Ah, the smell of fear and failure.

Training students is an important part of the future in science.  Especially important is imparting the shroud of fear upon the future scientists.  Fear is an important factor, culling out the weak and mentally damaged, while focusing the strong and reminding the price for failure.  There is an art to this, first putting them on guard and self-doubt weakening their critical analysis of statement, increasing the chance of the debilitated students  accepting the statements about grad school which I will present to them.  Fear of the advisor increases the focus of the student during research, and pushes them much longer and harder.  I may even grow a large mustache, because everybody fears a professor with a gigantic, unkempt mustache.  Airhorns at random intervals will keep them off balance, while screaming imprecations about their recent simian ancestry for looking or jumping during the airhorn test, just for fun and giggles.  Psychological manipulation, called "torture' by some, can never start early enough to prepare the student for graduate school, and I will not shirk in my duty to the scientific field.

Hellooo, Stereotypes, meet my Kill-o-bot.

Yet again I am reminded that we, as Mad Scientists, are a misunderstood and stereotyped group of people.  Sure, I love a good plan to destroy the moon, or cut off all lutefisk shipments to Iceland, just to annoy them, but there are many of us that are 'mad' only because we think differently than the average bear/plebe/peon...I have just been informed that 'no one uses the term peon anymore'...anyways, you get the idea.  I know of a scientist whose only goal in research is identify and purify the pheromone to cause Monarch butterflies to group and mate, so he can strip naked, cover himself in the chemical, and be the butterfly king of the mexican mountain wintering grounds of the butterflies.  A bit creepy, but fairly harmless until you think about being covered with an orgy of butterflies on your bare skin.  Some collect stamps, some create glow-in-the-dark beer, and some make sonic rayguns to make butter inside of the cow.  Completely normal, we just don't like the box definition.

[Edit]  Um, boy, this is...so embarrassing.  After all that soapboxing, I have to amend my statement--some of us just accidentally cause  death, chaos, and species extinction (No comment on the last one).  I am REALLY glad I tested my glow-in-the-dark beer on a mouse model, because I apparently tweaked the structure a little too much and turned a completely harmless beta-barrel protein into a large pore-forming toxin which doubles as a random immune system activator.  So, um...the mouse died disturbingly quickly of hemorrhaging and a cytokine storm, making the mouse look like it was messily turned inside out.  Guess I need to tweak the recipe again, but I don't think it invalidates my above argument one bit.

 

I am a meme...

So, I have struggled this semester because of the ungrateful undergraduates and their masses of complaints--"Why are your tests so hard?", "Why won't you give us a better review sheet?", or "How do I get extra credit by eating this?". Bah. Research has gone slow, partly due to mistakes by my undergraduate research students (hereforewith will be referred to as Minions), and partly due to the infernal amount of faculty meetings I am required to attend. Like they listen to my ideas anyway. "No, Dr. X, we can't make a deprivation chamber in the morgue for students who don't turn their assignments in on time because they've offended you, just send them a strongly worded email like everyone else!" Bah, they have gotten soft, forgotten the intrigue and back-stabbing of the academic world, to say nothing of the research postdoctoral life. Aaahhh, that was the life, where it wan't a good week of research unless you had launched an attack on a rival postdoc of either a psychological or biological nature.

So, in my distraction this semester to the aforementioned reasons and lack of sleep, I accidentally befriended one of my minions. I emphasize, by mistake--I know very well that treating these things like a person encourages free thought, not to mention a vague sensation of loss when the minion eventually needs to be sacrificed. Anyway, the minion began to talk about himself and his background. I must have made some kind of grunting sound that sounded a bit like encouragement, for he babbled further, but I blocked it out and focused on the Chlamydia infection that I was starting. Temporarily blocked, for twenty minutes later, a couple of key words, "flying monkey", "costume" popped through my concentration. Curiousity got the better of me and a lengthy interrogation complete with flapping arms and what was described as the "evil monkey dance" later, I realized the full extent of what I uncovered. My minion was a flying monkey, or at the very least he still had the costume from high school, which he apparently brings out from time to time for wearing. I am now a living joke, I have an evil flying monkey as my minion. *sigh* Well played, Murphy. I am exactly one mountaintop lair and a shark with lasers away from becoming the joke of the fringe science community, the evil mad scientist.

No Punching for the Wicked?

Ok, so apparently it is considered faux pas to have a punching/kicking bag in the lab.  Now, granted, the faces of the faculty that were rotated through on the target of the bag was more the issue, but I thought that when I was faculty I would have complete freedom of decision.  bah.  There is no true freedom anymore.  This wouldn't be a problem if they would have just let me use an undergrad intern with body armor as a realistic fleeing opponent.  Is Opponent the correct word when they are actively trying to get away?  hmm.