One week without

I would argue that most professional graduate students out there, especially by the time they hit year 3 or 4 of graduate work, would agree that prolonged ventures in grad school kill a bit of your soul. That’s why I call all of my projects my little horcruxes. Like any graduate student out there that has been in grad school so long they have indeed relinquished part of their soul, alcohol is a good friend. I’m in no way saying that we’re all hard-core alcoholics; I’m not even saying that I am; but we all get by with a little help from our friends. And sometimes our friends are wrapped in Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo, PBR, or <$10 bottle of wine labels. Lately, my preferences have moved to Balvenie, Oban, McCallums, and Hendricks labels, but habits I can’t monetarily support is the subject of a separate post.

Recently, I took a group of teenagers camping and rafting. Understandably so, it was an alcohol-free trip. I was pretty confident in my ability to handle myself without a drink for a week, though I had never done it while also being around 11 teenagers. As another precaution to ensure appropriateness around kids, I also refrained from taking any smut along. Now, I’ve been out of the closest for a while now about my love for romance novels, especially during the summer. I don’t even get embarrassed when I have a guy ringing up my smut-tastic purchase at the bookstore or feel like I need to slip in a Churchill biography or collection of scientific essays to distract them (though self-checkout at the library is an amazing thing for those shy of their smut habit). However, I just didn’t feel that it would be an appropriate topic for conversation if a kid saw what I was reading. Consequently, I took book that had graced the best sellers list for a while this year…and I’m still not really sure what it’s about.

The last days of any period of self-denial are the toughest. It’s why when I was doing fieldwork in the Arctic a few years back and we were living on dehydrated food (plus something that could only be termed as “meat stick” along with crappy Kraft cheese by the kilo, which hardly qualify as food), we weren’t allowed to talk about real food until at least 2/3 of the way through the trip. The second to last night on this last trip was trying on the Beer-O-Meter; after all, I hadn’t been on a river without beer since high school. But the last night is what took me by surprise. I missed smut. Horribly. And this is saying a lot since I have notoriously horrible taste in romance novels. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anything on the order of Smut > Alcohol, but…a girl’s gotta get her fix.

And just for the record, I did buy beer before I bought smut upon my return.

Lastly, here’s a project I deeply lament not being a part of: "Smart Bitches Trashy Books". After all, a good beach read is nothing to be ashamed of - even in higher education. It's why the tower is off-white and not pure white.

Science is delicious

I think it's an important aspect of those doing research in the biological sciences to eat their study group. Take the inspired, wholly accurate Onion article for example: New, Delicious Species Discovered. Granted, this is easier and and more palatable for some scientists than others. And to the others, I say: suck it up, princesses. Organismal biologists have it pretty easy - every study has it's causalities than would likely be delicious on the grill, sauteed, or with a white wine sauce. For those studying viruses, would they not work harder to find cures and treatments if they were to ingest the samples in their petri dishes? And do those studying human anatomy and physiology really not get curious? I mean, I'm not going to rush off to join the Korowai tribe or hope for a plane crash in the Andes, but I'm honest enough to admit that I'm curious.

Now, many would say I have it easy since I study birds, but it's not a smooth sailing as one would think. Yeah, duck and geese are easy to get and are best served with a cranberry or orange sauce and paired with a mellow red wine. I prefer a pino noir or chianti. However, my other study groups are not so easy to get my hands on - penguins and auks. Unfortunately, all the specimens I have in my possession arrived fleshless. Well, not that unfortunate since I don't really do flesh - thank goodness for dermestid beetles. And due to the Antarctic Treaty and Antarctic Conservation Act, there's no chance of penguins showing up in markets and restaurants in the U.S. anytime soon. Bastards. There are reports of penguin-eating before they became contraband. One source describes penguin meat as "If it's possible to imagine a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce, the illustration would be complete". Nothing a little BBQ sauce wouldn't take care of. I've also read that penguin tastes rather like seal. I've had seal, which makes me think that perhaps I shouldn't be so eager to taste penguin after all. But I wonder if their eggs taste fishy, too....

I don't know if there's any legislature against eating auks (puffins, murres/guillemots, auklets, ect.), but I'm guessing not based on the results from googling "eating puffins" and "what do puffins taste like". When I was in the Arctic in 2007, there weren't any in the area to sample, or buy off the Inuits, and I've never been to other places within their habitat. I wonder if they ship them from Maine like lobsters... I wonder if this could be a business opportunity for me... But, to help appease my curiosity until fleshy specimens become available, I can rely on a delight I discovered (or possibly re-discovered) on a camping trip last week: Puffins cereal. And let me just say, peanut butter flavored Puffins...omg, I'm addicted. I was not above shamelessly high-grading the food from the 7th graders we were leading on the trip in the name of making sure I got the Puffins. They are one of my study animals after all.

And my final study group are fossil birds. These are a lot harder to find a suitable way to consume. After spending years cleaning off microvertebrate fossils in the field by putting them in my mouth to remove the dirt, I find that I'm not too interested in eating fossils in the traditional manner. There are always rumors of explorers, scientists, and commoners eating frozen mammoths, leading to various gastrointestinal catastrophes, but the truth behind these wives' tails are unsubstantiated. However, I spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about all the studies on delicious and exotic animals out there, as well as considering what my fossil birds tasted like. In fact, I have a conference talk already prepared discussing which wines to pair with my fossil birds. I've provided a little teaser. The reports of soft tissue being found in fossils gives me hope, though. Perhaps if I boil them long enough...

But in reality, this is pretty much just a long ad for Puffins cereal. The cereal of ornithologists.

Avain leprosy: The next pandemic

I recently came into the possession of 40 freshly plucked Branta canadensis and Anas platyrhynchos legs. To the layperson, those are Canada geese and mallards, respectively, but I like using the scientific names because I think it makes me sound like a real scientist...until my office mate points out that I pronounced the name wrong, and I just help confirm his low opinion of the intellect of Southerners. At least in writing, I'm safe (as long as I cut and paste from a reliable source so the names are spelled correctly). I say "freshly plucked" since the legs were FedExed to me from my mom's friend's husband just after shooting them on a hunting trip the weekend before. Who knew you can just FedEx freshly shot body parts? It seems like someone should be checking into this kind of thing, or at least including it in an episode of CSI. But after being FedExed cross country in ziploc bags in a Tupperware cake carrier without ice, lets just say that "fresh" was no longer an accurate adjective. And after leaving them in my office overnight, which has a tendency to get warm, to baste in their own bloody juices, let's just say that "fresh" was even more of a stretch... and it's good thing my office has a window that opens.

For some inconceivable reason, my advisor and the collections manager forbade me to open the bags and play with the legs in the paleo labs. Instead, I unleashed my odoriferous wrath on the zoology department, who are apparently used to rotting flesh. After gearing up in gloves, mask, and lab coat in case there was a Shamu-type splash zone (yeah, I don't do flesh), I braved the bags juicy juicy bird legs. I should perhaps have mentioned before now that my research involves comparing the internal structure of fossil and modern bird leg bones - I don't just randomly have married men send me dead bird parts. (Though would it really be infidelity if they did?) Upon opening these bags of festering juiciness, I discover that I was just sent the feet - tarsometatarsi down. My research focuses on the femora and tibiotarsi - the upper and lower leg bones. Essentially, I was sent nothing I could use for my dissertation.

So the next natural question was what to do with 40 rotting bird legs. Well, you see, my office has a balcony outside the windows that you can get to through the kitchen next door. Typically this balcony is just used by me for reading or lunching when I feel a case of Rickets coming on, but, could conceivably be used for things like shooting champagne corks at undergrads. Not that I'd ever do anything like that. And while thinking about things that I would never do on the balcony that would also imply that I drink champagne in my office, I spawned a wonderful solution for anyone with extra rotting bird legs in their office. Avian leprosy. You hear about avian flu, swine flu, hoof-in-mouth, but nothing about avian leprosy - just Google "avian leprosy" or "bird leprosy", and all you get are hits from blogspot, livejournal, etc. (not that those aren't respectable scientific and journalism outlets....I mean, just look at my blog). My idea is a fabulous social experiment by testing the mindset "ignorance is bliss". Because they've never heard of it, no one fears avian leprosy. We'll see about that. Using the tactical position of the balcony, I would lob rotten bird legs at passersby. This would be followed up with a public posting on the threat of avian leprosy (I could use this blog, but I wouldn't want to overwhelm the world, knowing what a mass media outlet this is), perhaps even a scientific report showing photos of up to 40 disarticulated bird legs . Then I would just sit back and sip champagne on the balcony watching the panic spread. Honestly, I think it'd do a lot to get people's minds off the economy. So it'd really be a benefit to society.

The Sexual Selection of Cankles

Quite unexpectedly, I have found myself a fancier of flightless birds. Perhaps this comes from doing my dissertation on flightless birds. Perhaps I have always had a fetish for feathery cloacas incapable of flight that has only recently been embraced. Perhaps they're the same thing. But as a flightless avian cloaca lover, I read a lot about birds. I have recently come across the word "caruncle". It seems unlikely that I haven't run across this piece of anatomical awesomeness before, but then I'm blonde and sometimes it take a few times for something to stick. In general, a caruncle is a fleshy outgrowth; in birds, the caruncle is the wattle - the fleshy outgrowth on the neck, throat, or below the eye. Though, upon discovering this word "caruncle", I now refuse to use the inferior term "wattle". Turkeys, chickens, and cassowaries are choice examples of birds with caruncles. while nothing will ever surpass my love of the word "cloaca" (and who doesn't love a universal hole?), "caruncle" now comes in a close second.

Not only are fleshy protuberances awesome, but "caruncle" reminds me of the word "cankle", another favorite. And it's rather fitting - are cankles really anything more than fleshy outgrowths? Mine aren't. That being said, it's upsetting that cankles have come to have such derogatory connotations. For example:

• http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cankle&defid=2633
• http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l15/ffivnik8/CANKLES.jpg
• And my personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIgvTxSgmk (cankle reference at 27 seconds)

And I think it benefits society to note that while googling for links, I came across this little gem: Gold's Gym has launched a "Say No To Cankles" campaign and even a Cankles Awareness Month. http://saynotocankles.com/. Thank you, Internet. And thank you, Gold's Gym for doing your part for raising cankle awareness. That's just one step closer to social acceptance.

Because caruncles and cankles are both fleshy growths and have so many letters in common, there's no denying that they could have much more in common. In fact, I propose that cankles are a human analog for the avian caruncle. Parsimony and actual logic be damned! Consequently, it's important to point out that the caruncle is used for sexual selection in many birds (though I'm not yet suggesting that cankles have erectile tissue like many avian caruncles do). In birds, the larger the caruncle, the more dominant the male. So, the next obvious step is that humans need to stop the mocking of cankles and start considering them when selecting mates. Gold's Gym even acknowledges that there are hereditary reasons (i.e., genetic controls) for cankles, implying that cankles are susceptible to natural and sexual selection. No, that's not just the steroids talking. Cankles are inadvertently selected in drunken hookups (as referenced in the energy drink video above) that result in pregnancy. It's time for cankles to step out of the drunken haze of bad decisions and take the sober limelight. In fact, it's past time sexual selection takes the forefront in human evolution. With advances in modern medicine saving people from their own stupidity, it may be all we have left.

Trains with British Accents

It's no secret that I have a masochistic fascination with train travel - see my December posts on my attempt to take the train home for Christmas for reference. I can make my mother hang up on me by merely mentioning that I'm taking the train home for Christmas again; my father gladly aids and abets. In my plans (as I tell my mother), this year I'm taking the train west to California, where I can then take a Southern route to Atlanta, rather than having to go to Chicago, the only direction trains go from Denver. I figure this way I'll run into less bad weather (in case you missed my Christmas train adventures, metal tracks contract when they're cold), which I thought would make my mother happy. My father and I have now progressed in our machinations to him flying to California to meet me, and then we'll take the train home together from San Francisco. So, if this winter is as bad as they're predicting, my dad and I will be spending Christmas in El Paso. My mother's silence is filled with anger.

While I was in England I took the opportunity to take the train from Bristol to Birmingham. Granted, it was just a two hour trip, but nowhere in England is actually more than a few hours away (unless you're trying to drive, where upon you realize that their roads don't go anywhere useful and they don't have road signs telling you where you are or where you're going). Meanwhile, I've always heard that trains actually work in England/Europe, and I was ready to test this hypothesis.

Firstly, I found the train situation very confusing – the trains don’t have numbers like planes and US trains, they have final destinations and departure times. Birmingham is not the end-of-the-line for any train. After a week of drinking and very little sleep, this was quite daunting. There also weren’t any employees on the platform to point clueless Americans in the right direction. Luckily I happen to glance my destination on the list of stops for the Edinburgh train, so I cast my dice and got on that train. On the platform I was instantly faced with the painful realization that neither the outside or inside of my train looked like the Hogwarts Express, and I died a little inside. All British trains should look like the Hogwarts Express by principle - have they no national pride? The cars on the train also aren’t labeled, and all I had was a seat number, so I went in and out of several cars before I found that some man was sitting in my seat – at that point I figured it was just a free-for-all. Sitting on the train in the station I realized no one had yet checked my ticket; apparently I didn't need to buy a ticket after all and England is run on the honor system. Excuse me, honour system. I could have just gotten on any train I had wanted to without ever buying a ticket, in fact I seriously contemplated staying on the train and just continuing to Scotland. I could have gotten better prices on Scotch there. However, after a few stops someone finally came around to check tickets, so I guess I would have been busted…or could have just hidden in the bathroom. Sometimes it's just too easy it's not even worth it.

On the train, I was sitting across from an old man who didn’t realize I couldn’t hear him if I had headphones on and started drinking Guinness at 10:30am. What can I say, I liked him...even if we didn't understand each other very well. But towards the end of my trip he started telling me that we were taking an unplanned detour around the city and were at least an hour behind schedule. I immediately lost all faith in the British rail system and considered all trains a failed way of travel. I also started texting my friend meeting me in Birmingham that I was going to be late. Five minutes later we pulled into the station on time. I regained my faith in non-American trains as an acceptable way to travel, but learned to never trust people with accents.

Running around like The Hoff on purpose

I recently visited England on a combined business and pleasure trip, and took delight in many of the unique features, deliciousnesses, idiosyncrasies, and pure crazy of a foreign culture. Pubs are fantastic. I've always loved them in the States, and in England (shockingly) there are even more of them. Cask ales aren't my favorite, but I always enjoy trying new beers; and the ciders are delicious. Additionally, in the north, they actually serve their beer at a respectable temperature. Cream Tea is to die for. I first thought this was tea with cream. What's so exciting about that? But no, cream tea is crack. It's a scone smothered in jam and clotted cream. It's crack. After eating this you immediately feel like you're about to vomit, you then proceed to have a minor heart attack (or massive, if you've already had a scone that day...not that I would have three scones in one day or anything), and wake up the next morning ready for another. On the less tasty side, The British have a love of coins that I don't get. If there's anything more useless than a pence coin, it's a two pence coin. Why two pence? I think the sagging pants trend started in England as a result of all the coins they have to carry around. If the U.S. ever produces a two cent coin, I'm defecting to Argentina. Good for them, but it's not for me. However, the Brits have some passions that are completely unforgivable.

The Hoff. It's just wrong. My British friend with whom I was staying in England for the vacation portion of my trip is obsessed with The Hoff. She had a picture of him hanging in her bathroom. I had to pee with my eyes closed. Prior to visiting England, I thought her obsession was just because she was a freak, but apparently it goes frighteningly deeper than that. The British love David Hasselhoff. He's constantly talked about on the radio. I heard several interviews with him on BBC radio, and they talk about him all the time even when he's not being interviewed. Apparently every topic can be related to The Hoff. And I think all TV channels are under contract to show constant airings of America's Got Talent and Meet the Hasselhoffs. I'm getting ill just thinking about it.

But, what's to be expected with a country that produces this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Gh1U14RZA. British music at its best. I heard this song in England and it got stuck in my head; who knew the video was going to be the highlight of my life. The first time I heard the song the DJs were just playing snippets because they thought the lyrics were "like a cow on purpose", rather than clown. So they would play the refrain and the shout "COW" over the the "clown" lyric. Craziness. Craziness that was stuck in my head for 5 days straight. I can't wait for a video of The Hoff karaoking the song to surface on youtube.

Sniffing dead moles and other childhood habits

So I like to smell things – flowers as I’m walking down the street or through the woods, the aroma of yummies in the oven, the air after a spring rain, rubber cement, whiteout … all the normal things. Some people tell me I have a problem, but I don’t feel that just because I make mistakes on purpose so I can white them out means I have a problem. I just really enjoy delectable smells, which happens to include lots of office and lab supplies. And before you really start to judge me, I’d just like to clarify that I am NOT a paste eater; some things are just wrong.

I think it goes without saying that this is in no way my fault. I didn’t choose to be “That Girl” who automatically smells the sharpie or whiteboard marker every time she takes the cap off. I don’t really even like the smell of sharpies and white board markers, they make me a little queasy. But when I started the first grade, the first thing I was given to put in my desk was a set of Mr. Sketch markers. Now these markers may be the best things ever invented, but they are also the root of my odor fixation. Who gives a 6 year old a set of 12 scented markers – which, as being scented in the first place, are obviously supposed to be sniffed – and doesn’t expect them to graduate from first grade without a huffing problem? And, at the same time, we’re taking art classes that involve lots of gluing. Now at my school, we didn’t use that pansy Elmer’s nonsense; we used the real stuff – rubber cement. Rubber cement is quite possibly still my favorite smell, and it’s no wonder to me why you get carded when you try to buy it these days. It’s like getting mad at people for trying to get rid of prairie dogs – you can’t put a Whack-a-Mole game in every Chuck E Cheese’s, Showbiz Pizza, and arcade across the country, and not expect people to want to whack prairie dogs in any way possible. It’s conditioned into our being at a young age. But as for me, Mr. Sketch smells way better than whacked prairie dog.