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.

Tequila - that's all I need to say.

When it comes to drinking, I can't refuse a cold Corona. When it comes to drinking hard, I can't refuse a shot or ten of my good friend Jose Cuervo. Jose and I have spent many memorable nights together, and he's the one I always take home with me at the end of the night (providing I haven't left him in somebody's toilet... or floor... or both).

We met on my 18th birthday party and have been close ever since. When my friends see him coming they know there's going to be trouble. When I decided much older men were great at kissing, Jose was there. When I decided it would be great to throw up all over someone else's bathroom, Jose was there. When I dance so hard that I'm drenched in sweat when the club closes at 5am, you'll know Jose was there. And when somebody mentioned making out with everyone in the room, ladies included, yep, it was Jose.

Jose is responsible for many of my finest and not so finest moments... God bless you, tequila.

My Bar Fridge

One of THE most important things a uni student will ever own is a bar fridge. Now, being a guru on all things alcoholic, my dad knew this and gave me a fully-stocked fridge when uni started. This is my bar fridge before O-Week:

And this is my bar fridge after O-Week:

Am I not the model uni student?

Bugger

At John Flynn College, you are given the options of living in crappy, tolerable or comparatively luxurious accomodation. If you're poverty stricken and end up with a crappy room (which, as a side note, have recently been done up and aren't too horrible anymore) you may be lucky enough to be on the balcony side and have your very own little patch of slab overlooking my bedroom window. Now imagine the following individual's dismay when they discovered that they couldn't use theirs because that's where the water heater lived.

Ripped off! Alas, somebody needs to make sacrifices so I can shower for as long as I want.

Drinking Tips for Uni Students

It is my strong feeling that drinking at universities has become a problem that undermines the academic atmosphere and turns brilliance into slobbering vomiting sloth. I have thus compiled a guide on responsible practices when drinking and how to remain respectable when one is undertaking this regretful activity.

1. Whilst doing that trick where you suction a shot glass to the side of your face by sucking all the air out with your mouth and sliding it to your cheek, don't suck too hard. You don't want people to be thinking your partner is a wifebasher, now.



2. Make sure you get REALLY close to cameras because otherwise it's hard to see you in the picture.



3. When staying the night at a friend's house, try to use some sort of support for the head. Scuba tanks aren't recommended, but they sure look funny.



4. After a few drinks, it is easy to get slightly disorientated, like this individual. No, the bottle doesn't go in that way...



...Well, that's close enough...



5. Now for hats. Hats go on your head, not your face.



Not that way, silly.




Good work!




As my uncle always said, "At uni you don't have too much money, so you're going to have to choose between food and beer sometimes. There are a lot of hungry uni students out there."

Seamus slapped my nice arse

No, I'm not revealing anything about what happened that fuzzy night after the last exam, I am merely reciting a mnemonic I use to remember the metamorphic progression of shale.

And alas, for it is probably the last time I'll ever have to use it - I'm no longer doing geology. It was one of the most influential subjects I've ever taken and I'm so glad I did it. It breaks my heart to leave behind my dear lecturer, Blenky Boy, with whom I have such fond memories. Who could forget the overnight field trip we went on together? The starry skies watched over by the luminous moon... the campfire that burned like the love in our souls... the columnar joints in the igneous rock and its delicious plagioclase phenocrysts... And who could forget how sexy he looked in this kid's camp chair?

That pose is totally turning me on.

As our love blossomed over the semester, I learned so many valuable things, like the cleavages and hardness of... hee hee... minerals. We dined on sedimentary rocks together, and on one special occasion, he rubbed his own saliva all over the rock I was studying so its features would come out. He was a man of many talents - so many desirable talents.

And when he spoke about tectonic plates I could feel my world shaking, vibrant and alive! Together we explored the mysterious trenches, scaled the highest peaks and rejoiced with the erupting behemoth volcanoes. And even though his arm was cradled in plaster, he had no shame in wiggling his noodle with it to demonstrate the P- and S- waves that so rocked my world.

In secret, we met under the canopy of green life to discuss the finer points of microgranodiorite, swathed in soft sunlight beside the restfully gurgling stream...

If it weren't for you, my sweet Blenky Boy, I would never have been able to get a high distinction in geology... Well, maybe the completed pracs and exams passed down from a second year helped a little bit.

Today's most valuable lesson

I am very proud to say I now know what cane toads and sausage rolls have in common. First of all, meet Toadby:

Toadby is a rather misfortunate cane toad who spends most of his time flaking out (ha ha) in the back lane from the college to the uni. Since this is the fastest way to the uni from our deck we have to walk past him all the time. I can pretty safely say that he hasn't visibly decomposed AT ALL since he first appeared. The smell, on the other hand, makes it pretty obvious that there are definitely some bacteria at work.

It's hard to imagine something that small and flat can smell so bad. I was gagging when I took this photo. See the sorts of sacrifices I have to go through to entertain you people?

Lunch today was sausage rolls, because some brainiac decided that they'd put it down on the special requests list. Everyone's first bite of these sausage rolls was followed by one of those "This isn't quite right" looks. They tasted kind of fruity, almost more sweet than savoury. Still, I bolted one down and grabbed another one for later.

On the way home from my Geology prac today I said g'day to Toadby. Usually the wind only blows one direction down that lane, so once I'd gotten past Toadby I thought I was in the clear. Typical, the wind had changed. I got a nice strong whiff of decomposing cane toad. Awful! A bit later in the evening I went to eat that sausage roll. My first bite was recieved a little differently this time. For some reason, it tasted exactly the same as Toadby smelt. That's what had grossed so many people out at lunch. I'd finally put my finger on what it tasted like, and it made it all the more revolting. One of those things you never thought possible.

Just a note. As it turns out, I didn't get that question on eating rocks (below) right. Makes me wonder if all those wantons I've eaten in the past might have been bull testicles or something.

Getting our rocks off

After being told at the beginning of our Geology prac that we were NOT to think about sex for the next three hours (I kid you not), we were taught how to tell the difference between silty rock and not-silty rocks: eat them. That's right, "just snap a bit off and have a chew. Don't knock it til you try it". Being the person who had snorted a bowl of soup the previous evening, I was naturally voted the official rock taste tester. I take great pride in these kinds of juvenile achievements so I took this highly flattering and sexy photo of myself:

I said it was definitely siltstone instead of mudstone. Other people thought differently, but they hadn't eaten it. I'd better be bloody right.

There were also a few interesting tidbits in the prac book itself. One was this warning:

"Even though taste is a very good way to distinguish between shale and siltstone, DON'T taste this particular rock. Don't make your friends (or enemies) eat it either. Wash your hands after examining this specimen. Really. Do not suck your fingers or pick your nose. There are metals present in potentially toxic quantities should you suck, lick or eat the specimen. Immediate death is very unlikely, it would more likely be a protracted and painful death, or just slowly damage your health. No, it's not mercury or arsenic, it's lead, so you'd probably have to eat several rocks to get really sick."

Another is this little exercise. As you can probably tell by now, our Geology lecturer is a weeny bit quirky.

"Exercise 6: Briefly examine 3/20, bauxite from Weipa. The round things are called 'pisolites' formed by..."(bla bla bla, scientific boring stuff)..." Say the word pisolite out loud (pronounced 'pizzolite'). Do not say this word to your answer sheet."

There was nothing else involved in that exercise. I worry about these guys that get hard ons from looking at dirt.

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?

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.