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: