Goats, Benches and the like

"sopra la panca la capra campa, sotto la panca la capra crepa"

This translated roughly means "On the bench, the goat lives, under the bench the goat dies"
It is an Italian tongue twister and has kept me equal parts confused and delighted all day.
Something about this language, I find it endlessly satisfying to speak. As a committed francophile that is a very hard statement to admit. It's not that I ever struggled with french pronunciation per-se, but rather I struggled with the way French people struggled with it. It's a sign of how much they adore their language that they will patiently stand there and correct you nine or ten times in a single sentence, but if you are trying to learn the language, it is nothing less than infuriating.
So Italian is satisfying to learn and the Italians are very satisfying in their ability to allow you to finish your sentence.

Il dolce far niente

So between working two jobs, learning Italian AND still trying to have a social life, I haven’t really had a chance to practice the above. But thanks to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and their inability to correctly calculate my taxes; I may finally be able to fund my trip to Italy without fear of having to sleep on floors and eat only left overs.

First stop shall be Bellagio on Lake Como, where sadly all the money in in the world won’t save me from sleeping on a mattress on Sara’s floor for a couple of months. But I’m willing to accept that in exchange for her mother’s cooking. Not to mention the fact that I’ll be working so much I doubt I’ll care where I’m sleeping.

Then to Milan where I shall make a point of trying the very special risotto alla milanese followed by the grand Milanese institution, the aperitivo. One quick flight and then I shall be in Rome, where I plan to spend a week, maybe two, eating gelato on the Spanish steps; sneakily attempting to take pictures inside the Sistine Chapel and generally making a nuisance of myself by getting lost on trams, and getting in the way of drivers on their mopeds. Not to mention the inevitable trip to Da Baffetto that shall have to made in order to try an authentic roman pizza. From there to Istanbul for a few days where I plan to eat my weight in Dondurma and Baklava, finally visit the Blue Mosque and my beloved Hagia Sophia before flying to Kyrenia in North Cyprus where I shall devour trays full of Lahmacun and meet up with my sister and her boyfriend for a final debrief and loll about on the beach before flying home to miserable old London.

Scrap that, I shall have no time to be idle, I’ll clearly be too busy eating…

Can't Get You Out of My Head...

I miss that feeling you get when you find yourself attracted to someone. Not that my life is a barren no mans land. There is after all the arrogant Italian, who even if he wasn’t gorgeous -as it seems all Italians are- I would still probably find attractive just for his attire alone. Then there is the adorable and adorably awkward but charming German boy who blushes every time I look at him like a bride on her wedding night. Finally there is as always a whole host of lovely French boys, and we all know how I feel about the French.

But I miss that butterflies in stomach, nervous, pink gooey feeling. Before I go any further I should clarify that I am a hideous, uncontrollable flirt. If flirting was a competition I would win medals in the sport. I will also pretty much try and flirt my way through any situation. Terrible, I know, possibly a-moral and my inner feminist must be in tears. But, if I can get a free coffee in the morning just by fluttering my eyelashes and smiling like I have no brain, I’ll do it, no need to ask me twice.

But I miss that feeling you get when you really like someone. That pulse racing, nerve wracking stage that happens early on. When everything is still very chaste plenty of stolen glances, loaded exchanges and the odd lingering look from across a crowded room. That is what I miss. When your so head-over-heels for somebody that the possibility of flirting doesn’t even occur to you because you’re too busy trying to recall how to breath, let alone speak.

Every outfit is evaluated before being worn and every sentence rehearsed six or seven times before it ever leaves your mouth.

Frankly, no amount of blushing youths and cocky Italians can really make up for that…

Gold nanoparticles could transform street-lights

Researchers in Taiwan have come up with the most perfect way of replacing your bog standard, ugly, inelegant and energy guzzling street lights. All of this shall be done by implanting their leaves with nano-particles of gold. This shall cause the leaves to give off a soft red glow which shall light the street for passersby below, without the need for electric power.
Not only would this cut down on carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, all this without in any way harming people by sacrificing the safety that street lights bring.

Like pretty much every great discovery before it, this one came about by accident, when aforementioned researchers were trying to lighting as efficient as LE D's without using the overly expensive and toxic phosphor powder that LE D's rely on. The gold nano-particles are shaped like sea urchins and are places into the leaves of Bacopa Caroliniana plants (that's the stuff you find aquariums) which causes the chlorophyll to produce a reddish luminescence.
This luminescence will cause the leaves' chloroplasts to photosynthesize, this as you will recall from your high school science classes will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. Their next step is to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other bio molecules.

I for one, cannot wait.

The link to the article is Here

Cirrculem Vitae Infernus

It is exactly 6:06 am and at the age of twenty-one I am writing my first CV. I have been writing it for the past three hours and so far all I really have is my name and by date of birth. I have had some form of paid work since I was sixteen and I have never had to bother with one before now. Do you know why? I shall tell you, face to face I am impressive, I possess rather excellent people skills, of this I tell no lie. People meet me and they want to hire me, regardless of how good I may or may not be for the job. I am just that good. That makes me sound conceited but it's not. I am good at lying and telling people what they want to hear and doing it all without sounding like a brown noser, I am good at that. I am not good at putting it all down on paper. I hate merely having to read CV's let alone having to write one of the damn things myself. fml. I want a job at the V&A and I want to move to Italy yesterday.

Rant over, kids.

Now returning you to your regularly scheduled programs....

All those in favour say "Aye"

I had the pleasure of receiving the above package in the post yesterday. I am aware that my joyous excitement upon opening said package makes me a complete and utter geek, but I fail to care. I have to say, there are very few things on television that top The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin delivered to us in the course of its running the very highest highs and extreme lows, utter despair and unrealistic idealism wrapped up in snappy dialogue and inspirational (though far to frequent) monologue-ing.

I've just come off a binge of Grey's Anatomy so to switch to The West Wing is rather strange. Both great TV shows, both entirely fictional and both very far removed from my own daily life. I'm not an American, I'm not a doctor to my mothers utter disappointment and sadly I know very little truly about Polo tics. I like to think that shows like these, though fictional of course give the average Joe -if you like, if there a European equivalent? Average Joe seems to be such an American term- a little glimpse into the lives of others, the way things work, the chain of command. It shows us what the other Average Joe's are doing. They all really are people like us. They have a favourite TV show, a favourite band, they vote, they pay taxes, they have seriously complicated messy love lives, they love, they fight and they may even occasionally wonder what it would be like in someone Else's shoes.

I've heard that the Queen watches Eastenders, do you reckon she wonders sometimes what it might be like to be us?

Call me crazy, but I kinda like those guys...

"If you could take the place of God for a single day what would you do?"

"Destroy mankind, we're parasites, it's the only way to ensure the survival of the Earth"

Such ideas don't sit well with me, I may despair sometimes about my fellow man. About the greed, the hate, the jealousy, the pride.
I'm certainly no saint either, I get so enraged sometimes to the point I feel like plunging needles into the eyes of the next person to piss me off. I judge people, too harshly, too quickly. I'm selfish. I'm not gonna be nominated for Human of the Year.
I believe that we can become more, that we can be better. We are capable of such beauty in between all the chaos. We have achieved so much to throw it all away. As long as we don't lose touch, as long as we don't disassociate ourselves even further from one another then I believe there is still hope for mankind, that we are still capable of redeeming ourselves.
Yet, I suppose when it comes to mankind I'm still a hopeless optimist drowning in an endless sea of pessimists.
But, if I lose my faith in mankind, what else do I have left to believe in?
Yes, you may call us insects, we eat we fuck we shit and we die.
But we also build cities, write symphonies and we endure. Is that not something worth fighting for?

A Plea for Mercy on behalf of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the apparent scourge of modern cinema, a term coined by the Onion A.V Club to define every modern male in the midst of a quarter-life-crisis' Dream girl.

"That Bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

Natalie Portman's character, Sam, from Garden State, has long been the poster girl-child for the MPDG's but she is joined now by Zooey Dechannel's charmingly vacant eyed Summer from this years indie rom-com hit 500 Days of Summer.
These quirky, charmingly eccentric and entirely docile creatures with their big eyes and cute outfits are essentially stock pile characters cursed to live upon the pedestal of lost little boys with Peter Pan complexes, forever denied a life of their own outside of the protagonist's own imagining.

Needless to say she is a character largely despised by the female population. She is unconventional, adorably fucked up, yet inspiring and leaves a trail of guys in her wake, all of whom are hopelessly in love with her. Every modern woman's worst nightmare. Her only purpose is to gently lift the male protagonist out of the rut he has single hand-idly driven his life into and to remind him that life is sweet, to stroke his ego and set him on the right path to realise his dreams. Never mind her own happiness. Such characters do not, never have existed in real life. They have their prototypes, true, the dreamy eyed poet, the oh-so-quirky art school chick, always upbeat, with never a bad word to say about anyone, clad in their vintage dresses with long flowing locks they seem born to make men fall hopelessly in love with them and put women's teeth on edge.

Perhaps this is an unfair characterisation of the MPDG. After all take a look at Clementine's character from Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a subtle and perhaps unintentional deconstructing of the MPDG. Joel and Clementine's relationship quickly falls apart once he realises that Clementine is not this insatiable magical creature who will come and stroke his ego and fix his life as he had imagined. The close of the film has both Joel and Clementine looking at each other without the rose-tinted glasses and realising for the first time that they are both equally fucked up and capable of making mistakes.
500 Days of Summer does this too, though subtly, perhaps too subtly, as everyone seems to have come out of the cinema with the conclusion that Summer is -of course- a bitch.

"How dare she not be the idealised version of herself that he thought her to be! How dare she have flaws! How dare she have her own dreams for life that don't directly involve Tom! That Cow!"

We hate, not the girl herself, but the realisation that the girl is not whom we initially thought her to be, we feel as though we have been duped, played, lied to, betrayed.
Why hate the girl, why not instead hate the men who create them? These hopelessly lost individuals too lazy to change their own lives and find meaning in it, who instead place all their unrealistic expectations and childish notions of romantic attachments onto one girl's fragile shoulders.

As the character of Clementine so aptly put it:

"Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's looking' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."



Don't hate the player kids, hate the game.

Collegen Implants May Help to Restore Eyesight

Corneal Damage results in hundred of people losing their site each year. It is currently treated by implanting corneas from human donors, which as you can imagine are in very short supply.
Most potential donors, hesistate when asked if they would like to donate their corneas. Understandable, I suppose.The idea that the eyes are the window to the soul predate Cicero. Even to this day, we close the eyes of an individual who has just passed, it stems from the idea that evil spirits may enter the corpse through the eyes. No one ever has to look at their kidneys or their liver in the mirror so does it matter if it removed after their death? But the eyes? Imagine going into a coffee shop only to look into the eyes of your barista and see
eyes as your dead spouse peering out of a strangers face. Somewhat disturbing to say the least.
Its perhaps why May Griffiths and her colleauges at the Linköping University in Sweden have been trying to find an alternative to traditional cornea transplants which usually result in an unsightly -no pun intended- prosthesis, resembling a pinhole camera. Recent tests have resulted in six test subjects having had their sight restored using collagen implants. Griffiths and her colleagues made the replacement corneas from collegan moulded into the shape and size of a natural human cornea. These where then insertedn into the eyes of ten individuals with seriously blurred vision resulting from corneal damade. The corneas where held in place with temporary sutures across the impant and all subjects of the trail where put on immunosuppressants for six weeks to prevent the impant from being rejected.
After two years the collegan implants had become filled with the patients' own cells anchoring them to the eye, nerves grew across the cornea, which is important for cell survival and allowed the eyes to maintain the blink response.
Of the ten, six have now had their vision restored. The remaining foru were left with a visual haze, a result of scarring from the sutures. While the project is still in its infancy it shows great promise for the future. It's also arguabley a more worthwhile and benifical useage of collegen then the standard lip implants for which we tend to associate it.

Fearful Thoughts of the Near Future

Where do I see myself in ten years time? It’s a sensible, oft’ asked question, one with many possible answers for a single individual.
The pessimist in me answers, married, with kids and a mortgage. Carrying on in the grand old tradition of my ancestors. Working some thankless job, one more slave to the wage, just scraping by, a drudge with nothing to show for it at the end of my days.
I’d like to think, that should life be kind. Part of me hopes -foolishly no doubt- that the past four years have thrown at me the worst of all the hardships I shall ever have to endure in my small insignificant life and that I will be free to accomplish all that I desire.
To travel, to see the world, to carve out some small slice of happiness which, frankly, I think I deserve.
Perhaps I’d own my own business, if I was lucky. I’d own a bakery maybe, it would suit me well, the nocturnal hours in which a baker needs to create his goods suits a life long insomniac to a tee. Maybe I’d own a pretty house filled with memories from years of travel. Maybe all my nagging would have payed off and I would actually have found somebody to build me a house. Perhaps I might even share my life with someone who I wouldn’t feel the constant need to have to explain myself too. I don’t imagine myself to be married with kids -which seems to be most peoples answer to such a question- or rather I hope I’m not. Ten years isn’t really a long time and I’m still something of a child-woman, everyone things I’m grown but i’m really just little, how could I ever adequately care for another human being when I’m still of the opinion that our parents are only put on this earth to fuck us up? Maybe I’ll do as I’ve always threatened and run away to France and live a life of decadence with some hideously inappropriate man who will bring me naught but unhappiness in the end?
Thinking to much about the future fills me both with an intense longing and a gut wrenching fear. I should be thankfull that my life is not mapped out meticously for me by another, that I am not trapped by my own past choices. The future is unknown. How can I know how my future will pan out if I don’t even know myself?
Perhaps in ten years I will. Perhaps not. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
It is things like this that cause Yvonne -an intensely logical and sensible German friend of my acquaintance- to slap my arm and yell at me for thinking too much.
“Your gonna miss what’s in front of you, if you keep thinking too much about the future”.

But then again, I’ve always been far too stubborn to take advice…

Manifesto of the Single Girl?

It is the 21st century and yet I find it baffling how ‘bad’ it is to be a single 20 something in the developed world. Something about ‘being single’ seems to make people (and by people, I mean almost exclusively the fairer sex) cringe.

It seems to stems from more then just the condescending looks one receives from those desperately happy couples, the sympathetic pats and the empty advice of “just hang on in there”.

Nor does it seem to be in fear of nosy questioning relatives. We are sold the idea from childhood of the perfect life. We grow up, we get married, we have two hideously cute children and then we retire and spend every waking moment from then after gardening and nagging our other half.

This fear of ending up alone seems to begin quite early on.

I choose to believe this is why we seem obsessed with our search for love or even more disgustingly “The One” to fill the void.

However, I personally choose to rebel against the norm of society and embrace the state of singled-dom which I am now so very well acquainted with. The freedom to be myself without any kind of limitation. To selfishly manage my time and express myself in any way in which I desire. To enjoy the freedom of being free.

If I should ever end up falling for the 2.4 dream of white picket fences I want it to be with the knowledge that for a time at least I was utterly selfish and unrestrained and confined.

Consider the next nine years a gift -if you like- to my faceless dearly beloved whomever they may be. It ensures that I shall not spend our eternity regretting every second spent with aforementioned spouse.

So, if this is my choice, my decision, why does it feel like I’m trying to convince myself?