Texan glamour at the ICIS Intro to Baseoils training seminar

I've just popped in to the ICIS training "Introduction to Baseoils" seminar at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, where tomorrow's World Baseoils conference is going to be held. You can tell it's IP Week, because there are oil company names on all the hotel suites listed on the screens in the lobby.

Baseoils isn't really my field, but there were some cracking good papers this afternoon, particularly the unlikely sounding "Hybrid processing schemes for base oils" paper, delivered with great sparkle by speaker Amy Claxton from My Energy in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, and which I caught after lunch.

She's from Texas and a very enthusiastic speaker who really knows her subject, speaking all day without looking at her slides, and with some interesting props including some reindeer antlers. I was very taken with some of her Texan expressions, talking about "cracking the crap out of it," and "those lucky dogs with their highly paraffinic crudes," and "Those fuels guys don't want to share their stuff with us." One slide was entitled, "All crudes are equal but some are more equal than others," and when I asked her if her students were enjoying it she said, "I don't know, but I always have a blast."