all sorts of wonky

me

ugh. ugh is how i feel. ugh is me.

i'm just sitting here at work feeling trapped and cagey. i'm cramping and feeling ill and i want to go home so badly, but i don't have enough pto.

*big sigh*

must survive 2.5 more hours.

continuing onward, i had mentioned that i wanted to write about some books i had recently read. i stole madge's little reading/currently reading sideline list idea. (teehee, when typing her url into that link, i almost wrote blogspigot.)

the emperor of scent. this book was absolutely fascinating. it was about a guy name turin, who has an extraordinary sense of smell. his descriptions of perfumes are lush and entrancing - i found them captivating partly because i'm such an anti-perfume type of person. in any case, he's somewhat of a dabbler in the sciences - physics and chemistry and biology all rolled into one - and he's come up with a really interesting and solid theory of how we smell. currently, the main theory is that we recognize a smell by the shape of the smelly molecule. turin's theory is that we actually have a sort of organic spectroscope in our noses that can recognize a molecule not by the shape, but by the vibration of the molecule's bonds. i admit that i know almost nothing about this sort of science, but the book is great at really breaking the ideas down and it's mindboggling at how the science world doesn't take turin's more complete vibrational theory seriously.

self-made man. this one was about a lesbian woman who dresses up as a man for about 9 months, infiltrating their secret man world in order to see if men really do "have it easier" than women. ... really, there's so much i want to write about this one - it may be a post all on its own. i also may not have the mental capacity at present to do it justice.

::urgh:: must... continue... mustn't let... cramps... drag me down...

• designsponge wrote about hitachino nest beer and kiuchi brewery! so cute! (and delicious.)
• a village in china apparently served a "sumptuous fish banquet" for 200+ cats as thanks for killing rats! (via boingboing.net)
• also via boingboing - a video of a giant centipede devouring a mouse. i haven't watched this one yet, it might make me upchuck at present.
• and this cat piano reminds me so much of terry gilliam.