113. Biologically Incorrect: The Body Count Attendee of University Guest Lectures

A Cartoon and Five Points.

#1. Above is an old cartoon / art piece I created during my time at UC Riverside, spring 2006.

#2. The Origins of Victoria's Cartooning. The free temporal niche space during a busy life of learning ecology / evolutionary biology / geology / environmental sciences was only during (a) a few boring undergraduate courses (e.g. a required "diversity" course during my senior year, which as a class on ecology and religion), and (b) a series of guest lectures for the UC Riverside Earth Sciences Department that had a mandatory attendance due to the small size of the department (and hence I was more of a "body count" rather than an intigued and engaged audience member) (though ironically, if the "body count" factor would have not been an issue, I probably would have gone to several of these lectures out of my own free will... *sigh*).

#3. In this particular geophysics lecture that featured some prospective candidate for professorship, this lady was by far superbly boring, outrageously technical and jargonesque, and to add the final stain of rust and force vector to make the whole ragged bike fall apart (this was no cherry added to the whipcream of a cake), ths lady had a chronic twitch on her shoulder, which placed me in this extreme mood of high anxiety for most of the talk. Not that I blame people for their internal biological issues--I have my own problems as well. It's just this case, this factor was the "tipping point" to my aggravation.

#4. What do you do when you reach a tipping point? Well, you need to dissipate the energy build-up either through (a) yelling or (b) doing something quasi-constructive, even though you are trapped in a certain location for... let's see... another 40 minutes. I chose (b) and in the back of the class, I slumped in my chair, observing her powerpoint slides, stripping the art components from the words of each slide, drawing the art components to form an impressionistic collage of random artistic geogphysics jargon. And Voila! Another piece of biological incorrectedness. My dad was at that lecture to, and one time I had to wake him up because he was snoring in the back of the classroom! (To remind you, my dad is a professor... snoring in the back of a guest lecture... and I thought I was bad). I showed him my artwork, and he busted up laughing, completely understanding my pain for sitting through that lecture when I could have been doing something productive with my own work.

#5. I think this would be a superb art series called "Biologically Incorrect: The Body Count Attendee of University Guest Lectures." All I would do is create an art series that involved conglomerations of random technical visual jargon of different fields. Great. I think this would fly. I have an idea in my pocket for a future to-do list.

Oh no, I have a couple of additional points. Oh well. This here represents run-off flow of ideas.

#6. There were a couple of "biological" components in the image: the back of Chris Rhinehart's head, top left), and the bottom of the bubble collage has two hands curved concavely toward each other, symbolizing how people were giving this lecturer an artificially enthusiastic round of applause... please... man... is this a joke?

#7. And back to the man theme of all this, the ultimate Ph.D. question for Biologically Incorrect is "What's the point?" and this applies very well here.