The bulging male cheerleaders aren’t even remotely the strangest part of this slop.

But they are the most accurately-rendered part of it.

Say what you want, they got the diameter of his ankles right.

My first thought was, why didn’t she just paint a finger? Something small in case she was wrong. But then I remembered how I was in pretty much every lab at that age.

Not as cool as the original story, but I was working with a big carboy of dilute HCL in a CHEM 101 lab. The previous person that used the carboy had managed to spill dilute HCL all over the stopper. I was not aware of this.

The protocol was to grasp the stopper between middle and ring finger, pull it out, then pick the carboy up with both hands and pour into the beaker. That way, the only thing the business end of the stopper ever touches is the inside of the carboy.

I’d just started pouring when I felt the skin between the two fingers start to itch. It was obnoxious, but I had a heavy piece of glassware in my hands trying to measure out a precise amount. So I ignored it until it started to burn. By that point I almost had enough in my beaker so I topped it up. Then I lowered the carboy and replaced the stopper.

Then I ran over to the sink, turned it on full blast, and washed the acid off my hand. I had a red, tender patch there for days. After that, I always wiped the stopper off with a paper towel before I pulled it out.

Odo, centaurs, and the Grinch just standing in the middle trying to avoid eye contact with each other.

Dan Brown writing men: “He had steely grey eyes and was very smart. Scientists thought he was an idiot but that’s because he was smarter than them and didn’t spend as much time writing papers. He did four hundred pushups and took a shower. ‘Not bad for a fifty five year-old guy’, he thought, which was smarter than other thoughts even if those thoughts had won prizes.”

Reading Shakespeare is torture. That is why we make actors do it for us.

I can see at least one innovation there. Diodes make current go one direction. D1 ensures current goes neither direction.