Intradermal M. rufopictus - and plug for the BBC's LOTR radio production

So...c'est moi. The colours do look better in real life, my new camera being cheap and having poor autofocus.

Funny thing about yesterday was that I'm more afraid of strangers and strange situations than of needles. Maybe it's partly my morbid fascination with anatomy and pathology - within the past year I've been vaccinated against JE, hepatitis A, rabies, and to cap it all, smallpox, and was actually excited about that. Kicking around in front of the desk waiting for Dave to set up his workstation was more uncomfortable, psychologically, than sitting on the chair with a sharp buzzing thing feeling as if it was being dragged through my skin. The pain was comparable to a small bee's sting, fluctuating depending on site and whether he was using the one big needle or the shader (several small ones grouped). At the moment it's still a bit sore, like a sunburn or a first-degree scald.

The artist who did my shoulder was a really nice guy, and I liked his portfolio on the website - a lot of naturalistic wildlife pictures were what caught my attention. He had books on outdoor ponds, koi fish, and Ando Hiroshige at his workstation and was chatting with another of the staff about a book of ukiyo-e prints he picked up for cheap at Barnes and Noble.

(Something that's rather baffling about Americans - tattoos of Japanese- and Chinese-style images are popular with them, even though in those cultures, tattoos have strong negative [i.e. criminal] associations. The most baffling are those idiots who get Chinese words written on them even though they're totally illiterate, and apparently have never thought of searching for the abundant Chinese dictionaries available online, often with disastrous results (see Hanzismatter.com for some prime examples). )

Here I would like to insert GREAT PRAISE for the BBC's radio production of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, since I was listening to the last few bits - from Cirith Ungol to Aragorn's triumphal entry - while being inked. I'm not going to knock the movies again, but this recording brought back a state of mind that I haven't felt for a long, long time. It was in my mid-teens when I'd reread the books so many times within so short a timespan - perhaps three or four times within the year after I first discovered them at thirteen - that I'd internalised them, carried Middle-Earth and its legends around in my head.

I can still recite Sam's scrap of the Lay of Gil-galad, and Galadriel's farewell lingers in my head as even some scraps of foreign poetry will, like the quotation Eco ended The Name of the Rose with: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."

This regenerated that feeling whereas the movies didn't, because a movie forces you to experience a story as the camera eye, grand panoramas and narrow close-ups. Reading or listening to a story recreates it in the way that one's own human memory does, shifting from concept to concept instead of shot to shot. The part that almost made me cry (while on the bus) was listening to Pippin pledge his loyalty to old mad Denethor. "...until my lord release me, or death take me." Wahlau...goosepimples.

Hey, and what's a bit of smarting when Frodo and Sam are trudging across Mordor to Orodruin?