Proposal Madness

I am listy today:

1) mad mad mad last minute text for doomed proposal and deadlines in, like, five femtoseconds

2) I got trounced by sarahparah last night on the Oscar picks. My choices sucked huge donkeys’ dicks and I only got six right.

3) Summary of the Oscars: boring films and nobody gives a monkey’s. The dresses were awful, just awful.

4) More vivid dreams: I was organising an expedition for conferences attendees, and had to marshall everybody into a set of tour buses. But people kept getting in the wrong ones. And finally, when they were all settled, there was no place for me, and I had to follow along in a beat up old Jeep Grand Cherokee, that had been completely stripped of all interior fittings, but which somehow worked just fine.

Knobs

Proposal madness! Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again when we run around the farmyard like headless chickens who’ve forgotten their way to the coup, and are in the wrong farmyard anyway, on account of their having been recently sucked up from their own and then dropped in another by a freak tornado.

I have a big bit of thick plastic sheet on my desk that is there for goodness knows what reason, perhaps to protect the fine precious Simolean Spruce from which my desk has been lovingly fashioned by artisans of the first Millennium, and which inexplicably occasionaly traps one of my arm hairs between it and the woodwork, so tweaking me unexpectedly and excrutiatingly at the most inopportune moments. For example, I will be in mid-sentence, in a telecon, and one of my hairs will be plucked out, causing me to issue forth a mild to extreme expletive, that must come across as incongruous, to say the least, to my colleagues. “Yes, well here we are in the middle of uploading our budgets to FUCK! …. Fastlane.”

In other news I just bought a small knob.

Merriment in Camp Cogshifter

In which Johnny Mathis sings “Oh Wondrous Joy, I Do Not Have To Write That Proposal After All”, accompanied by the male members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing didgeridoos. To celebrate, there will now be a Poll.

Bear with me, folks, as I am a bit fruity.

Proposal Madness

Flarty flarty arty barty with a snigle snagle bliffing plib.

It’s proposal madness time again! Have you uploaded your Bio? What about your Current and Pending? Do you realise your margins are illegal? What’s the page count? You’ll be removed from Senior People if you don’t kiss my arse. What about these references that aren’t cited in the text? Does the budget add up? What about the overhead? Is the first 25 large exempt or subject to O&B? How many letters of support are there? Should we ask George Bush for a LoS? Is the Program Officer a dickhead?

I want my mummy.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into Fastlane

It’s “Deadline Submission Passed – the Sequel”.

So the proposal was submitted.

It is quite evident that 99% of you have no idea what I’m wittering on about. I had fewer comments on that post about proposals yesterday than the famous time I posted about lancing a boil on my left butt cheek, and it squirting in the cat’s eye.

“Deadline for Submission”

Yes, folks, it’s Proposal Flap time again!

Episode Twelve: “Deadline for Submission”

This week’s special guest: some dickhead from Sponsored Research.

Starring, in Random Order:

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Man who forgets to resend his letter of support

Henry Kissinger: Man whose Bio and CV don’t conform to NSF Guidelines

George Bush: Man whose Bio and CV are so embarassing no one wants him on the proposal

Nastassja Kinky: Nubile token woman on the proposal who everyone wants to shag

James Earl Jones: Big black guy whose voice everyone likes listening to on telecons

Kevin Costner: Weedy white guy with droning monosyllabic voice who everyone hates listening to on telecons, but who insists on gassing away anyway

Cogshiftingman: Himself

SarahParah: Girl at Bar holding Cosmpolitan

Missing Documents Required for Submission:

1) Mars Bar wrapper vintage 1975
2) Letter from Schwarzenegger giving support, including signed photo at 1952 Mr. Universe awards, holding two dumbbells and having stern face reminiscent of Sumo Wrestler with bad constipation
3) Extract from an advert for spine tingling Tiger Balm
4) Three checks each for $500 made out to names of NSF Review panel members

This nail-biting episode features cameo appearances by Kermit, Elmo, Miss Piggy, and Professor Bunsen Honeydew (playing NSF Science Advisor).

Statement of Work

OK everyone can relax now. I have completed the SOW. I also fixed the budget and gassed on about the facilities.

I thought you might like to read a little of the SOW:

“… notwithstanding the ubiquitousness of overwhelming demand for sytem resources that conflagrates the combobulation of the underachieving discriminatory purple pompousness of plastic penile implants, we have confabulated and corruscated in the morning dew drops and syntactically enunciated uniformally our desire to go for a wee wee outside in the garden. Further details are to be found in Section 3.2.1.c ‘Burble Burble Quite a Hurdle’ and accompanying references, cross-stitched in Burgundian Yak’s wool ….”

Well, that at least was the first draft. I had to modify it quite a bit.

Surprises

“Dear Cogshifter,

Attached is the proposal. All that we need now is the Budget Justification, Programme of Work and Statement of Facilities, which X says you are working on. Please send them to me now and I will upload to OSR, so that the proposal can be submitted on Monday.

Thanks,
M.”

WTF? Was someone supposed to tell me I’m to work on the Budget, POW and SOF, each of which takes about a day to prepare? Sometimes the lack of communication around here is breathtaking.

OMGWTFPOWSOF!