Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

A minister's son from Simljan in Austria-Hungary, you were precocious from an early age. At three you could multiply three-digit numbers in your head and calculate how many seconds visitors to your home had lived. In awe of your older brother Dane, you shot a pea-shooter at his horse, causing it to throw him and inflict injuries from which he later died. This tragedy haunted you ever after. You frequently suffered bouts of illness with hallucinations throughout your life. During one affliction of cholera, you encountered the writing of Mark Twain, with whom you were later to be close friends. Later, another, this time mystery, illness inexplicably heightened your senses to a painful extent, only relenting when you hit upon the idea of the alternating current motor.

You developed an aversion to human contact, particularly involving hair, and a fear of pearls; when one would-be lover kissed you, you ran away in agony. Later, you insisted that any repeated actions in your day-to-day life had to be divisible by three, or, better yet, twenty-seven. You would, for example, continue walking until you had executed the required number of footsteps. You refused to eat anything until you had calculated its exact volume. Saltine crackers were a favourite for their uniformity in this respect. In the midst of important work, you forgot trivial details such as eating, sleeping or, on one memorable occasion, who you were.

Your inventions, always eccentric, began on a suitably bizarre note. The first was a frog-catching device that was so successful, and hence so emulated by your fellow children, that local frogs were almost eradicated. You also created a turbine powered by gluing sixteen May bugs to a tiny windmill. The insects panicked and flapped their wings furiously, powering the contraption for hours on end. This worked admirably until a small child came along and ate all the creatures alive, after which you never again touched another insect.

Prompted by dreams of attaining the then-ridiculed goal of achieving an alternating-current motor, you went to America in the hope of teaming up with Thomas Edison. Edison snubbed you, but promised fifty thousand dollars if you could improve his own direct-current motor by 20% efficiency. You succeeded. Edison did not pay up. It was not long until you created an AC motor by yourself.

Now successful, you set up a small laboratory, with a few assistants and almost no written records whatsoever. Despite it being destroyed by fire, you invented the Tesla Coil, impressing even the least astute observer with man-made lightning and lights lit seemingly by magic. Moving to Colorado Springs, you created a machine capable of sending ten million volts into the Earth's surface, which even while being started up caused lightning to shoot from fire hydrants and sparks to singe feet through shoes all over the town. When calibrated to be in tune with the planet's resonance, it created what is still the largest man-made electrical surge ever, an arc over 130 feet long. Unfortunately, it set the local power plant aflame.

You returned to New York, incidentally toying with the nascent idea of something eerily like today's internet. Although the wealthiest man in America withdrew funding for a larger, more powerful resonator in short order, it did not stop you announcing the ability to split the world in two. You grew ever more diverse in your inventions: remote-controlled boats and submarines, bladeless turbines, and, finally, a death ray.

While whether the ray ever existed is still doubtful, it is said that you notified the Peary polar expedition to report anything strange in the tundra, and turned on the ray. First, nothing happened; then it disintegrated an owl; finally, reports reached you of the mysterious Tunguska explosion, upon which news you dismantled the apparatus immediately. An offer during WWII to recreate it was, thankfully, never acted upon by then-President Wilson. Turning to other matters, you investigated the forerunner of radar, to widespread derision.

Your inventions grew stranger. One oscillator caused earthquakes in Manhattan. You adapted this for medical purposes, claiming various health benefits for your devices. You found they let you work for days without sleep; Mark Twain enjoyed the experience until the sudden onset of diarrhoea. You claimed to receive signals in quasi-Morse Code from Mars, explored the initial stages of quantum physics; proposed a "wall of light", using carefully-calibrated electromagnetic radiation, that would allegedly enable teleportation, anti-gravity airships and time travel; and proposed a basic design for a machine for photographing thoughts. You died aged 87 in New York, sharing an apartment with the flock of pigeons who were by then your only friends.

Ridiculed throughout your life (Superman fought the evil Dr. Tesla in 1940s comics), you were posthumously declared the father of the fluorescent bulb, the vacuum tube amplifier and the X-ray machine, and the Supreme Court named you as the legal inventor of the radio in place of Marconi. Wardenclyffe, the tower once housing your death ray, was dynamited several times to stop it falling into the hands of spies. It was strangely hard to topple, and even then could not be broken up.

Your New Years Resolution is...Experience the single life.

Isn't it about time you broke away for the hassles of commitment, and got to live life as your own person? Chances are you've got a hard time getting a date in the first place anyhow. If that's the case, good job, resolution met! Just stay single for the rest of the year. Don't worry, you can do it. If you're in a failing relationship right now, just keep being the lazy self-centered bum everyone loves, and soon enough you'll have the freedom of the single life, too!

New Years Resolutions that you can keep! - Created by ptocheia

This holiday season, you'll be getting...A Furby

Some people are just packrats, and sometimes those well-intentioned people buy gifts, wrap them, and then rediscover them about 6 years later. Just ignore the fact that you never wanted one of these even when they first came out, it's the thought that counts, right?

What bad holiday gift will you get this year? - Created by ptocheia

Book Meme

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

"The laboratory features of particular importance are the shape of macrocytes (oval in megaloblastic anaemia), the presence of hypersegmented neutrophils and of leucopaenia and thrombocytopaenia in megaloblastic anaemia, and the bone marrow appearance."

Courtesy of "Essential Haematology" by Hoffbrand, Pettit and Moss (2001).

Yes, I am a nerd...

I am having computer problems again! Goddammit it's only a new one too.....dumb Macs.....

So I may not be around too much til it's fixed...at the moment I am using el crappo computer I liberated (ummm....borrowed) from work. *sigh*

He he....I'm a labrador....



Woof!

I am so bad.....I signed up to this livejournal thingumy aaaaaaggggggeeeesssss ago and posted maybe once. I blame lots of work and an almost exploading....or imploading, I haven't decided yet.....head due to the pressure on my brain that lots of work exerts! I don't even have any time to sew at the moment *gasp* (yes, I hear the shock and horror resounding throughout the interwebs as a result of that announcement!). chastangela is the one who prodded me into looking at my livejournal again tonight. Not that I have much to say at all.....I never do, life is a tad on the boring side. Apart from work there is home, and then there is study (yes, stupid me has gone back to uni.....as if I didn't get enough punishment last time), and then there is work....again......still. Doesn't leave much time for anything else really. Look at me go....whinging again!
Okay, who knows how long it will be to the next entry.  Hey, maybe I sould make that a competition......go on.....who can guess how long it'll be???? Nah, that means I need to think of a prize for the winner and I can't be stuffed, so there!

I'm thinking of growing my hair again.....but not too long.....I dunno.....
I might have to do something nice with this page *looks around*.....it looks pretty bland.....

Okay, again that will do.

Bye

Well hello there everyone!

This is just a really quick entry to mark my place here at Livejournal. I haven't really looked around very much yet, but I will do soon. I'm sort of in the middle of doing an assignment for uni, so I musn't spend too much time here - just a quick hello!

I will wander around and look at things later on, but for now - ta ta!