An Ode to Semester's End...

The thing about Vogons reading you poetry is that it was their poetry*. I think the damage is less severe if I present you someone else's poetry. Again from the archives is a bit of student rhyme from the 1990 school year, when I was just starting out.

This is in honor of the end of the semester, which comes a bit early for us due to a misguided alteration of our schedule to "compressed" mode. The non-lab divisions love the extra two weeks each semester, but all lab sciences had our labs cut, to the detriment of science education. It was all supposed to give us a full summer schedule with complete course offerings, but the enrollments and state budget cuts made that impossible.

But few seem to listen to grouchy scientists...

The Ballad of Historical Geology by Vicki

Winding our way throu geologic time
Has been quite an experience
Learning about critters long ago dead
from fossil evidence

Crumping, crunching orogenies
Adventure beyond compare
Transgressions, regressions, climatic extremes
If we could only have been there!

Or better yet, time lapse photography
To show us what occurred
From way back when in the Cambrian
When life forms were so absurd

Our list for field trips has expanded
We're poised, rock hammers at our side
Let's go find that Burgess shale
And some giant trilobites

Archimedes, archaeopteryx,
Let's go from A to Z
And collect all that we can carry
of every fossil family

Let's check out that iridium layer
In our search for ultimate truth
Or did the dinosaurs really die
From drinking tainted vermouth?

Now the semester has drawn to a close
We're all ready to go
But there is one thing we haven't addressed
That I'd still like to know

The text mentioned Lucy
But it did not discuss
Fred and Wilma, Barney and Betty
And their importance to us!

And where the heck is Bedrock
On Pangea I or II?
Could I get a map to go there?
If so I bid you adieu!

*a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, for those unenlightened, in which having poetry read was the worst possible form of torture....