The Fiftieth Gate

For English Advanced, I have to read The Fiftieth Gate. It's a book by Mark Raphael Baker and explores his parents' history as Jews that survived the World War. I'm not even half way through it yet (just started yesterday). There are so many gems in the book, sentences and passages that resonate. Some parts outright made me break into goosebumps.

This is a passage that actually made me cry:

They come waving their waving their flags, a contingent of Israeli students bearing the blue and white colours of a prayer shawl, at whose centre lay a Star of David. They observed the boulders from a distance, but do not lose themselves within the maze. They have no single thing to find here, just the whole cursed site. They stand as a group, establishing a new focal point against Warsaw, a unified entity at a distance from the dispersed villages. A girl stepped forward with a flute, and plays for the students who accompany her melody in mournful voices. She plays 'Hatikvah', the Israeli national anthem: 'The Hope'. Then another student stands outside the circle and recites a Hebrew verse: 

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

 I recognise the poem from Dan Pagis, a Rumanian-born survivor who emigrated to Israel. 'Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car', it is called.

The student completed his recital, and then another voice speaks the same words, each time stopping before the sentence is completed. 'Tell him that i ...' Another plea, then another, until every member of the group proclaims the unfinished message.

When I returned to our hotel in Warsaw, I recited the poem for my parents.

My mother says the train must have arrived.

My father says: 'When I was taken away from my mother she said nothing.'

I wanted to break the silence for him, to force him to look back for his mother, Hinda.

He is crying; I look away.

here in this carload
i am Hinda
tell him that i 

The poem is on the net here.

He establishes an eerie sort of mood and atmosphere that brings together the past and present, the personal and the factual. There's a strong sense of memory, like old books and ancient records and faded photographs.

What it comes down to is that he has a writing style that I personally like, and the subject matter has always been of interest to me. For a compulsory English course book, it could certainly be a lot worse.

I got new icons

My pretty monster icons, let me show you them:

Okay, so it was a huge waste of time to change them, but they look nicer now, and if I enjoy looking at them I might work harder, or something... *kills self*

There are so many different lovely icons out there, I've already collected 383 MB worth of them, this set, Artcore, is by far my favourite. I just found out I can change my icons on Saturday and I went mad with it. I have two apps that makes changing icons a breeze.

This is why I love downloading apps and things to tweek my computer with, it's like shopping, except you don't have to pay for anything but your internet connection if you dig.

Wordle and TagCrowd

I found a really cool web application - Wordle. It creates a tag cloud of words in a piece of writing, and the words that occur more frequently is bigger. This is one I did of George Orwell's novel 1984. (click on the image to see it full size)



Doesn't it look cool? You can use it to find the most important points in a piece of writing, or find which words are overused in your own writing. You can customise the font, colour and layout. You can even print them out and hang it on your wall. Here's another I made of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.



Another similar web app is TagCrowd. It doesn't make designs that are as pretty as Wordle, but it does have a few more practical options, like a stop list to exclude words you don't want, grouping similar words and showing the frequency of words.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and Coraline

I watched Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in 3D yesterday. It's mostly pretty predictable, even if I haven't even watched the first three movies yet, but it's still quite an enjoyable movie. I think this is the first time I've watched a live action movie in 3D.

I love the mermaid scenes, it was so magical. Everyone one of them were amazingly pretty, but the mermaid Syrena is one of the prettiest girls I've ever seen. She really delicate and innocent looking, and her accent makes her sound so cute. She has that really pretty European/French look, and if you look the actress up on youtube, she looks amazing in some of her ads.

I'm just very partial to mythology, made up or otherwise. Especially the about things and people that looks beautiful but are actually very dangerous. I love the contrast.

I also watched Coraline on a friend's iPad and got half way through Mulan. It was Athletics Carnival and there wasn't much to do. I quite liked Coraline, but I don't know if I'm just a scaredy cat or what, but I don't recommend watching it at night by yourself, it can get creepy. The soundtrack is really good.

Coraline is based on a book of the same name by Neil Gaiman, and he's one of my favourite authors. He's one of the few author's I actually remember the name of. He wrote Stardust, which I enjoyed, and he was also the writer for a graphic novel series called Sandman. That series is one of my absolute favourites, it's about 7 entities, more powerful than gods, called Endless, and focuses on one of them in particular, Dream. It's a wonderful mix of mythology and legend and magic, the words he writes just sounds very, I don't know, deep and meaningful.

Gives Me Hope + MLIA

I found a website today called Gives Me Hope (or just GMH). It has very short accounts of sweet and touching moments. It's described as chicken soup for the soul, but 21th century and twitter style.

It's something that might make you feel that humanity gives you hope. I teared up when I read some of them. One of them went like this:

One of my classmates in high school had leukemia, and he was really depressed after his first round of chemo when he came to school with no hair. When they found out about it, all 70+ members of the varsity football team shaved their heads too. Their yearbook picture is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. GMH

Another website I found (connected to GMH) is My Life Is Average (or MLIA). This website is a collection humorous moments in the lives of ordinary people. I wasted hours on these two website. But this is just something to cheer you up in between the hours of hard studying. Enjoy.

Lesson where the teacher told us stories + Monster Blood Tattoo series

Yesterday we were able to get the English teacher to tell us anecdotes for the whole period. We were talking about waxing and hygiene, tattooing, piercing (and how she pierced second holes in both her ears herself with a sewing needle when she was a teenager). We kept asking her questions and for more information on this and that, I wasn't expecting her to really keep answering them. I think we only got away with it because she didn't have anything important to teach us then.

Book rec: For the Win

Machinery of the Stars by alexiuss

The title is what first made me pick this book up. "For the win". That's something so pop culture and so internet culture that it surprised me to see it on a book, even in teh fiction section. I picked it up, I read the blub, and it was about gaming, it was about gold farming, it was about China and it was about underdogs all over the world banding together to overthrow their oppressors. In other words, right up my ally.

Physics Homework almost killed me



Black Dress

I typed up 8 pages of summary notes in one sitting, and that's, what, 5 hours straight. My shoulders feel weak, my wrists feel weak, my fingers feel weak, my brain feels like much. I did another 6 pages on Friday. The sad thing is I feel like that's this homework has been the thing that's made me learn the most in physics, the teacher is that bad.

First post of the year

First post of the new year! (even if it's several days after the 1st) I wish everyone a wonderful, fulfilling year ahead of us. Year 11 is going to be a lot tougher than the years before, and it's likely to be more fast paced than we're used to, so let's work hard everyone. :-)

To start the year off with a laugh (hopefully), I present to you a funny website called (The Customer is) Not Always Right. This website showcases many many (410 pages as of today) anecdotes of when the customer is being stupid and when the salesperson is made of pure win.

I spent hours on Not Always Right last night and I laughed out loud so many time. The stupidity of some customers begins to make your faith in humanity falter. Not Always Right is extraordinarily funny, so I had to share it. Tell me if you like it! (I've learnt that my tastes are not always the same as other people's, so tell me if you didn't like it too)