An Interesting Observation...

Since it's Saturday, and Cate at Show My Face was kind of enough to kick this whole thing off, I thought I'd join in on the Six Word Saturday Thing.

Poignant Social Commentary Via My Blog

I picked up on this little trend late Thursday evening, but since I teach you guys how to pick up chicks in the subjunctive on Friday, I waited until today to record my observations.

Monday, I retold the story of St. Vitus, the Patron Saint of Epilepsy and Actors.
I got nine comments on the story, one of which was my own.

Thursday, I told you about how I gave Colin Firth a semen mustache.
I got thirty comments, two of which were mine, and I got three new followers and four new commenters.

...

Apparently, you people are far more enthralled with what comes out of my penis as opposed to some kid who survives being dunked in a vat of boiling lead.

I don't know whether I should be honored and a little bit humbled or if I should be concerned and a little bit scared.

Busting Six Words Out All Over Your Face

Today is my best friend's birthday. What better way to celebrate than to write a Six Word Saturday post in his honor. So, here you go, chief:

Happy Birthday to the Brewing Optometrist!

My best friend and I did a lot of stupid shit while we were in high school as teenage guys are prone to doing. Trying to pick just one story would do him a severe injustice, but I'm fucking lazy, so I'll tell you one of my favorites. One of the great things about our friendship was that it was a second generation friendship: his father and my pa had been best friends when they were in high school. Plus, he has red hair and big pecs. Hmmm...maybe I shouldn't have told you that last part.

Fortunately, he was about the only person my mom would let me ride in the car with, so he was typically the driver in our misdeeds. One day, we were in the mighty metropolis of Bluffton, IN, up to the normal chivalrous deeds that two high school lads would be up to on a fine day in early June. Such exemplary deeds as: minding our P's and Q's, rescuing kittens from trees, picking up litter, helping old ladies across the street--okay, fine, I admit it. We were buying comic books. There, are you happy? Christ almighty. You people bitch about everything.

Anyway, after we were finished in the den of dorkdom, we loaded back into the car and were pulling back out onto the main drag of the town (there was really only one drag in Bluffton, but I digress). As we were waiting for traffic to clear so that we could turn right on red, we noticed that there was a car wash in the Hardee's parking lot to our right.

Are you guys familiar with the charity car washes, or is this just a midwestern thing? The model for this is brilliant in its simplicity: you line up a bunch of cute girls to volunteer to work at the car wash. This, in turn, nets you a bunch of slovenly guys who pretend to care about charity so that they can hang out with the cute girls. You then make the slovenly males wash the cars while the girls, who are usually wearing bikini tops or white t-shirts that they've tied up in the front so their bellies are exposed, stand around holding signs to "advertise" for the car wash. Perverts Passersby see the girls and thus they decide their vehicles are in desperate need of a wash, so they pull into the parking lot for a very sick and dirty fantasy car wash, only to discover that some squeaky-voiced guy with a half-formed beard from the First Street United Methodist Church Youth Group is asking them for five bucks. Like I said, it's brilliant.

Anyway, there was a car wash next to us, with all the requisite filthy hot teens holding up their signs. But wait, there's more. There was...a clown. The clown, seeing us in our precarious position at the stop light, decided to approach the car. As we're waiting at the light and discussing all the egregious and perverted things we'd do to the high school chicks if we were given the chance Kafka, the clown sticks his head in the driver's side window (my side) and utters his stupid clown giggle. It sounded kind of like if Goofy were being given a prostate exam.

"Hey boys, you want a car wash?" the clown asks after giggling in our space.

Without missing a beat, my best friend leans over me and flips the clown a double bird right in his face. He bellows, "Fuck you, Clown!" as loudly as he can and, without checking traffic, stomps on the accelerator, rocketing us forward and around the curb. One problem: the clown's head was still in the car.

The force of the acceleration carried the clown's head with us, but--and this is rather tragic--the remainder of the clown, well, remained. As we sped away from the scene at--literally--breakneck speed, my gales of mirthful laughter suddenly turned to the terrified shrieks of the damned as something landed in my lap. Staring back at me, with a look of horror and shock on his face with his hollow, haunted eyes staring deep into my soul, was the clown's head.

To say I've never been quite the same since would be an understatement.

So, here we are, tearing through town with the remains of a freshly decapitated clown on my freaking lap and we have no idea what to do. We can hear sirens, but can't see the pursuit cars yet. We know it would be a bad idea to be pulled over with the clown's head still in our possession. Fortunately, the Wabash River runs through Bluffton, so, as we approached the bridge, I picked up the decollated clown's head and heaved it out the window, over the railing of the bridge and into the murky brown waters below, thus ridding myself of our rather maudlin souvenir from the trip to the comic book shop.

Okay, so, the last few parts might have been a bit embellished. However, everything up to the words "Fuck you, Clown" was true. Oh, and the Brewing Optometrist did floor it to escape the scene because, seriously, clowns are lame and fucking creepy.

And now you know why I chose him to be my daughter's Godfather, which is a fitting way to end this tale because today is also my daughter's First Communion. See what I did there? I took the story full circle. Well, not really, but I kind of distracted you from the decapitated clown story, didn't I?

No? Well, fuck you, I'm not paying for your therapy. Happy Birthday, J!

Have more fun, six words at a time, over at Cate's place!

Six Word Saturday, the Second Coming

Okay, so I had some fun the last time I did this. But then, the last time I did this, I was talking about pie and blow jobs. How can you not have fun with that???

Anyway, today's six words:

I should have been a cowboy!

Back when I was in graduate school at Notre Dame, the very first reaction sequence I tried could be summed up in the words "epic fail". Nothing went right with the material I had made, and it was a simple reaction of adding a Grignard to an epoxide in the presence of a Lewis acid. Simple stuff, right (trust me, non-chemists, a monkey could do this shit).

Problem was...it never went.

I changed solvents (from anhydrous THF to THF from a still to THF run through our purification system); I changed the source of the Lewis acid (used three different bottles of copper(I) iodide from three different groups on the floor); I even remade the epoxide, thinking a different batch would help. Nothing. Still no product.

Now, for you non-chemists out there, a Grignard reagent is a kind of highly-reactive organometallic reagent, which means it mixes organics (carbon and such) with metals (bright and shiny and malleable) to give you something that will react wicked fast if you look at it cross-ways. That being said, you get a little water in there, and it all goes to hell. Fast. And being that northern Indiana in the summer is a bit...what's the word...*snaps fingers*...right, humid! A little bit of moist air and the bottle of vinyl Grignard you've got suddenly becomes magnesium-based sludge.

I suggested as much to my graduate school advisor. I know. The audacity of a first-year grad student saying "Maybe this highly reactive and water-sensitive reagent over here is the problem." My advisor insisted I was full of beans--or shit, take your pick--and gave me some different conditions to try, all using the same bottle of vinyl Grignard, all the while reminding me that what I was trying to do was a "literature reaction" (which, essentially, means that someone else has already figured this out, all I had to do was follow the recipe like a good monkey). Finally, after one of the last conditions still failed to yield the desired product, I closed my eyes, rested my head against the cool hood sash and said to myself (because everyone else in the lab was down at Happy Hour) "I should have been a cowboy..."

Yes, it was about that time that the Toby Keith song was popular, and if you've ever spent any amount of time in Northern Indiana, you'll know that country music is the aural poison of choice. Plus, I kind of liked Toby's sweet mullet.

To cap that off, I skipped work the next day (it was Saturday) and moved my stuff from my old, crappy apartment into the house I was sharing with three other guys. After moving, I was too tired to go to work, and--honestly--too pissed off with chemistry to worry about it. Unbeknownst to me, my advisor was in, running that exact reaction.

I came in Monday morning to find him standing near my hood. Figuring I was fired, he simply stated, "That bottle of Grignard is bad. Order new." And left. Vindicated, I ordered the new Grignard (actually, I ordered two, the bromide and the chloride). The reaction worked just fine after that.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that I dislike my job. I love my job. I love the people who work with me. I love the project I'm working on. I might not bust out of bed every morning like Spongebob screaming "I'm ready!", but I do hop out of bed and head off toward work and do my job with a big, dumb smile on my face.

However, every so often, a cascade of events affects me in the lab that goes so far beyond absurd that it thrusts itself deeply into the realm of situational comedy. This past week and a half has been one of those eras in my life. See, I've had this compound that we've really wanted to make, and I've made it. Problem is, it's not getting pure. And, I've tried everything. I tried traditional chromatographical ways of purifying it. Still dirty. I've tried recrystallization. Still dirty.
It might not be thermally stable, so I haven't tried sublimating and depositing it. Finally, I decided to work on the HPLC--essentially, a robot whose soul sole purpose in life is to purify compounds. Problem was...when I took my stuff up in methanol (a very polar solvent)...it didn't fully dissolve. Thinking that I would help it along with a few drops of DMSO (an even more polar solvent), my stuff suddenly crashed out of solution. Yes, I recrystallized my material with methanol/DMSO. My supervisor laughed and said, "Well, maybe we can get a paper out of that..." I took the polar solvents off and tried again. This time, however, I decided to see what would happen if I added water, since the HPLC uses water to purify the compounds.

My reaction essentially puked orange-white stuff onto the sides of the flask.

Heaving a heavy sigh, I shook my head, looked at my friend Joe, and simply said:

"I should have been a cowboy."