"..A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE OUTCROP."

I once regaled this audience with my perception of the "academic pecking order" -- from Mathematics to Physics to Chemistry to Biology to Geology -- and concluded that as geologists, residing as we do at the bottom rung of that Moh-Scale-like listing, we require sufficient cognizance of those nepharious subjects pressing on us from above to make sense of what we call Earth Science. That breadth of knowledge makes us among the very best suited to surmount interdisciplinary barriers in order to contemplate, study, and understand the globally interactive problems that face us as scientists these days.

I appear before you again, this time to point out yet another consequence of the geologists' "lowly" status in the academic pecking order. Though not nearly as serious as the attribute mentioned above, it is nonetheless a fact that geologists are an informal lot. Perhaps this is so because in our field work as students and faculty we mix socially, sleep fitfully, drink carelessly, eat horribly, and dress, er -- dirtily. This informality presents itself in all geological venues, from oil companies to university departments (save those departments that have eschewed field work and rank their esteem in proportion to the square of the number of volts it takes to run their lab instruments, divided by the distance to the coffee pot). A natural spinoff of this informality is a sense of social congeniality and good-natured humor that permeates those same venues(except perhaps in those departments mentioned above).

I see it as my duty this day, then, to present to you true and honest examples of humorous events gleaned from my own checkered past. No holds will be barred. Names will be named. Except maybe for the Geology 1 student at UMass whose paper I graded as a TA back in 1959, who defind a fossil as, "..an orgasm preserved in rock." I have forgotten her name, but I do remember giving her extra credit for her answer. I always was a pussycat.