This and that

* Most of the weekend was spent reading textbook chapters, updating my knowledge for the basic bio class (we changed textbooks, this one has added some stuff, and uses some different terminology, so I have to read up on it).

One of the things is that taxonomic classification - which I learned as Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species and which I recently learned to amend with a Domain on top of Kingdom ("Dumb King Philip Came Over...."?) now ALSO has a "Supergroup" for some classifications inserted between Domain and Kingdom. ("Dumb Stupid King Philip....")

Yeah. Supergroup. Being a child of the 70s, I got a few giggles out of that, wondering where Little River Band or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer would fit in.

(I'm not convinced how much useful information "Supergroup" adds. Domain is useful, I can see that....)

* Still enjoying Duolingo. Today, I learned a few adjectives, and the useful sentence:

"Nein, du bist toll" ("No, you're awesome".....though "toll" can also translate to "great" and maybe some other things. I guess in the old days it meant "mad" or "crazy"?)

I admit, I now want a poster of someone doing that cheesy smile-point-wink thing and that says, "Wer ist toll? Du, du bist toll!" (Who's awesome? YOU'RE awesome!). Better even if I can find the one of a cat appearing to do a "Who's awesome? YOU'RE awesome" expression.

* I wrote this week's biostats homework. It has a question about means and medians, and my "data source" was (made up) incomes of full professors at a bunch of fictional universities. I thought of this a while back but could only remember Faber College (Animal House), Wossamotta U (Rocky and Bullwinkle) and Greendale Community College (Community).

Like everything else, Wikipedia has a list.....so now my list has Miskatonic University (students matriculating there go crazy, I think, and the diplomas are written in the language of the Elder Gods) and Empire State College (Marvel) and Sweet Valley University (ick, but whatever. Apparently when the Sweet Valley High girls grew up, that's where they went). And also the college Daria went to....

I don't KNOW that anyone will notice or get it but I find those kinds of things personally amusing so even if no one does it's okay.

* KnitPicks sent me an e-mail advertising an e-book of patterns.

Patterns for kids. One was for a hat called Eraserhead. It looks like a pencil eraser.

Cute hat, but of course I thought of the movie first. I tried watching it once when it was on TCM or somewhere and only got about 20 minutes in before I got creeped out by it and had to turn it off (It's a very.....strange....movie. Designed to be disturbing). I'm guessing the pattern author never saw the movie.

I don't have the stomach for that kind of designed-to-be-disturbing, surrealist stuff. At least not on film. (I actually liked Kafka's Metamorphosis when I read it in school, though that might be because it felt like a palate-cleanser after Chopin's "The Awakening" which I remember as a privileged woman complaining about her privilege)

* I pulled the Hagrid sweater out and broke the stall on it. I decided I can't start anything new until I finish a few of the ongoing projects. I'm not very far on the front yet but at least the back is all done....