So many of my so-called friends and associates are actually complete and utter *astards. First Matt Wedel goes and wins some coveted award for being a science genius. Now it turns out that Mark Witton and Graeme Elliott got to spend time with none other than Sir David Attenborough when at - cough cough - Buckingham Palace recently. I can only wince and shake my head in disgust. Mark's account of the sorry tale can be found here on his flickr site.
Our academic parent and master, Dave Martill, is in India right now putting on the same display about pterosaurs that he did at Buckingham Palace. The funny thing is, he got held up for several days at customs. It made the BBC news: go here.
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Sir David Attenborough and his programs on the BBC are fantastic. He is a legend in my country :-D.
That's all very well for them, but you've got the best science blog going so take some comfort from that.
Sorry to hear about Martill's problems with customs. I know that Makoto Manabe once had difficulties getting casts of dinosaur bones into Japan: the custom agents claimed that he didn't have the correct papers to import materials from "endangered species". It took him some time to convince them that the taxa involved were past danger at this point, and that these were plaster and plastic duplicates anyway...
Pterosaurs on display in India? Techfest '07, Mumbai? Missed it :(
"Witton joins the blacklist" - well, I suppose I can say I've been noticed...
For the record, you've blown it all out of proportion. We didn't meet Sir David at Buckingham Palace (that's so last year), we met him in the lecture hall at the highly-prestigious Royal Society, where we'd been lectured by Richard Fortey and conversing with the smartest scientists in Britain. How we got invited I've no idea...
As for Dave getting his pterosaurs caught up in customs, I hear that did get sorted out. A far worse sutuation is the BBC using my Tupuxuara picture without credit for the second time. I did try to track down the BBC Online people at the Royal Society to address the same issue, funnily enough. They must have heard I was coming as they managed to avoid me all evening...
Oi. Bastard is not not an insult. Knock it off. Some of your readers in your pre-scienblogs days are bastards, and rather proud of it.
I'm afraid to say I only managed to thank him for all his fantastic programs. Kinda got overwhelmed by the occasion. Still got to say hello though. :)