Our Chair, Oliver Chadwick, certainly demonstrated his sense of humor by “putting his head on the block” for the October 19 caption contest about the “attached” picture. Being the good sport that he is, Oliver decided not to choose a winner—so here are the “top 10” entries (names omitted to protect the not-so-innocent):
• New departmental award: “The Oliver”• Don’t be fooled. under the button-up shirt and jeans lies a quite chiseled frame• Piles of paperwork, calls from Henry Yang…, Oliver had only one way to deal with the demands of being Chair–getting stoned• If you lie down with soil, you wake up stratified• Getting stoned just doesn’t mean what it used to• Rapa Nui on the rocks, with a twist and oliver• Between a rock and a hard place• A heart of stone• Oliver – the rock upon which the Geography Department is built• Ok, Scottie, quit kidding around and beam the rest of me up
Actually, the real winner should be Dr. Peter Vitousek (Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford) who prompted this entire thing by sending Oliver the following email, along with the infamous picture: Hi Oliver, I’ve been hearing that you’re coauthoring papers from Rapa Nui these days, and commenting on soil structure and history without ever having been there. It seemed kind of a stretch to me – but a little research showed that in fact you have a much deeper history on Rapa Nui than I realized. I apologize. Peter (with thanks to some unnamed provider)
By way of explanation, Peter and Oliver have coauthored several articles about the ecosystems of Hawaii and Rapa Nui in such major journals as Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rapa Nui is the native name for Easter Island, an island in the South Pacific Ocean belonging to Chile. It is one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world and is famous for its numerous stone statues (“moai”). Thanks to the “head” of our Department for putting a “human face” on a “hard” discipline”!
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