Soundtrack to my Thesis Daze

I've been listening a lot to Patrick Watson lately, an entirely new discovery courtesy of Regnyouth archives, my main source of new music (instructions for newcomers here). His extraordinary, surreal and bizarre music is the ideal soundtrack to the sense of unreality that accompanies being incapable of thinking about anything other than concepts and truth. In that sense, it may be unwise to listen to too much of it. (Imagine Jeff Buckley and Björk had an adult child who was best friends with Martin Grech and whose uncle is Ed Harcourt.) Nevertheless, I'm excited about the slightly more experimental/electronic direction mainstream music seems to be taking in the US - at least if the rise of MuteMath can be considered significant (this discovery courtesy of John Mayer).

Neil's Birthday Weekend

Here are some pictures from this weekend, notable for two things: (1) it was Neil's birthday and (2) Laura and I didn't have to spend several hours driving!

Presents were ready for Neil's arrival in the morning, and we all sat down to a delicious breakfast of croissants, fruit salad and Raven Road Muesli (patent pending).

Penny arrived later in the day - on holiday from Jane's parents. She seemed nonplussed by the fesitivities, along with pretty much everything else.

Neil is 8 - for the 5th time!


The night before was also a culinary wonderland, featuring Jane's most excellent fishcakes...

And of course the essential birthday cake... (Plum upside-down cake in this case).

Neil struggles to blow out eight candles - by my count it took him five attempts...

But he looked very pleased with his lot afterwards...

At least until his medication wore off...

Funny

Enough said...

Caption Competition

Perhaps it's our esoteric sense of humour, but Laura and I found the university's choice of new brand graphics slightly amusing...



Your own suggestions of captions involving the salient notion of firing arrows at people are welcome.

My suggestion:

Sheffield Undergraduates: like a shower of arrows, somewhere becoming rain.