Spades and Hubris

Have you ever played the card game Spades? I used to play this all the time in Spanish class in high school. Whenever you put down a spade, you had to say the name of the card, e.g. "Three of spades". If you put down the ace of spades you had to say, "The ace of spades, the ace of spades." (I have no idea why.)

If you forgot to do that, someone else could say, "Failure to call a spade a spade!" and something bad would happen to you (I forget what - this was over ten years ago.)

The previous blog entry was all about calling a spade a spade. Sometimes people really hate it when you call a spade a spade. They refuse to play with you anymore. I think life would be a lot better if there were a penalty for failing to call a spade a spade. As it happens, there tends to be a penalty for calling spades by name.

Moving on.

Hubris: I was just feeling like I could finally trust my data, and trust myself to generate data that could be trusted. This angered the research gods, who decided to take me down a peg. They slipped into the -80 and changed the writing on my cell vials. They twiddled the coverslips around from plate to plate. Now they are sitting up in their Olympic offices sniggering like smug turtles.