figured out wi-fi. no major complaints yet! except that telstra's pre-loaded 'applictions' (really they are web shortcuts to their own site) can't be removed, but because i don't have them on my home screens they don't really bother me. SO MUCH TO PLAY WITH.

fillums

xxiv. i am love
hellooo tilda swinton speaking italian in a russian accent. and everything else. i am a sucker for films about the rich showing upstairs/downstairs interplay, how a house runs like clockwork via secret passageways and dumbwaiters. i love it just like i love watching manufacturing processes on tv and reading about childhoods. (like that show 'undercover boss', which i watch mainly for the conveyor belts). uhh so yeah this movie was pretty amazing like it was made of emotion and tilda swinton closeups.

xxv. inception
pretty good! not as confusing as everyone is saying. there is one plot hole i haven't been able to find an explanation for yet but it is relatively minor. other than that it was thrilling and had a great concept though the action sequences themselves were best when affected by and showcasing altered environments. ellen page didn't really need to wear a bandanna around her neck at least twice, she could've asked wardrobe not to pigeonhole her so much.

watermelons and books

is my subconsious wishing it were summer?

xlii. my latest grievance, elinor lipman

this was pretty good mostly because i am a sucker for books about routine during childhood and/or school life particularly in dorms or other regimented residences. however the instigator of melodrama is someone who i would hate and i was annoyed that she took up so much time, well really she took up the whole book. why not have a cool quirky sidekick? i like those.

books i have read recently:
xxxix. everything ravaged, everything burned, wells tower
such an awesome name. pretty awesome book, short stories all written in a modern 'violent' style but mostly visceral. mostly about men. some choice cuts:
'a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled... looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute.'
'the moose tried to struggle upright but fell again. the effect was of a very old person trying to pitch a heavy tent.'
'the news sent him into his familiar tic, a trembling reverse yawn... the movement of his jaw behind his closed lips lent an illusion that he lacked a full set of teeth.'
'"need to go pull something out of a horse's pussy."
"what kind of a thing?" Bob asked.
"a baby horse, i hope."'
i mean COME ON.

xl. on beauty, zadie smith
ok i suppose, i almost expected more though.

xli. the end of the world, paddy o'reilly
i got it for a dollar and was pleasantly surprised, for the most part. mostly about women.

continuing with the vague non-theme, here is a baby in a watermelon.

i saw
xxii. how to train your dragon - cute, eh, etc etc
xxiii. toy story 3 - pretty awesome, 3D did not add much in my opinion. really quite an adult movie, i don't think little kids would enjoy it much, but i don't know any in the right age range to ask.
and i also saw 'up in the air' again, it was possibly better the 2nd time around.

i haven't found any good music to listen to in a while, don't know why. stuck on janelle monae but the other hyped releases of late all have some intrinsic style aspect that i don't find interesting e.g. sleigh bells, steel train, stone temple pilots, gaslight anthem, owen pallett; i find them all underwhelming. the same thing possibly happened last year, i wasn't into any of those grizzly bear/animal collective/etc best-of-09-list usual suspects. just so blah. dear sara quin, what are you listening to?

postscript to prior pronoun blowup - bookshelfporn changed their subtitle, score 1 for the 'who' revolution

i should be writing concise precise abstracts but i am doing this instead.

"Who is the interrogative/relative pronoun used to refer to human beings. Corresponding relative pronouns for non-sentient beings are that and which, sometimes used in contexts where who might be a more suitable choice.."

sometimes?!? more like much too much. i'm procrastinating but i don't even care, this is a serious issue!!! apparently i am such a fuddy-duddy THAT i have been reduced to blogging pedantically about grammar and the demise of the english language. dear the internet and all reputable newspapers (don't care so much about those in disrepute), please refer to sentient beings as they deserve!
yes that's you, bookshelfporn; pretty as your pictures are, i am a person WHO *hearts* bookshelves, get it right.

omg ev

asfewfwqf

it might seem like i have stopped reading but it is not the case, i got bogged down in
xxxviii. a fine balance, rohinton mistry
probably due to my being spoiled in reading rushdie before any other kind of fiction about india, because how can you even come close? ultimately i wasn't surprised by anything and it wasn't shocking or revealing like i think it was supposed to be, except that given all the storylines weaving tightly together it had a rather messy insignificant end. i would not read it again and would not buy it except that i got it from a library for $1.

last week i completed 64. an anterior composite course. basically opaquers are your friends, the rest is common sense and an eye for fine detail, as well as a soft buffer with polishing paste.

i want the celtics to win so bad, aaaanything to stop the lakers!! bah

so, i sit down at the computer, and everything i need to do disappears from my mind
this is terrible, and it happens every time, too many times a day

dear mon,
get your shit together!!
love from
your future prospects

p.s. stop procrastinating like a mofo

our hearts didn't come together but i saw the two collide

came across this photo and all i can think about is why we make a big deal about how small the world is. i love lady gaga, i love raquel zimmermann, for totally different reasons, and in separate compartments in my mind. now this artificial compartmentalisation has imploded (mind = blown) by their sharing the same actual physical space, but, actually, logically i did know that they would know the same people so why not? but this brings me to.. why are people so fascinated by coincidences and surprised by the complexity of relationship networks? this is fascinating to me. ultimately i guess there is only one world but when one person's fixed perspective is challenged by different possible views, it's always a surprise.

also here are 101 new york sandwiches which you cannot see if you are using google chrome. it reminds me of scanwiches, and also the fact that i possibly intend to paint a giant sandwich painting.

possibly boring work stuff

well today i took a leaf out of ray bertolotti's book and repaired a chipped porcelain bridge with a sectional veneer, bonding porcelain onto porcelain. it actually didn't look as good as i thought it might but the patient didn't mind so that's most important. they were just happy, and i quote, 'not to speak like ita buttrose anymore'. my new theory is that even ray bertolotti can't make them look seamless in real life but relies on fantastic photos to wow during his lectures, because my one looked pretty damn amazing with my macro lens under flash. i also did a composite repair on the pontic, with a better cosmetic outcome but not sure about strength and/or flexure.

before:

after:

after (without flash):

so yeah we shall see how it goes, i have multiple digits crossed because my first composite repair on the 22 flicked off really quickly, way to build confidence, but then i didn't triple check the occlusion, which i did today. my boss was/is skeptical so i double triple really really want to prove him wrong.

really i am procrastinating but this might count as work. i pretended to be an orthodontist (via actions, not in name or actual fraud) for like 20 minutes last week and it was not stressful which i enjoy and am starting to appreciate more and more.

hue, chroma, value

françoise nielly

movie roundup, multiple sentences

xx. the white ribbon, michael haneke
this blew me away, i guess it's been a while since i watched anything with true depth and stark depression, reminds me of hopping over to nova on lygon st. i guess it was about the inherent evil and cruelty in all people including children, and how that is manifested in family as well as in a small community, and therefore can be extrapolated to the country at large (germany pre-WWI). fascinating. i wonder how child actors actually work, how are they protected from terrible things even in make-believe?

xxi. 9
well, this was an animation in the same vein as 'wall-e' in that pollution apocalypse scenario, this time with a sci-fi bent with evil robots versus tiny cute frankenstein bobbleheads, both being remnants of a crazy scientist's split psyche!! yeah all that stuff.

book roundup in single sentences

xxxiv. the adventures of augie march, saul bellow
a personal epic, as opposed to being a family epic

xxxv. kitchen confidential, anthony bourdain
all this current glamour surrounding the cooking industry belies terribly hard work, it seems

xxxvi. the house of god, samuel shem
a novel about medical internship which changed internships forever (?!), the writing was average and i couldn't actually pick what was so outrageous about it

xxxvii. zeitoun, dave eggers
a non-fiction account of a family's experiences during and post- hurricane katrina, truly horrifying
dave eggers is like bill bryson in that he can publish whatever the hell he wants

i am watching glee and it is sadly pretty crap

tegan and sara, big top, luna park, milsons point, sydney nsw, australia, the earth
it was pretty good, the jezabels have a good singer, astronautalis i would hazard to guess doesn't appeal to australian sensibilities much. this was my 6th time seeing tegan and sara, definitely their operation is now of a significantly large size! complete with blinding light show. not really going to gripe about it not being the same as being 2 metres from the stage at the corner in melbourne, watching them do their own setup in capes and masks. vocally they are possibly more consistent than ever but the venue's sound possibly let them down a little in terms of that clear nasal tegan and sara tone. anyway i wanted sara to sing more songs, the end.

also i am 2 pages from the end of reading saul bellow's 'the adventures of augie march' and it is well into that epilogue tone so i don't think anything else major is going to happen. anyway most notably i thought that it was really realistic the way that one meets so many different people during life and some of them you never see again and some pop up here and there, and some are constants.

in dentally related self-obsession, tonight i bit on something unexpectedly hard inside another foodstuff of soft texture and had a scary half hour of having pain on biting down on my 36, followed by pain after release from biting. but this sensitivity has now decreased though i am avoiding chewing on the left side. self-diagnosis is not fun, cracked-tooth syndrome!! hopefully i won't bite on my 36 until some significant dentine bridging occurs and that is sadly probably impossible.

21(iv) crispy crispy benjamin franklin

so, i saw regina spektor play last tuesday at the opera house, it was pretty great! the opening band jupiter one also doubled as her backup band, my only small gripe was that the drums were occasionally too loud, but regina is a consummate professional and adjusted her vocals several times mid-song to suit. opera house, can't be beaten on acoustics. most memorably she played 'samson' right after the encore break and the lights were like stars, esp in that bowl of a stage formed by the side boxes and choir/organ seats behind, it was like lady gaga's diamonds frozen in the air except in real life.

a couple of fillums

xviii. micmacs.
this was notable apart from being a funny french movie full of extremes and escalating cartoonish revenge, by the state of the cinema that we saw it in. a) i saw it on my birthday, b) we had used a buy one get one free voucher, c) due to small audience numbers it had been allocated to the gold class lounge at regular prices. so basically i am cheap and it was awesome. also it was pretty cool that they had a poster for the movie as a gag in the movie itself? ingenious without being self-aggrandising (had to google that last word but my vocabularial hunch was correct [also it is exceedingly hard to google the word 'vocabulary' itself for an adjectival form!!!])

xix. fantastic mr. fox.
as may have been mentioned previously i was initially wary of this movie because of course the trailers focused most on george clooney and his american accent, upon which i based suspicions of americanisation. because roald dahl is nothing if not british. but my suspicions were only half founded, i don't know if it would have been too drab with an all-british cast. but i'm glad that boggis, bunce and bean were british, i mean otherwise it would have been entirely different. which brings me to the obvious issue of accents to demarcate animals and humans (and in other movies, humans and humans), namely, why??? why. and this is why i love quentin tarantino because inglorious basterds not only had correct accents but correct languages, i mean that is what life is like, right? aaanyway for all that i quite enjoyed fantastic mr. fox, more for the little wes anderson details than anything else.

also a slightly movie-related random picture, this shit is awesome, i don't think it quite deserves to be on ugliesttattoos.com.

dear nobel biocare,

i am writing in regards to your recent 6 week-long mentor program, of which i attended 5 of 6 parts on thursday nights when i would otherwise be at kickboxing. i would like to thank you for the 5 free dinners and also the small plastic maxilla models, as well as a warped kidney dish with assorted gauze and a non-sterile surgical scrub kit and drape. in addition, i did actually learn something about implants even though i don't find it enjoyable. also it is horizon-widening to talk in large amounts of money, i will just leave it at that.

regards,
mon

p.s. your pens while cool have a flimsy spring release action, i broke one and then had to take another. as well as another pad of paper.

a farewell to happiness

why yes, i did read yet another hemingway book.

xxxiii. a farewell to arms, ernest hemingway
rather depressing on many levels, including lack of interesting main characters, compared to other hemingways. also how did anyone function in those days with the constant imbibing of alcohol? did their feelings not change apart from then being able to say 'i feel a bit tight'?

i went clothes shopping today and waited a good 15mins in line for the ladeez fitting rooms, and then when i went to try on more stuff i just walked right into the guys' fitting rooms, no fuss no muss. there is no moral to this story except that it might not work if you were to take in clothes other than jeans and tshirts. actually did you know that guys' skinny jeans can be stretch denim? i didn't but maybe that's because i am dumb. but now they don't sound so cool, huh.

tomorrow i am going to melbourne for 2 days!! i keep saying i've been working hard and playing hard (not really working that hard.. that is until this week which was almost death-inducing), i am also having a minor crisis involving my many mixed feelings about small business and health care. together they are impossible. i no longer know how to speak.

oops p.s. there were no sweet mysterious short-haired females in the above book. so now it's 3/7.

book

so i am reading again, i spend a lot of time on the train.

19xxxii. fiesta: the sun also rises, ernest hemingway
this is a sweet book. characters are everything but i think lots of it comes down to whether you know people like that. but so the theory goes there are only finite types of people in the world, and i believe it, personality and appearance wise. i didn't so much like the faint anti-semitism because one does not have to be jewish in order to be annoyingly superior. however, my inkling of a hemingway-gamine theory is now in full swing, like seriously. 3 out of 6. this was very easy to read and when i finished it i wanted to read it again right away except for the fact that next up is 'a farewell to arms'.

...

"Experimenting with dog mandibles in vitro and in vivo, Zengo et al,27 Bassett and Becker,28 and Pollack et al29 demonstrated that orthodontic canine tipping bends the alveolar bone, creating on it concave and convex  surfaces, identical to those generated in bent long bones."

ha ha ha get it, geddit??!? this is what i'm reading right now. it reminds me of cow tipping.

what would it be like to be bill bryson?

19xxxi. mother tongue
this was another insightful and thoroughly researched book on a pet topic of bill bryson's, the english language. i guess any book that he writes can be considered to be on a pet topic of his. in this case it was a very interesting look at the evolution of english and how it is the way it is now, the tussle across the atlantic etc etc. not even remotely boring for something that seems quite dense.

20xvii. also a while ago i did manage to finish watching the hurt locker. i liked it quite a lot, except for the shakiness of the hand-held, but that's a personal thing because i suck at that kind of stuff, i can definitely see how it added to the overall feel of the movie. in general i like intensity, i know others have said there is a significant lack of female characters but that didn't bother me because that wasn't the point, to have stereotypical romantic type interests or whatever. oscar-worthy? yeah, why not. i think inglourious basterds should have won original screenplay though, that was way more finely tuned to fantastic storytelling effect.

74. roadtrip to country victoria

so this past easter long weekend i visited my uni friends in their rural habitats, in benalla and warrnambool respectively, driving all the way from sydney! it was a lot of travelling to be sure but we had a great time catching up and playing with super cute pets.

this is milton:

who lives in benalla, where the sunrise looks like this:

it gets more and more pink and orange, pretty amazing! no wonder they host a hot air balloon festival.


and this is gandalf, who lives in warrnambool:

while in warrnambool we walked along the breakwater beach and found an ominous collection of sheep mandibles; there must have been 12 or so in total, pretty freaky:

i was nineteeeen

xxx. the garden of eden, ernest hemingway

yeah, i don't know about this one. the blurb possibly oversold me on the character of catherine, who i don't find to be amazing at all. you know how many books have books within them, like when a character is a writer and is reliving the event they're writing about, or whatever, i suppose it's supposed to be insightful but sometimes it's just not interesting! do writers consider it a risk? this is completely missing the main theme of the book but it was superrr distracting and i flipped through most of it. apparently this was actually quite heavily edited prior to posthumous publication, so who knows how hemingway would have wanted it.

also i have a theory in progress which is that hemingway loves him some lithe young women with close cropped hair, based on a sample size of 2 out of 5. i have a few more to read so will update stats as appropriate.

the words, they are spelled with letters

so i got on the train to work, sat down. some guy standing near the doors decided to have a stupid loud phone conversation, stupid not because it was loud but because he sounded really dumb. not judging (totally judging). anyway, my point is, then he stood there dumbly until someone else sitting on the stairs asked him what his t-shirt said. i can't find the graphic so this is an approximation of what it said (pretend these letters look like pictures, like the first letters of chapters, work with me here):

T Y P

O G R

A P H

Y

he said he didn't know.

and that's why, it was worthy of being written down immediately so i could share it. my notes say, 'idiot'.

.

yeah i lied, my memory is poor i did finish a book this week.

19 xxix. a man without a country, kurt vonnegut
can pictures really be handwritten sentences just printed with colour inversions? i don't know anything maybe i should reattempt to read slaughterhouse five.

i'm doing applications and bought fancy paper (linen bond) to print on, but i only have enough for one wrong sheet. #printingjitters

63. implants.. are boring, and other things

so, i am currently 1/5 of the way through a free (!) implant mentor program, in which i am sure to add to my collection of unusually small maxillary models (care of Nobel Biocare). i have come to the conclusion that i don't find implants that interesting, mainly because no matter how great they are they never look 100%. sure they can look pretty good, but the onus is on the clinician to do the best with what they've got. even with grafting etc, there are definitely limits. it's not so much problem solving as trying to get the closest to the ideal procedural steps. which is stressful, and for a result which can always, always be improved upon, and which will only deteriorate with time. not my idea of job satisfaction.

if i were to remain a general dentist i think my most favourite things to do would be anterior composites and endo. nothing like immediate (or relatively quick) results. the thing about RCT in general practice is that i have found most dentists get extremely lazy and don't do everything they should, which gets them by most of the time. but then they wonder why it sometimes doesn't work? i wouldn't be an endodontist though, the end of the line is never really a good place to be especially when it means dealing with other people's shitty work.

i probably think much too much about work when i'm not at work.

mainly i'm writing this because i'm in the middle of reading 2 dense books, 1 larger than a brick, the other a pocket penguin. interesting that it is the latter in which i am reading every single word. therefore i have not finished any books this week and have no reviews to write.

i had been debating whether to purchase a holga or not this past fortnight, but have concluded that my dad has awesome old film cameras so i am gonna play with them first.

i haven't been this tired in a long time and yet i am here and also i know i probably won't sleep in tomorrow, it's a very bad habit to be both a morning person and someone who stays up late.

p.s. should i blog about other stuff? this list thing is not my life though my life includes it. opinions please

alice in underland

xvi. so, i saw alice in wonderland today, in 3D. ever since hearing that this movie was being made by tim burton i was very excited! when i was little i had a picture book version with a cassette tape so the poems were set to music as well, so my imagination of wonderland was pretty detailed. well, this movie didn't disappoint. going in knowing that the story was a sequel meant i was really going to see the prettiness, but the story was pretty good as well. plus, it's the little things that count - good acting, complete plot, little funny moments such as helena bonham carter's facial expressions, you know, details. makes all the difference between a good movie and an average (= crap) one.

'twas also my first 3D movie experience, and it was pretty impressive, i didn't really have good past experiences with red/blue paper glasses and a non-midline coincident focus or whatever, but it wasn't an issue.

so yep, i really enjoyed it.

and while i'm at it here is a link to some amazing hi-res desktop backgrounds, i am currently sporting the keyholes.

http://mantia.me/wallpaper/

the xx

48vi. i bought the xx's cd today, along with a copy of the con for my friend. i have a long-running list of cds that i am looking to buy, but the price has to be right.

have a cool picture.

post no. 50!! book number 25 and beyond

books i have read recently:

xxv. the torrents of spring, hemingway

clearly a completely unveiled satire of certain books and authors, i don't know if i liked it.

xxvi. alice in wonderland; through the looking glass, lewis carroll

i got this recently and had to read it before seeing the movie, which i have not yet done. but the faintly dodgy history behind these stories bring a whole different light to the writing.

xxvii. the great gatsby, f. scott fitzgerald

i actually read the comic book version of this before the original, and i have to say the comic book version really gets the tone right. studying it may have ruined that kind of detachment that i have from it which allows me to still like the characters? i don't know anything

xxviii. best american essays 2004, ed. louis menand

i mentioned this before but forgot to write about it, and now i don't remember. my general feeling was 'good' i think but i don't remember anything too strange and interesting, though the medical-based stories are always good.

44 - are you ready? I DON'T THINK YOU'RE READY

so, our basketball team got new uniforms, ostensibly for next season but we have them now, a couple of games before the semifinals. presenting team ice cream via oldschool denver nuggets:

uh huh, they are super rainbowtastic, we even got a rainbow banner with them! pity the mardi gras parade was held the weekend before, we could have had our own float (HAHA)!

more consumed media

surely this is getting a little boring. i do nothing but work, spend time on the interwebs, read on the train and also in breaks at work, watch movies, play sport, compulsively watch large sporting events on tv even when the coverage is shit. that's it. that's all i do. sometimes i buy things.

onward.

19(xxiii) the red pony, john steinbeck
this guy, he likes disappointment and having people not live up to expectations. and inflicting this experience on children.

xxiv. the moon is down, john steinbeck
so very different to every other steinbeck work i've read, it reminded me of camus' 'the plague' (i just typed and retyped plaque like 5 times just then) but farcical. in a people are dying but we don't even know them kind of way. no mention of any ranches or dry fields of salinas, without any true localising description at all. therefore seemed a little strange to me, steinbeck has always seemed more a human nature through geography and dialect rather than pure human nature in extenuating circumstances type. maybe i am completely wrong, not sure i even make sense.

all the short novels by steinbeck were in one handy volume but then i had to return it to the library, so.

20(xiv) precious
totally forgot to write about this movie, it was pretty good! i liked the balance of the fun against the very low lows, and the performances were fantastic across the board. i usually will point out bad things over good things but i had zero complaints about this movie. it was less depressing than i expected but i think compared to most people i see or have seen a lot a lot of depressing weird shit.

xv. caspar the friendly ghost
aw this is clearly a rewatch because i used to watch this all the time. it used to be on tv quite a lot as well, maybe it should make a comeback over 'love, actually' or whatever other crappy apocalypse dribble gets replayed every 2 months. i almost expected to be disappointed by my nostalgia but it didn't happen! still as cute as ever, and much less dumbed down and slapstick than most kids' movies are these days.

hmm, have a picture of caspar-like fat cheeks:

number nineteen, are you bored yet, also another movie

why hello, another week another book. this week i read:

xxii. the discomfort zone, jonathan franzen
this guy jonathan franzen, seriously, he is popping up in EVERYTHING that i've been reading recently. one of his essays from 'how to be alone' referred to how 'the corrections' came out the week before september 11, so blah blah blah. then, i was in the midst of reading this book which is somewhat of a memoir, in a less hilarious less exaggerated david sedaris kind of way, when i started also reading 'the best american essays 2004', in which one of the first is by a female writer who proceeds to develop a relationship with an unnamed male writer who proceeds to make it big with a book released the week before september 11. i mean, what? if i hadn't read these pieces within a short period of time i doubt i would have picked up the connection.

aaanyway, i enjoyed this book because he described himself as being a fundamentally ridiculous small person, and i always like when good writers write about their childhoods. hell, i even like crappy writing about childhood (to wit, i liked the childhood parts of 'memoirs of the geisha', but i never intend to read it again, the writing was so ehh)


also i watched:
20(xiii) antichrist
holy effing shit, way to be provocative, lars von trier, i've never seen anything else by you and now i don't know if i want to. sure the acting was pretty incredible, and some images were amazing in their horror and that sickening dread kind of clarity, ugh. but i mean come on, you don't have to be explicitly extreme in order to convey the crazy in a psychological thriller, to the point where it becomes patently unrealistic and shocking for the sake of being shocking.

19 boooooks

xx. less than zero, bret easton ellis
the first thing i could think of to compare this book was like an older catcher in the rye, but on crack. kindof depressing when the most positive thing in the book is that the main character eventually shows revulsion to abhorrent things. also if they were going to be taking drugs all the time i kinda want to know whether they actually have effects or not, because it seemed like there was not much difference nor addiction, just bleeding noses. the writing was nothing special, in that way didn't compare with salinger.

xxi. possession, a.s. byatt
pfft, a marathon. and i didn't even read all of it. well i read it but i flicked through large parts of it. it was seriously 3 books in one, and i was only interested in one of them. ye olde victorian correspondence, ugh. and poetry. allll i could think was that the author sure put a lot of effort into it, writing all that. for ultimately a relatively simple story. maybe the booker prize was for the effort, and the writing in the parts i found boring, because the main story was pretty standard. quantity, quality, all that.

47 - new toy

ch-ch-check it outtt!!

from now my new resolution is to actually take this to work and use it, because now thinking back i have had so many cases worthy of before-and-afters, like, beautiful.

19(xix) disgrace, j. m. coetzee

having read this i am now interested in seeing the movie, the book is clearly about race and its implications in south africa and yet no one person's skin colour is described explicitly. i guess it would warrant reading again but i need time away from the somewhat minimal plot before i'm going to want to read for the details in the writing, i think. doesn't really help either that i am also reading 3 other books at the moment.

19(xviii) of mice and men, john steinbeck

i don't know why i didn't read this earlier, east of eden is one of my favourite books. upon realising that this is pretty much required high school reading in the US i was trying to reflect on what typical things we read at school and all i can think of is shakespeare, jane austen, what else? thomas hardy? did we ever read any novels written after 1950? now that i'm looking at the syllabus possibly some students read 'of mice and men' but i don't remember our 'texts' being very interesting or powerful. maybe my memory is being unfair. lord of the flies! i am the cheese! hmm.

i wonder if learning to analyse texts ruins those texts which are forced on you, yet sets you up to appreciate literature you choose in the future. sigh, english was not fun. at the same time i don't necessarily consciously analyse while reading if i can avoid it, i let my subconsious deal with it and then just feel a general sense of whether a book is 'deep' or not.

therefore i don't really want to go into details about this book because i thought it was really good but i don't want to expound on specifically why, there is a lot of general knowledge about this book out there but i want to enjoy it on its own without getting into that whole thing. and i don't really want to break it down into what it means, because i'd probably end up sounding horribly cliched when the whole point is that i liked the general sense of it, and that feeling you have when you imagine devastation that you have never felt in reality, but you still really feel it, that is magic and can't be described in words.

20(xii) nine

the musical, not the quirky cartoon. ergh, oh the trials and tribulations of being a famous old man with too many ladies on his plate! the songs were no good, only 2 of them were remotely catchy. the accents were all over the place and distracting. nicole kidman was not as annoying as usual but that was probably because she was hardly more than a statue. marion cotillard is like insanely beautiful. compared to chicago, there is no comparison.

20(xi) - the counterfeiters

quite a good movie. oscar-worthy? maybe not. 'typical' of many movies about the nazis in WWII i suppose, i think it's interesting that german and american cinema seem to like to show the same things, like people who are brutal, people who will turn any situation to their advantage. i dunno, maybe i expected more insight or something? i was sad for TB boy but the political activist was a little too strident, however he did end up making a difference. i guess i judge movies on whether i would see them again; not in any hurry for a repeat of this one, though i would watch it if it was on tv. to compare i never want to see or hear about 'love, actually' ever again, holy crap.

hmm well, speaking of the oscars, i find it interesting that they still hold such standing, like academy-award-nominated actors and directors are henceforth known as such, when it is KNOWN that the awards are not necessarily given to the most deserving. avatar, seriously? i am totally being unfair right now because i haven't seen it, but i don't even want to! acting and plot are most important to me, and it seems obvious that avatar is lacking in those areas. right? also, up, cute but no wall-e that's for sure. all i can think about when someone mentions it is that the famous adventurer looks like statler from the muppets aka one of the ghosts in shackles from the muppet christmas carol. i mean, the resemblance is too close to be a coincidence. also also, i watched the trailer for 'the blind side' and thought, omg typical american redemption the land where dreams are made story, blergh.

ANYWAY cynicism aside i will be seeing 'precious', 'the hurt locker' and 'district 9' soon, stand by. (i also really want to see 'a serious man' but can't find it for the life of me.)

mindful entertainment

19
xvi. how to be alone, jonathan franzen
hmm, a bunch of essays on a variety of topics, they felt a little detached, like he had been commissioned to write pieces for a variety of magazines and publications, which is probably actually the case for most of them.

xvii. a moveable feast, ernest hemingway
similarly to thoughts i had while reading 'a short history of nearly everything' and 'fun home' it's a little eye-opening to imagine that famous authors alive in the same period actually knew each other even though they always seem like discrete figures. maybe that's what history is about? i never studied it.

20
ix. religulous
the title is never explained but i guess it's supposed to imply ridiculous-ness. which bill maher does to great effect, by pointing out inconsistencies inherent in all religions, not to mention plagiarism and jealousy and a distinct lack of peace. where does logic end? he's preaching to the choir though, i often wonder how religious people would view these kinds of documentaries, probably with the same kind of cynicism that goes the other way as well. basically the unsolvable problem.

x. cold souls
the concept that your soul can be extracted from your body is quite strange, because never was 'the soul' defined; is it the good parts, the bad parts, what parts do they leave for normal functioning? i would have preferred the movie went more in this direction and maybe more also about soul residues, rather than going off on a tangent about trafficking and stereotyping russians.

38 - piano

inspired by watching the film 'vier minuten' (by the way super depressing but really good), have learned a couple new pieces, i seem to be better at piano than i recall. but like any kind of practice boring basics need to be done too, sigh. also, have been playing on a digital piano which seems nice and easy but very different to a real piano! not as real, not as subtle nor skillful, not as much finesse.

20(viii) - up in the air

saw this in the cinema today, which i actually rarely do. quite good, definitely an 'adult' movie in the same way that juno was a teenage movie. everyone glowed but the movie itself was not shiny. however it was also not that complex, now that i think about it i don't really need to see it again apart from the beautiful people. solid plot and characters though, more than you could say for most movies these days, but lacking that extra little quirk. maybe that's where george clooney is supposed to come in but i am not the target audience for him i'm guessing.

76 - eyewear

before i run off and have no internet for like 3 days again, i got new glasses, they are heston blumenthal-like, which is to say not only are they a similar shape but they are really cool, because that guy seriously has the coolest prescription eyewear i have ever seen. my glasses are 'titanflex', i mean come on. cool.

p.s. 61 - RACDS primary exams

postscript to this.
results came out a while ago but i didn't know what i was going to do with them, still don't really. in any case i did well so now i am contemplating my future direction, WHAT DO I WANT TO DO WITH MY LIFE??

19 - i forgot one

xv. best australian essays 2004, ed robert dessaix
far superior to the 2007 edition which was bogged down by reviews of books and reviews and/or rebuttals of those reviews. much more variety, some farce and comedy, almost i guess you could say like the best american non-required reading.

clearly i have given up on finding pictures for book covers or anything in particular, hopefully my prose is scintillating enough to maintain attention.

21(iii) joanna newsom

ack, i saw her last night at the opera house! so good! almost spine-chillingly so. i liked how the arrangements worked with a few instrumentalists, very nice. she has a new album coming out 'in a month of the year'. her voice, pretty damn pitch perfect. i was also impressed that she had some songs on which she played piano, quite well in fact, i did not know she played piano, but i guess you could say it actually is quite similar to the harp. so glad i went after missing her a couple years ago. SO GOOD.

19 - guess what more literature

xiii. catcher in the rye, j.d. salinger
i am counting this even though i have read it before because it is very different to how i remember. maybe i have learnt recently to enjoy reading for more than the plot.

xiv. a confederacy of dunces, john kennedy toole
hello, wtf, genius in the form of grotesque hilarity. everyone was so frustrating! everyone was a cartoon and yet they were perfectly real. i read this in 2 days but i probably won't read it again anytime soon, my poor nerves.
haha

21(ii) neko case

part of the sydney festival, we sat up in the high balconies but the sound was great, nice and loud. apparently too loud in the stalls section. she has a great voice, in a very open-throated kind of way. and there was a guy playing a pedal steel, that instrument is fascinating.

also as part of the sydney festival free night i saw the manganiyar seduction, AMAZING

27 - holiday in vanuatu

i went snorkelling and floated in saturatedly salty water and saw lots of tropical fish! i went kayaking in a lagoon, in a rainforest river, in the open sea! i went swimming every day which has not happened since i was less than 10 years old! it was hot! mostly it was a great break from work.

19 - HI I READ MORE BOOKS

x. the brief wondrous life of oscar wao, junot diaz - i think i need to read it again and also look up some spanish words, similar incorporation of but not as expert as hemingway. good though, i took it to vanuatu and also read everyone else's books, no one read mine because it looked hard. THAT HAS NEVER DETERRED ME

xi. love my rifle more than you, kayla williams - memoir/account of being in the US army and going to iraq. i feel like it is one of the better non-fiction memoir type books i have read in a long time, sufficiently detailed and about real things and not seen so much through rose-coloured glasses like many are. though i have read the night of the gun which was anything but that.

xii. tales of the otori 2, lian hearn - worldwide bestsellers what? being made into a movie? who reads this stuff? dribble. stereotyped characters. literally, they would say or do certain things which were clearly meant to mean more like 'oh hi, look at me i'm a haughty acristocratic woman being dismissive of others, go do shit for me!!'