» My Collection

Even Mr Lawofnations doesn't know this
When I was about 10 or 11, I started collecting fluffy bugs. You know, the little furry pom-poms with eyes that have a ribbon sticking out of their bums saying "I escaped from Twycross Zoo" or something equally amusing. I don't really remember why, except that one day I worked out I had about 20 and that constituted a good start to a collection.

Labels were made and affixed to their feet, with a 6-7 digit classification number. A letter denoting whether I felt the bug was male or female, then a serial number (01, 02, etc - had to go round adding extra 0s once I got my 100th bug), then a three-letter code that uniquely defined the bug in question. So if it had a name, like Squiggle for example, it might be SQL or SGL.

Each bug was catalogued on one page of A4 lined paper - I drew a picture of the bug in colour to show its most prominent characters, put in measurements and observational notes on its behaviour and occasionally "married" a bug off to another.

I put this display of utter anal retentiveness down to the fact that, even at the age of 10 I was a frustrated palaeontologist, and this was the closest that I could get to a museum collection.

I am also collecting masters degrees. I have an MA, an MSci and an MRes. If I stuff up my PhD I'll have an MPhil too.

And the MRes is in taxonomy and systematics - collecting and classifying living things.
(Tue 16th Jan 2007, 19:49, More)

» Going Too Far

Her hair was so silky and shiny...
On a failed PhD attempt in the US, I lived with a girl who was sleeping with our married supervisor. He let her steal my mate's research, ruining his first year and his PhD thesis. When she was off on fieldwork with said professor (i.e. romantic break in Mexico with the twunt), I moved out.

On my last night in the flat my mate, his girlfriend and his dog came round. I'd been peeing in her shampoo all week. He grabbed her pump-action hairspray and peed in that. Then we took the dog into the kitchen and gave him all her glasses and mugs to lick. Next, we played a rough and tumble game with the dog on her bed. The grand finale was to go back to the bathroom and clean the dog's teeth with her electric toothbrush.

We possibly went too far when we took ALL the replacement heads and cleaned the dog's teeth with them too. She was probably using those heads for a year afterwards.

Yes it's long but I'm new.
(Tue 14th Nov 2006, 7:24, More)

» Where is the strangest place you have slept?

Playing a cruel game of "buckaroo"
Not me but...

I was friendly with all the engineering students in my college. One of the lads had decided to try out for the university rowing team AND acquired a fit bird to shag by three weeks into the term. As a consequence, the only place he could catch up on sleep was during engineering lectures. All my mates would sit either side of him, and when the head started lolling forward it was a race against time to see how high they could stack up pencil sharpeners, rubbers, sweets etc before his head came smacking down on the desk, scattering stationery all over the three rows in front.

Me, I fell asleep in a palaeontology lecture and woke up to find I'd written all about "penis worms". This troubled me for ages. Then I found out my lecturer was daft as a brush and that was actually what he'd said.
(Fri 29th Dec 2006, 11:24, More)

» Work Experience

Best job ever!
My very first venture into employment was work experience. The only good point about my dad being a deputy headteacher at my school was that he got me the cushy top job on the list - quality control at the local brewery.

I got to play around with chemicals, fill tiny phials with beer and whack them through mass spectrometers, grow bacteria and yeast cultures and (of course) drink lots of beer out of pyrex beakers (which was the best bit, especially for my immature 15-year-old liver).

The only bad bits were when a co-worker accidentally tipped over a vat of caramel on my feet, and when I accidentally set fire to the sink.
(Thu 10th May 2007, 19:42, More)

» Housemates from hell

Wonder how much mileage I can get out of her...
In the God-forsaken hellhole that is St Louis, I shared a flat with a fellow female student who seemed to have taken the view that as she moved in a week before I did and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, she should be absolved of all cleaning duties for the duration of the lease. She didn't even use the toilet brush after she successfully basted the entire bowl with her excrement.

The defining moment was just after Christmas. I went home, and flew out a couple of days before she did, but returned a week before she came back to town. When I opened the door to the flat, I was hit by a wall of stench. She'd had a party the night before she went home for Christmas. But she neglected to clear anything up before she left. Three weeks earlier. Beer bottles were now welded to the coffee table (I lost absolutely no sleep over the sheer amount of varnish that I ripped off in the course of separating the two). There were dubious stains in the bathroom (and of course, shit smeared all over the toilet). The worst of it was of course the kitchen. She'd obviously cooked earlier before the beer started getting chucked around, and that was where the plates had remained.

For three weeks.

The friends who had picked me up from the airport were so horrified they took me back to theirs and cooked me dinner so I wouldn't have to eat in the cesspool that was our flat. To add insult to injury, she'd left a very giggly message on our answerphone saying she hadn't had time to do the dishes (not apologising or anything, just explaining why I came back to rotting cabbage). There were no flies, but she had switched off the gas in sub-zero temperatures, so I'm amazed they didn't all hatch the moment I stuck the heating back on.

Think it was at that point that my friends started calling her "skank ho" behind her back. I got my own back eventually though.
(Sat 7th Apr 2007, 21:38, More)