I am better than my Tutors.

James Cook University is world-renowned as one of the top universities in the world for Marine Biology - precisely why I'm here. So far, the course has been fairly good. Sometimes disorganised, but mostly good. The only thing that bugs me are the tutors for the practical components of our subjects. For the most part, they suck.

A few weeks ago, we were looking at a dissected squid and fish. The task we were given involved drawing up a table of differences between the two in 100 words. For starters, this is retarded, because these two animals are so goddamn different you could write forever about it. And then it happened:

"And while fish reproduce externally, squid give birth to live young."

My bullshit detector went off straight away but I didn't say anything, because, hell, if these suckers want to lose marks by writing complete crap that's fine with me. I got busy that evening making sure I was right - and I was. Squid lay eggs, like every other damn cephalopod. So I kicked up a bit of shit by emailing the co-ordinators about it and got the tutors in trouble. Fun fun. Then on my assignment I added a smug little footnote about them being wrong. Man I love being smart.

A week later our assignments were available for collection. Mine was filled with wonderful little comments like this:




I thought about emailing the co-ordinators and telling them what unprofessional hooligans they were being represented by.... but I was laughing too hard. Fuck me if I can't take a joke.

Chemistry Tutes = JCU History

My Tuesdays are made up of eight delicious contact hours that run until 9pm. Wednesdays are worse, beginning with an 8am start and running til 5pm. It's a struggle getting up for those 8am Chem tutes, but it means that you can get a nice fresh hot breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, baked beans and HASH BROWNS! In the class, the Chemistry lecturer/tutor goes through a bit of the actual work, but spends most of his time telling us little stories about the uni's colourful chemical history. Two are of particular note, so I thought I'd share the joy.

JCU's NMR Machine
For those of you who don't know what NMR stands for, it's shorthand for enema.

For those of you who DO know what NMR stands for, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, this story will make more sense. Several years ago James Cook Uni bought a brand new shiny NMR Machine thing (you can tell I wasn't listening in the lecture) that makes molecules vibrate and it's used to determine what molecules are in a sample. Or something. They use this same technology in medicine with MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machines.
Anywho, they imported the machine in from overseas and it arrived in the country on time, but for some reason it took six months to get it to the actual uni. Upon further investigation it was discovered that since the stamp on the box mentioned the word "Nuclear" nobody was game to go anywhere near it for fear of their balls dropping off for those six months. Customs had had a real good long poke around at it (with a ten foot pole, no doubt) before it got the okay. Apparently this is why MRI machines are called that instead of NMRI - people freak out when they see "nuclear" on anything.

Any chance to use a Bazooka
I wish I could remember what chemical it was, some sort of liquid chlorine compound I think, that they used in great quantities to keep the tanks nice and clean over in the aquaculture buildings back in the day. Since the uni used it in bulk they bought it in bulk and stored it in big metal drums. The problem with this chemical was that over time it would release gas, and since it was in a sealed drum, the drum would get bloated and people started to get a little bit worried that they'd go boom any moment. The uni had over-ordered the stuff and they had about half a dozen of these big bloated drums lying around waiting to blow up. So what would you do to dispose of them? You could ask a chemist OR you could get the bomb squad in. Guess what the blokes in charge chose. So the army turns up in their big manly trucks with their big manly guns and decides that the best thing to do would be to stick the drums in a field and shoot them with a bazooka! And they did. The explosion was pretty big - like REALLY big. It knocked some of the humvees over, two soldiers had ruptured ear drums and it blew out all the windows in the buildings and cars within a 200 metre radius.
Turns out that if they'd asked the chemists, they would have been told to stick a hose in the drums and fill them with water. Chemicals disposed of. End of story. I think I still would have preferred the bazooka though.

Library Treasures

The JCU Library is pretty good. Of course, I've never been to another uni library so I can hardly compare. There's a help desk where they encourage you to ask them anything about anything. There's always a computer available for you to use. It's always quiet. But there's one thing that, shall we say, 'sticks out' a little bit from your standard library. We have a naked man chained to the wall.

He's standing right next to the libarary catalogue searching computer. As a side note, they've tried to be cool by calling the catalogue "Tropicat" which sounds like one of those lame nicknames somebody wants to be called but nobody does. I think the Library staff even cringe when they say it. Anyway, It's kind of distracting having a naked man right next to you when you're trying to search for journal articles. I'll be there typing in my search then suddenly realise I've put "plant* AND etiolat* AND penis OR bondage".

It's one of those things you don't want to get caught staring at but at the same time you can't help it. So let's have another peek:

At least it's not as bad as the stone sculpture outside UTS. I so wish I had a photo.

At Home with the Nuns

At John Flynn there is an annual event called the At Home Dinner. Basically it's an excuse for everyone to dress up in drag and dance like Napoleon Dynamite. This year everyone had to pick a song or movie beginning with the letter of their deck - T-Deck did Titanic, F-Deck did Footloose and, not surprisingly, N-Deck did the entire Napoleon Dynamite dance.

L-Deck, as I have mentioned in the past, has been dubbed "The Nunnery" because we're made up entirely of girls. It only seemed appropriate to dress up in habits and dance to Like A Virgin.


Oh, don't we look so wholesome? We walked to dinner in two lines with our hands in the praying position and promptly sat down and started guzzing down the goon and passion pop. One by one they called up the different decks to perform. We were one of the first few to go through. We got up and our DA Julia gave a speech about how we'd been excommunicated because we liked to indulge in certain activities that the church didn't approve of, and that we "know more about heaven than you could ever imagine". One of the girls had spliced together this prayer song that came on first before it abruptly changed to the first chorus of Like A Virgin. When this change occurred we threw off our habits to reveal our inner souls.



HOT!! Our dance consisted of such classic moves as the group orgy, the Mexican bum-slap and me giving a lucky stranger a lap dance. We ended up coming second which we were all pretty stoked about. The prize choccies were gone in about 8.54 seconds.

Then we all got outrageously drunk and I projectile vomited all over a rival college's bathroom.

Got Dead People?

Today for geology we got a new lecturer who was a little more enthusiastic than the last one. I was almost sad to see the old one go, because he was very... 'quaint' is really the definition of his character. In farewelling him we let go of the geologist stereotype:

It's not all bad news, however. Let me run through the way in which he opened his lecture on mineralogy. All pictures are pretty accurate to what he put on the board.

Lecturer: Okay, so let's say you die. Everyone dies, calm down, it's gonna happen one day. We bury you in your little box in a nice little graveyard.



You're sitting there, quite happily decomposing. Now, what are the most common elements in the human body?

Me: OMG loiek Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen!!!!!!! LOLZ!

Lecturer: (with an aside of 'Emily, you rule so much, see me after class naked') Right! Now let's say it's a few million years down the track. You've been covered in a few kilometres of sediment and ocean and stuff. By this stage there's not really much left of you apart from a few squashed pockets of carbon


Then, OH NO! HERE COMES A SUBDUCTION ZONE!

Now your remains are pretty far down where the pressure is immense, so what are you made of?

(Silence)

Lecturer: Okay, who has a dimond ring here?

(A few hands go up)

Lecturer: OH MY GOD YOU'RE WEARING DEAD PEOPLE!

He was still laughing in our prac a few hours later. It's always nice to see somebody being passionate - this guy was really getting his rocks off...on rocks.

Cuckoo Curlews

I've mentioned curlews in the past as birds that wake you up in the middle of the night by screeching in the college grounds, but my description was severely lacking. I forgot to mention their legs are made of wire and you can bend them in all sorts of wacky shapes. I made this one myself:

Pretty cool, huh?

JFC: Home of the Quad Run

Every college has its own little traditions. The kind of stuff that the guys in charge know about but turn a blind eye to because it's culture! John Flynn has a few nice ones that I thought I'd share.

The Quad Run

Everybody who goes to John Flynn has to do at least one Quad Run before they leave/get kicked out. The quad is a big grassy area with a few trees in the middle of the college where people play footy, lounge about or go for rides in the resident kangaroos' pouches. At night however, the quad turns into a playground for something a little odd. Flynners from all over come (most of the time a touch intoxicated) to do a couple of laps of the quad, do some pushups, flex their gargantuan biceps and impress the ladies. Twist is, they're butt naked. Shoes are allowed, actually, and Batman capes have become quite fashionable lately.

My only complaint is that I live in L-Deck (also known as The Nunnery or The Convent). L-Deck is separated from the quad by one of the other college buildings, meaning that we miss out on all the Quad Run action. I propose that, since we have a very nice new concrete slab in front of the L-Deck buildings , the Slab Run be incorporated with the Quad Run so that the poor nuns get to see some flesh too.

Gavin Peterson is coot

Nobody knows quite when it happened, but a long time ago there was a boy called Gavin Peterson. Now, Gav was a bit of a ladies' man and was admired by many during his time at John Flynn. One girl happened to be quite taken with Gav, but she apparently wasn't too crash hot in the spelling department. Thus her declaration of affection yields the classic message "Gavin Peterson is coot".

It has become a tradition of John Flynn to write "Gavin Peterson is coot" anywhere and everywhere. You can see it scrawled on toilet doors, under beds, desks, on trees and even on t-shirts. People have seen it written interstate and even overseas. Impressive, eh?

I myself have written it four times in various places. I hate graffiti, but in doing this I feel like I am an exception to the rule - I'm doing my duty as a Flynnian!

The Bongo Van

A while back St Paul's procured a van. Not just any van, but the oldest, crappiest van they could find. They took out the engine and stripped it of anything it didn't really need for its intended purpose. It was christened the Bongo Van. The idea is that the fossils jump in and buckle up (if it even has buckles), then the freshers push it wherever it needs to go. It's one of the main modes of transport to inter-college cricket games.

My very first Bongo Van experience was during the 4.30am wake-up call on the first night at college. We neared the St Paul's carpark and noticed that there was one vehicle that didn't quite look like the others. As in it was lying on its side in the
parking spot.

It is a long-standing tradition that Flynners try to steal the Bongo Van. The greatest story ever told of this was that some bloke went over to the van in the middle of the night, dismantled the whole thing and hung the pieces from the trees in the quad. Brilliant, and it'll be hard to beat. On several occasions we've ventured over to the Bongo Van late at night to see if we could turn ourselves into legendary freshers, and on all of these occasions we've found the van to be heavily guarded. We're talking people sleeping on mattresses around it. Big people. It was unanimously decided to leave our hopes and dreams for later. A lot later.

The Haunted Rooms

This one isn't really a tradition but it's still creepy. There are several rooms in the college that are said to be haunted. We've been told that in the past there was a fireman going around and checking that all the fire extinguishers were in good nick. One of them wasn't and it blew up and killed him. I don't know whether it's true or not, but it still might explain some of the creepy stuff that happens. In one room if you throw open the door it sometimes bounces back - but there's nothing for it to bounce off. In another people complain that at night when they're sleeping they feel something pushing hard on their chests, like somebody's trying to crush them. When they get up to look there's nobody there. Spooky, huh? I guess living in a brand new building has its advantages - nobody's died in it yet. Hopefully, anyway.

GOOD MORNING ST MARK'S!!!!

I'm sure many people have fond memories of their first night at college. Undoubtedly there will be a lot of booze, a lot of yelling, a lot of vomiting and then a lot of hangovers. Ours was no different.

First I must explain the fresher dance. Every year at John Flynn (JFC for short) the student exec teaches all the widdle freshers a dance that they have to do whenever they hear the designated song, no matter where they are or what they're doing. This year it's Hung Up by Madonna, and the dance consists of such classic dance moves as the Mr Bean Thrust, the Shopping Trolley, the Sweeper and the Monkey.

You can probably understand that getting up at 4.30am is not enjoyable (Alison will tell you this fairly often). Put that together with a late night of heavy drinking and spewing and you have the sort of cruelty the fossils inflict on the freshers. At said time we rose from the dead to our DAs beating our doors down to get us up and into the quad. Upon arrival the tell-tale tick tock of Hung Up started belting out from somebody's room and we were forced to dance. Alas, this was not the end of the morning's activities. The hundred or so freshers were then rounded up and marched to all the other colleges, where we proceeded to wake them up with rather loud group "GOOD MORNING!!!"s, war cries and (my personal favourite) airhorns. It was a long and difficult journey seeing as though many of us were still a bit tipsy, but we did it in the end and laugh about it now.

Don't you just love O-Week?

Welcome to sunny (one so true) Townsville!

Townsville, Townsville, Townsville. What is there to be said about this sleepy little town where all the shops are closed on Sundays, where petrol is 10c cheaper than Sydney and where multi-laned roundabouts pollute the streets like toxic prawns in the Harbour? Well, that's about it actually.

James Cook University is a diamond in the rough of Townsville. One could quite happily live there and not need to venture outside the campus, as long as they didn't have various college activities requiring purchase of outrageous costumes. The Douglas Campus, as it is known, is quite small in comparison to many universities in Sydney. The med students complain about the ten minute walk from the college to the faraway Medical Sciences building. Of course, this arduous trip can be made in two minutes by car, which is an option a number of students choose.

The university is in the middle of a national park, meaning that a great variety of animals can be found mingling with the students. Bush turkeys are apparently quite fond of the smell of the refectory and can be found outside fairly often. Curlews, birds that look like kookaburras with stilts, enjoy late-night shrieking just outside the dorms and are thus the natural enemy of pre-exam students. Besides the birds, it is not uncommon to see kangaroos eating the grass next to your dining hall, butterflies trying to rape your sparkly fresher hat and cane toads hanging out in the puddle of washing machine water. Ahhh, such are the delights of nature.

Among the bizarre trees that congregate in the university grounds, there lie great tombstones...or at least, that's what the buildings look like anyway. There are a number of questionable architectural ventures, for example the Chemistry building looks...um...cheesy?

Can't even begin to imagine what they were thinking. Probably about lunch. We can't forget these beautiful window shades adorning several Humanities buildings. Note that this is the closest area to the colleges and takes a horrendous 3 minute walk from door to door.

The two general main lecture theatres are the HLT and CLT. The big sign outside the HLT says "Sir George Kneipp Auditorium" and the CLT hardly even has a sign, so it is only by word of mouth that we know where and what either actually is. Then there's the matter of what HLT and CLT really stand for. Most people get the 'Lecture Theatre' part out, but the H and the C are still a mystery even to the uni admin staff I asked. Upon asking a second year I solved the dilemma: "Huge Lecture Theatre" and "Crappy Lecture Theatre".

That's the uni sorted, what about the colleges? There are seven on-campus colleges and anyone who lives off campus wants to live on-campus. Until this week, I thought the movies had hammed college life up. I was wrong. It's even more crazy.

For example, take my college: The John Flynn College. John Flynn has its foundations based firmly on Christian values, and last year's fresher shirt read "Flynners do it like ANIMALS!". I've never come across the terms 'fresher' and 'fossil' in Australia until now. A fresher is a brand new shiny uni student and a fossil is a returning student. Upon arrival at John Flynn in 2006 all the freshers are greeted by the student executive committee and given a sparkly hat with their name on it. They are not to remove the hat unless showering or sleeping - it is to be worn at all times. Punishment for not wearing it varies from standing on a chair and singing Mary had a Little Lamb to pushups and having to introduce yourself to everyone with a megaphone, among others. There are many variations of the sparkly hat in evidence. Showercaps, stripey bibs, foam visors, bandanas and dorky caps with the peak pointing up have all been used by the different colleges over the years.

Further analysis will be given to life at JCU and JFC a little later, as they are playing Madonna's Hung Up and I must go out and do the fresher dance to it.