It’s still Friday. Somewhere.
’It’s hot like hell. And you smell of death!’ Lieselotte said to Neil one morning, not long before I left that particular lab. This is the girl who uses the English language rather like a cluster bomb: inexpertly, and people get hit by shrapnel.
‘My barbecue cooks like hell!’
Back in Fenland we had a circular dichroism measuring-type instrument. If you don’t know what one of those is it doesn’t really matter, except to say that this particular one appeared to be carved out of solid granite, sat in a scary room in the basement and ate undergraduates for elevenses.
Despite that it was quite fragile, consisting of various antediluvian optics and a mercury lamp that absolutely was not, without exception, under any circumstances to be struck in the presence of oxygen. Not ever.
To help even the most suicidal student with this seemingly simple yet somehow elusive directive, the CD machine was connected to two dirty great nitrogen cylinders with an automatic switching device connecting them: the idea being that one would turn on the tap and flush the machine with nitrogen well in advance of wanting to use it (often overnight)—and if one cylinder were to run empty in the night then the other would without a flicker of a metaphorical eyelid take up the burden. And if one cylinder was empty when one came to use the CD machine one would trog off to Stores to replace it. You could tell that the cylinder was empty because there was a useful little dial on it with a red line and the letters ‘E’, ‘M’, ‘P’, ‘T’ and ‘Y’.
And there were instructions and warning signs all over the room to this effect.
‘BC9 expresses like hell!’ Lieselotte said the next morning. ‘Beta octylglucoside is like hell!’
Uh huh.
Time passed.
‘My CD spectra are like hell!’.
Oops.
Turns out that Lieselotte had stormed into the basement room the previous night, in that inimitable way of hers, switched on all the taps and gone home for the night. In the morning, she’d stormed (like hell? probably) back in, struck the mercury lamp—and yes, you’re a country mile ahead of me—and stormed out again to get her samples.
Not noticing, natch, that the needles on both the nitrogen dials were firmly against the letters ‘E’, ‘M’, ‘P’, ‘T’ and ‘Y’, and probably had been for most of the night.
Was she popular?
Like hell.
Nice. LOL. Should have saved that for Lablit!
It’s never too late.
I’ve got something else on the burner for Lablit as it happens: and all y’all should consider this a call for papers as I’m the Poetry and Fiction Editor there and Ian isn’t doing his job properly.
Sorry, stressful week. I love you really, Ian.
Glad somebody does :`(
Anyway, bugger orf, I’m working on the damned list. I get spend all day coding crappy html at work, then all night coding crappy html at home >:)
No one’s asking you to do HTML, mate: it’s all in PHP!
I suppose that should be The
DamnedListXHTML fule
Wait, you’re telling me you’re coding that by hand? It’s not database-driven?
You’re
stupiderbraver than you look.Cut & paste kiddo! I have a list of 55 books, I cut and paste 55 times, then I
fire up my bongopen a bottle of scotch and start filling in the blanks.It’s a zen thing.
Plus I can’t code for toffee, so by the time I write a script in Python to trawl Amazon.co.uk for titles, authors and URLs, add the Lablit tag and then code the html I believe the universe will have ended and/or jenny will finally have given up on me, had a nervous breakdown and
made you do itdone it herself instead:)
I wouldn’t worry about that. I found a tame PHP programmer today. SRSLY.
I’ve kind of got one. But He’s busy and right now, AWL in DC…
This is so sweet, gentleman. Do carry on.
Richard, your Lieselotte sounds a lot like someone in our lab from a particular country from whence Bond Girls tend to spring. We were tidying up the lab today and she found an unopened, brand-new Mini-Protean III cassette, waved it in the air triumphantly and and pronounced: “Look! We have another…this thing!”
I just heart meta-syntactic variables. They’re so useful for native and non-native speakers alike.
Jenny; aww.. we all know the magic word is “stuff” and “this thingy”. Magic for foreigners ;) very accurate…. sort of… sometimes…
Brooks; it is the easiest way of doing it; copy and paste. And no, I am not saying that because I am doing that too :) Thanks for helping! (I was a tad bit busy….)
Thingamabob, doohickey, thingamajig, whatchamacallit, whatsit, widget, doodah… Dingsbums. Like hell.
A man walks into a bar.
‘Ouch’, he says.
(Courtesy: Gee Minima, aged 9)
Did he get hit by shrapnel, Henry?
The bad joke thread is thataway →
Oh, I see, just past the station. Thank you, Madam.
I think it was the ill fated David Blayney who released hydrogen cyanide, or was it arsenic, into the chemistry building one day. Teachers trying not to panic, “Everyone leave by the main door. HOLD YOUR BREATH IN THE CORRIDOR”
Ah, the halcyon days of youth.