On my way into the lab yesterday, I noticed major construction works going on in the main university quad. I was struck by how small and dainty the bulldozer was – only about the size of a bicycle – and by the fact that there didn’t seem to be pipes or anything else useful being unearthed to account for the massive swathe of fine grass that had been exposed.
And that’s when I noticed the cops – half a dozen Metropolitan police in full regalia, buttons and brass glinting in the sun as they staked out the cordoned area. And the handful of men and women in white disposable suits, pawing through the rain-soaked dirt one clod at a time. As I watched, one of the CSIs pulled out a deflated black balloon – no doubt debris from yesterday’s lackluster anti-budget-cut demonstration – and examined it briefly before throwing it over his shoulder. In no time at all, a few heavies had erected a square green tent to hide whatever ever it was they were exhuming.
Or whomever.
The rumors had already hit my department by the time I got there: human remains, it was said – nobody knew how old. Maybe they’d discovered some stray bits of Jeremy Bentham that hadn’t made it into the Box? Fodder for your next novel, a few people quipped: you could call it Death on the Quad.
Murder turned out to be the day’s theme. A few hours later, one of our PhD students was giving his viva talk, and my boss launched his introduction like this:
“He had a very unusual career path into Biology. In addition to doing a Bsc in Physics and a Master’s in computer science, he spent a couple of years working for the Ministry of Defense. So not only does he look like he can kill you, but he actually can.”
Which is certainly one way of intimidating a thesis committee.
First!
(sorry)
Oddly, I can’t find any account of the incident in the news this morning. If anyone else has, please let me know.
When I walked through last night it looked just like they’d been laying pipes: no rozzers, nuffin. I guess the UCL newsletter will be te place to look.
And have you started a book on who it is/whodunnit? Would make a fun if gruesome competition.
PS didn’t you post this after Branwen’s? Oddness.
Perhaps they have unearthed the remains of the old Nature Network… it was a bit of a murderous day, yesterday, wasn’t it?
Professor Plum did it in the staff bar with ten milligrams of reagent-grade sodium azide.
Wow, severe comment lag. Not only does it take 3 minutes for me to upload a comment, but Stephen’s arrived five minutes after I’d posted the one that ended up below his in chronology. If this persists, we’ll all have to be careful about responding to one another in a rapid-fire thread.
Also, the comment tally on the ‘old-look’ blog is lagged too…and Branwen seems firmly stuck in the top spot!
Sorry, that should have been spelled ‘Bronwen’ – looks like we still can’t edit our own comments, eh?
Does anyone know how to edit a post once published? The pdf guide says go to the Manage menu, but I can’t work out how to get back to the Mt4 interface once you’re in the
EasyjetNature Network Orange Zone.You can if you click on the orange “Write New Entry” button and then select Manage > Comments from the menu. Looks like only the blog author can do that, though.
Oh, thanks. That answered my question of how to edit too. Perhaps that button should say ‘go to MT4’ or ‘manage blogs’ because I would never have thought that was the way to the manage blogs area.
Also – I find that sometimes even after signing in to my blog page, the orange button does not appear. I have to refresh the page to get it to show up.
I think I’m going to bookmark the mt login page.
And Bronwen (sorry, my tyop up there) is still stuck on top!
That happens to me too. Another bug is that if your session expires while writing a comment (an all-too-common occurrence as it seems to be set at something like 30 seconds at the moment), after you log back in, the Submit button vanishes. So you have to copy your text to the clipboard, hit refresh and start over (all within the 30-second limit). I’ve reported it.
Anyway, didn’t mean for this thread to degenerate into whinging. I’m just happy to be here. Anyone have any good cadaver anecdotes?
Apparently, on my floor at the hospital where I worked, someone once put radioactive stuff in a colleague’s soup. I forgot the full story, it was before my time, and I don’t think anybody actually died – at least not yet. (Really, if you’re angry at someone, and want to hurt them, radioactivity doesn’t seem like a very smart choice…)
I am sorry about the “stuck on top” situation. I managed to fail to schedule the post, so for a while there was a dead link… and then I decided to push it live properly as I hate dead links. Anyway. It seems to have been pushed down now.
From the fact that no-one noticed the dead link, it is clear that people read Jenny’s posts, and… well… don’t even know my name. 🙂
But back to cadavers…
I am not really sure that this counts, but I once gave somebody quite a bad fright. This is how it happened. Because of the rather anti-social hours I kept as an undergraduate, I frequently needed a post-lunch sleep. And I used to do this between bookshelves in the library. This was okay in the main library as it was quite easy to find a spot that people didn’t go to often. But one day I did it in the (very much smaller) music library. When someone came to check my pulse and administer first aid I, obviously, woke up.
Ha! Hope you stopped them before they issued mouth-to-mouth…unless the person in question was particularly fit.
Hmmm, now that’s an interesting pulling strategy!
shudders
PS It is possible to edit comments by going to Manage Comments??
It takes so many clicks to get from the displayed blog to the nuts and bolts that I haven’t had the energy to explore that option.
My level of impressedness with MT4 is slipping. I wonder if MT5 will fix it.
I laughed involuntarily, Richard.
(I am trying to remind myself that we had trouble with the previous platform at first as well. It was less stressful as there were far fewer of us, but teething problems there were.
Who am I kidding? I am not Pollyanna. I am burning with rage.)
I’d post a soothing picture at this juncture, but I think that functionality’s not enabled yet.
What the hell, I’m a wordsmith.
Imagine, if you will, the crocuses on my windowsill right now: delicate lavender blossoms streaked with darker purple veins, lurid golden stamens, deep green fronds pushing towards the light; sunlight refracting through their glass vases and splashing onto the desk in front of me…
Am smiling. Very pleasing that it is spring again (at least on your windowsill).
I didn’t mention that the ponds by my house are iced over – again. So not quite spring, I’d say!
Is spring contingent on minimum temperature?
Just a quick note to say that Eva is absolutely correct. The radiation poisoning incident was particularly nasty. Almost as nasty was the crackdown on record keeping following it. Apparently the regulators, when they investigated exactly how an entire vial of P-32 went missing, were not amused.
Eva – the gentleman in question did not die, no, but was hospitalized with a bad case of radiation poisoning. The poisoner was charged with aggravated assault and some odd charge with a name like “administering a noxious substance with intent to harm” or something like that.
Oh, I hate it when I see a massive police operation going on, and there’s no word of it in the news the next day. I’m so nosy and it drives me nuts! The other night we were on our way to a bar to watch the Olympic hockey semi-finals, and passed two side streets that had been cordoned off with police tape. There were five or six police cars there, and a cop walking around with a massive machine gun. Not a single word about it in the media. I hope you solve the mystery of the quad!
Oh, I hate it when I see a massive police operation going on, and there’s no word of it in the news the next day. I’m so nosy and it drives me nuts! The other night we were on our way to a bar to watch the Olympic hockey semi-finals, and passed two side streets that had been cordoned off with police tape. There were five or six police cars there, and a cop walking around with a massive machine gun. Not a single word about it in the media. I hope you solve the mystery of the quad!
This explanation just in, from the newsletter of our rather dashing Provost:
“Works have started to remedy a problem of damp in the south-eastern corner of the Quad, and last week they came across some human remains. The police were called, and concluded that they were very old, apparently over 100 years. The site has now been cordoned off for our archaeologists to work on, and there have been further finds, with animal and well as human bones. Before UCL’s foundation in 1826, the site was both a rubbish pit and a dueling ground – and the site of Trewithick’s original railway – and it is possible that the remains stem from this time. Archaeological research will no doubt solve the puzzle.”
I love the thought that it could be the remains of a felled dueler!
That’s amazing! It’s a dead rubbish collecting dueling railway worker!
The animal bones will probably turn out to be the 19th Century’s version of a KFC Original Recipe Bucket.
Wow! A duelling…um…dueller! That’s cool (except for the dead bit, although I suppose you’d be dead by now no matter what…).
keep us up to date on this one!
That is waaaay better than the modern-day murder scenario. An archeological site! Excellent.
By strange coincidence, I was just reading a book about inventions to Jr. Wintle #1 last night – the bit about steam engines and Trewithick.
I’d never heard of Trewithick, but I’m just amazed nobody dug up those bones ages ago with the amount of landscaping we tend to get in the Quad. Mind you, the holes were a lot deeper than normal.
I was just thinking how amazingly lucky this was for the current crop of UCL Archaeology students. Do you think they just dropped the normal curriculum and are just going to go at it full tilt? I guess it’s fodder for the graduate students more than the undergrads – but what great inspiration.
Hah. ‘One of his school masters described him as ‘a disobedient, slow, obstinate, spoiled boy, frequently absent and very inattentive’. There’s hope for Bob yet, then.
‘frequently absent’ – sounds like a good criteria for someone in charge of British trains.
I dunno Jenny, I feel ‘frequently absent’ could only improve the Tube management at the moment.
I saw this reported in the Metro newspaper this morning, with a couple of photos. There’s a lot of bones!
I missed this! I don’t think it’s online – or at least I couldn’t find it.