Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Daily Douchebag: BALB/c mice
DOB: the strain originated when Halsey Bagg purchased a pair of albino mice from a mouse dealer in Ohio in 1913
Occupation: I'd say "guinea pigs," but since they're mice, I'll say "experimental subjects"
Hometown: Memorial Hospital, New York via Ohio
Current residence: my lab's infrequently used chemical fume hood so J-Sexy and SisterChristian won't bitch about my rodents stinking up the lab
Douchebaggery: No matter what a grad student works on, whether it be yeast, worms, flies, cells, viruses, bacteria, mice, rats, monkeys, or whatever else, there's one thing that everyone has to do which is the scourge of our existence: a timecourse experiment. This involves setting up whatever you're doing and taking samples at different times afterward, usually as inconveniently as possible. In my case, this means infecting mice with virus and dissecting out their respiratory tracts, then making smoothies out of them with my trusty power tissue homogenizer. It's the time of my life. There's nothing more entertaining and delightful than spending a very long day whipping up infected tracheal homogenates. It's better than sex. It's...also apparently opposite day.
I had to get up this morning at 4:30 a.m. to start an epic experiment involving
I shouldn't complain too much because this was the lot I cast when I signed up to do mousework in a virology lab. Lengthy timecourses are part of the package. When I get this experiment to work and can demonstrate that rhinovirus is growing in my mice, I will get to write a banging first-author paper and graduate. However, I'm seriously annoyed because I could have been working on this experiment months ago if it weren't for the stupid mice. My mice are housed in what's called a barrier facility. This means that there are certain procedures and controls in place to prevent outbreaks of mouse diseases. Obviously, when you have thousands of mice all living in close proximity, epidemics can be devastating. Unfortunately, my stupid mice decided to go and get mouse hepatitis virus anyway because some dipshit wasn't following barrier protocol, and I had to stop breeding them for three months to clear out the epidemic. While this wasn't ALL bad (I got some face time with this hot veterinarian, and spent it dropping sexy virus talk all over his fine ass), it really set my work back. Then, when I begged the hot DVM to let me resume breeding and he grudgingly gave me permission, my mice were all old and not at the height of fecundity. Mice only reproduce until they're about a year old, and many of my breeding pairs were eight or nine months old, so the females were disinterested in the old, fat males they were caged with. The few pairs who still apparently had an active sex life produced small litters. I had to use what remained of my young, virile, experiment-worthy mice to set up new breeding cages, thus making me wait another few weeks for sires to rape the dams in estrus and produce some pups for me to experiment on.
Finally, after a month of trying to get my mice to get down and get pregs and not eat their young, I managed to scrounge enough mice together to do half of this lousy experiment. Hopefully enough of the recently born mice will avoid consumption by their mothers long enough to be weaned and participate in the other half of this experiment next week. With my luck, there will probably be an outbreak of mousepox in the barrier and all my mousework will be delayed another six months. I swear these bastards are conspiring to keep me in grad school via epidemics of every disease EXCEPT human rhinovirus and a refusal to reproduce like the rodents with nothing better to do that they are. It's pretty sad that I'm being outwitted by a strain of witless vermin inbred via twenty-six generations of brother-sister mating. Pretty sad, indeed.
Labels: Daily Douchebag, epidemic geekery, grad school bullshit, mice, Rxxx Sxxxxxx, science, viruses rule
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Bill Nye the Surprisingly-Razzy-Like Guy
Bill Nye, better known as "The Science Guy" managed to secure a temporary restraining order against his estranged oboist of a sham wife, Blair Tindall.
She's way sexier than I would expect a big nerd like Bill Nye the Science Guy to bag, but it just goes to show you that everything has its price. Undoubtedly fearing that he would lose out on this hot piece if he didn't marry her promptly (as she had been carrying on a torrid affair with the conductor of the Boston Pops), he went ahead and did so. However, by the time he realized the marriage license was invalid, he also presumably realized she was out of her fucking mind and dumped that bitch. He told her to take her sorry ass back to the orchestra pit, and went about his business making vinegar-and-baking soda volcanoes, soda bottle rockets, and otherwise exploiting the miracle of acid-base reactions for educational and entertainment purposes.
Blair didn't much appreciate this, and decided to take out her aggressions on Bill's vegetable garden. Late at night, she crept into his garden and tried to spray weed killer all over it, but fled when he caught her. Like a total dumbass, she started running as soon as he said, "Blair?", essentially confirming her identity. So he went to court and got a restraining order to prevent further threats against his "food produce" and his eyesight from her deadly toxic solvents/herbicides.
I've always liked Bill Nye because not only are science nerds cool (a notion validated every time I look in a mirror), he's from the P-N-Dub and got his start on a local sketch comedy show called "Almost Live" that I used to watch all the time. That show was fucking hilarious. Just thinking about those skits on "Almost Live" (especially the fake Kent and Ballard episodes of "COPS", the TV ad for the "Lynnwood Beauty Academy," and the "Dale Chihuly: world-famous glass artist and vigilante crimefighter" sketch) is cracking me up as we speak. But I digress. Bill Nye was one of the most successful "Almost Live" alums, and I love that his whole game is science-related. He really has geek chic down to the polka-dotted bow tie. It sucks to be just going about your pimptastic business only to have some honey go nuts and disrupt your life with stalking.
Stalking is just not fucking cool. I've been stalked a few times in my life, mostly by harmless dudes who would leave shit on my porch or write me inappropriately lengthy notes or blow up my phone. They would annoy me, but not really scare me. When I lived with Miss Corbutt in Tacoma, our exploits about town ensured that we got stalker gifts at least once a week. We used to joke about it. However, there is NOTHING funny about a stalker who comes ready to kill--even if the intended victims are Bill's tomato plants. I had a stalker this past year who was of that scary stalking variety.
The Ja-Fake-An who wouldn't eat pussy--who henceforth shall be called Rxxx Sxxxxxx, because that's his name and I don't feel any reason whatsoever why I should protect his fucking identity--didn't like what I wrote about him on my blog. I only wrote about him because I was furious that he seemed to feel like constantly sexually harassing me was acceptable, and I wanted to get all my anger out of my system constructively. He did not respond well to this, and came to my lab raising hell and threatening me, menacing me at my lab meeting, and trying to get my PI (ie: boss) to agree that I was a stupid bitch who needed to be put in her place. My PI said he was concerned for my safety, because Rxxx was obviously crazed. Rxxx was told by our department chair to stay the hell away from me, but after getting kicked out of his SECOND lab at Columbia for behavioral issues (he got kicked out of the first for sexual harassment), he decided that he wasn't going to abide by that anymore. He started showing up on my floor, showing up at Free Friday (grad student happy hour), where on one memorable occasion he took two beers out of my hands. This was after I was assured he would ESPECIALLY stay away from me when he was drinking.
Now he has a formal disciplinary letter advising him that any contact with me will result in serious disciplinary action, and I have informed the deans, my department, and Columbia public safety that I will not fuck around should he bother me again. I will go straight to the courthouse and get my own damn TRO, because malevolent stalkers are not to be trifled with. Therefore, I applaud Bill Nye for exercising his legal right to not have solvent sprayed on his veggies or into his eyes by a scorned ex-not-wife with abysmally bad coping skills. The Blair Tindalls and the Rxxx Sxxxxxx need to just get served. Served with legal papers saying that they are ordered by a judge to stay the fuck away!
I feel Bill Nye. It's hard to be a not-really-that-attractive-but-still-possessing-a-certain-something type of sexy geek. I've got basically the same thing going on, but I'm more stacked.
It's hard out here for a science pimp. Dodging stalkers who want to either fuck with your garden or fuck with your rotation student's presentation by glowering into the conference room during her scintillating presentation on mouse dendritic cells and poliovirus infection is not a small task and is very stressful. From one stalked scientist to another, Bill, keep your chin up and don't let the stalker bitches get you down!
Blair didn't much appreciate this, and decided to take out her aggressions on Bill's vegetable garden. Late at night, she crept into his garden and tried to spray weed killer all over it, but fled when he caught her. Like a total dumbass, she started running as soon as he said, "Blair?", essentially confirming her identity. So he went to court and got a restraining order to prevent further threats against his "food produce" and his eyesight from her deadly toxic solvents/herbicides.
I've always liked Bill Nye because not only are science nerds cool (a notion validated every time I look in a mirror), he's from the P-N-Dub and got his start on a local sketch comedy show called "Almost Live" that I used to watch all the time. That show was fucking hilarious. Just thinking about those skits on "Almost Live" (especially the fake Kent and Ballard episodes of "COPS", the TV ad for the "Lynnwood Beauty Academy," and the "Dale Chihuly: world-famous glass artist and vigilante crimefighter" sketch) is cracking me up as we speak. But I digress. Bill Nye was one of the most successful "Almost Live" alums, and I love that his whole game is science-related. He really has geek chic down to the polka-dotted bow tie. It sucks to be just going about your pimptastic business only to have some honey go nuts and disrupt your life with stalking.
Stalking is just not fucking cool. I've been stalked a few times in my life, mostly by harmless dudes who would leave shit on my porch or write me inappropriately lengthy notes or blow up my phone. They would annoy me, but not really scare me. When I lived with Miss Corbutt in Tacoma, our exploits about town ensured that we got stalker gifts at least once a week. We used to joke about it. However, there is NOTHING funny about a stalker who comes ready to kill--even if the intended victims are Bill's tomato plants. I had a stalker this past year who was of that scary stalking variety.
The Ja-Fake-An who wouldn't eat pussy--who henceforth shall be called Rxxx Sxxxxxx, because that's his name and I don't feel any reason whatsoever why I should protect his fucking identity--didn't like what I wrote about him on my blog. I only wrote about him because I was furious that he seemed to feel like constantly sexually harassing me was acceptable, and I wanted to get all my anger out of my system constructively. He did not respond well to this, and came to my lab raising hell and threatening me, menacing me at my lab meeting, and trying to get my PI (ie: boss) to agree that I was a stupid bitch who needed to be put in her place. My PI said he was concerned for my safety, because Rxxx was obviously crazed. Rxxx was told by our department chair to stay the hell away from me, but after getting kicked out of his SECOND lab at Columbia for behavioral issues (he got kicked out of the first for sexual harassment), he decided that he wasn't going to abide by that anymore. He started showing up on my floor, showing up at Free Friday (grad student happy hour), where on one memorable occasion he took two beers out of my hands. This was after I was assured he would ESPECIALLY stay away from me when he was drinking.
Now he has a formal disciplinary letter advising him that any contact with me will result in serious disciplinary action, and I have informed the deans, my department, and Columbia public safety that I will not fuck around should he bother me again. I will go straight to the courthouse and get my own damn TRO, because malevolent stalkers are not to be trifled with. Therefore, I applaud Bill Nye for exercising his legal right to not have solvent sprayed on his veggies or into his eyes by a scorned ex-not-wife with abysmally bad coping skills. The Blair Tindalls and the Rxxx Sxxxxxx need to just get served. Served with legal papers saying that they are ordered by a judge to stay the fuck away!
I feel Bill Nye. It's hard to be a not-really-that-attractive-but-still-possessing-a-certain-something type of sexy geek. I've got basically the same thing going on, but I'm more stacked.
Labels: assholes, crazies, crime and punishment, grad school bullshit, oh the horror, P-N-Dub, Rxxx Sxxxxxx, science, sexual assault
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