the local tv station is filming under my block of flats, so there's lots of shouting and screaming. they have been filming here quite a bit over the past two weeks. what's so special about my block?

in other news, our hilltop university has been ranked one of the top 50 in the world by newsweek. here's some of the schools we "outranked":

• nyu
• mcgill university
• brown university
• vanderbilt
• purdue
• emory
• carnegie mellon
  

well, i guess we can be proud, since singapore, hongkong and japan are the only asian countries represented. but to be ranked higher than the aforementioned schools is nothing short of surprising.

after cramming for the clinical test (causes of clubbing? causes of hepatomegaly? causes of splenomegaly? causes of hepatosplenomegaly?) i now have an aversion for talley's. had to refer to it while going through the medicine mcqs, and i had to hold it at arm's length and quickly push it out of my sight after i was done with it. it'll be a looong time before i'll pick up any of the medicine texts again.

while studying neuro however, i found this queerly named condition called witzelsucht, which is due to lesions in the orbitofrontal cortex. according to wiki, it is "characterized by the patient's uncontrollable tendency to pun, tell inappropriate jokes and pointless or irrelevant stories at inconvenient moments. the patient nevertheless finds these utterances intensely amusing." (in german, witz means joke or wit and sucht means mania or addiction.) somehow i feel as if we all must know someone in our midst who fits that description. heh.