Passed 50,000 plays on last.fm, the milestone song being Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet (which has been listened to 46 times and is #15 in my list of top tracks). Gosh, I love last.fm. Nerdy music statistics FTW.

Doggy has been staying in my room overnight because he cries and whines if we shut him in the kitchen. (A pink poodle in a tiara could out-butch this dog, I swear.) He's curled up in a perfect fuzzy black oval on his paw-print blanket. ♥ The problem with looking after dogs is that they go back to their owners and I get a couple of days of post-dog depression. Note to self: sort your life out and you will be able to surround yourself with puppies.

Are there any illnesses that have symptoms similar to being in love?

My cousins are away visiting their dad for a week or two, and my aunt's gone to Arisaig for the weekend with mum, so the grandparents and I are dog-sitting my cousin's cocker spaniel. I am becoming more convinced he wants to be a bandom dog. He's got the look: all black with a white stripe down his muzzle, throat and chest like some badly bleached streak; when he's not recently been to see that scissor-happy groomer, he's got a JoeTroh 'fro; he runs around the garden like Frank Iero onstage; he cries all emo and angsty if he's left alone at night; and he has a habit of showing off his bits, particularly if there's a camera nearby, which is rather Wentzlike behaviour.

Would there be enough interest for a bandom craft LJ comm? I ask because I've got a bandom-themed cross-stitch project and also a knitting one on the go at the moment, with ideas for several more, and I was wondering if other folks indulged in similar things. I totally don't just have the ulterior motive of wanting someone to either write or point me towards a trucker hat pattern that could be used to make a knitted version of Patrick's I ♥ BINGO hat. Oooh, and there could be discussion about how to replicate Mikeyway's gray woolly hat. Maybe I'll just go ahead and make the comm and get it pimped in dotcoms_refresh.

Today I am dressed super classy. Black and white plaid, strapless, ruffly dress with black and white brogues. Um, and my spotty blue bra partially on display because my rack needs support and I don't have any strapless bras because I doubt the structural integrity of ones in my size. Any recommendations for big strapless bras? Any of these, maybe? I'm still convinced that the only decent 38G strapless bra that provides stability and prevents the downward slump is going to be an anti-gravity machine. PHYSICISTS, WORK ON THIS. THE BOOBIES DEMAND IT. OBEY THE BOOBIES!

It's an absolute bitch trying to find biosciences research assistant/technician jobs in London at the moment that don't require (in the essential column rather than the desirable one) experience of mammalian tissue culture. Bahhhhhhhhhh.

Earlier today I was telling ihavecake about Melissa Cross, a classically trained vocal coach who specialises in extreme vocals, teaching rock, punk and metal vocalists how to sing and scream and growl and make all those super hardcore noises without damaging their vocal cords. Melissa is a seriously awesome lady, and her clients have nothing but praise for her teaching and her understanding of extreme vocal styles. I originally found her site when I was googling for advice on doing death metal growls without shredding one's throat (for some stand-up comedy material I've written) but I found her DVD and warm-up exercises really helpful just for general vocal improvement. So I share!

The Zen of Screaming - as I got it off the torrent, with the DVD chapters as separate wmv files. The picture quality is quite low, but it's watchable and the audio's the important thing anyway.

Warm-up exercises: contralto, mezzo-soprano, soprano. Use whichever one suits your range, and if you're not sure about that there's a bit in one of the vids about finding your range (at around 14:30 in the Note & Timbre chapter). I've also got the warm-ups for bass, baritone and tenor, but I didn't know if there were any chaps on the flist who would be interested. If you want the files, just comment and I'll upload them too.

So there's been a slight change of plan regarding Comecidal Lolocaust in August. I will now be doing the show wearing a fake moustache. Maybe I have a big stick-on one or I'll draw one on, I haven't decided yet. It's to promote the short film Moustachette. (Written by, directed by and starring a certain Mr Patrick Stump. You can understand my interest here.) In return our show's been twitter-promoted by @moustachette. So hopefully the combined outcome will be more tickets sold for the Lolocaust and more interest in the movie which will lead to film festival showings so I can see the damn thing. :D Hurrah!

"Radio 4 is to offer students free stand-up workshops at a series of university roadshows to woo younger listeners." They'll wait till I'm no longer a student, won't they? Bah! And I love radio 4 as well!

And now we have some sort of girly habits questionnaire meme thing.( Makeup, hair, scents, jewellery, purses and shoes, shopping )

It's not asked in the meme how one looks while filling in all these answers. No makeup yet, Fall Out Boy Dance Dance t-shirt, black ra-ra skirt, gray leopard print tights, purple moc-croc high-heeled mary-janes.

Aaaaaand back to work.

I started knitting a lace shawl last night. I've already gone through my entire vocabulary of swearwords twice. I think I'm going to have to invent some new ones to get through this project. It's not difficult, I just keep losing my place on the bloody chart. It'll be worth it in the end, it'll be worth it in the end. This is the pattern, the Luna Moth shawl. I chose it after I'd bought a pile of yarn I thought might make a spiffy shawl, and delightfully it turns out that the yarn has colours in it similar to the luna moth, Actias luna. Appropriate!

And back to the louse genetics and comedy writing. More on the louse thing on Wednesday after my next meeting with Rod. I want to blither at you all about host-parasite coevolution. More on the comedy writing at random intervals as I panic about only having a month left to finish writing and learning my twenty-minute set for Camden. I must get a spot at Red Raw or something, as I really need more performance experience. I'm considering asking the other postgrads in the ecology and evolution division if they fancy some free comedy in the zoology museum. The perfect audience for material on animal communication and courtship rituals!

*hyperventilates* The Tragically Hip are touring Europe at the end of the year! There's a Glasgow gig (03/12/09) and a London one (30/11/09) so I'll get to see them whichever city I'm living in by then. Oh my god! And here I've been thinking that I'd only ever get to see them live if I went to North America. SQUEEEEEEEEE!

Time for tattoo talk! My foot's all healed and apart from a tiny bit on my toe joint that needs touched up (it's difficult to protect the scabbing on an area of skin that's constantly smooshed about during walking), it looks fantastic. I've had a fair few designs in mind for a very long time, but my most recent one is for a sleeve. It'll have to wait till I have the money and I'm safely in a job where visible body art is acceptable (thank you, laboratory-based science, for not caring what your whitecoated nerds look like!) and I'll need to check with a tattoo artist that the stretch marks on my upper arms won't cause any problems. But here is the idea: a collection of British garden birds (robin, sparrow, bluetit, chaffinch, goldfinch, etc.) with a background of the leafy tree they're perched in. Done in a realistic or painterly style along the lines of these: budgie, tiger, frog, rhino, koala. It would take a lot of research to find the right artist for that kind of work, but ohhhhh, I'm kind of in love with the idea.

My only comment about the first part of the new Torchwood miniseries: Peter Capaldi is fucking ace. :D

Earlier, on twitter... We're pickin random RT'ers for a prize! Spread the word: Get @WeAreTheUsed - new single "Blood On My Hands" here- http://tinyurl.com/lh3m3k.

I am a good fan, I retweet. AND THEN!



:D

Sent my email and got a reply from the lovely person at the record label confirming that I will indeed get "some stuff" sent to me. I love the vagueness of stuff. It has an element of danger when it comes from The Used. (Would something Bert coughed up survive transatlantic postage? What would the customs charge be for importing biohazardous material?) :D Excitement and glee!

Right. Need some motivation. My to-do list is growing like mould on my damp, decaying soul and pretty much all I've done lately is knit and complain about the heat. Yes, the heat. I don't care if you think 25°C+ is just pleasantly warm, this is Scotland. We're not built for that shit here. We're more about porridge and aran tweed sweaters and throwing another Englishman on the fire to warm us through the cold, rainy night. The potentially Italian part of my heritage is keeping quiet on this matter, the easily-tanning bastard. COFFEE TIME.

Happy Canada Day for yesterday! To celebrate, I drank a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale. Mmmmmmmyummy.

Popped up to Glasgow yesterday for a bit of shopping, braving the crowds and the sweat. I got yarn and a couple of TPBs, vol. 1 of Doom Patrol and vol. 1 of The Umbrella Academy. I was supposed to be looking for new jeans but I decided I would be frugal and attempt to patch the holes in the old ones first. (With spare denim, self. It is a relatively easy sewing task. Do not think, oh fuck it, and use duct tape instead.) Also, I couldn't quite face the prospect of a jammed Primark or peeling off the sweat-clingy skinny jeans I was wearing.

I had a nice chat with the dude working in Forbidden Planet when I bought the trades, and I kinda wanted to hang around for a bit as the shop was unusually quiet and any pubic displays of Girl Talking Knowledgably About Comics are good for the comic book industry and culture (how fucking ridiculous is it that in 2009 the simple statement girls read comics is still widely disbelieved?) but the guy bore quite the resemblance to the slightly creepy brother of a slightly creepy ex-boyfriend. Which, ah, creeped me out a little.

I've currently blocking my three latest knitting projects - somewhat apprehensively, as I've never bothered blocking anything before. Two cowls and one beret. I just hope the cat doesn't decide she needs a fuzzy new nap spot...

Patrick Vaughn Stump Is Sexy: A Picspam.

Yeah.

Not dial-up friendly; not at fucking all. Not laundry-friendly; you may need fresh knickers after this. Not dignity-friendly; I can't believe I get this embarrassingly flaily over some little dude in a hat.

( I've got troubled thoughts and the self esteem to match, what a catch )

Had a bit of rough turn at the weekend. Observations of facts twisted into niggly little daggers, and some ridiculously overblown sense of abandonment because my constant F5ing wasn't showing anything new. My friends, all going out, having stuff to do, leaving their computers and the internet behind, thus leaving me behind. Stupid, stupid. I could go out, too, but I'd still be alone, and this town's too miserable an influence without conversation to distract from it. There's Glasgow, of course, but it costs over a fiver just getting there, and it's filled with all these people loudly advertising how Not Alone they are (usually called Hanging Out With Friends And Having A Good Time, in rational vocabulary).

Twitter is full of fucking tennis.

I'm so fucking fed up with alcoholics in denial.

Ugh, enough wankery. Oh, wait, no. One more bit of whiny shit: I got hit with bad knitting karma yesterday. Three times I started new projects then had to frog them because I'd totally fucked up. The fact that I've managed seven rows of 1x1 rib without a single mistake feels like a huge achievement. *facepalm*

Now: Planet Earth and more (hopefully mistake-free) knitting.

Tomorrow: getting the fuck out of the house no matter what, mooching round Glasgow, not being a miserable cunt, seeing if there's any good yarn in the John Lewis sale.

kittie_la_rue requested a pic of my unicorn shirt, ( so here it is. )

And I finished knitting the cowl this morning, ( so here are pictures. )

I HAVE A PRESENT FOR YOU. There's this film, Local Hero, that I mention quite frequently because it's my favourite film. Ever. Of all time. It's funny, it's quirky, it's Scottish, it's at least as quotable as Withnail & I, and somehow it remains rather obscure and only a few people on my flist have seen it. It stars Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson (WEDGE FUCKIN' ANTILLES, also Ewan MacGregor's uncle) and, for fans of In The Loop and The Thick of It, a young Peter Capaldi. SO DOWNLOAD IT.

Local Hero <-- click, save, unzip, watch, love, quote.

And here are some random photos... ( cat, dog, me )

Working on a Hell Yeah, Patrick Stump Is Sexy picspam, and knitting. I am so in love with Noro Silk Garden and stratospherique's cowl pattern. It's pretty early to be planning, but this is probably what everyone in my family's going to get from me for Christmas, with the yarn adjusted to suit the recipient. (I don't think anything I've got on the needles at the moment is season appropriate. Cowl, cardie, gloves, scarves. I've not quite figured out summer knitwear yet.)

Today is a day for yarrrrrrn porrrrrrn. I decided to treat myself to a couple of skeins of Noro Silk Garden to knit stratospherique's new cowl pattern and oh! the stunning colours and the visual texture of the graduations. A rich rainbow of vibrant, jewel-like hues: beautiful. I could stare at this yarn for hours, but it's far more fun to actually knit with it so I cast on as soon as I got on the train home. I also got some Mirasol Hacho, again because of the utterly gorgeous colourway. I'll have a poke about on ravelry to see what projects would be suitable for just the one wee hank. Calorimetry, maybe?

I was served by the supersupercute girl I maybe have a teeny crush on in the Co-op again today. And once again I didn't manage to say anything other than hello and thank you. This is probably wise because she still needs the supervisor's OK to sell booze (I know this because I was buying Guinness) which, if I recall the law correctly, means she's under 18. SPECIAL HELL, Holly, YOU ARE GOING TO THE SPECIAL HELL. Hmmm. Maybe I should just stick to the cock to avoid accidental lesbian paedophilia. :/ (OK, so I did have a fifteen year old girlfriend once, but I was also fifteen so it was fine and normal and not SPECIAL HELL baiting.)

The meeting with my (endearingly geeky) supervisor went well, and he told me how I could use sequence data from two separate genes to build a more robust tree. The project's going well, but it's pretty straight-forward up to the point where the cospeciation hypothesis is tested. In fact, it's mostly been drudge work so far, copying and pasting, and filling text files and a spreadsheet with data, but now I get to build trees, which is the fun part.

Yes, I am excited about exploring the phylogeny of bird lice. This really shouldn't be surprising...

I made a music! Sort of. Well, I've been messing about with Acoustica Mixcraft, which is supposedly one of the best PC alternatives to GarageBand. Using only loops and sound samples from the Mixcraft library (all royalty-free from various online sources) I put about a minute of track together and gave it a super wanky title, because all experimental instrumental tracks should have long wanky titles: A Wave of Vertigo, Alone, on a City Street at Dawn. The next step is to play with the midi things and virtual synthesisers and make my own tunebits. Hmmmmmm, I could also use the Hobnox Audiotool and Tonematrix to record loops to then use in Mixcraft. Wheeeeeeeee! Making noise! (Any crap I make with this will be given the artist tag nerdsoup, matching my twitter handle and the most recent domain I bought.)