Downing the Wine: Part 2

After downing the wine with Oli on a previous blog post, I though it would be cool to see if James strutt could beat me. Here is the eventual result of that!



10 minutes later, we were feeling pretty happy. As soon as the photos come out on facebook, I will properly post about Strutts visit.

Gravity Vomit animal night

On thursday, we at Gravity Vomit (the circus skills and juggling society) had our animal themed pub crawl. It was very fun, and I figured I should try hard with costumes to keep up appearances with Karys's ones that she does. As for ideas, pretty much as soon as I was told it was animal themed for some reason my brain just went "raccoon." and said nothing else.

So raccoon it was. It was a really cool evening, and I spent a substantial amount of time explaining to people that I was not a cat. In fact, I actually went through the effort of painting my face with accurate and characteristic raccoon markings and sprayed my hair in grey and black. See below for fair comparison.

So here is the basic list of the costumes I thought were funny as far as I remember:

Ieuan: He went as a spider, and spent a long time trying to untangle his legs
Chinery: Went as Knuckles by wearing a red suit and wig sprayed red
Leo: A badger! he made an awesome badger suit and painted his hair
Tom: A penguin
Lee: A penguin with a MASSIVE ASS
Thornton: Went as a clownfish using inventive use of sainsburys bags and lots of tape
Scott: went as animal from the muppets. Amazing.
Rich: Of course, he went as roadkill with a lot of fake blood

There were also peacocks, zebras, a ladybird, an elephant and even walruses (walri?)

So yeah, a very good night. On the way back, I was the only one on the bus dressed as an animal and it was awkward. Also a man threw up in his top hat, that was hilarious.

We didn't steal anything.

Today, I was in god damn inorganic labs again. I'm just home for my lunch break now. For the first part of the experiment, me and Tom Bartlett were working in pairs. It involved making a rather noxious concoction of chemicals, heating them up and then vacuum filtering the precipitate off. The basic idea was that you would be left with a nice amount of lovely pink  cobalt chloride precipitate to work with afterwards. However, there was a slight hitch in ours. Well, we cocked it up.

Instead of getting a large amount, our yield was just a thin layer that came to almost nothing. We were faced with the possibility of having to start again... we spoke to one of the 4th year demonstrators about the problem. He told us we may have to start again, unless you "found" some more. He said that he could see a lot of people in the lab with more precipitate than they needed, that they wouldn't miss... but for the record he said he may overlook but will not condone theft.

So, me and Tom (known henceforth as Tom Foolery) set about with a dish and a spatula, claiming precipitate tax off our friends. So yeah... "stealing". Or permanently borrowing if you prefer. Well, hopefully the experiment will go well from now, and we wont have to steal anything else like boiling chemicals or hazardous gases.

A list of very funny jokes

Ok, here are some jokes we found hilarious. Enjoy!

Q: A king walks into a bar and looks around. He sits down and what does he say to the barman?
A: One beer please

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: One beer please

Q: An Irishman, a german and a butcher were in a restaurant when suddenly
A: One beer please

Q: What do you call a no-eyed deer?
A: One beer please

Q: complete this phrase: "to be, or not to ...
A: One beer please


The more eagle eyed among you may have spotted that all the puchlines to all jokes simply end with 'one beer please'. For those of you who aren't 'in the know' thats how we roll in devon. Yeah man. Every joke is instantly made exponentially funnier by that line and it saves on memorising a whole bunch of less funny punchlines that actually go with the jokes.

One beer please

In response to graham

Hahaha. Yes, One beer please.

Thats right, there is actually translation software on the market that translates one beer please into 60 languages. Now, in theory, we know the punchline to every possible joke in 60 countries.


Oh yeah, and MASSIVE ASS

Inorganic Time-wastery

I spent 8 hours in a lab today, working on some ion-exchange resin. Let me give you the low down on standard lab prep.

1. Lab instructor emails you to collect your lab manual 1 week to 3 days in advance
2. You collect the manual, and read about the experiments you will be doing
3. You read and/ or watch any required books/ videos that help you understand the appropriate techniques
4. You complete usually approximately 2-3 hours worth of preliminary work BEFORE the lab. this could be research, questions, equation sheets etc.

The basic idea is that you turn up to the lab with complete understanding of what you are supposed to be doing, how it works and how to do it properly without making a tit out of yourself. Here is what actually happened today:

1. No emails received prior to lab session.
2. Consulted my peers, they too had no idea what was happening
3. There were no lab manuals available to collect
4. We all turned up to the lab, and were given our manuals to look at for the first time
5. Lab working time starts now.

In a nutshell, I wasted 2-3 hours of my potential lab time working on preliminary work that I could have done in my own time beforehand if I was given the manual. In semester 2, we are timetabled for 8 hours in the lab on thursday, and 4 on friday. So naturally, everyone's goal is to finish quickly so you don't have to come in on friday.


I asked Dr Johnson why we had not been given the lab manuals sooner. Here is the dialogue that followed.


Me: But we could have done the preliminary work beforehand and had longer to read about the experiment!
Dr Johnson: HAHAHAHAHA
Me:...
Dr Johnson: But this is a short experiment, and if we gave you the manual earlier you would have definately finished before friday- and you're timetabled for friday
Me: you have got to be kidding


I was like "oh, man" for the whole day after that. Especially because I have essentially been tricked into making my way to the lab at 8:30 in the morning on an inevitably snailing (see previous post) day rather than asleep until 2 in the afternoon.


Gah.

Snailing

 Today, the weather was snailing again (i'm sure Karys will approve of this word) quite heavily. It is a most inconvenient type of weather. Imagine snow (yay!) and hail (meh) and rain (aw man). Snailing is when all 3 of these weather patterns occur at the same time. This makes the bad effects of them worse, and the good effects of snow rubbish.

What happens is you get drops of rain, little bits of hail and big flakes of snow all falling at the same time. This looks rather odd, and I have only seen it a few times before. The snow lands, but that gets turned to half slush by the rain simultaneously. The hail then lands on the slush and makes even tarmac slippery. Instead of a puddle, or a sheet of nice crunchy snow, you end up with an inch thick layer of what I can only describe as something with a very similar consistency to vaseline. Very annoying and slippery.