I was sent this silly little idea on Facebook, and it's quite fun if it works out.

Instructions:

1. Go to "Wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2. Go to "Random quotations"
or click: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

So.. what did I get?
Which I think worked out pretty well all told!

Making Focaccia 4

Here we go. All finished, and well worth it. It has a pleasing salty outer crust (vaguely reminiscent of pretzels), with a fluffy olive-oily centre. Not too oily though. Delicious.


The recipe was from this website, and it worked very well. The only changes I made were not putting yeast in (ahem), but then adding it later, and because I rose it in a slightly warmed oven, I shortened the rising times from 2hrs, 45mins and 45mins to 1hr, 30mins and 30mins respectively. Also, I used dried rosemary from tesco, as we haven't got rosemary in our garden at uni.

A most delightful morning well spent. Now back to the cardiology.

Tom

Making Focaccia 3 (How can you tell I'm supposed to be revising for an exam?)

Now yeasted and happy, focaccia is in the oven and we are very excited - here it is in ready to go state.

Making Focaccia 2

Yes, Alex is right, and for all I'll be teased by my father, I did somehow forget to put the yeast in. Which means I spent 2 hours rising a lump of playdough. BUT, I've now added some extra yeast, with a splash of water and flour to help it dissolve, and the bread is now on its 2nd rise. Soon (though not as soon as originally though) there will be tasty focaccia.

Here's a picture of the dough struggling to rise (with no yeast).

Making Focaccia 1

We're currently having a European morning. Having enjoyed a cup of coffee with croissants, and now I'm baking some focaccia - tasty Italian salted bread with olive oil and rosemary. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. At the moment, it's rising, and in our poorly lit Sunday morning kitchen it looks like this:

So dentistry day wasn't too bad.

So dentistry day wasn't too bad. The worse thing was getting up, the best things were that it was a beautiful day, and it was actually very useful. I pulled an incisor and a 2nd upper premolar, both very successfully! Huzzah!

Saturday? Dentistry? Together?

The intrepid 5th year are spending 7 hours at vet school tomorrow (Saturday) learning all about dentistry. Now, I don't mind dentistry - it's another string to the exciting bow of veterinary practice (what other profession lets you be a GP, surgeon, radiologist, dentist, business adviser and smart-ass all in one (with the possible exception of plumbers)?). I also don't mind Saturdays; in fact, I positively enjoy their usual lie-ins, and the invariable swelling of my fridge that occurs later in the afternoon.

What I don't enjoy however, is when Saturday and Dentistry conspire to coincide. With an almighty bang, like the start of the universe, but in a less exciting all-creating sort of a way. Especially bang-worthy is the fact that we have a Cardiology exam on Monday (which is pretty huge and conceptually difficult), so we're all a little unimpressed.

Still, it gives me something to moan about to anyone who doesn't have a 7 hour practical on Saturday. Bring on the sympathy

Tom.

Ads

Some of the more astute amongst you may have noticed that some ads have appeared on the page (on the right-hand nav bar). Sorry, but if it helps, it's because I realised I don't give any money to charity. If by any chance I do make any money from the ads, it'll all go towards Macmillan Cancer Care.

And so the lists continue

And so the lists continue... Monday is Cardiology, which is a course of 15 lectures, each one as listy as the one before. Just lists of diseases followed by lists of diseases. Incredibly dry, incredibly sapping. All the courses are like this. Jumping through hoops. Leaping, like a lion in the circus.

Copied from my most recent post on the Broken Glass Blog (here)

"And so the first ever Short Fuse came and went, in a flurry of drama (not to mention snow), and was more of a success than we could have imagined.

My own personal involvement in Short Fuse, as web designer, poster-maker and mandolin player for Broken Glass’s own piece, Salon Loitscheck, has seen me follow the progression of the evening, and its philosophy from the initial idea to its conception and the evening itself. Vicky and Alex received a huge number of applications to perform on the evening, and were restricted to choosing around a quarter of these, which I think is testament to just how much something like this was needed.

In designing the posters, I wanted to produce something (like all publicists) that would give away everything the evening was about in as concise an image as possible..." read the whole post

This is the tastiest honey ever. I can usually take or leave honey, but I decided to treat myself the other day in Tesco and splash out £3.99 for a pot of honey. Boy was it worth it!

What I've discovered this week.

I haven't posted for ages again. There's been a flurry of exams (still 2 more to go this term), so I've resisted blogging.

I'm currently holed up in the Clare library. I've got an electric heater next to me, and a nice little cubbyhole in the laptop-room - very snug, unlike our house - which is freezing!

Things I've discovered this week:

1. Discovery from current revision: Dilated Cardiomyopathy is more common in dogs, while Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is more common in cats.
2. I much prefer espresso coffee from coffee shops than their horrible watered down mud. Particularly starbucks coffee which is strong, but in a horrible over-brewed way. Espressos taste good though. However, espressos are by definition, small, and so are not useful for stretching out for 2 hours for a work-fest. Hmm. Fortunately I have justified the caffiene content to myself by discovering that most bought coffee contains 2 shots of coffee, exactly the same amount as a double espresso. Huzzah!
3. People like drama - Short Fuse was a massive success (the room was completely crammed with people!). We had to turn people away at the door, and people were heard to remark that they want to come to the next one. So there probably will be another in Autumn. Huzzah!
   
4. You can hold a bed together with paperclips. I finally got hold of the bed for my room from my landlady, and unfortunately there were a few screw missing for the cross poles. Luckily, after some sword fighting with the loose poles, Reece, Bethmo and I came across some paperclips and twisted them around the poles to hold everything in place. Bodged beautifully.
5. Music made with dropping water is good, but only every now and then. Otherwise too much like water torture. The song I refer to is "Drop" by a Japanese chap, who goes by the name of "Cornelius" - very Japanese.
6. Gilbert and Sullivan can be quite good fun. After my previous trip to the Mikado which I promptly forgot a few days after seeing it, Alex and I went to see Iolanthe at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on Wednesday (our 4th anniversary), and it was very enjoyable. Nice and laid back, with some good tunes and an amazing set. The girl playing Iolanthe was particularly good. Plus the oboeist was, of course, a stand out genius (Mary).
7. While not strictly this week, Jamie Frost has a podcast. It rocks. Go to his website, or get it on iTunes. I'm listening to it while learning about myocardial disease, and it's very soothing when the fatty degeneration gets too much.
   

Tom

Excitements

"Song" is now on youtube. You know you want to watch it! Unfortunately, the 4th video is taking a while to process, but you can watch most of it already.
EDIT: The 4th video is now available!




Part 1 of 4


Part 2 of 4


Part 3 of 4



Part 4 of 4

This napkin drives me mad! "Less napkins"? Which fool came up with that? And which brain-dead monkey in management said "Duuh, yeah, do dat"?

Short Fuse and the cinema

Rehearsals for Short Fuse have now begun. Alex and Vicky are putting on their adaptation of a part of "The Golem" by a Mr Meyrink (I think) for the Short Fuse event on the 6th of Feb at Liberties Bar in Camden. I am playing the new, and very exciting, mandolin (or tiny -guitar as it has now been dubbed) for the performance, as it requires some traditional music at various intervals. Rehearsals went quite well - I'm particularly enjoying my easy part of simply sitting in the corner of the stage tinkling away while people act around me. So that's how minstrels felt!

In other news, I went to the cinema with Alex last Friday to see "The Reader", featuring Kate Winslet's Golden Globe winning role as a concentration camp guard (lots of WW2 holocaust-related films around at the moment) who strikes up an affair with a 15yr old school boy, who later becomes a law student and is present at her trial for war-crimes. It made interesting viewing, and raised some interesting questions into the worth of trials, particularly of those lower down the orders (and the Nuremberg defense, which is only invalid if a moral choice was available to the defendant). Kate Winslet was fantastic, and as always I was amazed by Mr Fiennes' range. What a range... Again, a very different role from that he played in 'In Bruges', which was in turn very different from that in 'the Constant Gardener'.

Talking about ranges, there was an interesting blog about Kate Winslet's range on the Telegraph Online today, talking about the fact that she hides out of the lime-light which enables her to maintain such an impressive range of performances. It argued that because she keeps herself apart from celebrity culture we can forget we are watching 'Kate Winslet', and get fully involved in her role.

The revision continues - even Charlie is getting into it...

NEWS FLASH

17 DEGREES!!!!

What Will it Take to Heat this House?

A little Maximo Park quote there ... a group of guys from the north who are probably loving the cold. It has been very cold in Cambridge, our house is struggling to reach above 14C inside. I recently resorted to nailing old curtains over the back door which has helped the temperature claw up to 16C. And no, the irony that I spent Sunday on my knees insulating someone else's loft has not been lost on me. I'm tempted to offer to do ours to the landlady. AND, everywhere in Cambridge has sold out of fan heaters! Even the disgustingly tacky bright pink Argos heaters had all gone. What will we do? What will it take to heat this house? Currently it's taking alot of gas and some chunky energy bills to... how shall we say... tempt it out of single figures?

On the other hand, it has meant my new dressing gown has been christened in exceptional style - getting hours of wear every day (pretty much from the moment I enter the house to the moment I go to bed). And my flat cap has had a little outing to vet-school. This brought a flurry of comments, possibly each one more sarcastic than the last (or less sarcastic... no... AS sarcastic?). Or not. I shall continue the wearing until everyone is used to the image of Tom as a posh farmer/landed gentry type-fellow. Excellent.

AND, we have an exam on Monday - Urology which is a LIST. LISTY LISTY LIST. A few tasty little concepts to get into, like the "nephrotic syndrome", and the big spider of renal failure, but apart from that, it's listylist. However, it did inspire Alex to give life to the beautiful song, #There's a hole in my glomerulus dear Liza, dear Liza#. Joy!

Tom

I've edited this post to remove my excessive use of the passive tense. Why do I think that writing in the passive makes me sound more capable of writing?

Yesterday - Rotation day! I started the term with Obstetrics, which was a 'self taught' rotation, where we 'learnt' the finer details of calving and fetotomies. I won't go into the gory details, but suffice to say it involved wheelie bins with holes cut in the bottom. Classic.

That afternoon, we ventured to Mary's where she made us kedgeree, a weird Scottish/Indian dish of smoked fish, egg and rice. Only the Scots could think up something like that - with a little friendly Indian input. It was surprisingly nice - an official version of Andrew's very successful smoked fish risotto that he made last year.

I have spent this evening resting my weary legs, and Alex and I have trawled the internet for interesting geographical marvels:

Ship Graveyards of Russia
The tiny city of Diomede on Little Diomede, the US Owned Island in the Bering Strait - photo
Chernobyl, Ukraine
The US Mexico Border in El Paso, complete with moat(?) separating the two