Perfume: Story of a Murderer, and More...

What's in a smell? A rose by any other smell would not be named as sweet...

It isn't very often that I can't sleep because of a book, but I have to say, honestly, that Perfume has officially done something that Harry Potter couldn't. The first thing that struck me was the power of Suskind's imagination to come up with such a concept. I mean, smell? One of the most basal, animalistic senses? One that we've often been taught to disregard? Fascinating...

The central character of Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, has an exceptional sense of smell. It's so exceptional that he uses his nose to identify individual people, and he has a particular interest in beautiful, virginal young girls. And you guessed it; he kills the girls he fancies. That's partly why I couldn't sleep last night – as much as I tried to convince myself that I only satisfy 75% of Grenouille's requirements (and therefore am at no risk at being murdered in my sleep), I was disturbed as to what kind of sensory messages I'm sending out to people.

During high school I was fairly mystified by the way some of my girlfriends could walk into a party and turn every male's head towards them. I had my theories – their impeccable dress sense, their body proportions (y'know, the “golden ratio” business), the grapevine (which promoted them as hot stuff, since Facebook wasn't around in those days)...but perhaps all of them were wrong? Perhaps they had particularly strong, enticing pheromones that the prehistoric creature lurking in every boy had learned to recognise. After all, real medical studies have shown that pheromones play a role in attraction for animals ranging from rats to humans (One of my lecturers is actually doing some research on pheromones at the moment!).

I've had a long-term suspicion that I send out “bugger off, I'm queer” pheromones, since it's been well-established that romance and I go together like onions and chocolate sauce. Now I wonder how much of my personality people can detect “subconsciously” on a first impression. Whether I reek of reluctance to commit to animate objects, or intense competitiveness/neuroticism/hyperactivity, or my support of some very radical minority groups...

Perhaps I can decompose it down to rational terms. Perhaps people who are very interested in a relationship will take pride in and put effort into their appearance, since they're the people whom perfumes like “Baby Doll” and “Delicious” and “Lovely” and “Darling” are marketed at. Perhaps neurotic people like me break out in nervous sweats much more than calm, collected people. Perhaps, you give off a slightly different odour depending on whether you're a normal omnivore, or a pescetarian (like me!), or an ovo-lacto vegetarian (like I used to be), or a vegan.

Just something to think about next time you're at a party and you're suddenly attracted to somebody for no reason.

Of course, just before I wrap up, I'll plug the novel a bit more. The language is exquisite – you can almost experience the myriad of odours along with Grenouille just thanks to the way Suskind constructs his prose. The religious allusions are confronting, but still captivating, even haunting. I'm not very good with my pre-revolutionary French history, but seriously, the novel's setting is gorgeous. And what I found surprising was how fast a read it was – since I've started med school I've sat on novels for at least a week (and this makes me very sad, as I long for the days when I devoured 20-odd books over a 2-month period) - and I just raced through Perfume in about...what, six hours in total? And yet I savoured it – I enjoyed all the descriptions of perfume-making (like the cold-pressing of jasmine blossoms) and the extensive travels of the main character throughout France, and the sensuality and physicality and immediacy of...well, everything.

If you guys read nothing else of this entry, then read this. Go and read Perfume! You won't regret it.

Harry Potter's Scar

To the tune of Missy Higgins' Scar, written to say thank-you to everyone who celebrated my birthday with me.

He left his mark with a bit of soul
And my parents dead in Godric’s Hollow
The Dark Lord, grandson of Marvolo
And before I’d calmed from the green flash of light
I was dropped on the doorstep of 4 Privet Drive
Tormented by the Dursleys for 10 years

Then a giant knocked down the door
Of the hut-on-the-rock
He said I was the boy who lived

Cause aren’t I Harry Potter
And don’t I belong to a magic world
Where everyone knows my story
Before starting at Hogwarts

Where everything’s unfamiliar
And everyone’s scared of Voldemort
He killed off half the Order
But with me he didn’t get far
He just left me with this scar

On the Hogwarts train, shared a lot of sweets
With Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley
But Malfoy said, “don’t trust them, trust me.”
We put on the Sorting Hat one by one
It looked at my insides, asked if I was sure
Till at last it shouted “GRYFFINDOR!”

An owl named Hedwig and a broom called a Nimbus
Getting mail
Playing Quidditch

Cause aren’t I Harry Potter
Don’t I have to save the Philosopher’s stone?
From two-faced Professor Quirrell
Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher

And Severus Snape, that peculiar
Teacher who tried to throw us out
Despite finding the Secret Chamber
Because we crashed our flying car
And because I’ve got this scar

I realised just in time
Sirius Black was innocent and a Godfather of mine
Saved him from Dementors, for book four, but not in book fiiive

Cause Voldemort came back to life
Despite Umbridge pretending otherwise
Tell me, did you really think my CAPSLOCK!ANGST was LAME?

I realised, far too late
That the Half-Blood Prince was really Severus Snape
Who loved my mother, and turned out to be good AND brave

Now I’m over weepy Cho, it’s a pity that
Ginny’s going out with five guys
And the monster in my chest thinks the same!

A triangle and a rod and a circle
These Deathly Hallows just don’t fit. (The plot)

Cause aren’t I Harry Potter
Don’t I have to find the Horcruxes
To defeat Tom Riddle (Voldemort!)
Now Dumbledore has gone

Last book – I came back to life, yeah
Bit of luck with the Elder Wand
Got with Ginny in the Epilogue (Ron with Hermione!)
Gave our kids pretentious names
Though all is well, I’ve still got this scar!

gettin' spexy

What does it mean to look for a laptop?

Foreword
Those of you who know me (rather too well) will be well aware that my free time in the last couple of weeks has been largely consumed by laptop shopping. It has caused me so much angst and internet time that I began to wonder: is this more than just a desire to get value for money? Does my indecision between models extend beyond greed for specifications? (specs?)

I started writing this while lying awake at 1am and contemplating the Lenovo Thinkpad X60s and the Sony Vaio SZ38. Superficially I was having internal arguments about specifications such as weight vs screen size, battery life vs hard drive space and so on. Typical nerdism, hey?

But why can I not find answers, despite having hounded the best nerds computing brains to my knowledge? I have my theories... **insane laugh**

1. Girls vs Boys
My girlfriends have very different requirements for techgear than my male friends. For example...one dinner party some weeks ago...

Sue: I'm thinking of buying a Macbook because it's pretty!
Thadeus: Did I just hear...you want to buy a laptop because it's pretty?" **expression of disbelief**

I noticed markedly that when I asked my girl/boy friends whether I should go for a Lenovo or a Sony, that the boys went with Lenovo and the girls with Sony.

Now, why do I suspect Sony is tapping the female market?

Ever seen a man buy a pink laptop?

Moreover, their laptop designs are sleek and lightweight, while simultaneously packing in features like Dual-Layer DVD Burners (and sometimes Blu-Ray!) as well as webcams.

Lenovos, on the other hand, are chunky - but this allows them to outdo the average adolescent male in terms of surviving bumps and scratches. The lightweight ones don't have optical (CD/DVD) drives. To quote my mother, "Who in this day and age would make a laptop without a DVD drive?" She reckons it's because boys have different pastimes to girls - for example, girls watch their chic-flick movies using their laptops' DVD drives, but boys download car/plane/violent/explicit movies directly from the internet, thus rendering the DVD drive useless.
(NB: that Lenovo might cause the boys some issues when they run out of hard drive space though...HAH!)

Penultimate statement - I quote the divine Philadelphia (Dellie!)...

Dellie: (go with) "The pretty one, you're female."

Lastly, take a peek at Sony's latest advertisement.

Sorry about bandwidth - but I felt you had to see it in its full glory -

Anyway, this ad features 3 people, all representing different brands/kinds of laptops. Notice that only VAIO is represented by a FEMALE. I rest my case.

2. What to do with the Ugly Duckling?
With reference to the ad above, notice that the PC man (whom we can associate with brands such as Lenovo) is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. All right, so he's not aesthetically displeasing, but he's not particularly...well, pretty. On the other hand, the VAIO girl takes pride in having a quirky sort of prettiness, I guess "bohemian" isn't the word, since the style implies long, tiered skirts and peasant tops, but it's the same idea - individualistic=beautiful.

Perhaps, (since to be fair, the man in the Sony shop pointed out that boys are snapping up the apple-green laptops as fast as the girls) it's not a question of gender roles, but something even more fundamental to society - the pursuit of beauty?

Several thoughts have run through my head which equate my Sony and Lenovo laptops with different aspects of beauty.
* "I'll take the Sony...it's pretty!"
* "I'll take the Lenovo...I don't want a laptop that's prettier than me..."
* "I'll take the Sony...I'll be sitting in Gloria Jean's using the wireless, and men will be drawn to my beautiful laptop."
* "I'll take the Lenovo...and I'll MAKE it prettier than the Sony! I can knit it a cover! I'll buy rainbow stickers!"

So during my extraordinarily long meditation session, I decided, "let's overcomplicate stuff..."

If I take the Lenovo, it's a question of, adopting the ugly duckling and waiting for it to turn into a swan.
If I take the Sony, it's as if I'm buying an extravagantly expensive parrot.
Does maturity really mean learning to deal with delayed gratification?

3. Magnetism
The Sony has a magnetic clip to hold it together when you fold the screen down - but then I wondered, could Vaio laptops be magnets for other things (apart from laptop thieves?)

A not insubstantial part of my adolescence has been spent on wondering how to be a boy magnet, or becoming an iron filing to some boy's metaphorical magnet. So, combining part I, concerning boys and girls, and part II, all about beauty, I came up with an even more twisted theory.

Just shortly before I was writing about maturity. Perhaps, the conflict between Sony and Lenovo in my case is an expression of despair that I don't know what guys would like to see in me now that I'm supposedly mature enough to deal with long-term relationships with the male species.

Here is a table, which I feel sums up the attributes associated with each brand. And why.

Sony	Lenovo
Looks (already reiterated too many times)	Brains (Thinkpad)
The stuff of flings (I've heard they can be flimsy)	Long-term dependability (everyone says they're durable)
Playfulness (cf PC-Mac-Vaio ad)	Seriousness
Emily Bronte	Jane Austen (if you've read them you'll know what I mean)
"La Vie Boheme!" (watch RENT if you don't understand the joke...)	Conservatism
The OC	Ugly Betty
...the more accessories, the better!	Minimalist fashion philosophy
Consumerism	Frugality
Individuality	Conformity (alright maybe this is really stretching it...)
Sexy boys from the Arts faculty	Nerdy boys from Engineering or Science (thanks for the idea, Perpetua!)

Obviously, both laptop brands claim to capture different elements of personality - good lord, now I sound like an essay - but isn't personality what the guys rave on about these days? **sigh** I wish it were true...if it were true, pornography would not exist.

In Conclusion
a) It is now 2am and I still haven't made a decision.
b) The next morning: "Or maybe this is all just another hiccup on the journey towards perfection? Learning how to make compromises is a sure-fire sign of maturity!"
c) Some days later: "It'll be a Sony!"
d) Sometime in the future: "It is a Sony!"

snow white retold

The REAL story of Snow White - by Robbie, Min, Kathy, Jem, Loz and Clair...

Snow White went a creeping
Past her father weeping
Gold and silver she had took
And hid it where they'd never look

But her stepmother was very smart
And as she hid she saw a part
Of Snowy's ugly horrid deed
So then she ran, with greatest speed

"Rear view mirror in my car,
Where did she hide it? Is it far?
Tell me know you little shit
Otherwise I'll throw a fit"

He told her once, he told her twice
She ran right there on his advice
And there she caught the evil girl
And there some insults she did hurl

"YOU IDIOTIC BIMBO SLUT
YOU PIECE OF CRAP, YOU STUPID NUT
You're being sent right to the slammer"
And then did Snowy begin to stammer

"It was not me! I was possessed
An evil spirit grabbed my breast,
And dragged me right by the nipple
To take money, hundreds, triple"

She quickly dialled 911
And 7 dwarves came on the run
Dressed as policemen, quickly the came
And beat poor Snowy with a cane

Off they dragged her to the woods
But then she bribed them with the goods
And so off to a hut they went
Where the next 10 years they "quietly" spent.

kept in the dark

Kept in the dark? What? Where? Who?!?

Although society has moved on into the twenty-first century, there are still suppressed groups in our society. Despite the fact that we have live in a free, democratic and socially supportive world, there is still a silenced population which resides amongst us all. The forgotten are still being kept in the dark, a primordial society where every day is a fight to survive.

They are the goldfish.

The way we treat our goldfish, despite the fact that their names imply wealth and luxury, is morally wrong. Look at their accommodation, daily care, public image, and what happens when we say goodbye.

Take a peek into the average goldfish’s home and you will see a dim, dingy bowl, fake plants, gravel polluted with detritus and murky, acidic, nitrate-rich water. The human equivalent of such squalor would be confinement to a single furniture-lacking room, sewage mixed with scraps soiling the floor, and everything layered in dust. Of course, there would be a window, not sufficient to keep the room bright, but large enough for the inhabitant’s privacy to be invaded 24 hours a day.

What happens every day in a goldfish’s life? Well if they’re lucky, they get fed with some kind of synthetically prepared formula. If not, they may be forced to sift through the gravel and re-digest their own waste products, or yesteryear’s leftovers. Some days, goldfish tanks are cleaned out and the water is changed. But this is seldom; they confine their mess to their tank only, unlike a dog, which messes your whole house; it’s so easy to forget about fish…

…which leads to my next point. Everybody knows the insult, “you’ve got the memory of a goldfish!” But, many goldfish have good memories – eg, mine learn the times for feeding as babies – every 6 hours. Stereotypes are not helped by easy obtainment. Most goldfish cost around $5, but many people give them free. What’s the point of spending money on something that costs less than a tube of lipgloss, and may not even last as long?

People often lose their goldfish in under a year, because they have not taken responsibility – shocking – if you treated your cat that way, the RSPCA would come after you. The poor neglected goldfish is disregarded, thrown in a bin, left on the lawn, of if he or she is lucky, buried in a compost heap.

It is tragic that goldfish today are treated worse than women in the dark ages – ornaments held captive in the worst conditions, goggled at for entertainment, never given a second thought after they leave this world. But Goldfish are living creatures just like us. And so, I think it is time we stop mistreating our goldfish in this completely immoral way; free them from their prisons of darkness and allow them to see the light.

anarchy college

Are school rules really that important in this day and age?

A school without rules might sound like seventh heaven to the vast majority of youths, a utopian paradise which can never be reached. But for the students of Anarchy College, this is the painfully down-to-earth, rational reality.

The first thing which would become apparent if you turned up would be the fact that nobody turns up with the aim of learning anything. Educational classes were abolished back in the Jurassic period. Homework is another part of history; for the teachers have relinquished the mere thought of setting it because it fails to interest any of the students. Today, the hallowed halls of Anarchy College reverberate seven hours a day, five days a week, with the harmonies of adolescent gossip. This ranges from the ordinary chatter between students, to mobile phone conversations, to the “rejects” who are forced into cyberspace to conduct their social lives.

Technology runs riot in Anarchy College. There are no terms or conditions concerned with using the school’s super-fast Ethernet connection, and thus many choose it over their snail-pace dial-up modems at home. The lines between legal and illegal internet pursuits do not exist in the minds of Anarchy students, who “rip and burn” Compact Discs, “share and swap” documents such as videos over networks such as “KaZaA”, download massive amounts of pirated music and software, deal in fraudulent identities and credit cards to fuel their web designing pursuits.

The air is thick with the signals of wireless phones, radios, computers and many other kinds of electronic communication. In fact, it is suspected that after discussing their evening plans, it is known that several children have disappeared. Naturally, due to all the unreined “chatting” with strangers on the internet, there have been cases of stalkers becoming obsessed with certain students and, much to their amusement, tailing them around school due to the lack of security.

But electronic corruption is not the only criminal activity which takes place at Anarchy College. Many less sophisticated crimes have plagued the students, such as minor theft and assault. Fights between students are exceedingly common, although not all disintegrate into physical violence. The student groups are clearly defined, and trespassers, unless new and unwary, are not generally treated in a friendly manner. These cliques often lead to a type of civil war, as small disputes can easily erupt into blazing battles. Many bear the [mostly mental] scars of these clashes.

Although there is a school uniform at Anarchy College, it is never followed. Having no rules does mean more comfort and freedom to follow the laws of fashion, but, as the principal claimed this would give Anarchy a bad public report, the students had to invent a solution to this. It was decided that it was better to eliminate the uniform entirely and wear casual clothes. This opened up yet another form of rivalry between students, turning the school into a world where people were judged by the cost of their clothes and the cosmetics above their skin.

To the rest of the world, Anarchy College appears to be the closest thing to heaven on earth. But to say that it was hell on earth would be closer to the truth.