Modest Mango

17:48 Sunday 29th June

Nothing interesting is happening. Mikey, BSc Honours, is sitting in his living room.

13 hours until Mikey gets to leave St Andrews forever.

I haven’t been posting because it’s been relatively uneventful so far. I could post excerpts from my essay but they are very boring, and mm is far from being a boring blog. Today I am simulating macular degeneration. Actually, I’m going to post an excerpt:

There is a central loss of vision and blurred vision throughout the visual fields. 1 inch squares of tape were placed over the central areas of the left and right parts of the goggles to simulate the central scotomas, and a single layer of tissue was attached to the entirety of the goggles to simulate the blurriness.

i.e…

So far there’s been a lot of walking into things and inappropriate touching of people that I didn’t realise were even there, but it should start getting interesting when I go completely blind for the last couple of days.

Okay. Time for a new project, and it’s a bit of an odd one. It’s odd in that it’s going to be submitted as part of my assessment for 3rd year Medicine and also because of this:

I’m basically going to be simulating various visual impairments during breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days (including cooking and eating). Cooking and eating are some of the problems blind people have to live with every day. I’ll try to post my day-to-day accounts on here (sans the boring stuff.) The stuff I post will actually be used in the essay that I have to submit for my assessment.

Wish me luck.

Today, Parliament votes on whether to extend the 28-day detention limit to 42 days. That’s a month and a half of detention for a crime that may not have been committed, for an individual who may not even have been charged. Britain already has one of the longest pre-charge detention laws in the western world.

I bring this vote to the attention of the mm readers solely because it is a terrifying prospect. More disturbing than Sir Alan Sugar and Bill Gates love-child. In this decade, the government has already increased the limit from 48-hours to 7 days to 14 days and then to 28 days. There’s been talk of 90 days. While we need to protect innocent civilians from terrorism, we also need to protect innocent civilians from the government, trigger-happy special forces, and incompetent police officers.

I fear we’re sitting back and letting the government erode age-old liberties for an unspecified, largely fictional threat, creating an atmosphere of fear to ensure an apathetic acceptance of poorly-thought through and unnecessary laws.

Remember, mm readers, when we let this happen

Getting through a song on expert on guitar is not really much of a challenge anymore, so I’ve come up with a sub-game. It’s called “Try not to hurt the feelings of a singer who is completely tone deaf and can’t sing, not even on easy.” The trick is to save up your overdrives and correctly time the use of them so that the talentless singer can get through a song without realising that she is in fact sucking and if it wasn’t for you, would have failed a long time ago… on the lowest possible difficulty in the game.

Unlike just playing the game, the singer’s* own self-esteem lies in your hands, raising the stakes just that little bit higher.

The Rock Band Appeal

Rocking out ain’t cheap. The Rock Band Appeal is currently accepting donations and many happy rockers have donated to the cause. Please feel free to come round, rock out, and consider donating a few pounds to the fund. Your donation will be added to the Blue Peter style totalizer and your name will be forever immortalized on a piece of paper taped to my wall.

It’s £132 for the game and instruments if you are a student and buying from Zavvi. It’s also worth every penny.

* Using the word singer wrongly implies that she has any talent at all. I also have to add that the pictured singer is not said talentless person.