Reflection at boundaries

Right right right...

So I was teachin this lesson on Friday on the reflection of waves at boundaries right...

It starts off with a walk to burn down the school

"Who's with me!"

Everyone.

"Right, take your school jumpers off, wrap them around a long stick, dip them in petrol and set them alight. We're off to burn down the school!"

So I have on the board 4 parallel lines.

At the first parallel line I says

"Right the school is protected by a swamp. The swamp contains piranha that will nibble your toes. Then, when they taste blood they will devour you to the bone. To add to this you will have to swim with your torch above your head to keep it alight."

"So who's turning round?"

1 person.

fair enough.

So at the next boundary we get more hardcore and I say

"Right, in the Amazon river there is this type of fish, called the Candiru fish. Gents you may want to cross your legs"

"Basically, when you take a pee, the Candiru swims up your stream and embeds itself in your *whistles*"

"It pushes spikes out to either side and stays there eating your *whistles*

"So who's turning round?"

Most male hands go up.

Two more boundaries and I'm running out of ideas. So the crocs come in.

By now there are like 10 people left and I'm thinkin

hmmmm how am I gonna get rid of these ones...

So I say

"Right at this boundary there's a bunch of heavily mutated octopii. They have 25 legs each."

"And what they'll do is that if they get hold of you they won't kill you. Well not straight away. What they'll do is they'll stick their tentacles in your mouth, in your ears and up your nose. Then they'll look for any other holes they can find and slot their remaining tentacles up there"

"so...."

"Who's with me!?"

Anyway, the moral of that story is that at boundaries, waves will reflect if their situation changes too much, which is to say that if the density of the medium changes substantially they will mostly reflect.

For example, waves travelling from solids to gases will mostly reflect, which is why they put that jelly stuff on to your belly when they do ultrasound scans.

Man. I love my job.

More ironic homosexuality from the Gulf

This time brought to you from the excellent sknkwrkz, another fine example of ironic homosexuality.

Check >>>this one<<< out

One simple way to make every day seem wonderful

I was chatting to TK, one of my online pals yesterday and when she asked how I was, I said

The sun is shining, I've just got paid and most importantly I'm not in Kuwait! Yes!

The thing is, that TK is not aware that I was ever in Kuwait, and she's also not aware of just how shit Kuwait is, so it was up to me to try and describe it as best as I could.

Hmmm Kuwait. Yes to imagine Kuwait, imagine a toilet in your mind.

Now fill it with shit, add a load of bigoted, racist, ignorant Arabs and a lot of dust. Not sand, grey dust that does nothing but swirl around in the wind and get in your eyes.

Now put all the ethnic minorities from the Indian subcontinent and Asia in substandard conditions and make them work like animals/slaves while underpaying them/beating them/raping them, add a nice dose of ironic homosexuality and you're starting to get an image in your head that looks pretty similar.

Oh yeah and don't forget to remove all your human rights if you're not Kuwaiti..

Welcome to Kuwait!

I'm sure I left out some bits, not eating bacon, drinking photocopy cleaner, and not being allowed to have sex with other human beings of the opposite sex (they obviously found ways around this by not involving the opposite sex, or not involving other human beings), that sort of thing. I didn't want to disturb her too much.

These days I wake up every morning and think...

Thank fuck I'm not in Kuwait.

Try it tomorrow. I guarantee you you'll be smiling all day!

Please note: those of you who ARE in Kuwait will have to imagine that you're not in Kuwait before you attempt this exercise

Car crash, Antonio Machado, Madrid, 3pm, 26th March 2008

I was talkin to my mate L-plate Big Cheese, who came to Spain the other day and she said "You always seem to be around for weird or unusual events, and I seem to always miss them"

I tried to play down this statement by saying that I just appear to be around for unusual events.

Then, the day after she left, I was walking around Madrid, just wandering really and ended up in a place called Antonio Machado, a place I will probably never be able to find again and wouldn't really want to anyway, there's bugger all there.

Just walking around with my beautiful Canon 20D and I heard a screech of wheels and a bang just like a few months ago outside my window.

And lo and behold a couple of cars had crashed about 30 metres behind me! I quickly snapped this one, then went over to try and help, but with my Spanish limited to ordering beer and asking for the toilet, I wasn't really much help so I buggered off.

My condolences

Matt came online just a second ago and opened by saying that the worst thing in the world had just happened to him. Expecting the worst, nothing could have prepared me for this...

He's been sent on assignment to Kuwait.

Poor poor bastard.

On the upside, as part of his research he typed in "Shit Kuwait" into google and found my blog.

Anyone who wishes to pay their condolences to Matt, leave them in the comments and I'll pass them on

Edublogging

I've just put my first noteworthy post up on my new edublog, The Lightbulb and I'm hoping to retain the mischief vibe while having a bit of professional-ness going on.

Same flavour, different site so twice the fun!

The first major post is on teaching about famine - enjoy!

VOTE FOR ME!

I've just put The Prohibition up on the Flickr 5 picture storybook group, where I sort of half got the idea for the lesson from.

Vote for mischief for March story of the month!

Knackers

A great spot by my mate Big Cheese, who came over to Spain for the week.



Another one to add to the sandwich methinks - just stick a couple of knackers in there...

Spankin the KKK

This friend of mine, who will remain anonymous, has been trying to keep me from talking to her mum for a while, perhaps because I have this uncanny knack of saying the first thing that crosses my mind as you may have noticed.

On meeting for the first time, her mum told me that she reads this blog all the time. I always find it strange when my friends mums tell me that but from that little snippet I figured that if she had read most of the stuff on here then chances were I couldn't put my foot in my mouth TOO far.

Hmmmmm

On Friday night we went out to watch this years KKK parade in Anton Martin. On the way back we were discussing exactly what one had to do to get themselves involved in this whole thing. I think it would be rather good if I somehow managed, as a non-white, English-speaking non-Catholic to get to wear one of those KKK things.

So my mate said I needed to talk to her mum about this sort of thing, as her mum is quite well-educated in these matters (and fairly prudish and probably religious too she tries to tell me).

So we meet her mum in a bar ten minutes later and I say

"So, what does one have to do to get involved in the silent walking KKK thing then?"

"Well" she says, "firstly you would have to convert to Catholicism"

"Oh bugger" I replied, "Does that mean that I'd have to get my nob sliced off?"

"No that's Judaism"

"Oh"

"Then you have to get yourself a whip and develop a thing for flagellating yourself"

"Oh" I said, now pretty interested.

"Does it count if someone else has flagellated me?"

"ANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNDY! STOP IT! THAT'S MY MUM YOU'RE TALKING TO!"

Yup, I guess it is. Hello if you're reading! *grins and waves*

Fuck me it's the KKK

Last year, after walking to Santiago de Compostela just in time for Semana Santa (Easter) I took this photo in the streets of Santiago.

Obviously, I hadn't read up on this beforehand, but it turns out that Spanish Catholics like to dress up as the Ku Klux Klan every Easter and walk slowly down the streets in silence, scaring the shit out of ethnic minority tourists.

Naturally, I hid in a doorway until it was clear that black people were not being brutalised in the streets. Why doesn't anyone ever tell me about these things...

Eats shoots and leaves

A while back I met a girl on the bus back from Barcelona.

We met up a couple of times and the gossipers at school were calling them "dates" cos they don't really know what I'm like

Anyway, the girl was Chinese and lived in Chengdu, where they have the most famous panda breeding and research centre in the world. Turned out that she was actually a panda breeder and worked there at the reserve and was on loan to Madrid zoo and working here in the panda section.

For ages, I've been wondering why I'm single, but me and Liang went out one night and, short of conversation, I said

"Ya know, I really think pandas are too bloody fussy."

"Oh yes?" She replied, "Why do you say this?"

"Well," I said, "I mean we humans put two of them in a cage right, one male and one female and then they just turn their nose up at each other."

"If you put me in a cage with a female, I'd probably at least TRY and have sex with her."

"Oh"

"I mean for f*xz sakes. If they don't even WANT to have sex with each other, if they can't be bothered to propagate their own species then they've only got themselves to blame when extinction comes. And that thing about only eating bamboo. Jesus. If I said I only wanted to eat Kellogg's cornflakes, I'm sure that the rest of the human race would just leave me to die."

Strangely, I never saw her again after that.

And this is what you SHOULDN'T do kids...

Today I had to teach my horrible year 7 class (I have one really nice class and one really horrible lot) about the dangers of everyday chemicals, and how you should never be fooled into thinking something is safe just because you've seen it before.

So what I done was I told them a gory story of caramel torture, where sugar is melted down and poured on the skin. The thing is that it takes AGES to cool down and burns the skin real nasty while it's there. Even worse than this is that you can't wash it off as it has a similar structure to glass, so if you put water on it the stuff will just glassify, and when you try to peel it off it will rip your skin off. (Try it with a piece of paper or the cat - it's great fun!)

This lesson was a bit of a rush-job so I had to get my sugar from the canteen, and it came in these little paper packets, which I poured out, discussing the properties of solids, liquids and gases as I went.

Like I said, this was my horrible class, and they wouldn't shut up, so as I waited for them to quieten down I got a bit bored and decided to put the paper in the Bunsen burner.

It started burning but, as it still contained some sugar, I couldn't blow it out so, in my infinite wisdom I flicked the bloody thing, and caramelised sugar flew out and hit me right on the neck!

...and yes It FUCKING hurt!

So, after all that shit about the dangers of everyday chemicals I'd only gone and dropped melted caramel on myself hadn't I!

What a fuckwit.

As I sat there with my neck on fire, the kids screamed and one of them helpfully pointed out

Sir your neck is on fire

to which I replied the immortal line

Yes I know. But at least now I've got your attention

At this point I realised that I couldn't put the fire out with water, as the damn thing would caramelise on my skin while the kids were screaming "Put water on it sir!".

Bastards.

Anyway, I decided the best way to handle the situation was to put my hand over it.

Now, with my neck on fire and my hand on fire, things weren't really getting any better.

The best bit though, was walking into the science staffroom after the lesson.

My colleague, Steady Eddy was in there, I had an ice pack on my neck and he said

You'll never believe the crap lesson I just had...

The good bit of politics

One of the younger kids, ya know the tiny ones, has a father in the PSOE, the party that just won the election. She was overheard saying

Mi Padre estaba supercontento este fin de semana!*

Now why can't all politics sound that good!

*My daddy was superhappy this weekend!

The prohibition

*e.g. Al Capone in Chicago made millions from the sale of illegal alcohol

Should I wear a dress?

I have been looking around for an "intercambio" which is like a social language exchange for a while and the most popular one in Madrid happens every Thursday night at Cafe Madrid in Opera.

However when I found their website I must confess I thought I had stumbled on something else.

http://www.languagesexchanges.glo24.com/

I'm not sure they really thought that URL through. I only came here to learn a new language doctor!

Throwing Vista out the Window

My old computer was starting to really have trouble with cooling after 4 years travelling and blogging so last week I bought a shiny new laptop, consigning me to a month of skintness and starvation.

One of the reasons I bought the new Acer was to run Apache, mysql and php for moodle, with the intention of starting to learn to develop for my site.

After about 3 hours of trying to work out my way around Vista with it's confusing submenus and user-unfriendly and frankly confusing interface complete with dizzying window transitions, I was ready to throw the whole thing out the window.

For much of the weekend I found myself doing battle with the system trying to install Apache and realised that this is a major flaw in the system. As I'm no expert, I hammered away for all of the PM hours of Saturday and ended up giving up. Basically the damn thing won't install at all and I was left wondering why I didn't just buy a mac.

My fallout with Microsoft has been long in coming, with my hotmail being abandoned for junk mail a few years back, msn being replaced by google chat and Office killing my old computer (it used to turn off from overheating whenever Word was used) and now the whole bloody operating system is just being so damn INVASIVE and uncooperative that I think the time has come to part ways with Microsoft.

So now I'm looking at Ubuntu with intent to wipe Microsoft off my computer and out of my life completely (well almost - I still have to run it due to some Photoshop compatibility issues. I think Open Office and Apache sounds easy enough to get started on it.

All this geeking is not healthy for a man.

The verdict on Vista? Steer clear.

Eating?

The question of when I find time to eat is sure to be raised again as I start yet another two blogs for work/fun at edublogs.

I decided that it was time to knock up a blog called The Light Bulb on science teaching ideas, using group dynamics in the classroom and online so that now exists at http://thelightbulb.edublogs.org/

The second blog is cheating really as it's just the old class blog moved over to edublogs, as they allow you to upload documents and stuff, which is kinda useful when teaching. That is at http://scienceheaven.edublogs.org/ and is frankly none of your business.

The pedo-file: Weekend report

Saturday - 5856 steps
Sunday - 5865 steps

Something is not right. How could I POSSIBLY have taken more steps on Tuesday at work than in my entire weekend?! The new computer may well explain a lot, but I think I'm starting to understand why they say I need to get out more...

Election special

I'm in Madrid on the night of a very important political thinger. I think.

Zapatero has just defeated some other bloke in some election and I've been on the BBC news site to try and get excited about it so I can understand what people will be saying in school tomorrow.

Oh alright, I don't really give a shit about politics, but have you seen that story about the bloke with the hairy ears?! That's incredible!

Am I a homophobe? Part 2

Just to make sure you don't think I'm some sort of homophobic Nazi, I would like to say that I am certainly NOT homophobic.

I'd just like to back that up by explaining that my understanding of a phobia is that it means that you are scared of the thing that prefixes the phobia.

Personally I am not particularly scared of homos, homes or Sherlock Holmes, so I don't see how I could possibly fit into any of these categories.

However, if a gay man were to ask me take off my trousers or suck his willy I would run a mile.

Am I a homophobe? Part 1

Usually, when accused of being homophobic, people will raise their hands and say "I'm not a homophobic, I have lots of gay friends"

Personally I can't say I have that many gay friends, so I can't really use that in my defence. However I often tell my friends that they are gay.

Does that count?

Lazy bastard

I just looked at my pedometer and I only took 4084 steps today - what the hell have I been doing all day!? Scratching my arse?! How did I manage to do 3 times less steps today than in my last post on Tuesday?!

I'm gonna have to start watching my weight if this sort of laziness continues.

Toilet paper confessions

I live on the fifth floor of a block in Madrid and it faces outwards onto the road. Just outside my flat there's a late-night supermarket.

Very often people will park up and jump out to get some some bread and in the process, they will block some other guy into their parking space.

So what normally follows is that the blocked party then sits there honking their horn and pissing everyone in the neighbourhood off until the person comes in and drives away.

Last night, at about 11:30pm this happened and the silly arsehole was sat there for about 5 minutes with his hand on the horn.

I went to the window and shouted "FUUUUCK OFF HIJO DE PUTA!!!" very loudly but to no avail.

In the end I snapped, went inside, grabbed a wet wad of toilet paper and flung it out from the fifth straight on the prats windscreen. That shut him up!

And yes I feel rather good about it too...



Oh big hello to the person in Riga, Latvia who stumbled across my site after typing in "Gorilla fucks nun" on google and came up with this classic gorilla and banana in Amsterdam tale. I always love it when that happens.

Flota

Yes it's a slow day for gags today, so I've had to root around the dustbins (literally) for a laugh...

Fanny

Last night was a good night. I managed to pick up some fanny lying around the street.

My immoral pedometer

You may remember a few years back that a paediatricians house was daubed with graffiti after stupid "vigilantes", riled up by the media confused her professional title with "paedophile" and went on the rampage in south Wales.

Not being one to deliberately stir up trouble or anything, I thought I'd start a Pedo-file of my own today using my new toy.



I picked this pedometer up in Sweden. Using the Welsh thug logic above, you would be forgiven for mistaking a pedometer for a device that tags and tracks paedophiles. However, those of you in the know will be aware that, disappointingly it actually does nothing of the sort but merely counts steps taken.

Today, I managed to take 11,137 steps from leaving the house to teaching and then back.

Anyway I need to add that the story behind this pedometer isn't entirely innocent. Don't worry it's not got anything to do with paedophilia (jesus why did I even make this link. The cops will be all over this blog in no time)

I picked this pedometer up by accident. I had put my coat in one of those bag rack things on the bus and when I pulled the coat off, this thing came off the ledge and fell on the floor.

Realising that it wasn't mine, I thought I'd leave it on the floor, when some guy came up, tapped me on the shoulder and said

"Hey mate I think you dropped this"

So I sort of extended my hand, he put it in my outstretched palm and I said

"erm thanks mate"

and walked off without so much as a second thought. Oh yes I'm a bad man.

And a pedometer-owning one at that.

The Bargains first release

Has it really been a year since Simon passed away from Epilepsy? Time passes so fast and I still wake up sometimes thinking that he'll just log on or call, but he's gone.

On the plus side, Jon has held the side up and The Bargains release their first album with Si on vocals for many of the tracks.

Check it out at www.thebargainsmusic.com or take a look at their myspace site at www.myspace.com/thebargains

Priced at 4.95 including p&p

5 Tracks, an 8 page booklet including the lyrics

What a Bargain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mischievious teaching practices

After getting a fair few (alright two - it's more than usual) comments on my nucleus post and getting a link up from Foss on his site I thought I'd just whack up a few pics of a class at work.



It's always been in my head that the classroom is somewhere that is totally underutilised for learning. We sit down in a classroom and often it's treated as a box in which you learn, but the room itself is not used for learning. Taking this approach to it's logical conclusion I decided in my last school in the UK to make use of every square inch of the room, the tables, the floor, the ceilings and the windows and to bring it alive.



We don't do that a lot in secondary for some reason, I guess it's seen as a primary thing, dressing the class up, but when pupils daydream and look around the class doesn't it just make sense for them to actually take things in that may have some educational content?



Obviously, all of this stuff had to be taken down at the end of the week. Fire safety hazard apparently.

Oh well. At least I TRIED to be creative.

Trafalgar Square freeze

Damn I missed it.



Everyone suddenly freezing for 5 minutes in Trafalgar square while bewildered tourists look on! Great stuff!