Issue Two, this fourteenth day of March, 2003

'I wouldn't piss in his ear if his brains were on fire'

Greetings to the exiles, and especially the exile who has rejoined the fellowship (Hi Lesley). The past week has been made more bearable than usual in that we are all looking forward to the departure of the Dark Lord to the Upside-Down domains. War has not yet broken out and the odds are in favour of him leaving, although once the bombs start falling we are praying that every airline in the world, evar!, will go bust and Sauron will be forced to swim back to civilization.

He intends to return on 1st April. This is a very sick joke.

It has been a quiet week, enlivened briefly by Sauron's discovery of the Laws of Kinetics. Apparently every nuclear trafficking experiment ever done might be labouring under a misapprehension - because they are (mostly) measuring steady state conditions and not rates.

Your correspondent is quite excited by this discovery, partly because I gain a perverse kind of satisfaction from extracting real numbers from a biological system, but mainly because it's Not My Problem any more and I can come up with all sorts of ideas and be generally enthusiastic, thus gaining favour in the eyes of the Dark Power and simultaneously pissing off everyone else who actually has to do the crazed experiments. Two for the price of one and a half, you might say. It remains to be seen whether a Nature paper will be forthcoming - watch this space!

Sauron talked for nearly an hour in the lab meeting, and then proclaimed that it was time for him to 'stop twittering' and he allowed Stud Muffin to say exactly three words. This was obviously deemed enough of a break and the tirade resumed for a further fifteen minutes. My very young apprentice found it difficult to control himself; he was still tired and emotional after the events of Thursday night, and this was not helped by Grasshopper making 'waaaa-aaa waaaaa' noises throughout. Your correspondent was shocked by Sauron saying 'You might like to fantasize' and had to go and lie down in a dark, dry space for half an hour. My confusion was compounded when the Honorable Companion (Yosha? Yozza?) yet again smiled at a joke and further when he made a most sensible and helpful suggestion with respect to a technical issue I have faced this week. I shall forgive him for saying 'kinetics' in front of the Dark Master.

Other news - Pombe is the new black, or new NTF2, or something, and Sauron is going to try and find a 'Pombe Person'; failing that, to schmooze with Sir Paul Nurse, leader of the free world, and single-handedly revive Schizosaccharomyces pombe as an experimental model. Whatever.

That's all for this week. I'm now off to have a gothic fantasy.

Flying the Flag,

Richard (aka Penfold).