Exploded Your Mom’s Cambrian Energy Drinks
10:14 pm Since this will (in theory) be my last scholastic all-nighter ever I thought I’d do it in style, with many different kinds of shiny energy drinks, and blogging whenever my paper hits a lumpy point. When I went through the checkout line, the clerk informed me that a beverage known as Monster was his energy drink of choice. Oddly enough, that was the only kind I didn’t buy.
Supermarket clerks have favorite energy drinks. What is the world coming to?
10:37 pm I’ve just finished the sugar-free Red Bull. The inside of my mouth feels like a warm sno cone. Blugh.
11:34 pm Hansen’s Energy Pro bears a most unfortunate resemblance to Surge. Remember Surge? They tried promotional giveaways of the stuff when I was in high school; even then, when I could swill Mountain Dew like a hemophiliac taking transfusions, I couldn’t handle Surge.
On the brighter side of things, my cerebellum has started to squirm. The excitement hasn’t gotten up to any of my higher-level thought processing yet, but it will eventually.
3:42 am Holy shit, I am not going to finish this paper on time. All the energy drinks taste the same to me now. I am one large, sessile energy drink filter feeder, and I am writing about how the evolution of plankton poo changed the oceanic ecosystem forever.
6:17 am God, KMX is disgusting. Six pages written, 10 required, and three more hours to write. Done with plankton poo, have moved on to viciously mocking geneticists and insisting that bizarre air-mattress looking trace fossils be considered as ancestral arthropods. For all I know they are actually superintelligent yeast colonies.
8:01 am Well, that was possibly the worst paper I’ve written since high school. But that’s okay – I can flunk paleontology and still graduate. I can’t flunk anthropology, but absurd essay exams on the three tenuous pieces of evidence in favor of Whorfianism are best done on no sleep and scary-sounding animal energy products, so that’s fine. Six and a half hours until my sleeping packing booze fest begins!
12:31 pm I just spilled the last of my energy drink all over my shirt. One question to go, plus an extra credit mini-essay if I’m still awake. I hate Benjamin Lee Whorf, but not as much as I hate the whole community of anthropologists who decided to take him halfway seriously. Except for de Groot. I can’t hate anyone named de Groot.
I smell like lemon-scented sugar cane pee.
katie wrote:
Plankton poo? Now that’s a paper I’d like to read.
Posted 05 Jun 2020 at 5:19 am ¶
yami wrote:
So this one guy’s theory is that the evolution of mesozooplankton capable of preying on single-celled algae was
an important link in the food chain, because only medium-tiny creatures can efficiently eat super-tiny creatures
at first a way to keep nutrients in the top of the water column (floating poo pellets!) and slow the transport of organic carbon to the bottom of the ocean (which provides an explanation of some carbon isotope ratios we see at the base of the Cambrian)
also a way to rapidly transport nutrients from the top of the water to the bottom, where they could support a larger benthic ecosystem (concentrated food that hasn’t been totally chewed by bacteria on the way down)
I never did figure out exactly why he thought floating-poo plankton would have evolved before sinking-poo plankton – he never explicitly said anything about it, but he did advocate both floating and sinking poo as triggers for expanded ecological opportunity, and if you’re going to have both scenarios the sinking poo has to come last or you get the carbon isotope data wrong. But anyway, that’s the theory behind the plankton poo thing.
Posted 06 Jun 2020 at 11:23 am ¶
des wrote:
I’ve been hating on the Whorf for yonks, but I still know I’m going to have to buy and read his wretched book some day. I came close in the University bookshop, but the preface announced that he started his career with creationist argumentation against evolution, which sums the fucker up perfectly, really. Sigh.
Posted 07 Jun 2020 at 10:09 am ¶
Lab Lemming wrote:
I have no idea how your “related entries” thing sent me here, but this is the funniest blog entry I’ve read all year.
Posted 20 Mar 2020 at 2:30 am ¶