Episode Report Card Deborah: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy
By Deborah | Season 1 | Episode 12 | Aired on 01.08.2004
Kevin wheels into the gym in sweat pants and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Hey, it's The Bear! They wheel toward each other -- Bear has a big smile on his face -- and Kevin says sheepishly, "I thought I'd give it another shot." Bear smiles -- he's cute, eh? -- and says, "I could tell by your jock-like apparel." Kevin asks, "Do we need to go through why I, uh...bolted last time?" Bear replies, "Anywhere you've been, I was there a long time ago. So I'm not much of a listener. It can be an annoying quality." They do one of those jock handshakes. Do people get together and plan those out and come up with a strategy for popularizing them? Are they secret handshakes gone bad? What's the deal? How does everyone know which one to do when? Am I the only one who wonders about it?
At school, people are putting up the Science Fair banner, and it's certainly a professional-looking bit of business (unlike the one for the Crystal Ball). The kids are setting up their exhibits as Ms. Lischak wanders around with her pointer, making comments. One team is floating a beach ball above some kind of three-legged...something or other. It's like a cauldron with air blowing up out of it. Where's Frink when I'm writing these recaps and need technical terminology? She walks over to Friedman, who's wearing...an orange jumpsuit, for reasons likely best not explored, and Glynis, who's wearing a denim pinafore and whose name we will now be spelling to accord with the IMDb. They're in front of a huge, thin, rectangular tank of water, and Friedman counts down as Glynis presses a button that seems to make air bubbles in the water. Friedman aims an air horn at the tank, and when the sound comes out, the water lights up, creating sonoluminescence, a word I'll finally add to my spell check, since it keeps coming up. Their experiment is quite pretty, really. Frink comments that this science fair kicks the butt of any of the ones he was ever involved in. There's a poster in the background for a "Van de Graaf generator." Isn't it "Van der Graaf" -- or is this another one of those things I've been addled about all my life? Glynis crows, "Definite perturbation!" Ms. Lischak says, "Mmm...you can do better. Consider the radiant flux in quantifying your emittance." She taps Friedman's chest lightly with her pointer for emphasis and zooms off. Glynis gripes, "Is she allowed to talk like that to high school boys?" Friedman says, "We could increase the iodine." Glynis, primly: "Any noble gas will do."