tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post7774227794599337904..comments2023-08-19T02:26:10.888-07:00Comments on Wackmobiles and Spurious Brainchildren: Haunting a Giant... Bickford?Spoony Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10730057249256927206noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-72725808979836030692007-11-04T12:43:00.000-08:002007-11-04T12:43:00.000-08:00` I must have child-bearing fingertips!` I must have child-bearing fingertips!Spoony Quinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10730057249256927206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-9124480513097364962007-11-04T07:18:00.000-08:002007-11-04T07:18:00.000-08:00Hello again Miss Quine.It's been a long time, but ...Hello again Miss Quine.<BR/><BR/>It's been a long time, but I'm happy to see that you're continuing to give birth to such entertainingly spurious brainchildren with such gusto.<BR/><BR/>:)Simonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02267233281434285112noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-49920753392274972842007-11-03T09:32:00.000-07:002007-11-03T09:32:00.000-07:00` Wow. That's some pretty gross stuff! Long ago, w...` Wow. That's some pretty gross stuff! Long ago, when I had a TV, I saw an elephant masturbator at work!<BR/>` Those big bull elephants can be dangerous, so they are trained to walk into a cage where people can get in and out of before the person with the plastic bag comes along.Spoony Quinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10730057249256927206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-28709025408154694452007-11-02T21:03:00.000-07:002007-11-02T21:03:00.000-07:00WORST SCIENCE JOBSORANGUTAN-PEE COLLECTORTheir wor...WORST SCIENCE JOBS<BR/>ORANGUTAN-PEE COLLECTOR<BR/>Their work is noninvasive—for the apes, that is . . . "Have I been pissed on? Yes," says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of "noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling." Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen's rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. "It's kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what's going on in their bodies," Knott says.<BR/>SEMEN WASHERS<BR/>It's a job that separates the boys from the men, OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like "cryobiologist" or "laboratory technician," but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. "Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, 'Do you know you'll be working with semen?' " says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country's largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let's start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened "donors" emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the "plasma" from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it's off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.<BR/>"The hardest part is explaining it to friends," Schillinger says. "But we do have stories." Like what? "Like the donor who was in the room for the longest time. We had a big discussion about who was going to check on him. Turns out he thought he had to fill up the entire specimen cup." <BR/>MANURE INSPECTOR<BR/>The smell is just the start of the nastiness. Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That's the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It's a load of crap. And it's loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.<BR/>Farmers fertilize their fields with manure, but if the excrement is rife with E.coli, then so will be the vegetables. Luckily for us, researchers at the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety are knee-deep in figuring out how to eliminate these bacteria from our animals, their poop and our food. But to develop techniques to neutralize the nasty critters, they must go to the source.<BR/>"We have to wade through a lot of poop," concedes Michael Doyle, the center's director. "If you want to get the manure, you've got to grab it. Even when you wear gloves, the fecal smell tends to get embedded in your skin." Hog poop smells the worst, Doyle says, but it's chicken poop's chokingly high ammonia content that brings tears to researchers' eyes.<BR/>FLATUS ODOR JUDGE <BR/>Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level—or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people's farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each "episode of flatulence," Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and—eureka!—Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.<BR/>DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER<BR/>In the early '80s, Virginia Tech profs Tracy Wilkins and David Lyerly studied the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile in sample after sample after sample of loose stool from the disease's victims. They became such crack dysentery docs that they launched a company, Techlab, dedicated to making stool-analysis kits. Today, Techlab employs 40 people, 19 of whom spend their working hours opening sloppy stool canisters and analyzing their contents in order to test the effectiveness of the company's kits. You'd have to have a pretty good sense of humor, right? Well, fortunately, they do. The Techlab Web site sells T-shirts with cartoons on the front (two flies hover over two blobs of dung; one says to the other, "Pardon me, is this stool taken?") and the company motto on the back: "Techlab: #1 in the #2 Business!" <BR/>BARNYARD MASTURBATOR <BR/>Researchers who want animal sperm —to study fertility or for artificial insemination—have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal's rectum, shove an artificial vagina onto the animal's penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way—manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal's nether regions. "All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe," says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. "It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking." Electroejaculation generally requires anesthetizing the animal and is typically used on zoo dwellers. The other two methods—the artificial vagina, or AV, and the good old hand—require that animals be trained to the procedure. The AV—a large latex tube coated with warm lubricant —is used primarily to get sperm from dairy bulls (considered the most ornery and dangerous of bovines). The bull gets randy with a steer; when he mounts the steer with his forelegs, a brave technician, AV in hand, insinuates himself between the two aroused beasts and deftly redirects the bull penis into the mock genitalia, which he must then hold tight while the bull orgasms. (Talk about bull riding!) Three additional technicians attempt to ensure this (fool)hardy soul's safety by anchoring themselves to restraining ropes attached to a ring in the bull's nose. Alas, this isn't always absolutely effective: Everyone who's wielded an AV has had at least one close call, and more than a few have been sent to the hospital. The much safer "digital pressure" is used mostly with pigs, who are trained from an early age to mount a small bench while the researcher reaches around with a gloved hand and provides appropriate pleasure—er, pressure. <BR/>CARCASS CLEANER <BR/>Natural history museums display clean white skeletons or neatly stuffed animals, but what their field biologists drag in are carcasses flush with rotting flesh. Each museum's taxidermist has his own favorite technique for tidying things up. University of California, Berkeley, zoologist Robert Jones swears by his strain of flesh-eating buffalo-hide beetles and has no problem reaching his bare hand into a drawer to pull out a rancid shrew skeleton swarming with thousands of these quarter-inch bugs. Jeppe Møhl at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum deposits sperm whales and dolphins into vast empty tanks and lets nature take its course. And then there's the boiling method, useful for chemically preserved samples that bugs won't touch—an approach favored by archaeologist Sandra Olsen, who has done her own skeleton work. She recalls a particularly vivid experience boiling down hyena paws: "It felt like inhaling the gases would literally kill us." Nah. It merely gave her a lung infection.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-63171257383143691772007-11-01T19:48:00.000-07:002007-11-01T19:48:00.000-07:00` Morgy... I know, my life should be called Tres B...` Morgy... I know, my life <I>should</I> be called Tres Bizarre!<BR/><BR/>` Nick; it's very hard for me to estimate (by dragging and clicking) the size I need to display the photos, so I have to do it manually.<BR/>` Plus, if Blogger is going to shrink my (larger) photos, so you can't actually view them in their original size, I don't want them being uploaded on there in the first place.<BR/>` As for the last day of the haunt, I didn't go because I had some... complications and wound up passed out in a bathtub. It's a long story. But at least I got some very good rest!<BR/>` Luckily, I didn't need to navigate safely through all the creatures, or the giant Bickford, though I hope you've managed to pull through?<BR/><BR/>` Gareth, I guess I'm just obsessed with getting my pictures displayed the right size and shape - I've always been able to do it before much more easily:<BR/>` I usually upload my photos elsewhere, then copy a bunch of 'image' html codes all down the post and then copy the URL of each photo in each piece of code.<BR/>` No way in hell I would stay in that trailer - it's just a freezing cold box with a deafening generator that very shakily powers a light bulb.<BR/>` All it was for was to replace the tent because changing into our costumes with paying customers trying to get in at us constantly kind of spoils things.<BR/>` Plus, then we had to parade out into the maze ahead of everyone, so they saw us very clearly.<BR/>` While the trailer was incredibly inconvenient, at least nobody saw us... though it was hard for us to see well enough to get into the maze.<BR/><BR/>` Angel, yeah, you have no idea. And PayPal somehow 'lost' the $800 dollars we gave them.<BR/><BR/>` Thanks, Galtron. Since we've been waiting since the 29th for our key to even get <I>into</I> the new apartment, I still don't know if we'll have the internet, but if we don't, we'll probably just tack that onto our new expenses.Spoony Quinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10730057249256927206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-36013446786693434772007-11-01T19:10:00.000-07:002007-11-01T19:10:00.000-07:00That's so funny you were in a giant commercial log...That's so funny you were in a giant commercial logo! That IS scary! You look so... well, isn't that what you usually look like? I think I would be scared if I saw you on the street -- they hired the right person!<BR/><BR/>Good luck with everything! Hope you still have the internet!!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-34093327999535097662007-11-01T09:37:00.000-07:002007-11-01T09:37:00.000-07:00sheeeez but you been busy!!!it looks totally exhau...sheeeez but you been busy!!!<BR/>it looks totally exhausting- but i would have loved to be there too!!!AngelConradiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09423318903817661244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-68494681055371644722007-11-01T04:52:00.000-07:002007-11-01T04:52:00.000-07:00Yeah I do the same as Saintly Nick with the photos...Yeah I do the same as Saintly Nick with the photos. Just a few clicks and it's all done. I didn't even realise you could go into all that resizing stuff or is my blogger different from yours lol?<BR/><BR/>Neato post dude! I guess the maze must be quite a distance away from you otherwise you would be going back to your apartment each night unless staying in the trailer is all part of the experience for you. And that's how I imagine you to be all the time in your mad scientist's lab coat - looking like a ermmmmm mad scientist :-D<BR/>Nice way to spend Halloween though.Kingcoverhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02416924407739626732noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-56848663384829212472007-10-31T20:56:00.000-07:002007-10-31T20:56:00.000-07:00Sara, you are just too bloody intelligent, creatin...Sara, you are just too bloody intelligent, creating dilemmas were they need not be. I never use a calculator to figure out the accurate height and width for the code for Blogger to display photos. Just indicate the size you want displayed (Large, Medium, or Small), then the orientation of the photo (left, right, enter), click on the search for the photo file on your computer, and load the thing. You can edit the size on the dashboard and, one posted, clicking on the photo allows one to view it at its orginal size.<BR/><BR/>Enough of that! I hope you are having fun in your haunting. Thanks for this post and the photos. May you get some good rest.<BR/> <BR/>May you also safely navigate through the ghosties, goblins, sprites, trolls, imps, hobgoblins, ghouls, banshees, poltergeists, specters, spirits, witches, and warlocks wandering the earth this night.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16939152657551690867noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14272138.post-23091353871991981732007-10-31T19:11:00.000-07:002007-10-31T19:11:00.000-07:00I think that your blog should be called Tres Bizar...I think that your blog should be called Tres Bizarre.<BR/><BR/>I wish I hadn't taken that name. That way you could use it on another blog since you already have like 300????<BR/><BR/>-Jmorgetronhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11817172265416669063noreply@blogger.com