dom.blog

Tunnel visioned, that’s me. I have Physics Practical tomorrow morning. As you can tell I’m really confident about it all although actually, I feel ever so slightly better now that I know how to measure with Vernier Calipers in millimetres rather than inches!

As soon as the Practical is over, my mind will turn over to Maths for Monday, and then afterwards English for next Friday, etc etc. Anything else can and will be neglected, exitus acta probat. And yes, that includes you, personal statements! I don’t want to even think about applying to university any more. Not. Interested. Even a little bit. Wait until after AS exams, thank you very much.

However my propencity to be distracted is never ending, hence I am also participating in Babble’s amazing Summer CD Big Swap, which Pingu slyly convinced me to do last night.

Shout out! To Amber, one of the poor Year 8s who now blog themselves, and much better than I do too. There are loads more: Marion, Izzy, Zenobia – more links on her site.

Talking of websites, I’m getting the itch again to do something to my own. Summer holidays, and you never know what might happen…

Physics Practical. You take a little bit of Physics, stamp on it with studded boots and throw it off a cliff, whereby it is urinated on by utterly sadistic and annoyingly muddy two-horned goats before being mailed to Michael Winner in a brown paper envelope. And that’s how much I like it, although the percentage uncertainty is probably way off.

Anyway.

Other than Physics Practical, things are quite alright. Year 9 SATs started today (best of luck, my little Year Ninelings) whilst revision continues apace for AS. Today our History teacher took the unprecedented step of actually apologising for telling us off, which must be a sign that either we’ve cracked, or he’s cracked, or we’ve both cracked under the pressure.

Utterly unrelated to all of that, I just wanted to call out today’s Quote of the Day for further examination. You see, it turns out the Boy Scouts of America refuse to let in three very dangerous and subversive groups into their organisation (either as Scouts or as employees) – girls, gays and the godless. Seriously. One guy was given one week to find god or get out. Although the attitude scares me, it did conjure up an amusing image of someone deciding to leave it to the last minute. “Oh, I’ve got a week, I’ll find god tomorrow…”

Finally – shout to, ooh I don’t know, Clare for her new ‘blacker the than the deepest night’ hair (very cool) and Rishal, because coupled shout outs are lovely and sweet, and also because he stopped me actually dying after Physics Practical. Physics Practical? We go through our mock tomorrow! Oh joy…

– Dommy
(Clare being the only person in the world to call me this)

News just in: they teach blogging in schools now! Wow Well apparently they do here, since my blog is being held up as some kind of template for the Year 8s to follow. Interesting.

I wonder if it’ll work. Can you ‘tell’ people to write a blog? Will that ruin the fun? Will you end up with a class of MySpace accounts? Apparently, the teacher who asked me about this (howdy to you Sir) believes that blogging is an ‘important literary movement’… is it, or is just a bunch of *shifty eyes* emotional outbursts about dead cats?

Oh who cares, anything promotional is fine by me!

This, incidentally, is a strange little semi-promotional video (edit – I say semi-promotional, but in their infinite wisdom, Google seem to have cut off the final caption. ‘Love it’ was the strap line, with dominicself.co.uk. Oh well.) I made at the beginning of the holidays. It doesn’t mean anything, the soundtrack is stolen from Sonic the Hedgehog and you’re only losing about ten seconds of your life by watching it. So go on, I dare you.

It was back to school and ‘real work’ today, and I can actually feel myself slipping back into work mode quite easily which is reassuring. Still have rather a lot of Maths work to do for Friday, but it’ll come, it’ll come…

Today (well, yesterday) was our wonderful Physics lectures trip to prepare for upcoming exams. An examiner was going through power in electric circuits when we notice a guy standing in one of the rows behind where we were sitting, praying. Praying loudly and annoyingly and distractingly with lots of humming. Well, it was a church after all, when it’s not being rented out for conferences. Attempting to first ignore him, then asking him to leave (prayer rooms were available elsewhere after all ) the police were eventually called and he was led out in handcuffs.

Forget about the individual case, I just love the symbolism. Physics over prayer

And prayer certainly won’t help with what I have just realised… it’s almost April, and April is my last full month before exams start again. Eek! And my first exam will be a Physics practical, officially the most stressful exam in the world, ever, bar none. Making language orals look like a walk in the park. I’d fail it but I really don’t want to, so I won’t.

Update: How did I forget to mention that Costa Coffee gave us all free coffee as we came home yesterday? I’m not really a coffee person – go hot chocolate! – but I like the price of free. So here you go Costa, have some free blog publicity in return

Today was a rather amusing day on several counts aside from being March 20th (although apparently March 14th counts too, so says Wikipedia, those with no idea what I’m talking about should discard this sentence.)

The first incident occurred in History where we entered to find the board defaced with some frankly immature messages implying that they disliked the school, that they preferred certain sexual positions and most notably a charming phallic illustration. So far so good. However, one member of the class did not appreciate the illustration, taking a full 15 minutes to catch on. Apparently, he\she had viewed it as ‘An A with two 0s’

Rest assured said person will now bear that catchphrase for the rest of his\her life.

Our assembly today took place in the gym with us all sat at little exam desks so we could do a little Reasoning Test for a university researcher, but first Mr. Birch came to sell PhotoReading once again. And denounced me! “SOMEONE in this hall I know doesn’t agree with PhotoReading, questions the ETHICS of PhotoReading…” as I sat at the back grinning. (For the record it was very nice and good natured and don’t shoot me!)

Well here’s the deal. There are perfectly valid techniques which I’m sure you pick up on these courses. Skim reading, scanning, concentration, etc. If you want this, go for it! I have, however, a healthy scepticism of the ‘PhotoReading’ component which has – as far as I can see – never undergone a scientific peer-review.

So that’s that. Have a lovely afternoon.

P.S. Oooh I nearly forgot! Mum has gone away for the week so we perform the ancient tradition of Dad, Tash, Katie and I playing Rummikub each night. And I won the opening match! Woot