Here’s a real email I received at 7:56 today, the first day of labs for the quarter.

“(My name),

I made a very bad mistake thinking my lab was thursday and just realized i missed the first day, so I was hoping that you could tell me what I missed and where to go from here, possible even meet sometime to get what i missed. I emailed Dr. (Professor) already, so i could appreciate if there’s anything you could do for me or what i need to do. THank you, (his name)”

And here’s a completely real event I heard about for the first time today.

Later that decade, Davis led a quasi-covert operation that recorded the vaginal contractions of ballerinas with the Boston Ballet and other women, then translated this impetus of human conception into text, music, phonetic speech and ultimately into radio signals, which were beamed from M.I.T.’s Millstone radar to Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and two other nearby star systems… The Air Force soon found out about the million-watt Poetica Vaginal broadcast, as Davis calls it, and shut it down.

..

“The images of humans placed aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft show impeccably groomed men that lack any facial and body hair,” Davis hoots, “and women with no external genitalia.” Poetica Vaginal was in part a response to this curious censorship. “By making this attempt to communicate with the other,” he explains, “we’re really communicating with ourselves.”