SCIENCE!

Do you remember doing stuff like this?

For the Austin Public Library's Teen Center, I worked at the Science Festival this last Saturday. It was a great time and I kept thinking of how spot on my Jack Smaz friend was about having her students spontaneously yell "Science" during biology class to foster enthusiasm. Turns out that learning about science can be quite exciting, as seen in one of my favorite tri folds below...

It reminded me of my 6th grade science project when I use the ol' scientific method to determine whether a dog's or a human's mouth was cleaner. My dad hooked me up with 3 "blood auger petri dishes" (he made me spell the whole thing out in my project rather than just using petri-dish). Then I got an "inoculator" (a wire hanger that had been sterilized on the stove) to swab around in Geezer's, my dog, mouth and then onto the petri dish. Then, after sterilizing the hanger again, I did the same with my mouth for the second dish. The third I swirled the inoculator in the air a couple of times to make the "control dish".

Two or three weeks later I got the shock value I wanted, and the justification that it wasn't in fact gross that my dog licked my face, the dog's petri-dish grew far less gross looking stuff than mine. By 6th grade science fair standards, that meant that my mouth was clearly dirtier than my dogs. Infallible logic really. The funny thing was that the control dish grew a huge blob of something terrible looking. I wasn't quite sure what the deal was with that except that maybe it had something to do with me waving it around in the air above a pot of bubbling Hormel chili (it was on the other burner - the one not being used for sterilizing a hanger). On second thought, maybe what I proved was that Hormel chili is actually much "dirtier" than both a dog and human mouth... Who knows? Science can be so elusive....