smells like teen spirit

Today we had a chemistry prac.

We were reflux-ing ethanoic acid and 1-pentanol to make amyl acetate or pentyl acetate I can't remember what we're meant to call it.
This ester is to have a fragrant banana smell, in contrast with the sharp stinging smell of ethanoic acid, and the nail-polish-smell of 1-pentanol.

So we were being told a story of how the previous class conducted the experiment without any major incidents. One boy did manage to spill ester on his hand and he smelt like banana.

I finished the story to our table by adding "Then he ate himself and he died. The End."

Anyways so we were refluxing and in the space between lighting the Bunsen burner and actually getting results, we were being simultaneously being taught and told anecdotes.
He was informing us of how if we hit a couple of notes out of the many notes smelt in a banana, and we can still recognise it as a banana. And how it's like an mp3 ripped off a CD, which holds only 5% as much data as the CD file. Which sounds like so much lower quality than "compressed 20 times" =O. The power of expression to warp our interpretations of the same data =O. Mr Bialy is such an audiophile.

Then he was showing us a word doc with a bajillion esters and what they smell like. Then we found out that amyl acetate/pentyl acetate is also the bee alarm pheromone. So presumably if you torture many bees you will extract a fragrant fruity smell. Appears to be legitimate, good gentleman/lady.

"So, if this classroom was right near the JR plots, and we had our windows open, the bees would be going ballistic!"

And I chimed "One might say, they would be going bananas."
(inb4 Tranny)

I think that's the first class-laugh-out-loud quip that I've made since like year 10 =O. I slightly ruined it by smiling too much but whatever =P

As an addendum:
Do you know what's bloody cool? As a catalyst, we used 18mol/L sulfuric acid. Not 1.8. FREAKING EIGHTEEN. Theoretically that's a pH of -1.6. It was so exciting to be so close to something 180 times more concentrated than what we usually use. Think of all the things we could destroy - the possibilities are endless!