Dougie Barnett
The moment I saw this topic I thought of the legend that is Dougie Barnett.

Dougie was a physics teacher at my secondary school, and retired a couple of years before I left. The stories about him are numerous, and I'll try to summarise some of them as best I can:

Someone in his class asked him whether you would get an electric shock from urinating on a piece of railtrack. He disappeared into the store room for a couple of minutes and came back with a steaming beaker of yellow liquid in which he proceeded to place a couple of electrodes connected to a power pack.

Once, with virtually no prompting, he drew the chemical structure of LSD on the blackboard for us and was part way through describing how it could be created before coming to his senses and exclaiming "I'm not telling you that!"

One of the guys in our class once recieved a piece of pretty ordinary work back from Dougie with "11/10 A++++" as his mark. No explanation was given.

One lesson, we decided to play chess instead of doing any work. Dougie calmly watched us play all lesson without comment.

Apparently, his wife threw him out of his house at one point. During this period Dougie was found sleeping in the labs by one of the technicians. At this time, he was seen around school with his trousers tied up with bunsen burner tubing in lieu of a belt.

While briefing us on an experiment in static electricity, he produced a 12" polythene rod and spent a good 5 minutes rubbing it vigorously against his groin to demonstrate how to generate static. He was completely mystified by the ensuing hysterical laughter from the class!

He did a 'practical' once to demonstrate inertia, which involved us taking turns riding passenger in his Nissan Micra while he performed handbrake turns on the school car park.

These are just some of the things I observed with my own eyes - doubtless he did much more...
( rubberduck should only be used after consulting with your GP, Wed 9 Nov 2005, 16:19, Reply)