Friday, August 31, 2007

urban legend

What percentage of women presenting to the emergency room claiming that "there's no way I could be pregant" have a positive urine pregnancy test and are indeed pregnant?

10%


I'm listening to:
Birdmonster- No Midnight

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Special Topics in Avoiding USMLE World

I slugged my way through Special Topics in Calamity Physics, slamming through the last 200 pages overnight last night. It unsettled me in the way reading any mystery does, which is why I avoid them. I prefer to be left savoring characters and insights, not picking apart plot hints. Today I find myself turning over the plot clues in my head tying together the loose ends. I didn't like the first half, the setting up bit. Too many verbal calisthenics, too few revelations about humanity.

Lolita is the only novel of Nabokov's that I've read. I was in the 9th grade- too young to appreciate it- but I didn't like it because I felt it too full of literary and sexual allusions. To devote myself the novel, I felt I had to keep skipping to the appendix at the end of my edition, and that ruined the flow. I complained to my then boyfriend that I felt that Nabokov had made a list of 500 obscure sexual references and piled them into his story hodge-podge. I don't know that I'd feel the same way today, but it is how I feel about the first half of Pessl's book.


I'm listening to:
Polysics- Polysics or Die!!!
I newly love this cover of My Sharona.


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