I'm not sure this is the right place to post the story ,   because it's real (believe it or not ). Ok. As you may know I'm studying in a foreing language high school and most of the time I'm studying french. Every year we're celebrating "La semaine de la francoponie" the week of the francophonie. There are several contests  like a cooking competition   , every class make a stage play (in french) and we play it in the theather. oh! They rejected my piece again, not because it wasn't good,(it certanly wasn't    ) but because it was too serious for 17-19 years old audience and TOO pessimistic. :   Ok. When I was younger we were almost forced to participate in the cooking competition by our french teacher. I really couldn't understand why she was insisting. The whole class had to be separate in groups of 5-6 persons. The others were very enthusiastic to give a lot of money for ingredients in order to cook oridinal french dishes witch are usually prepared in elite restaurants.   I wasn't so I didn't say anything and tried not to be noticed thank to my short height.   Unfortunately the teacher noticed me and put me in a group with 5 boys who also weren't entousiastic about cooking. Me and boys? Impossible!   But me , boys and cooking Absolutely  : NO WAY!!! :   By good luck one of my father's best friends owns a restaurant. It's not a french restaurant but they do everything with recipe. So it wasn't me who cook it but an expert in cooking. The rest of te group didn't know, they did nothing at all. Now comes the funny part I'm sure you'll not believe in this but it is true. The dish was called "Coquille de poisson", "poisson" means fish so all I knew was that there is a fish in it. But I was thinking about "punish" the french teacher and the rest of the people who invented this foolishness.For the rest of the class it was absolute waste of time and money. So I used my mother's old make-up and made my face look so jellow that it was possible to think I had jaundice. I saw how the dish looks like in the beggining of te competition .WoW the cooker was a pro.   Then our blue-ribbon Jury of teachers "tasted" all the dishes aka they ate almost the half. Of course I won the first place.   There was no price and the most irritating was that they ate ALL not only my dish. :   So I put more of this jellow make-up and started pretending I'm "sick". ( I do this all the time ). Subsequently the french teacher accompanied me to the school doctor's cabinet repeting "Is it because of the fish?" (   )Oh she was so scared...  : this was one of my best "live performances". Of course there was nothing wrong with the fish. Then I had to go home and take with me what rested from the dish. ( I couldn't guess even witch of all dises was mine!) and I enjoied a 3 days "fake illness vacantion". Later the same day the french teacher called my mother still scared and gave her a lot of advices what to do , witch is somehow ridiculous 'cause my mother is older than her and has lot of experience. At least I have a good memory from my school adventures.    

If anyone has done something similar please give me some ideas.

        

While reading about your adventure I was chuckling enough that my Mom asked me what was so funny, so I read it to her.  She really got a kick out of it (american slang for amused to the point of loud laughter).

When I was in school, I did not do such things on purpose.  But there is one accidental incident that I am reminded of:

In my highschool science class we had to do on our own with our own resources science and technology experiments and projects, then write a paper reporting on the project, we would also be required to make a presentation to the class.  I undertood the task seriously, but, I did not have the resources available that would be needed for most of the experiment/project/report/presentation, so I improvised with what I did have.

One of my experiment/projects was on the subject of the purity of drinking water, or as it turned out the inpurity of our drinking water.  I wanted to identify the biological, chemical, and particulate  inclusions in the our tap water.

For the particulate inclusions the task was simple, I removed the screen from the kitchen faucet,
turned it on to a marked setting and measure the rate of flow.  After that I placed a funnel below the faucet that lead into a hose so that the water would not be wasted (the hose lead to the garden).  I lined the funnel with filter paper (drip coffee maker filter paper), and turned on the faucet.  After a while I turned it off again once the garden was well watered.  The next day the same thing.  I continued with this process until I had processed 1,000 gallons of water (measured by time based on the premeasured flow rate).  I had to chage filter paper a few times as it began to wear out.  I gathered the particles from the papers into a single clean container.

For chemical inclusions, I used a washed and boiled out narrow necked glass two liter softdrink bottle.  I filled it part way with tap waer and placed it on the gas stove to slowly boil off.  I kept adding more water as the waster was evaporated away, until I had boiled down another 1,000 gallons of water.  The materials that did not boil away remained in the bottle.  By this I had improvised a reverse still that removed the water (and chemical impurities that had a lower boiling point than water), leaving the rest of the impurities behind.  By the time I was finished I had about a quart of a nice thick yellow mixture left in the bottle.  That if anything looked like urine with the thinckness of pancake syrup.

For the biological inclusions, I was thinking of alge and bacteria.  I left a sample of tap water open out in the yard.  To gather the spores and other material floating on the wind.  I kept replenishing that water as it evaporated, using water that had been rendered safe for aquarium use.  Then using a "toy" micoscope, I identifed the lifeforms in that sample and then identifed the no longer living versions of them in the particulate inclusions from the filter stage of the experiment.

It was not my intention, but during the presentation first one then two then more and more of the students started to look green around the gills (slang for looking ill).  At the time of the presentation I was suffering from a sore throat, so I had a large glass of drinking water that I would take a sip from whenever I found that I was begining to have problems speaking.  As the presentation continued, I noticed that when I reached for the water to drink, most of the students and the teacher would look away (at their desk or shoes or at the ceiling) and not look back at me until they heard me begin to speak again, knowing that I was finished drinking.  Not wanting to cause additional discomfort, I asked the teacher if I could be excused from completing the presentation.  She told me to continue or I would get an "F".  So, I continued.  I did the presentation in the morning session, that afternoon quite a few of the students who were in that class were absent from school.

This was not my only presentation for that class, but it was the only one that most of the students remembered in detail for quite some time.

Pangor

     !!!

LoL !! Funny stories   !! It reminds me when I faked illness because I wanted to avoid a classwork. I was 11 years old and I faked a stomach ache (I used headache the week before ...   ) My mother brought me to the doctor because she suspected that I was not really sick, so she believed that when I would have heared the word "doctor", I would have immediatly felt better, but I insisted... At the doctor he touched my stomach and I couldn't say every time "I feel nothing" so at a certain point I said "Ouch! It hurts there!" and he said "Appendicitis! urgent!"

So it's why I've no more my appendix   ... (But I avoided the classwork   and 2 weeks at home   )

( Tormie thinks about old errors...)

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Wow, talk about say ouch at the wrong moment!

Pangor

WoW!         
@ Pangor, I guess they still this presentation!   My Mom made such presentations in her high school and she still remember some other student's mistakes.   Oh she won a price too....a book...in russian      :   Before 1989 all students were forced to study russian no matter what was the school. Russian grammaire is a nightmare! It's similar to the latin grammaire. I guess they just wantes to remind her how bad her russian was...  

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I asked the teacher if I could be excused from completing the presentation. She told me to continue or I would get an "F".

Oh!        Your teachers were worse even than mine witch means the worst!!!

@Tormentor, thank you for giving me such a good idea  :   :    Next time I'll try this trick. TWO WEEKS!!!    So, all I have to do is repeating "I feel nothing" and then " Ouch! It hurts!" ? lol I'll do this very very very dramaticaly like an actress from a soap opera.  :

I miss te ol' good times. Today these "fake illness vacantions" became in a very formal way. For example today I just said my father :"I'm not going to school today. Our programme for today is terrible!" Then I showed him the programme and he agreed with me. I just had to said how much I don't want to get an "F" and how much I'm worry about my diploma (   .... ) and how I want to study everything better in order to have an "A". And that was all. So boring... the old shiver is gone.

Two years after I graduated from highschool, I was in college I was going from my office to the cafeteria to take a break before checking in at the computer lab to see if my job had ran yet, then back to the office.  (Point of explaination, I was student at the college and I had a part time job there also.  Computer jobs, in those days we used puch cards and printouts rather than video terminals).   On the way, I encountered one of the students from my highschool.  He was at the time a student in the highschool and was visiting the college campus to determine if he wanted to become a student there after his graduation.  He was not one of those students who was in the class were I gave that presentation.  When I mentioned that I was going to the cafeteria to get something cold to drink, he looked a little strange and asked me, If I was going to be drinking water.  When I told him that I was going to get a half pint of milk, he looked relieved.  I asked him, why whats wrong with water?  He replied, "What?  Don't YOU know?".  That is when I learned that they were STILL telling each other the story of that presentation!

On the other hand, there was another presentation that I did in highschool, it was actually more like a lecture and demostration.  This one had to do with communications via various segments of the electromagentic spectrum and other vibetory medium.  I had already been teaching myself electronics for years by that time so there was no real experimentation involved.  For the demonstration, I set up a chain of different electronic devices that I had made on prefboards, so they were not pretty, but they worked.  Starting with a simple free power radio reciever made from one salvaged variable capacitor, one diode, and one aircore coil.  I wound the coil on an empty cardboard tube that was to core of a roll of toilet paper.  Having to battery or other power source the radio was not very loud.  I tuned it to a loud local broadcast radio station, then proceded to create a chain of electronics devices and mechanical devices that the sound passed though.  In the chain the audio from the radio was passed though various trasmission mediums, such as:  a magnetic field from by two home made coils brought in proximity to create a transformer; visible light by an led and phototransistor a few feet away; infrared same as the visible light; wood by a speaker rigged to be sound proof except in one direction and that direction being the top of a wooden bench and picked up a few feet away by a microphone (actually another old speaker that I modified) attached to the bench; by water via two old salvaged speakers rigged to work as underwater transducers placed suspended in water at the opposite ends of an aquarium.  Combined that with proof of how the vibrations and transducers worked.  While by the final stage the quality of the sound had degraded consideribly, it was still understandable.

About six months latter, what do you think was remembered about this presentation?  That I made a tiny disco strobe light blink to the music from a crummy sounding radio.  After summer vacation, I overheard one returning student telling a new student about the presentations we have to do, and described it that way.  He used it as an example of how people can just mess around and do nothing and still get credit.

But the water, they remembered even after I was gone from that school!

Pangor

LOL funny stories. Erenda - if you want to fake appendix, it hurts on the lower right part of the stomack. I haver had mine removed too ( but mine was about to burst, so i didn't fake it). I was 6 years old and very sad that i would have to stay in the hospital without my mum or dad.

I only faked illness once when i was in school. I pretended to have a fever. I took the thermometer and held it close to a lightbulb and voila i had a fever. High enough not to go to school, but low enough for my mum to not stay home with me . The key is to hold the thermometer close to, but not touching the lightbulb.

Erenda have you seen a movie called: Ferris bueller's day off. It's a comedy (american) about a boy in high school pretending to be sick so that he and his friends can have a day off. It's very funny and i think you would like it. ( it also gives a list on how to make your parents think your sick lol).

All stories are very fun, I loughed a lot!!!   
Erenda: spanish like Italian are latin derived languages and they are not a nightmare (a little complex, maybe), I love my lenguage even we need 3 times the amount of words than in english to keep a fluid conversation the beauty of it, is we can twist, bend and re order a phrase and take something new from it it have a very beautiful gramma that let you say amazing things...
I love my latin derived spanish, so please don't offend it ...  

(just joking of corse, but I love my Spanish language)   

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I only faked illness once when i was in school. I pretended to have a fever. I took the thermometer and held it close to a lightbulb and voila i had a fever. High enough not to go to school, but low enough for my mum to not stay home with me  . The key is to hold the thermometer close to, but not touching the lightbulb

      Oh, there are a lot of more powerful techniques to do the work with the termomether, you can make it warmer than 37° C and then shake it slowly till the "right" temperature... Bit there are more subtle techniques who involves parts of the body who are warmer than an armpit   ... (how a human being colud go low to avoid a classwork ? Very, very low I think). (edited: I wrote some sly techinques I used here but I don't want to teach them to erenda, but I knew a lot of them   )

@ Rayera: I want to learn esperanto, they say that's very easy   ! I studied latin at school but it's a mess  

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I studied latin too, in the hischool, and jeringozo (they teached us it in the first year of elementary school to lear syllabication, and good pronunsation) example padre (father) is sayed papa drepe, father could be fapa therpe (no idea how to pronouse it or if the syllabication is ok, spanish have specific syllabication rules, I think english don't)

(How foolish I'm!!!)

The english language is very complex, perhaps one of the most complex that there is.  It has element that have been attached to it as a result of many invasions and conquests.  The language started as Galic, Latin was added by the Roman conquest.  In fact both the name of the Island and the capital city are derived from what the Romans called them.  After the withdrwal of the Romans during the deline of the empire, there were invasions and conquests be multiple wave of barbarians.  The thee major groups of invading barbarians were the Jutes, Anglos, and Saxons.  Then there were various the invasions by Vikings.  The language assorbed works and grammer from each of these people.  Then in the year 1066, Viking who had settled in  the Normany region of what is now France invaded and took England.  Hence the Norman and Saxons of Ivanhoe's and Robin Hood's time.  With them came more alterations to the language, but the lanuage kept changing.  English was considered a gutter talk verbal language until quite reciently  There was no officialy spelling or grammer for the language.  But it was not codified very well.  It is a rich language with its own beauty, but few even here are taught very much of it.  I don't think that anyone is familiar with the entire language.


By the way, does anyone know what the word British and the name of the land really means?    











British = painted people.   Britain = land of the painted people.

I didn't say it's not a reach lenguage, but maybe a little less complex than latin derived lenguages, spanish had a lot of influences of other lenguages too like the arabian domination of 1000 years in spain, here in my country get enriched by italian, german and jewish, and of course by the true primitives habitants of this lands like the mapuche, we, argentinians, continuously use a word that is "che" "che, como estas?" means something like Hey, how do you do?, but the mening of che is deeper it mean peopel, brother in mapuche lenguage, mapuche mean (people or brother of the earth), we have La Real Academia de la Lengua Espaà±ola" (The Royal Academy of the Spanish Lenguage) that rule our lenguage since a lot of years (maybe thousand) and keep for the good use and evolution of the spanish lenguage, some month ago The anual gather of the Academy was done in a city near of mine, and some funny resolutions was taken related to some derty words.
I think every lenguage is beautiful, every lenguage work for something in special, English have the power to comunicate the world, here diferent people of diferent lenguages uses English to communicate, that is pure beauty for me.

Quote:

"che" "che, como estas?"

Oh Yes, I know him   !

"Che" ! "Che Guevara !"

....Or not ?  

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Yes tormentor, because we use the "che" a lot in other places we are called "che" but that is like been called people or brother...
As I said che is a word o the lenguge of the Mapuche tribe, we use many others words from it an names too, like Nahuel (male name), Maite (female name), Catriel (male name) Aimà©... all are mapuche names and are very beautiful fonetically speaking, and have beautiful meanings too, but I don't remember well what they were.

(Tormie want to go to Argentina to drink mate', take an old bike and make a tour of the continent)

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