Issue Eleven, this sixth day of June, 2003
'Your time is worth money'
I walked into Sauron's lair one morning this week.
'You look happy,' he says accusingly.
Huh? I didn't realize being miserable was actually a condition of employment. I watched Alien: Resurrection at the weekend. Not as good as the first two movies in the series, but much better than Alien3. It struck me for the first time this week where I've come across the 'face-huggers' before. You know the face-huggers - the little, creepy vermin that attach themselves to your face and don't let go until they've done something nasty in your mouth. See where I'm going with this? There's one scene in Resurrection where Ripley fights one of the little buggers under water and finally rips the damn thing off, with a puff of white gunge. It's just a filler, wasting time in the movie.
Quite.
So, if my time is worth money, I wonder just how much an impromptu face-hug costs, and what a lab meeting could buy? I am seriously thinking of charging for the 'glutaraldehyde cross-linking', the 'pick the small colonies', the 'virtuous circle business' and most especially the 'gravity-feed gel filtration', all of which have cropped up at various times this week.
You'll be glad to hear that native gels are 'still a priority', because we all need to do them, 'every time something comes up', apparently. Of course, everything we do, all the time in the lab, we're saying 'Gosh, I wish native gels were working,' and 'native gels would solve all my problems'.
I've decided, after Sauron dismissed some results that were published by a Spanish group, that he's not racist; he hates everyone with equal venom. Mercifully I was somewhat distracted, when he was raving about something inconsequential, by the ad on the back of an old copy of Nature: Using light to explore relational harmonies in "Wa".
The workers in this building have been naughty boys and girls this week. I'm fully expecting to be kept in after school. We received an email saying that the 32-P CTP has been locked away because people haven't been signing for it. Naughty boys and girls. And two identical emails from some jumped-up domestic services mangler who should never have been allowed access to email in the first place whining about a sanitory towel being disposed of in the wrong bin. She's very 'dissappointed' [sic] in us all. Naughty girls and . . . boys??
The dihydrotestosterone the Doctor ordered in obviously hasn't had the required effect yet.
In other news, Hippy has been applying the Wire Brush of Enlightenment to the Foreskin of Ignorance and the Glans of Incompetence, with the upshot that the Doctor has been producing and purifying - you guessed it - NTF2. A common cry from the Hippy is, 'Where's the bloody medic gone?' Actually, I quite like the Doctor, and think he has great potential. This has nothing at all to do with the fact that he called your correspondent 'mad, but in a nice sort of way' on Thursday.
Studmuffin made me laugh in the weekly wan- I mean, lab meeting. Apparently he is making sure that, in the assays, he 'has an excess of everything'. I guess he'd describe the menage à quatre - or love oblong - that he experienced while in Venice at the weekend as having two protagonists, too. Unfortunately Sauron then said that this was an 'ideal candidate for the native gels'. I really should have him mounted in a museum somewhere so that future generations can exclaim in awe that I had the forebearance to not slay him out of hand.
Another day, another convenient restriction site.
Richard (- George III had nothing on me).