On my way to the A-List! [Weekly Head Voices #41]

(Post summary: TPN makes me a blog jingle, restaurant micro-review, the making of Dr. Zhao, a question for YOU about your weekend habits.)

In spite of severe lack of time, I have to write this blog, because the therapist in my head said so. Well, there’s also the matter of having really important things to talk about, but I could just have kept it all bottled up as well, so that doesn’t really count.
This is where this blog’s astronomical rise to the top could have begun.

This is where this blog’s astronomical rise to the top could have begun.

The first really important matter, is that of my blog moving up in the world. So far this blog has been threatened with a lawsuit (twice), got me a snazzy Mendeley t-shirt from the founders (with lots of help from Saskia Groenewegen) and has even been mistaken for a digital fashion hotspot, with an accompanying offer of money and shoes. However, its greatest accolade occurred this weekend, when the TPN composed this blog jingle (of course meant to be taken entirely seriously) with Garage Band on his iPad (I’m generally not a fan of any iStuff, but iPad+GB seems like a winning combination):

So, without further ado, here follows this edition of the Weekly Head Voices Review:

  • WHV Review Jingle: RULES!
  • Maxime Restaurant in Delft: RULES! I had a mixture of this week’s left and right menu, starting with the steak tartare (raw egg on top and all) and a Parisian Sauvignon Blanc, continuing with chicory soup and a dry Riesling, quail with mushrooms and a glass of Tempranillo as the main dish and finally a brilliant collection of cheeses washed down with a strong (as in flavourful) Sherry. The quail could perhaps have been less subtle, but all in all the sequence of the four courses along with their perfectly matched wines made for a superb culinary experience.

In noteworthy news, another one of my academic children flew the nest this week. The now freshly minted Dr. Zhao successfully defended his thesis on Curvature Lines for Lesion Detection and Visualization in CT Colonography and will continue his career, after a brief stint elsewhere, at Philips Healthcare in Best! Prof. Bernhard Preim came to visit our group for the occasion, which resulted in the prerequisite associated engaging invited talks and business lunches and dinners. It’s a tough job…

Now that we’re on about the tough job, I did manage to complicate my otherwise brilliant weekend by stressing about a self-imposed deadline delivering work to collaborators this coming week. The privilege and pleasure of accompanying genetic offspring #1 (her full name is of course Genetic Offspring Unit #1) to her first swimming lesson (compulsory over here, water everywhere!) somewhat brought me back to my senses. The raw humanity associated with the welcoming of my neighbour’s latest GOU (we have 18 of these superb units on our 9-house street now) knocked me back into reality by Sunday afternoon. So now I have a question for you dear readers: Apart from focusing on the now, what do you do to keep work-related thoughts and the sometimes accompanying stress at bay during shorter periods of R&R? Let’r rip in the comments!

The following video was posted by our man in Vienna, and it will do just nicely as a perfectly uplifting visual conclusion to this post. Have a beautiful week friends!