Bing!

I joked to Rob that I am like those annoying commercials for that Microsoft Bing! or whatever it's called - where people start spewing all that random information on a certain keyword. Only mine's not really random, and of course I hope to god I'm not that annoying about it! But I'm full of all this newly-acquired information these days, and I'm dying to share. Where I am Bing-like is that if you say, oh, Parkinson's disease, you elicit an immediate brain-dump - I really did do that one the other day, but it was only Art, and he's increasingly deaf these days and won't wear his hearing aid, so I don't know that he even heard it. -- Which reminds me, Col asked for a brain-dump about nerves and I haven't gotten around to doing that one yet, so if I'm really as gung-ho as I say, I ought to get on the stick, shouldn't I?

The next chapters in Anatomy were two subjects that were at the end of the other book - the senses and the endocrine system - and so I am sort of sick of them and I decided to skip them for now. I will come back to them later. The next chapters were the one on blood (thus the "buffy coat" term the other night) and the one on fluid regulation, which didn't have its own chapter in Med Terminology. Something new, yay! (And blood is a very complicated subject so I certainly needed a refresher there.)

(I am tempted to talk about Michael Jackson or LOTRO but I think I will go study instead. The former subject, in particular, does not need any more input. I had to turn MSNBC off because they have abandoned politics for the evening in favor of 24-hr King of Pop, and it was making me nuts.)

Dead Celebrity Remembrance Day

Good lord, I thought by the time I got up this afternoon maybe the Michael Jackson frenzy would've died down a little bit. I guess that was wishful thinking. However, there are some people writing some good words that pay tribute to the good stuff about the man without losing sight of the bad. cleolinda's is good, and ursulahitler's is better. (And that video Ursula posted is unbelievable. You can totally see the adult Michael there in the little kid.)

Rob said they have been talking some about Farrah Fawcett, too, although she mostly got eclipsed by the Michael juggernaut. (I'm sure most of you reading this are aware that his death broke Livejournal. Or rather, the whole world trying to log onto ONTD did, or so I hear.) I'm older than a good many people on LJ and a lot of people remember him differently than I do - that is, they were kids when Thriller came out. I was in my early 20s and living in Austin. We liked to mock Thriller and its zillions of album sales, that's mostly what I remember. I know MJ has a lot of cultural significance as far as having been the first black artist to have that kind of success, but to me he was this guy who was always around from the time I was 10 or 11 (and who happened to be about my age), and who made some good music, but wasn't really somebody who affected me that much. Farrah Fawcett - or Fawcett-Majors, as she was when she first turned up in my teen years - was not terribly significant to me personally, either, but I came to reluctantly admire her as she hung in there after her big fame had waned.

I'm mostly just rambling because I can't get onto LOTRO and I'm unhappy about that. Columbine was off today and we were planning to start playing early, but it's down. It's been buggy since the big update earlier this week and I imagine they're trying to fix that. (They were supposed to be fixing it this morning and be back by now, but obviously things did not go as planned.)

Gold paint and other myths

I forgot to say that last night in the wee hours I watched season one of Mythbusters (which is only three episodes) in order to get away from the endless talk about you-know-who on the TV. It was very entertaining - rocket cars and exploding biscuit cans and whatshisname painted gold, like in Goldfinger. I was particularly interested in that last one because I remember a friend explaining to me about the girl (allegedly) dying from the gold paint and I was fascinated - I must have been seven or eight at the time.

OK, I really ought to go study now. Tomorrow we are going to the Astros game so now much studying is likely to occur then, either.