Banana Phone

The three Deer researchers in my lab decided to have a big Ecology lab dinner last night as a final get-together, and we invited Professor Machado, our fearless leader, along to join us. On the surface, this seemed like a brilliant idea, as all of us have grown quite close over the course of the summer, and Prof. Machado is basically one of the coolest human beings alive, so it was destined to be an amazing dinner.

Our Fearless Leader, replete with the coffee thermos that probably doesn't leave a 2 foot radius around him.

But the more I thought about it, the more doubts I had. Firstly, I hadn't heard the greatest things about our apparent restaurant of choice, Peace A Pizza, and hoped this wouldn't make a bad impression on our guest of honor, who'd never been. Secondly, I'd never invitied a professor out for dinner before, and was worried that long, awkward pauses in conversation would form, or the professor would get shunted out completely by the college kids gossiping about dormitory going-ons. And third, we'd decided that we wanted to buy Prof. Machado a token of our appreciation for his guidance and kindness, so we went to Home Depot and bought him...a banana plant. Wut. It was one of the more surreal experiences in my life, ranking up there with the Garden Ruins discovery: five college kids going to Home Depot to purchase a banana for their beloved professor. I hadn't the faintest clue of how he'd react to a banana plant, there was simply no precedent whatsoever.



Fortunately, deep analysis was trumped by superficial impressions, and we had a fantastically fun dinner where we basically made fun of each other for three hours over some really excellent pizza, culminating in the hysterical presentation of the banana. The fact that Prof. Machado could hang with us for that long is testament to just how amazingly cool he is. Probably the coolest professor of all time, rivaled only by Shimamoto who loses out because he teaches multi-variable calculus and is probably less cool in person than in class.



Actually I had nothing to talk about, this was just a puff piece. I'm waiting till today's Tour de France time trail and fantasy football draft to have anything substantive to say.

Links then:

• Inspired by the World Cup, there's now some American interest in following the English Premier League, so here's a humorous primer from Bill Simmons, and another good take here as well.
• In more football news, some CFL team just won the game on a last-second 100-yd touchdown pass. Video included.
• Get all of your running gear in one little nifty package.
• Wind-powered bike light, which is pretty brilliant, not sure why this wasn't made sooner.
• Equally brilliant but far less practical for me personally, you can now take a shower and get a tan at the same time.
• Also brilliant, and with no intended practical purpose at all, a toilet aquarium for your fish.
• New theory sez an evolutionary arms race occured between humans and snakes.
  
• Umberto Eco writes on the possibility of a hollow earth.