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THIS IS TRULY GUITAR PLAYING
WHAT HAVE I BEEN MISSING ALL MY LIFE

Yeah. Work was shit cus we had a new manager and he's a Jon-style arse, which is surprising because all the other managers are so laid-back. It was so relieving when he left that it was almost worth the pain of him being there. Still, I guess he's a nice-enough guy.

Still. How did my exams go, eh? Quite good, I say. It's a testament to my "screw revision until the day before" method, I say. Others would say "If you manage to scrape by with day-before-cramming, think what you could manage if you revised properly!" I say "I suppose, but it's easier this way."

Okay. Theory of Knowledge, and my very first question was about reliablism. "Crap, I can't remember what reliablism is," thought I. "I'm sure I can make something up." Luckily for me I remembered about thermometers, so I was okay. Second question was about why true and justifiable beliefs are not knowledge, which was gravy because we'd covered that in Monday's revision lesson. The C question was "Assess empiricism", which was also gravy. I didn't think I knew lots about empiricism, but I just wrote about Locke and Hume and forks and tabula rasa and everything was alright. I'm usually shit at the essay questions, but this time I was just churning out (hopefully relevant) waffle.

Theory of Religion. Thought I'd do better on this one, but I'm not sure I did. Said about how God defines morality by stuff like the ten commandments, then inadventantly realised that by being omnibenevolent God defines morality just by existing, so I stuck that down too. Next question was about ... I forget. The C question was about "assess a priori arguments for the existence of God" so I just waffled about the ontological argument and even managed to get Alvin Plantinga's utterly pointless and overly-complicated Many Worlds argument in, even though I didn't fully remember/understand it.

Sartre - piss-easy! And I actually started to enjoy the essay question. Sartre is just so delightfully easy to attack because he repeatedly shoots himself in the foot by refuting his own arguments. I even added some exclamation marks. All in all, good stuff. Now to play Online Scrabble.

Had my biology exam. Success! Or not. I don't know. Naturally, the school had a power cut and was closed, so we was bussed to Taverham and we did the exam in a trio of mobile classrooms. Taverham wisely decided to spend all their money on a gigantic sports hall instead of, y'know, replacing the fields and fields of mobile classrooms. Lolz.

The exam itself wasn't bad. No questions on kidneys, one question on chi-squared (which I'm pretty sure I aced, as the Americans say, moreso than Shaun who ended up with a negative value!!!! Hohohoho!), a question on photosynthesis that I didn't have any idea about, and another on nerve cells. I doubt I did too well, but I think I scraped by.

Hey mama,
I know I act the fool but,
I promise you I'm goin back to school
I appreciate what you allowed for me
I just want you to be proud of me

Check out my new exams, exams of choice:

English: First paper: Brian Friel's Irish play Translations. Did the hour-long essay on the character's hopes and fears: used the word "irony" a hundred times, and the phrase "the power of love" once.
Then poetry: I chose the question about emotion exploring ideas. Wrote an excellent piece on Dylan Thomas's lovely "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", where I wrote the phrase "The line "Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears" shows us Thomas's view of emotions: they run the full gamult from cursing to blessing, encapsulated in his father's "fierce tears." I was proud of that line.

Second: the Lit bit. THOMAS HARDY'S RETURN OF THE NATIVE! I hate the book and I don't know much about it, but thank god the question was on fate in the novel. Fate! FATE! Writing about fate in Thomas Hardy's novels is like shooting fish in a barrel. Fate's everywhere! It's easy to do.

So: predicted grade? Maybe I'm over-estimating, but I'd like to think an A.

Critical Thinking: or, in Newspeak, Critthink. I actually have an odd liking for critthink: it's the only A-level that tests intelligence and ability to think rather than memory. If you're an intelligent person with no interest in Psychology you're not going to pass: but if you enter into Critical Thinking you've got a good chance. It wasn't too hard really, and even entertaining in parts: writing outlandishly exaggerated arguments and stuff. The multiple choice bit was kinda iffy because a lot of the questions could be answered by any of the possible answers, but meh.

Predicted grade? Who knows. B? ...A?

In non-school news, went to see the Da Vinci Code yesterday. Never read the book and I don't intend to (I stay away from popular things unless I liked it before it was popular) but it's a good romp, badly written in parts ("I need to go to the bathroom. I want to splash some water on my face." and "We need to get to a library!") and confusing and the underlying idea is a bit iffy (I suspect most Christians, if told Jesus was a father, would either say "So what?" or "I don't believe you" and nothing would happen), but it's an entertaining film, and the ending is pleasingly moving.

Good trailers:
United 93: Looking very interesting. Now I've yawned through Scream and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Aliens and a dozen crap teenage horror movies, but this film looks terrifying. It's about the hijackers on United 93 on September 11th, and the sudden visualisation of what it would actually be like to be stuck in a cramped plane, overtaken by terrifying madmen, and realising you're never going to walk on the ground again... absolutely terrifying. Want to see.
Miami Vice: looks very, very, cool. Probably will suck, but looks very cool.
Casino Royale: Ditto. Clive Owen Daniel Craig is blonde and probably will suck, but IT'S BOND!

Anyway, graphics card is here, time to install. Wish me luck, I need it.

lost points with the ladies
for saying he couldn't love a
woman with cellulite

Woke up, went to school, spent an hour or so in the common room revising for the Biology Practical. Ironically, none of the revision proved useful. Ho hum. Anyway, into D3 where we waited for the first group to stop doing the exam so that we could start. There was a short panic when Mrs Quackenbush revealed there were no more cover sheets for our coursework, so for those of us who had lost ours (i.e., me) then it couldn't be submitted. But then she photocopied them, we tagged them to the coursework, signed them, everything's hunkydory.

So: the actual practical. It was a pretty generic thing with the catalysation of starch hydrolosis by amylase. Test tubes, bunsen burners, iodine solutions... Mrs Quackenbush told me I'd got some pretty good results (covertly, of course), and the questions were pretty easy to answer. There was a meaty essay question on explaining your results, where I just wrote about how the enzyme catalyses the hydrolosis and solution E1 was more concentrated than E2 and stuff. It's GCSE stuff, really.

Then the microscope section. Oh, I assumed the microscope section would be easy! Get a slide, draw what you see.

You had to get a piece of red onion, the red outer skin. So I peeled a bit of the skin of, popped it under my microscope (which was a giant, electric light kind with about nine extra levers and knobs and stuff), and couldn't find any cells. So I struggled along, found something which looked like it might have been a cell, drew that. Then the next question: add some potassium nitrate and record what happens. Nothing happened. I assumed the question would be something about plasmolysis, so I wrote "The cell shrinks away from the cell wall", and continued to puzzle about why it wasn't working.

A helpful invigilator pointed out I was using the wrong bit of onion skin.

With five minutes to spare.

Of course, by the time I'd prepared another slide with the right kind of onion skin, I'd run out of time. So I tried to answer the last question, and didn't. Time up. Felt stupid, but eh, it's only 7.5%.

The next exam is Psychology, which I'll probably do some revision for, and English, where revision isn't much use. But that's next week.

Hmm. An ancient black and white movie on BBC2 just ended in classic The Movies-style bizarroness.

**man runs from fishing trip across town to woman's house**
"Why did you press the button?"
"I just called to say I'm sorry for earlier."
**ending music**
"This has been an RKO Radio Pictures Production!"


They don't make them like they used to.

Back from my Biology examination, and it actually went rather well. Answered pretty much everything with a decent answer, one or two questions I guestimated but I think I've got them pretty much right. And got a whole page of scribblings on enzyme concentration and rate of reaction, and remembered the word "phagocytosis" correctly. Plus the ever-wonderful nomaki leant me the first series of Lost on DVD.

Who are these The Servant I have just heard (mainly cus the song from the Sin City DVD menu got stuck in my head)? I like, the lead singer sings like some bizarre mixture of Damon Albran and Jarvis Cocker. And Matt Bellamy?!

I was trying to troubleshoot why my router gives me slow internet speeds, only to find my connection has somehow shot up to 3 megabit. Which is nice, but complicates my router troubleshooting

Anyway, off to my McDonald's inducktion soon. Hoorah!

We all say, don’t want to be alone
We wear the same clothes cos we feel the same
And kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight
End of a century
Oh, it’s nothing special

Psychology exam! Easier than expected, though I wasn't really worrying about it much. Revision helped with first half (about memory, oh the irony, ho ho ho). Didn't revise for the second half (about attachments in development i.e. babies) so I suffered in answering. Also I misread a question about day care and wrote a fabulous paragraph about insitutional care, before realising what the question was about and adding "But really, day care isn't like this. The end." Luckily the final 18 mark question was a juicy one about the Strange Situation, and, well, anyone can answer one of those.

Like Roper, to put off essay writing I have been doing other stuff. On a whim I bought the Operation Flashpoint expansion, Resistance. It's fun in campaign mode, but what's more fun is the sandbox mission editor, where you can simulate what would happen if a bus full of pensioners drove through a firefight between dozens of US and Russian troops. Fun results.