We-e-e-ell...

I went to the beach this weekend. It mostly rained, but I persevered and had some fun. I read my new favorite play. Sartre's No Exit. It's pretty brilliant. If you haven't read it, you really should. "Hell is other people." How could it be more accurate? Just google the following: sartre "no exit". There are a number of hits with the script online. It doesn't take more than an hour to read, so there's no excuse for not doing so, unless you've seen it or read it already.

I also started a really interesting biography/literary criticism of JRR Tolkien called Tolkien and the Great War. It's a biography which also discusses the impact of WWI on Tolkien's mythology. Tolkien was incredibly smart and essentially went through a secondary education which almost solely taught classical languages and literature. He competed in King Edward's School's annual debate entirely in Latin, as well as debates in Greek. Talk about a waste of time, but still pretty amazing. He became obsessed with Old English, Old Norse, Finnish, and the various mythologies associated with each culture; hence, there are a strong Germanic and North European elements in his literature. I was muddling around with some Old English and Old Norse, and apparently there are 7 classes of strong verbs and 4 classes of weak ones in each language. That's utterly absurd! Strong verbs are "strong" because they break the standard morphological rules: the equivalent of a stem-changing verb of the Romance languages. That's a lot of deviation from the norm, and probably doesn't include radically irregular verbs like "to be," "to go," etc. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Old English is far superior to Modern English. Although, from my knowledge, modern Norwegian is a fairly simple and regular language. I'll have to check out some of the Norse mythology. It sounds like an interesting contrast to more "classical" Greek and Roman mythology fromt the book I'm reading. It apparently has much darker elements, undoubtedly a reflection of the colder North European climate, denser forests, and otherwise less hospitable environment.

Speaking of inhospitable, I made my first error in our series of qualitative analysis labs! I had a perfect streak right through my first double solution. I messed up one of the four ions, and Mr. Wilson wouldn't tell me which one because he felt that he had given me to much explanation clarifying his faulty procedural instructions. I figured that it was the ion I had formerly suspected to be carbonate. I realized that I had to use an uncentrifuged solution because carbonate was added in the centrifuging process, thus giving me a false positive in my test for carbonate. When I tested the uncentrifuged solution for carbonate, I did not notice bubbling but some kind of gas seemed to have evolved (counterintuitive). I still have to run some tests to check my other negative ion, chlorine. Both the positive ions are surely correct. Strontium is pretty obvious with a flame test, and seeing as I probably burnt some nose hairs performing the crude test for ammonium (wafting and smelling it; somehow that sounds very scientific...), I reckon that it's in there. Since I'm done with all of my math for the week, I figure I can skip it to work on the labs. Our very french substitute was perfectly fine with my doing so today.