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| I was reading Broader Perspectives (proof: I do read more intellectual magazines than Seventeen!) and found this article interesting.
How good are we at predicting the future?
"The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad."
- The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
- H.M. Warner of Warner Brothers debating about replacing silent movies with "talkies" in 1927
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, professor of strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives."
- Admiral William Leahy, US atomic bomb project
"It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister."
- Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, 26th October 1969
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."
- Dr. Lee de Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television.
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
- Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles in 1962. The Beatles are now considered the most popular band in the world
"I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone."
- Charles Darwin on his book "The Origin of Species", 1869 | | |
| It must suck being Farrah Fawcett. No, that isn't right. It must have sucked being Farrah Fawcett, seeing as she died yesterday so the past tense would be more appropriate. To be exact, 'must have sucked' is a past modal perfect verb group. Occupational hazard of being an English Language and Linguistics student. I could go on taking apart that sentence, but I'll stop while I still have your attention. SO ANYWAY, everyone's mourning over Michael Jackson's death: fans keeping a vigil outside the hospital he passed away, MTV's playing tributes to him, BBC made his death their top story of the day (over a bombing in Baghdad, no less!). But does anyone know Farrah Fawcett, one of the original Charlie's Angels, died a few hours before him? | | |
| It's been a while since I blogged. The last time I was here, pigs couldn't fly (but now, swine flew/flu. Joke of the century), Newcastle was a Premier League club and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the president of Iran. Oh wait, he still is, but you be the judge how large a part fraud played in his re-election. I wanted to make a reference to Michael Jackson too. However, I doubted the politically correctness of that inclusion.
Anyway, terms are next week, so I should've been spending the past two weeks studying hard. Or even, at all. Which doesn't really provide an explanation to why I've been - big surprise! - doing the exact opposite. Also known to the average student by its more common name: slacking. Or as my decidedly unaverage friends (you know who you are) would say, lepak-ing.
It's not that I didn't try to study. I did. I even made a study plan. The kind that reads: Monday - econs (elasticity); Tuesday - math (graphing techniques); Wednesday - lit (Wide Sargasso Sea) and so on. But after awhile, this plan was scrapped for another one:
1700 Whose Line is it Anyway
1730 The Simpsons
1800 The Simpsons
1830 Two and a Half Men
1900 Friends
1930 Friends
Hard work, but somebody's gotta do it! | | |
| Today I went for my first extraction. It wasn't that bad, way less blood and gore than I imagined. It didn't even hurt at all, thanks to the anaesthesia. The part I hated was the effect of the numbing, like half my face was experiencing a severe case of pins and needles. I couldn't feel a thing. Which is good when "a thing" happens to be someone using pliers to forcefully remove teeth from your gums. But not so good when it happens to be blood and saliva dripping from your mouth.
It gets a bit disgusting here, so those who want to continue being able to look at me without seeing a freak, stop reading. ("But what about those of us who already see a freak everytime we look at you?" I hear you say.)
After the extraction I called my dad to fetch me, but apparently I'm not as high up on his list of priorities than I'd thought, only being his flesh and blood. So he told me to take a bus home. In my invalid state! Whatever happened to "Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind"? Lilo and Stitch have a lot to answer for. I won't go into too much graphic detail, but the short story is I took the bus home - looking like an extra from a low-budget horror movie, complete with real blood. So if anyone happened to take 963 today: don't worry, it wasn't a member from the legion of the undead you saw, just me. | | |
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