Can't get enough of that wonderful physics

This afternoon I have been spending time scanning some of the posts on cosmicvariance.com - and as such have been sidetracked by the attached comments and links to other blogs/websites (this interconnectivity thing can lead you off in some interesting tangents e.g. Naked Under My Lab Coat - well with a blog title like that I'm going to have a look aren't I). This (cosmicvariance that is) is a joint blog between 5 (astro)physicists and I've mentioned it before. It is also linked from my sidebar, although after reading several posts I've decided that the name of my link, currently "Physicists who blog about actual physics! And other stuff" is fairly wide of the mark, and should actually be "Physicists who blog about stuff, oh and some physics". The majority of it is talking about, unsurprisingly at the moment, the World Cup, along with other random topics that you or I might write about. Admittedly there is some physics (well actually having a second look at the blog there's a fair bit of physics, but being an astrophysicist myself I think I filter it out), even in a post about the World Cup. In another of World Cup posts Fiddling with the World Cup there was one of the most vitriolic anti-American rants, via the medium of footballing analogies, I've heard in a while by a guy called Alfredo Louro saying things like:

"Americans don’t know how to improvise. This is why their armies, the most technologically sophisticated armies in the entire Local Group, are helpless against some barefoot guerrillas. If Americans stopped thinking about how to change the rules of football, and actually tried to understand the game, they might actually begin to understand guerrilla warfare, and save their lives."

If you read his whole comment I think most people would agree that he was being a tad harsh (especially on the post's author Sean) - unless, say, his father was killed by an American misinterpreting the back pass rule (not quite sure how that could happen, but I'm just saying).

Comets

This morning I learnt from Prof. David Hughes that the more we learn about comets the less we actually know! He was in Glasgow giving a seminar to the astronomy group and very interesting it was to - he's a very good public speaker, so if you get the chance go to one of his talks. He did also show us some nice pictures of comets, although I didn't spot any alien spacecraft hiding behind any of them.

Drum piccies

Some pictures of my drums can be found here. I even took a couple using the timer on my camera to show me astride the kit, bashing away with all my might. I've had a quick go and tested out some of the preset kits. It all seems very nice so far, but there's a lot more to check out.

I've had a bit of a read of the manual and there are a couple of gems in the warning section. I like this piece of advice "Do not put burning items, such as candles, on the unit. A burning item may fall over a cause a fire", and am glad I read it as I was going to attach some pyrotechnical display to the drums - a couple of roman candles and a catherine wheel maybe. I also like this caution "Do not place the instrument in an unstable position where it might accidentally fall over" - it's a fairly boring caution but now I know not to place my kit in any precarious places. None of the warning labels quite match some of the ones found here though. A particularly good one is "Do not attempt to stop chain with hands or genitals" found on the directions for a Swedish chainsaw.

Practice makes perfect...

... well if not perfect then at least slighty better. Yesterday evening we had our second band practice, and all is going rather well. We've been going to a rehearsal studio called Lofi down a dark alley in the centre of Glasgow - last week we had to feel our way out in the pitch black, scary! It's a decent place with good equipment other than that, but we may try out some other places in the future. We have to hire the cymbols to use on the drum kit, which also requires knowledge of how to attach them to said kit. Last week we struggled through figuring out to attach them ourselves - it's all fairly simple except the hi-hat, and we did fine. This week I asked the guy who worked there to show me how it's done properly, but for some reason the way he did it didn't seem to be as good as our bodged effort from the previous week! Anyway we got the drum kit set up and started practicing. We managed to make it pretty much entirely through one of our songs - I forget which one, ooops. This was fairly impressive we felt. There was even an attempted jam session at the end - not as good. My own performance was a mixed bag and I need to tighten up a lot. I often kept falling out of the beat with my foot on the bass peddle and struggled to regain it again afterwards. I loosened up after a couple of beers though, which seemed to me to improve my drumming. You should have heard our Radar love - oh yeah!

The practice was followed by going to watch the second half of the France versus Spain match at a nearby booze merchant - who'd have thought that France would get through after how they played in the group stage! After the football finished though we didn't just all go home to our beds satified and excited about what we'd just achieved - oh no, we continued boozing until the early hours in a proper wild band stylee (not so good on a work night see Advice). We did throw a few band name about in our inebriated state, but still have yet to settle on something. In summary band - good, some booze - also good, lots of booze on Tuesday evening - bad.

The wait is over

Today my drum kit arrived. I've yet to see it, but my flatmate phoned saying it was delivered at 9.10 this morning. It'll be fun getting home and putting ti together, although hopefully this wont be as fun as actualy playing it. As it's electric I've got all sorts of preset styles to fiddle around with, so I'm sure it'll provide hours of technogadegtry enjoyment as well as being a good practice aid.

Pick a card, any card

It must be a hard job refereeing a football match. I mean you've got to have eye's on the back of your head to to spot each and every offence commited. You're not at all helped by the players, they'll cheat and dive, and swear and shout at you. They don't trust you enough to do your job that they think you need telling when somebody should get booked, or someones commited a foul, or handled the ball. And as for the managers... they've not got a kind word for you. You may have given a dubious penelty decision for their team, but that isn't enough for these guys. Barracking you from the side lines, arguing with the fourth official, kicking up a stink in the tunnel at half time. It must be a nightmare job. Well in the Holland versus Portugal game today the ref got his own back. How's about this for card happy - 16 bookings, 4 red cards! We can only assume he was trying to get his name in the record books - the previous highest number of bookings was also 16, so he didn't quite top it, but boy did he try. All the bookings and the general bad feelings between the players made for one hell of an exciting match though. Also all the bookings for Portugese players should hopefully make it a bit easier for England in the quarter finals.

Speaking of the England game... well actually there's not much to say. We've managed to get through, which is all well and good (honest I'm all very happy about it and that), but we still haven't managed to play at all well. Now I'll concede that it was rather hot out there and the players looked truely knackered (on both teams), but it wasn't the most enthralling game. I pity the poor neutral who was watching, cos at least I got some excitment out of it due to caring who won. Beckham did hit a rather sweet free kick to get our goal, but Lampard had a few chances that should have at least troubled the Ecuador keeper in some way. Well we've got the game against Portugal to prove ourselves and let's hope we make a good game of it.

Drums

I will find out what happened to my drum kit tomorrow. I'm hoping I'll be bashing away at the fake electronic style skins by tomorrow evening.

Where oh where can my drum kit be

So to allow me to practice my drumming for the band I've gone and bought myself an electric drum kit. This is not a cheap item, but it will allow me to bash away in silence (ooh err missus) without annoying my neighbours - I think a real drum kit might have been a problem for the guys in the flat beneath ours, especially as we've got laminate flooring. This kit was supposed to have been delivered yesterday and when I arrived home today (after my general dirty stopout behaviour of not going home on a Friday night - as ever thanks go to Bob and Fiona for their hospitality and living room floor) I was full of anticipation about putting together my kit. Unfortunately it was not hear. I'm not happy - think I'll be having to phone the delivery company on Monday. When the kit finally does arrive I'll let you all know what it's like. I'll need to be practicing "Radar Love" by the Dutch legends Golden Earring, which is one of the songs we decided on at our first practice.

Unsurprisingly I've still been watching lots of football. One of the most exciting games so far was the Australia versus Croatia the other day. I'd not liked to have been an actual Aussie or Croatian fan, because if I were I might have suffered a heart attack - it was tense enough as a neutral. And what the fuck was Graham Poll up to at the end there! Today's match between Argentina and Mexico was also rather good. In extra time the two substitutes Teves and Messi look particularly lively and were making some lovely runs - also it was a fucking sweet goal that Maxi Rodriguez hit. I was quite annoyed by a few things though, these related to the fact that three of the players in my fanstasy football team (Schweinsteiger, Cambiasso and Saviola) all got substituted and didn't get any goals, grrrrr!

So we're through

I thought I should comment on the result today. England are through to the next round - well we new that already, but now we know that we will be playing against Ecuador. We played quite well in the first half. Joe Cole has been by far our best player and again was showing some good form. His goal was a blinder, struck very, very sweetly. Rooney did ok for the first half and was showing some good touches - he can control the ball far better the Owen ever can. It was quite funny to see his reaction when subbed in the second half, throwing his shoes off and everything - hopefully he was just annoyed at his own performance. I should just give a Rooney style shout out "rOOOOOOOOnEEEEEEy, rOOOOOOOOnEEEEEEEY", it's all in the vowels you see.

I just wanted us to beat Sweden. It's been soooooooo many years since we managed it and it's just getting annoying now. They have some sort of hoodoo over the England team which says "You can't beat us, we have something unexplicable over you which means you will forever suffer defeats and/or draws against us". But, hey, we'll live with the result. But we have to play better... a lot better!

I'll comment on our band practice from the other night soon.

Really! Simple syndication?

After completely missing the little orangey icon in the corner of my web browser I finally discovered that I'm available as an RSS feed. This was mainly down to my LiveJournal using friend queennell syndicating me via her blog. This involved some sort of fancy wizardry, using her high level powers, which I would probably fail to understand.

For anyone (!?) who may have come across this blog hoping for some astronomy/physics content (don't laugh jakeybob and gingerfi, there might be other people than you that read this - no, no wait... feel free to laugh long and loud, there's no-one else) I have found the site that might be for you. It's a blog called cosmicvariance and is maintained by 5 actual (astro)physicists and has far more physics related topics than I've covered - not a hard task I know. It seems quite fun as well - I've even added a link to my links bit to your right.

Band

This evening we have three hours in a studio to create noise. Will we all make it out alive - who knows. We could have split before the day is out.

Right so how do I play these drums then - you put your left arm in, your put left arm out, in out, int out and shake it all about - oops, no that's the Hokey Cokey. Lets starts again...

Beard

Nearing three weeks and things are well on track with the growth (patchiness and all), however Peter has managed to become unfeasibly hairy, presumably via some sort of yeti heritage - this is deeply unfair.

That was the week that wasn't

The week that has just gone by has been rather vague and fuzzy - well it could have felt that it was a very coherent and lurid week, but when interpreted through my brain any such coherence would surely have disappeared. After way too much booze on Sunday I managed to pretty much forget who I was, where I was, what I did and which plane of existence I was supposed to exist in on the following Monday (hence this). Once I'd decided that I should settle into the usual three spatial and one time dimension which makes up our so called reality things started to improve. I then hit my brain with a very high concentration of saturated football, although I had already been building up dangerously high levels of football in my brain over the previous weekend. This excessively large dose built up to a maniacical fevour which culminated on Thursday with the England versus Trinidad and Tobago game. Whilst watching this game I managed to get wound up like one of those spirally bits of metal - ah yes a spring. There was much ooohhing and aaahhhing, and effing and blinding, and sitting on the edge of the seat - and consumption of lager tops (which as I will tell everybody is a refreshing yet manly drink and as such I should not be mocked for drinking it - see this article which backs up my argument). Then there was the release (no, not that kind of release) of the spring, when England, despite every effort not to win, won. Unfortunatley this didn't get rid of the football building up in my skull compressing my vital brain functions, as it made me then drag (well they were fairly willing, but it was my idea) people along to a fairly awful night at a club called the Viper. This led me to send out the following apolgetic email when I arrived home:

"To those who I convinced to go to the Viper tonight (aka last night) I can only profusely apologise. Yes, it was shit. And, yes, it was full of medics. I had thought that there would only be a few of said medics and otherwise it would be good for a dance and a drink. Well on all fronts I was very wrong - it was packed with medics and was neither good for dancing or drinking. Sorry and sorry again. Please ignore my suggestions in the future and give me a slap in the face if I try and do the same thing again.

Yours grovelingly,

Matt"

The following morning (aka yesterday) we had a bunch of school kids coming round the physics department, who I had the joy of telling about the wonders of gravitational waves. I managed to do this fairly well in my opinion although their enthusiasm wasn't all that evident. We then showed them round our research group labs, which mainly consisted of many vacuum tanks, which aren't the most exciting pieces of kit you can show kids. I tried to stay bubbly and lively throughout the tour though, and hope this rubbed off on the young people (again, no, I didn't rub any part of myself against the kids - stop it with your wrong thoughts). Later my own enthusiam for my subject was put to a fair old test by the dreaded event that is the code review. This involves me talking through my code line-by-line over the phone to a few others, who then point out what I've done wrong. It is a hideuos event which no one can enjoy, but our collaboration insists we do. During this is when my brain finally imploded as I tried to splutter through an explanation one of the functions in my code. I started mainly saying random words hoping in vain that they would provide a decent explaination of what the function did, but this didn't work gnnnarrgh.

This brain fug continued long into the evening with no word that I said, or sentence I tried to construct, coming out of my mouth correctly. I then started giggling to myself at random words. "Half Sugar" should not be a phraise to provoke that much hilarity, yet that it did. I also had a cash machine giving me strange looks - it wanted to fight me it did - or at least that's what I thought last night, but now I reckon it wasn't trying to start a fight at all.

I think sleep last night has had some calming effects and some of the football has oozed out my ears and nose to releive some of the pressure. However, I've already watch one match today with two more to go, so I think the levels may build up again.

Beard news - it's still there and growing. I will make it to the end of the month, I will.

Band news - we have our first proper practice on Monday. Need to get learning my drum parts.

ps in a lot of the above post I have talked about build up of football, in reality read that as football, booze and lack of sleep (but no pyschotropic drugs).

Itchy chin

My beard attempt has reached a rather itchy stage. If I think about it too much then the itching gets worse, and the temptation to shave stronger. I'll need to stop stroking my chin when in deep contemplation as this reminds me of it's irritatng hairy bits.

I've just finished watching the Brazil versus Croatia game. Are Brazil the most over hyped team other than England? Well on this performance yes is the answer. They didn't show much at all, although Ronaldinho still did alway look rather scarily good when he was on the ball. Kaka's goal at the end of the first half was a very good strike, actually similar to a few others we've seen in the World Cup so far, but that was about it from them attack-wise. During the second half Croatia seemed to be doing all the going forward and had several rather good moves, but kept striking the ball at the keeper when they had opportunities on goal. The prize for fattest, laziest person on the pitch went hands down to Ronaldo. He couldn't be arsed moving at all, even coming onto the pitch for the second half seemed to take hours for him. His fastest movement was going off the pitch when substituted. Brazil may have been holding back, but unless Ronaldihno does something really special I don't know where the extra things will come from - that said they've got the 3 points they needed and that's what counts in the group stage. Anyway, you maybe can't read too much into the first game as I hope is the case for England.

In a rather boring game (maybe the most dull I've seen of the tournament so far) the French showed absolutely nothing when playing the Swiss. They're not a patch on the team from say 6-8 years ago. I'm just hearing Henry give an interview and he's giving the whole "it was rather hot" excuse. Henry didn't really seem to get let into the game with passes not being played into him well, and the Swiss always kept a lot of men back. There's nothing else really to say about the match as bugger all happened. Boff, *shrugs*

After some rather negative comments there I'd just like to say my favourite team of the tournament so far. It's been the Czech Republic in their game against the USA. The play of Rosicky and Nedved was excellent, and I'm really looking forward to their next game. Also showing very good form was Robben for Holland. Everyone has also been saying that the Argentinians looked very good on the game against the Ivory Coast - I was watching the game but wasn't paying it as much attention as I should have from the subsequent reports.

Still it's been a good tournament so far and I'm looking forwards to a lot more from it. I have to say it - Come on England!

Advice

Don't drink too much on a Sunday!

Boring, boring England

It's been a few hours now and I've had some time to reflect on the game, but still the England versus Paraguay game was one of the most boring affairs I've seen in a long while. There's something to be said against the whole scoring early thing, which is that if a team does it then a lot of the time they'll just go into sitting back, dull-as-a-rather-dimly-lit-grey-thing, mode. Which seemed to be what England did. The pundits seemed to give England quite a lot of praise for the first half performance, but I'm not sure why as we didn't do anything. And then for the second half we proceeded to do even less. Not that Paraguay looked at all threatening, but I'd have liked to see something that provided a modicum of entertainment. Despite all that I'm still glad and releaved that we've got a win (and the associated 3 points) under our belt, and can hopefully go on to better things in the next game. Trinidad and Tobago look like they could be quite fiesty though and will be very much up for the game, but the Swedes were looking fairly poor and maybe England can break their tradition of shit performances against them. As any good manager does in a post match interview (with the possible exception of all the interviews that Mick McCarthy gave after Sunderland games last season) I'll try and take some positives from the game - Joe Cole was looking pretty good with some of his runs at the defenders down the left side, and Crouch keeps improving with some nifty bits of ball control.

Other than the England game I've managed to see 3 of the 4 other World Cup matches so far. I am liking the festival of football that it is.

After watching the opening Germany versus Costa Rica game yesterday I went to a pirate themed flatwarming party hosted by Ellie, who went to great lengths to bedeck her flat (aka the good ship the Three headed monkey) in a piratical theme. We all got dressed up approriately and had a swashbuckling time drinking much rum and grog. I recommend that everyone walk down a busy main road with about 10 other people dressed as pirates sometime - it provides amusement for all, especially when you go on a booze-based raiding party into Sainsburys.

Beard news - I have now entered uncharted territory with my growth in that I don't think I've gone 10 days without shaving before (well obviously that's not right as I didn't shave as a child, but you know what I mean!). There's the odd grey hair in the mix, but I fortunately don't have the classic signs of the ginger anywhere to be seen. I am still rather sparse and patchy though.

Band news - I'm on my way to being a proper drummer as today I purchased some drum sticks - I now just need something to hit.

The excitement rises

Can you feel it, can you feel it, can you feel it! You know, the anticipation, the heightened expectation, the fervour (had to look at a thesaurus to get that one). It's all about to kick off, it's the World Cup. There're going to be highs and lows on this roller coaster ride, but most importantly there's going to be lots of drinking and slacking off work early.

In beard competition related news (see here for an explanation (!?)) - my face continues to sprout hair in a patchy fashion, but I'm determined to make it to at least the two week mark before I wuss out from shame at my beard's shitness.

Also I send a call out to people to visit my friend Michelle's (and three other's) energy saving blog. They are currently camped out in the centre of Cheltenham trying to show that physicist can live energy efficient carbon neutral lives, via means of heating things up in a cardboard box covered in tin foil it would seem ;)

He bangs the drum

Today I will talk about the band. A few months (well now nearly a year) ago a new post-doc Chris arrived in the department brandishing the crazy idea that we start a band. At his previous institution (the University of Birmingham) he had apparently taken a rag tag bunch of non-musically talented physicists and they'd become a some sort of supergroup with record contracts coming out their ears - well not quite, but I think they might have played a gig in the back room of a pub or two. Determined to repeat his former sucess he has gathered together John, Neil (aka the Mole, aka the Total Ride), Ellie and myself to be his new rock triumph. I will be playing the drums in the band - this is due to the fact that I have no ability on any other instrument (well I'm a mean player of the maracas) and played the drums for a few months at school when I was eleven. Despite the band being nearly a year in the making we've so far not had a proper practice session, although this will soon change as we're gearing up for something next week. We have several songs lined up and have taken the appropriate instrumental tabs off the internet. I've been practicing for my role by playing the air drums, these are kind of like normal drums except they exist only in your head, and can turn you into a drumming legend (like Phil Collins say) with only the slightest leap of the imagination. Unfortunately I doubt my air drumming skills will match up with reality when I have to sit behind a real drum kit.

The main challenge now for the band, other than me aquiring some drumming skills (the other are all actually quite good), is for us to find a name. There have been several suggestions floated around, although I wont give away too much yet (and the people who read this are likely to be the ones who know anyway), but we haven't settled on anything quite yet. I'll keep you updated on our status when we've had our first full practice - should be interesting!

World Cup starts tomorrow by the way.

Mutants amoung us

After watching the X-men last night, I see today that mutants are indeed amoung us (in this case a three armed baby boy in China) - and we are indeed trying to restrain their mutant powers (by cutting off the third arm). Sure, they say medically it's the right thing to do, but who knows that three arms isn't the way that the human race is supposed to be evolving. We could start to compete with other post-quadlimbed creatures, like all insects, arachnids, and the most evil of them all the dreaded Octopus.

Mamma mia! It's the X-men!

My post title today is a cryptic crossword style clue to what I did this evening. No, it's not "albumen", I don't know where you got that idea from - egg white was not involved, but, wait, I can see where you were coming from - the guys from Abba (almost 'albu'!) wrote the hit west end musical Mamma mia! (along with the Abba song of the same name) and then the men bit obviously comes from X-men. And no, it's not "Paulo Di Canio" the facist footballer. He wasn't involved in my evening at all, but again I can see your line of thinking - he's Italian and a bit fiery, hence the Mamma mia!, and he was often known for getting red cards therefore leaving his team with 10 (X in Roman numerals - there's the Italian link again) men.

My title is in fact derived from having been to an Italian restaurant for dinner and then going to see X-men 3.

At the restaurant - Mimmo's on Ashton Lane in the heart of Glasgow's trendy west end - I had a lovely chicken risoto with peppers, roasted tomatoes and a lovely pesto suace. Highly recommeded. I would give a link to Mimmo's but I can't find one at the moment. I've been there a few times before and have generally found it to be rather good. It's a very small, but cosy little place, and has a nice atmosphere because of this. It's size can however leave you disappointed if you've not booked and find it full - which takes aproximately 5 and a quarter people.

After filling ourselves we went to the UGC to watch X-men: The Last Stand. I can't be arsed giving a proper film review, but I'd say it was a decent enough film, although not on a par with the previous ones. See it if you can spare the time and want a bit of fun, but I wouldn't go out my way if you're not that bothered.

Anyway, back to growing that beard. Hnnnnnnnnnnh, hhnnnnnnnnnnnh - those are the straining noises you have to make to get hair to grow. I've also been told by queennell that massaging the hair folicles works.

In the summertime...

Due to the lack of a summer so far in Glasgow we made the most of a fairly fair weather day to have a barbecue. There are quite a few green areas in and around the west end of Glasgow where you'd think a BBQ could be hosted, but we had the fear that we would incur the wrath of a park warden, so didn't make use of one of the major parks like the Botanic gardens or the Kelvingrove park. We did however find a nice area down by the River Kelvin, on the site of an old water mill. We seemed to spark off a bit of a trend as very soon after setting up the rather poorly performing disposable BBQ we had, at least three other groups of burnt sausage enthusiasts were copying us. After several rounds of sausages and burgers, and fending off the odd hungry dog or two, we were satiated and retired to mine for a bit of light reading (the Sunday Times) and TV (Top Gear). An overall satisfying day.

On a footballing note, well done to England in the game yesterday. Not the most exciting game despite the good score line. Just a note to Crouch, despite my previous post, stop with the robot now, you've overdone it. Keep up the scoring though, if not the celebrations. Bring on Friday.

I said I might say something about a beard growing competition, but have still neglected to write about it, so here is the email I sent giving the gist of things:

"Tomorrow is the start of the inaugural beard growing competition. As some of you may know it was decided in the RC last Friday that we would test our skills at facial hair growth by sparing our faces from the blade for the month of June. The outcome of this will be judged by Fiona and Morag who will arbitrarily decide on who has the best chin warmer. Unfortunately there is no prize for the winner except maybe some smug satisfaction at being good at sprouting hair, but I expect in reality we shall all be losers. People who pull out of the contest shall be branded weak and pitiful and shall be mocked unceasingly - although I expect I may fall into that category. Bob may well be at hand to take some time lapse photography so we can watch the hair appear in mere seconds when all is done.

Matt - I included you on this incase you felt like joining in the comp from Germany. If you do then send photos - we'll know if you've doctored them in any way though, so no finding pictures of beardy blokes and photoshopping their magnificent manes onto you own face. I also thought Ellie might want to have some say in this, particularly "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!".

Anyone how cares to take up this challenge, wield your razor to your skin for the last time tomorrow morning. Let the battle commence.

Your champion of the chinstrap,

Matt

ps you can't just grow a tash, it will not count."

I can just say that my own facial growth is progressing at it's rather poor rate - patchy at best. Bob has taken some initial photos, and Matt has taken up the challenge, as noted by a rather amusing picture sent earlier today. We'll just see how long I can last before shame sets in and I decide to shave. Updates may be given over the course of the month - whether the photo's get posted is another story.

Working late = psychotic episode

Arghhhh, I'm still in work and all is not well. I've been juggling trying to get code to work, writing a few slides for a talk, chatting to people via instant messenger and listening to early 90s dance music - on top of having had a couple of pint of Stella with my dinner. All this has made my brain a rather mushy consistency - rather like their mushy brethren, the mushy pea, only more pinky-grey than green. I think the time has come for me to get some sleep, preferably in my bed at home rather than at my desk in work. That requires some kind of walking motion, which I can hopefully remember how to do - it's right foot forward, left foot forward, then repeat, right? Or is that left foot and then right foot!? I just don't know anymore, it's too goddamn confusing. I need some sort of wheel type mechaism so I can just roll, that would make things all so much easier. Now if only I can figure out how to attach them. To the workshop...

Tomorrow I may say something about our beard growing competition. I bet that's got you intrigued.