07:45 – We’re working hard to get the first batch of forensic science kits ready to ship this week. Much remains to be done, but we’ll have a batch ready to ship later this week.
13:21 – Geez. After nearly melting a PET bottle a few days ago, you’d think I’d learn. Apparently not. I was making up Herzberg’s Stain this morning, using the saturated zinc chloride solution I made up a few days ago.
The instructions call for 125 mL of an iodine/iodide solution made up by dissolving 52.5 g of potassium iodide in 50 mL of water, adding 2.5 g of iodine crystals, swirling until they dissolve, and then making up the solution to 125 mL with water. That solution is mixed with 250 mL of saturated zinc chloride. So I carefully measured that amount of the zinc chloride solution and transferred it to a PET bottle. I then added the 125 mL of IKI solution with swirling. Of course, the solution immediately started heating up. Duh. So I quickly poured it into a polypropylene beaker and covered it with a watch glass so that it could cool down. Geez.
You’re probably just getting old and addled. Don’t worry. You’ll never be as old as Dave. Nor as flatulent, likely. (That is what OFD stands for, right? Old Flatulent Dave?)
(There are those who claim that the fart joke is the lowest form of humor. “You stink,” I tell them.)
He could get as old as me if I croak first and he catches up, you also. Because the aging of my physical body will have stopped at that point. (note the inclusion of the word “physical” there, ha, ha,)
Flatulence and other scatological humor goes back a very long way and was favored by high and low estate; from the 18th-C alone we had our own Ben Franklin on the case and over on Yon Scepter’d Isle one Dean Jonathan Swift, of Dublin Cathedral, so actually not on the sceptered isle but the Emerald one, hard to keep it all straight.
“Franklin punned that compared to his ruminations on flatulence, other scientific investigations were “scarcely worth a FART-HING”
and…
“Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
“Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”
–The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732)
See how rare and valuable a graduate-level education in English literature can be, folks?
Just think, OFD, today’s college kids will be able to get a classical education and make historically informed fart jokes … while waiting tables to make payments on their $100K student loans. Well, that’s assuming their classics professors are actually worth a damn and actually teach the classics, not a safe assumption.
SteveF wrote:
“(There are those who claim that the fart joke is the lowest form of humor. “You stink,” I tell them.)”
I used to play Hearts and Spades online at the Microsoft Zone, and one of my acquaintances changed his screen name to a rather amusing one that very few people would know nowadays. When he logged in and entered our “room” I typed the following message in the room log – visible to all:
stercus: I think your name stinks!
He and I were probably the only people in the room who knew what stercus meant. (It’s one of the Latin words for shit.) He had a good laugh.
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton) was also interested in farting, along with many other things. He wrote a book on the subject but his execrable wife Isabel burned it and many other manuscripts after his death.
The actress playing Isabel in “Mountains of the Moon” is pretty hot.
“…assuming their classics professors are actually worth a damn and actually teach the classics, not a safe assumption…”
Mos def not a safe assumption nowadays; most humanities and social “science” profs are too busy teaching “theory”, usually from some kind of neo-Marxist viewpoint and most seem to actually dislike literature and history and have very little sense of humor, always a bad sign. During my sentence I found that the older guys were more or less OK most of the time but by now they’re all long since retired or deceased. One sign of hope for me at the time was that the younger students I had as a TA tended to laugh at all the PC nonsense and knew they were being conned.
Eventually, as I am a very slow learner, I figured out that the game wasn’t worth the candle to light it, and that, along with the marriage breaking up and my dad dying of early-onset Alzheimer’s up in MA put the whole thing into perspective; plus just walking around the campus back then was like walking on eggshells, as a straight white Christian married male war vet, O the Horror! As the title of the late Robert Graves book said, and well worth the read…”Goodbye To All That.” A shame, really, because I loved literature and history and wanted to teach it and get the PhD and so on, but was apparently born about fifty years too late.
a straight white Christian married male war vet
Wow, couldn’t you get anything else wrong? I know! I bet you didn’t properly appreciate the
Massachusetts Royal FamilyKennedy family either…I still think an OFD English course styled after the Khan Academy courses would be amazing. Of course, it’s hard to find the time to make such things.
Here’s an example of something vaguely relevant. Adam Gussow is an English professor at Oxford (the Massachusetts one). He also happens to be one of the foremost living blues harp players. A few years ago, he started recording video lessons in which he would teach people to play blues harp — and occasionally lecture on the history of blues music. As he got more viewers, he set up a site, and even managed to make some money out of selling extra lessons, sponsored equipment, jam tracks and other things.