I was at a wedding a few months ago and, naturally, the bride and her family wanted everything to be "just so".  The reception was catered at the bride's parents' house and and there were a number of cooks and servers on hand.  One of the caterers, who looked similar to Samuel L. Jackson, was wearing a puffy, white, chef-type shirt.  Underneath that was black t-shirt with large white lettering on the back.  Clearly-readable through the thin chef's shirt were the words "100% PURE WHOOP-ASS".  When I saw him again a few minutes later, the t-shirt was gone, but not before we had gotten an amusing reminder that, no matter how formal the pretense, reality will always work its way to the surface, and it is good.
        This week I sorted through some boxes of old lab notebooks left behind by graduate students who worked for my boss some 23 years ago.  There were several notebooks filled with strips of photo negatives.  They were mostly photo-documentation of gels-- hundreds of pages of data more or less like the one pictured below.  However, mixed in with the data were a few photos of arbitrary subects taken, presumably, to finish out the rolls of film.  Twenty-three years later the legitimate data holds no intrest for anyone, but these few extra frames provide a ghostly glimpse into graduate student life nearly a quarter century ago.
        Out of all the years of work that went into these students' PhD dissertations, the hundreds of pages of negatives, we can now find a handful of photographic frames, human moments, each a fraction of a second in time, that are worth scanning and saving as positives.  In the end, isn't that all anyone can ask for?    [View scans]

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