Heroin

The Velvet Underground - Heroin

I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein

And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same
When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I have made the big decision, I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death

And you can't help me, not you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet silly talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that on a sailor's suit and cap

Away from the big city where a man cannot be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a Mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off than dead

Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jim's in this town
And all the politicians makin' busy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

'Cause when the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
When the heroin is in my blood
And that blood is in my head

Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess, I just don't know
And I guess, I just don't know

image via link

Terry the Economist

Once upon a time there was an economist named Terry.

Terry liked to do a lot of things - he liked to go fishing in his neighbour's Olympic-sized swimming pool; make love to his garden; and spend time with his beloved little badger - Mr. Thornton. But most of all, he loved looking at spreadsheets.

All day long, he would look at the tiny little rectangular cells, and wish belonging with them. All day and night he yearned to become a rectangular entity, full of equations, and the ability to produce an infinite amount of cells. One day, Mr. Warntan, the fairy godfather from the land of Grazia, overheard Terry making his wishes. Mr. Warntan was not impressed with Terry's constant whinging to become a spreadsheet. So he decided to punish him – and turned him into a text document instead.

Oh the pain! The misery! Terry, the grand economist, was now nothing but an obsolete text document. With no ability for formatting, or any cells or equations, Terry was left in despair. Now the only use for Terry was by drunken hippies, to randomly type up surrealist short stories at 4:39 in the morning – the lack of functionality of a text document soothed their simple minds.

Depressed, and filled with sad stories of pink turtles and various other LSD-infused dreams, Terry planned an escape. He called upon the great shaman king of Rangkor, Yolkles the Thorny. His title was Thorny because he had great big thorns all over his tiny fists, with which he would squeeze toads all day long. 

King Yolkles was well known and feared by everyone all over. There were few who had powers equal to him. In fact, he was so clever, he could easily defend his foes and suction in their powers, hence making himself even more powerful. Unfortunately, Mr. Warntan's power was equal to Yolkles the Thorny's.

However, Terry still hoped that Yolkles the Thorny would defeat Mr. Warntan and turn Terry back into an economist - or even better, into a spreadsheet. In exchange, Terry offered to use his economist skills and connections to get Yolkles the Thorny a good land deal in a prime location in upscale London City.

Terry looked in fear and awe as Yolkles the Thorny and Mr. Warntan closed in on each other. Both raised their titanium staffs, ready to strike the opponent with powerful, ancient magic. Luckily, Mr. Warntan's mobile phone went off at that exact moment, and he had an urgent call to attend to – his cow was extremely sick. This gave Yolkles the Thorny a clear filed into giving Terry his transformation out of a text document. Unfortunately, it is impossible to turn a text document into a spreadsheet, so Yolkles had to turn Terry back into an economist.

Terry was just glad to be out of the company of drunken hippies, and happily gave Yolkles the land deal. Despite his failure to become a spreadsheet, and join other spreadsheets in the great land of Korukkar, Terry was just happy being an economist again, and going about his daily business of conning old people from their money.

He had learnt his lesson though. He decided to now stop wishing for things which he could never be, and started living his life to the fullest. He now volunteered at a local nightclub, to find and help young hippies to recover from diabetes, for they consumed too many sugar cubes.

Hence, the moral of the story is: don't become an economist, for they yearn for idiotic things like spreadsheets, and rape their own gardens on a daily basis.

Sexual tension [?] Part III (Okay, not really, but this title is too tempting)

To people who make their dogs shit in public places: Fuck. You. 


Seriously bitches (no pun intended), not only is it disgusting that you are forcing people to waddle through your poodle's piss and shit, but you don't even bother to pick it up. I do not want to see shit on the pavement. It is disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.


What is your problem? Can't you make your dog shit at home before taking it out for a walk?


I hope you one day fall into a large pile of cow dung (face first), so that you can learn your lesson, you imbecile. 

Nerd Band Names

I came up with this a few weeks ago (as soon as this summer started), and just thought to post this here now.

The following is a list of 'nerd band names' - i.e. band names based on my C & Unix and Chemistry notes (I was a bit weird after my exams).

I just randomly came up with it after reading this article from The Guardian, which was all about how hard it is for bands to come up with innovative new band names, because everything is already taken.

Well, I hope I can prove that article wrong... (probably not.)

Band names based on Chemistry

Coordination Chemists

Eclectic Electrons

The Enantiomers

The Bidentates

Ed Taa Complexx

The Ionisers

The Amines

Cyano Shufflers

Hybrid Orbitals

The Valence Bond Theorists

The Octa Tetras

The Titanium Bastards

Fatal Catalysists

The Fullerenes



Band names based on C & Unix

The Unix Commanders

The Functions

Valgrind Vagabonds

The Terminal Signals

Flying Consoles

Major Wextra Flags

File IO Demonstrators

Sound Malloc

The Structs

Makefile Lovers

Hash Define Sound

Oh Log Ens

The Local Bins

The Regex Matchers

The Reaped Zombies

Dupe Two

The PCBs

Block Processors

The Assemblers

The Default Signals

The Signal Catchers

Seg Faultxs & Orangex

The Recursionists


You're welcome to use them for free - until you become famous; then I can sue you.


P.S. Please don't throw bottles of piss at me.

Are You Living the American Dream?

We studied the American Dream in school (can you believe it?), during 9th grade Human Geography classes. According the the definition, here are the main components to the dream:

1. A nice house
2. Oppurtunities to work, as well as for entrepreneurship
3. Good weather for most of the year
4. Lots of availability of food and water
5. A stable, democratic country

There were more things to it, but these are the main things I can rememeber. I can clearly remember the nice cartoon pictures for each thing, and these images somehow haunt me everytime I think of what is a good life. Note that I am not an American citizen myself, nor have I even visited the country - yet.

Cockney Maniac

Another subtitle comic, this time from The Mighty Boosh.

(Click on image to see larger version.)

Soo-kayy

Ahaha, Sookie can be so dumb sometimes. Made this little subtitle comic from True Blood (apaarently, I have a lot of free time).

(Click on image for larger size)

Ah Well!

Sexual tension [?] Part II

To couples who make out in public: Fuck You.


The sight of your libidos has blinded me. 

Links Ahoy! (9) - The Before-You-leave-For-The-Summer Version

Human Rights, Etc

A really informative blog from Philip Spagnoli, which discusses some fundamentals of human rights. It is updated almost everyday, and all the articles are a very nice read.

[LINK]



The Mountain by Terje Sorgjerd 

Terje Sorgjerd filmed this video between 4th and 11th April 2011, on top of Spain's highest mountain (3718 m), El Teide.

The goal was to capture the Milky Way galaxy, but a large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on 9th April and he thought that the whole film was going to be ruined, but the effects turned out to be even more beautiful.



[LINK]



Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The 50,000-year-old skull of a Neanderthal from the site of Shanidar in Iran (top)
has a prominent browridge and more projecting face than the
40,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull found at Pestera cu Oase in Romania.
(photo credit: Erik Trinkaus via link)

Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of our species. Over the past 4 years, their genetic sequences have been well collected and verified.

This absorbing article discusses the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to cloning a Neanderthal. A large part is also dedicated to discussing how cumbersome it was to collect all these genetic sequences - which I found very surprising, because it is not as easy as simply cutting up some old bone and doing a DNA test on it.

[LINK]



Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Conor Friedersdorf, associate editor at The Atlantic, compiled this list of articles which he thinks are the best of written journalism from the past year (2010). It is a well-sorted list, with articles in a diverse number of categories. Also, I found the article above from this very list.

[LINK]



Handbook of Journalism (Reuters)

The Reuters news source should be free from bias and any other form of opinion - the aim is to achieve complete neutrality and only providing facts. This is an online edition of the Handbook of Journalism by dozens of journalists from text, television, pictures and from domestic as well as international services.

I haven't read through all of it, but it sure does seem to be good advice from one of the best news sources in the world.

[LINK]



Ver Sacrum, 1898

via {feuilleton} 

via {feuilleton} 

Thanks to {feuilleton} for the link and pointer to this. This is an archive of the Austrian magazine Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), which consists of design contributions by Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller, Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt. It showcases the Austrian development of the Art Nouveau style, and the overlap between Art Nouveau and the final flourishes of the Symbolist movement.

I cannot read or understand German, but it is worth looking around just for the sake of the high quality layout and art work.

The first link takes to the list of all the issues in this volume. The second link is the same website, but is easier to browse.

Note that these pages are in German. If you are using Chrome, the page will automatically be translated, but if you are using another browser, please use Google Translate to navigate.

[LINK] [LINK2]



St Peter's Basilica Panoramic Views

I am a sucky college student, hence I cannot afford to go on a 6 month long trip to Italy to explore all these wonderful sites. The St Peter's Basilica is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City and it has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world.

It looks gorgeous and I would so love to explore it in real life. But since I cannot, I am left with the closest thing I can get - a wonderfully compiled panoramic view of certain sites in the church (by Jonas Carlson). You can look at a total of 12 sites within the church, just click on the little blue circles on the map to go to each different site.

[LINK]



Monoface

Click on each different part of of face to make all sorts of different faces. There are over 759,000 possible different faces you can make.

[LINK]



Google Image Swirl

A cool tool from Google Labs, which returns categorised image results, based on similarity between the images.

[LINK]

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great, when conquering parts of India in 325 BC, frequently held conversations with local sages and philosophers. In one of those, he asked them why they didn’t show enthusiasm for what he accomplished. The answer:

King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others. Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.

via the Philip Spagnoli’s blog, Human Rights, Etc. [LINK]