Prognathic, Mitten, Man.

A short trip to Paris just over a month ago was filled with a...

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 12:04:00 +0100

A short trip to Paris just over a month ago was filled with a variety of joys, most notably my engagement to the wonderful Alex - a most magical moment, and we’re both very excited. I always feel a little odd about posting personal things on the internet, and I generally feel it’s something we should all avoid, but I kinda want to shout this from the rooftops, and this is the modern equivalent.

In other news, the relevance of the elephant-gonad photograph here is not a symbol of my impending marriage, but in fact an example of the testicle-penis obsession of Parisian sculptors. There are a number of animal sculptures outside the Musee D’orsay which we got a good look at during our 45 minutes of queueing, and each of them is incredibly well endowed. The elephant drew particular attention, even so as to become photo-worthy, as elephants have internal testicles. This hilights their presence on the sculpture as an unhealthy obsession with pendulous cajones, rather than a slightly more healthy obsession with anatomical accuracy.

Perhaps the sculptor was sculpting from (a sexually-falsified) memory, or, more likely, from a painting of such a beast? Maybe this painting was also emblazoned with massive balls? Where does the buck stop? How many 19th century artists had ever actually seen an elephant, let alone get close enough to discover its apparent eunuch-status. I think the attitude was (and probably still is) almost certainly - “What a gigantic and terrifying beast. It must have huge balls”. Interesting, no?

I think a worldwide search of elephant sculptures is required to find out where the ‘pin the bollocks on the bull’ outlook sprang from.

Now a vet!?

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:44:22 +0100

Goodness gracious me, I let this slip! Unfortunately the last few months have been filled with exams and project work, but fortunately these eventually led to passing and completion respectively, closely followed by graduations, and I am now 100% officially a vet! Prepare yourselves for some more regular posting, and my humble apologies for being so slow!!!

"Exams are like saltmining. You stand there chipping away at an insurmountable pile of salt; then,..."

Mon, 10 May 2010 08:00:00 +0100

“Exams are like saltmining. You stand there chipping away at an insurmountable pile of salt; then, sometimes, salt being what it is, it collapses on you a bit. Then you dig yourself out and start over again. Now, the end is in sight, because the communist regime has been dissolved, and we will soon be free…”

- Alex, June 2005

Mont Blanc, Viewed from Switzerland through binoculars, Summer...

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Mont Blanc, Viewed from Switzerland through binoculars, Summer 2008.

Chatsworth House, Summer 2009

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Chatsworth House, Summer 2009

Blackwood suspension bridge, South Wales.

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Blackwood suspension bridge, South Wales.

Album of the Week #5 [11/04/10]: Led Zeppelin - Live 1972 -...

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Album of the Week #5 [11/04/10]: Led Zeppelin - Live 1972 - 1979

Now, this isn’t actually an album. It’s a DVD, but I’ve been listening to it this week as if it were an album. I’ve been revising you see, and somehow I can do that while listening to Led Zeppelin, but watching it at the same time would be far too much sensory stimulation to allow me to learn the inner workings of a cat’s pancreas. The thing I really love about live Led Zeppelin, is that they improvise like no one else. Each track is different to the preceeding one especially as they start jumping between albums; having ‘That’s the Way’ and ‘Bron Yr Aur Stomp’ next to each other in the tracklisting is genius. In short, the DVD is great, but try just listening to the music with your eyes shut, and it’s a whole new world of Led Zep.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1914) Le Grand Cheval Harking back to a...

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1914) Le Grand Cheval

Harking back to a recent visit to the Tate Modern, I managed to track down an image of one of my favourite sculptures. There’s something really lively about this sculpture; you can almost see the shoulder and hip joints winding up to jump. Alex pointed out to me that in 1914, the world had just started moving over from horse-power to engine-power, and this sculpture really captures that transition. Unfortunately you can only see it from one side here and you lose the whole 3D effect, but there are many images online taken from all angles.

Duchamp-Villon was an expert horseman, serving as an auxiliary doctor in a cavalry regiment during the war. This sculpture developed from his studies of a leaping horse and rider to become an abstract evocation of dynamic energy and power. His work has been compared to that of the Futurists in the way it aims to capture a sense of motion. The tension between the mechanistic and the natural world echoes that between solid bronze and the representation of movement. [From The Tate Modern]

Crow, Richmond Park, Winter 2008

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:00:00 +0100

Crow, Richmond Park, Winter 2008

At the Camden Head (in Camden Town) yesterday, Muso’s...

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:53:52 +0100

At the Camden Head (in Camden Town) yesterday, Muso’s Guide and Broken Glass Theatre Company put on ‘Beyond the Curve’, an afternoon and evening of poetry, music, theatre and art. Being in the midst of revision, I was a little lame and only made it down there for a few hours, but caught the Poetry and, of course, ‘Scenes From the City’, the piece we’ve all been working so hard on over the last few weeks!

Poetically, the day seemed to go well. I found that my current pre-occupations and the sweltering heat of the upper-room at the Camden Head (it always seems to hit the high 20s no matter what time of year it is) led my mind on certain wanderings during the set, but the pieces I caught were generally excellent. My particular favourite was a poem by Lizzy Dening called ‘Silverfish’. Sadly it’s not available on her website so I can’t give you the quote directly, but her comparison between the little silver creatures that crawl around bathrooms and hot solder spilling out from a tap really captured my imagination. Becky Varley Winter’s ‘Clouds’, and Benjamin Morris’ ‘Clue’ were two other stand outs.

Broken Glass’s exhibition-come-radioplay, I feel, went very well. Vicky and Ben had affixed Ben’s artwork on the walls, with small excerpts from Vicky’s short stories, and also included a free-standing ‘prop’ which used fishing wire to connect inter-related quotes and images from the stories. Once the chairs were removed from the room, the ten-minute projection of the images in time with the recording were performed, once to a rapt audience, pinned around the edge of the room on the floor, and then a second and third time while people wandered around taking in the images in their full glory with the sound in the background. I think it worked really well; the change in the space from the lecture-theatre-style rows of chairs, to the exhibition gallery really was something. The photographs from Broken Glass’s set are available on the website.

Image from ‘Scenes From the City’, (c) Broken Glass Theatre Company 2010.

Latest Adventures

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:16:36 +0100

Currently, most of my time is spent revising for finals. There are two large 35L boxes worth of folders to be learnt. That’s 70 litres of knowledge, about the size of a bathtub and weighing more than me, to be crammed into 1.5kg of brain (an average measurement). I’m not quite sure I fully understand the physics of the whole thing. I’m hoping at least 20% will go in, but even then, that’s a mass exceeding that of my brain. Ah, the mysteries of psychology…

Album of the Week #4 [04/04/10] - Clor - Clor I saw Clor live...

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Album of the Week #4 [04/04/10] - Clor - Clor

I saw Clor live back in August 2005 at the Leeds Festival, and they were fantastic. They were bouncy, fun, quirky and unexpected. They squeak, squeal and electro-beat their way through a range of songs that make you feel a little like you’re stuck in a telephone line (not sure if the album cover has something to do with that). Take the guitar riff in “Making you all Mine” for example; alone it must have sounded like such a bad idea, but with the drumbox backing and vocals it works, maybe not beautifully, but effectually. This is by no means the best album in the world, but it’s really good fun. I remember sitting on a Megabus, on the M1 going to Leeds a few years ago, listening to this album and feeling like I’d had about 7 coffees by the time I arrived. It was clearly all too much for them too, as they broke up in May 2006. Still, it was fun while it lasted, and now they’ve reached ‘album of the week’ status 4 years later. What more could any band want?

I was the bird that buzzed the bees, and stole the honey. (Love and Pain - Clor (2005))

Apple tree covered in lichen at Godolphin House, a NT property...

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

Apple tree covered in lichen at Godolphin House, a NT property in the heart of Cornwall. Photo taken last Summer. The property has only recently opened (and even then only partially), and so there are only ever a few visitors. It’s remarkably tranquil - one of the most relaxing gardens I’ve visited.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be uploading some of my favourite photos. You’ll be able to see them all together by clicking the photography link on the left hand side, or clicking on the photography tag on any photograph post.

Snazzy Invention of the Week: Ipod Desktop Stand With the clever...

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:01:00 +0100

Snazzy Invention of the Week: Ipod Desktop Stand

With the clever combination of an old Belkin ipod case and a small piece of cylindrical cardboard, I invented an ipod stand! Cheap and nifty no? Now I can access it with post haste while working, almost making up the time I spent making it, and then taking unnecessary photos! Woo!

The next job on the cards is to make a waterproof back-pack cover out of an old waterproof jacket as I got soaked today walking home, and had to resort to covering my bag with a bright orange Sainsbury’s bag. Not sexy. I will need elastic, scissors and the ability to sew. I have only one of these things… the scissors. I’m hoping that Alex or my Sister will have some Smart-Alec ideas regarding the execution of this plan (*looks hopefully*).

Scenes From the City

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:59:54 +0100

Scenes From the City:

While not revising, I’ve been cropping, photoshopping, syncing, de-noising and tying together some images and audio for a radio play, ‘Scenes From the City’ to be put on on Easter Sunday at the Camden Head, Camden. It’s a series of short stories by Vicky Flood, with drawings by Ben Lambert, is looking really good. It’s going to be part of whole afternoon of stuff, better explained on the Broken Glass website:

An all-day programme of award-winning poetry, theatre, film and music, the day represents a shared ambition to bridge the gap between different types of performance and open up new audiences to an array of diverse talent. The day offers a tantalising taster of emerging acts heading to London fringe venues and festivals in 2010.

If anyone’s free on Easter Sunday then I definitely recommend it!

Chinese Parasite Poster - Help Required! A few months ago, I...

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:33:00 +0100

Chinese Parasite Poster - Help Required!

A few months ago, I found a selection of old 1920’s public health posters when searching for a print of my personal favourite, ‘Pneumonia strikes like a man eating shark, lead by its pilot fish the common cold’.

When re-searching for the posters today, I came across an old Chinese public health poster, detailing a variety of parasites and their life-cycles. I’ve tried to work out as many of them as I can (trawling my memory from 4th year Parasitology), and label them alongside. I particularly like the diagram of a sarcoptes mite tunnelling through skin laying eggs behind it - I can almost feel the itch! It’s beautiful, has a fantastic retro-quality to it, yet is gruesomely detailed.

I’ve by no means got all of them, so please help me out with the ones I’ve missed, or poorly labelled! Leave a comment here, or email me at tom@prognathic.co.uk. Click the image above for a full-size view.

Isn’t this just beautiful? I have a thing for clocks...

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:37:00 +0100

Isn’t this just beautiful? I have a thing for clocks anyway, but the technical skill involved in producing this, and the massive variety of shapes it would produce during a 12 hour period would be mesmerising!

bauldoff:

Continue Time is a concept clock by Sander Mulder, where each of the three clock hands are connected end-to-end and rotate around each other (for example, the top photo shows the clock at 1:43:03, the lower photo at 3:38:30).

There’s a real time video on their website which gives you some idea of how it looks in action. The second hand flies through the air, totally detached from the main body of the clock but still controlled and exact. There’s something orbital about it, like the moon around the earth around the sun. All wild, but tethered.

I’d love to have this on my wall, but I fear the restricted run of 40 will make it FAR too expensive for me to even comprehend. I wonder how hard it would be to make something similar (if a little less beautiful) from cheap clocks? Answer: very (see my comment).

Online and Domain-ed

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:47:18 +0100

http://www.prognathic.co.uk

Isn’t it beautiful! Plus, no one had taken it! Not one of the 6 billion people in this world want a prognathic website. Superb!

About: Dispelling the Awkwardness

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:42:00 +0100

About: Dispelling the Awkwardness:

I just visited another tumblr page, and there was no explanation about what the whole point of it was. This upset me a little, and then I realised that I had no explanation either, which made me start in a shocked way like someone who realises they’ve been caught picking their nose, or a sneezing cat. So, to dispel the sneezing, nose picking awkwardness, here’s a quick ‘about’ page.

This is my blog, which is essentially just filled with stuff from my world. Stuff I’ve found, thought about, or wanted to show you all. I am a final year vet student, but having trawled through myriad vet student blogs and found them entirely irritating and unexciting, I have decided to keep the vet angle to a minimum. Obviously, a massive part of my life is in the veterinary world, so it’s going to crop up now and then. I wouldn’t have it any other way - it’s a very interesting world, but not the be all and end all.

The title is a confusing one. Maybe this quote from my old blog will help explain:

It has been brought to my attention by a Mr Greg that my pictured monkey is, infact, agnathic, being neither prognathic or in the possession of any jaw bones. However, the original quote (referring to one “Tom…”) stands as “A prognathic mitten-man”, for reasons unknown (excepting a slight overstudying of primate-skulls). I hope that has cleared up some confusion. Tom (A prognathic mitten man) and “Chimpy” (An agnathic knitted-chimp).

Chimpy was a knitted chimp that featured quite heavily over at Tomthevet.

As far as visitors are concerned, I would love for you to say hello, or submit stuff. You can get involved with the blog using any of the following:

Comments. Every post has a comments section, powered by Disqus, that you can comment on, anonymously if you wish. Just say ‘hi’, it’d be great to know who reads this!
Submit - There’s a button that allows you to submit stuff. I’ll then be able to check it, and if I like what I see I can post it onto the page! Huzzah!
Ask Me Anything - Got a question you want answered. Click on the ask button, and I’m all yours (within reason).

I hope that vaguely clears up what the whole point of the blog is! It moved from http://tomthevet.blogspot.com a few months ago to start afresh with a new angle. I hope you like it!

Album of the Week #3 [28/03/10]: Art Blakey and the Jazz...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:44:00 +0100

Album of the Week #3 [28/03/10]: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - A Night in Tunisia

It’s Sunday night again, which means it’s time for Album of the Week. This week, Jazz has invaded my musical world in a big way, and Fopp sneakily fed my newly found addiction with a £3 offer on a huge range of Jazz CDs, and this is the one that has really excited me. A Night in Tunisia is the opening track, and opens with a 90 second long drum fest, by way of preparation for the rest of the album. My only previous experience of the song was Charlie Parker’s sedate yet bouncy rendition, but the Messengers play it at about twice the speed with alot more spike. That’s not to do down CP’s version - it’s a beaut. Lee Morgan (another Jazzman whose albums I’ve picked up for £3 in Fopp) drives the tune on with some manic trumpet, and after 11 minutes the track is over and the rest of the album beckons you in like a siren.

It’s mighty different from Grizzly Bear, though notice how the album cover has a similar split-word alignment going on… creepy no?