One ornithologist, after 10 minutes of listening to a seminar, suddenly screamed and yelled at the seminar speaker saying "Boy, you know nothing about statistics!" This was typical behavior for this wonderful person. (I suppose the pertinent sentiment is that such arguments are so very vicious precisely because what is at stake is so very small.)
One of the profs used to put his beard in his mouth and chew on it during seminars.
The head of the department, with bells on her fingers, used to crochet during seminars.... jingling the whole time (And that was the least of it. Other people said her specialty was getting students to do research, then cutting off their funding so they would have to drop out, then after a few years slapping her own name on the research... in the Internet age, if that is true, I suppose it will all come out sooner or later).
One of the grad students was attacked by two students in masks and hit in the head with a hammer, presumably for giving them bad grades.
Students took a real human skeleton and stomped it to pieces in the parking lot.
A grad student and a security guard used to take my lunch and eat it.
One of the profs, who normally wouldn't give me the time of day, suddenly was very friendly and put his arm around me and asked me how I was. I said to myself: "Hmm, he is going to Hawaii and thinks I run a free hotel... or... he has something in Japanese that he cannot read..." It was the latter. He never gave me the time of day again. He didn't get tenure, possibly because... he used to put plants in tiny pots and couldn't understand why they wilted so fast even though he was a professor of plant physiology?
One of the really genius profs was trying to lay out a 30 meter by 30 meter square grid. I said let's just lay out a 30 meter tape and another 30 meter tape at approximately a right angle, and then get another tape and measure out the square root of 2 times 30 meters, and we will have a perfect 90 degree angle... but noooooo.... he had just bought a surveying scope... so we spent half an hour using the surveying scope while I had secretly done what I had said, and kept moving the marker and asking "How about this?" until his sightings agreed with what I had already laid out...
The same genius prof, after frequent warnings about a psycho who stole his stuff, said: "[That grad student] might shoot me [the prof] and set my office on fire!"
None of them could type. None of them could read a foreign language. None of them understood science in general. Sometimes someone would go into a lab and kill all the animals.
I used to mutter to myself, "God, these people must all be lead poisoned."
And so it seems, they were...
Even far below 10 micrograms per deciliter there is neurological disturbance... they must have been at 20 or more...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701073.html
There are therefore only three possibilities:
1) genetically stupid,
2) lead poisoned, and
3) stupid by choice.
As Dear Abby said, are you better off with 'em or without 'em?
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