Certainly Was A Treat To Me

Mosey on over to Old Timey, Dammit for my latest musical experiment. Another old jug band standard, "The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives To Me".

Man, you'd think after all this time I'd be able to play the kazoo with some kind of skill. Sigh. This is why we outsourced all that tricky stuff to the miscellaneous section. Anyway, it's short, and was kind of fun, so enjoy!

Them There's Good Eatin'!

So, it turns out you can get good barbeque in Madison. Smoky Jon's isn't the Dinosaur, but we were pleasantly surprised.

We got the first sign that it might be as good as it claimed was when we pulled up outside. It's out on Packers Ave, which is a 4-lane divided highway through an industrial neighborhood. (The Oscar Meyer plant is maybe half a mile from there.) The place itself is half of an old warehouse. The other half seems to be an auto repair shop or something. Anyway, sketchy enough to presage good barbeque. Stepping inside, the decor is more "log-cabin bunkhouse" than "dimly-lit biker den", but they were playing some good blues over the PA. There was also a roll of paper towels on each table. So far, so good.

I got a combo platter with a third of a rack of ribs and a smoked brisket sandwich, with fries and chili on the side. Anita got a spicy chicken sandwich with fries and cole slaw. It's St. Louis-style barbeque, which seems to mean a fairly sweet tomato-based sauce with a lot of vinegar in it. It was pretty darn good. I have only good things to say about the meat. Very clearly slow-smoked and more than tender enough to slice with the plastic knife. The chili was short on beans, oddly enough, and could really have used some cheese, but it was passable. We'll be headed back, that's for certain.

Anyway, I hope y'all are having a nice holiday weekend. We've been pretty successful in avoiding the Holiday Cheer this season, thank goodness. I should have time to record some music tomorrow (since there's nothing else to do), so stay tuned...

"Literature"

Well, Anita has been frozen into Watertown for the night (freezing rain storm!), so I find myself at something of a loss. Hence, an anecdote:

With the new "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" movie out, the subject of fantasy came up recently. I haven't seen the movie, and don't really plan to. I have fondish memories of the BBC series, particularly "The Silver Chair" with Tom Baker as the marshwiggle, but I always thought C.S. Lewis' stuff was a little weak. I said as much, and there was some debate on what were the really good fantasy novels out there.

Madeline L'Engle and the venerable Dr. Tolkein were bandied about, and somebody or other expressed a lingering fondness for The Black Cauldron. Watership Down was dismissed as "not really fantasy" by some, which seems silly to me. The most "grown-up" books anyone mentioned were the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which I despised, and Robert Jordan's ongoing epic, which I've avoided. My list of favorites met with blank looks, for the most part, but I suppose I should expect that by now.

In no particular order:

•Last Call by Tim Powers - although, frankly, everything he's written since The Anubis Gates has been brilliant, and I really, really liked both Expiration Date and On Stranger Tides. If only he didn't write novels so dang slowly.

•Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - stunningly inventive, reading this was like being punched in the gut repeatedly by H.P. Lovecraft and Karl Marx while watching a Terry Gilliam movie

•Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke - only came out last year, but is on my list of favorites already: set in the 1800's, the magic in this book has a lot of neat texture to it

•Rats And Gargoyles by Mary Gentle - possibly the most obscure thing on this list, but well worthwhile. She describes what she writes as "Hermetic science fiction", so obscurity may be what she's aiming for...

•The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll - I think everyone's favorite Jonathan Carroll novel is the first one they read. This one is mine.

I also mentioned Pratchett, who is reliably entertaining, and Neil Gaiman, who none of them had heard of. Startling revelation, that. I held off on bringing up old creakers like Mervyn Peake and E.R.R. Eddison and slowly extracted myself from the conversation. They probably wouldn't be interested in hearing about Jeffrey Barlough, the mutant lovechild of H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens, anyway.

So, um, read anything interesting lately?

Free at last!

Semester's obligations have been completed and they don't seem to be on the verge of booting me out yet. I also seem to have a Rhodospirillum mutant. Three weeks to get some work done in peace...

Ye Ancient Order Of Chicken-Flingers

After discovering the Historic Tale Construction Kit I am terribly tempted to recreate the entire tale of Arnold von Winkelreid in tapestry form. However, I have resisted (if only because there aren't any images of beer for the time-travelling Vikings to drink), and will only subject you to the above sad tale of a desperate man in desperate times.

Meme attack!

Well, I wouldn't normally post one of these, but this is far and away the best internet quiz I've seen this year. So, what biological molecule are you?


You are DNA. You're a smart person, and you appear
incredibly complex to people who don't know
you. You're incomparably full of information,
and most of it is useless.


Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Post-Thanksgiving Lull

We didn't do much for Thanksgiving this year, which is frankly cause for a certain amount of giving thanks right there. Don't get me wrong, Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday of the year. It celebrates something I can really support wholeheartedly. I just was not ready to face leaving the house this year, that's all.

Anita and I stayed in and had a fairly pleasant day. We played some board games, sat around on the couch, and confused the cats. I made seafood bisque, garlic bread, and pumpkin pie, so the Thanksgiving food essentials were struck. All in all, a nice relaxing day.

The lab is more or less deserted today, which is how I like it. I can have my music on without bothering anyone, and there isn't anyone to bother me while I work. Or, um, blog. Regardless, life is as good as it's been in a while, and I can't really complain. I mean, heck, some poor saps are trying to shop today.

Making My Mark

And people say I'm not accomplishing much with my life. Hah! I just got my contributing author's complimentary copy of the new Food Biotechnology textbook, and right there on page 1293 is a little thing I penned with the snappy title of "Genetics and Physiology of Pathogenesis in Food Borne Bacterial Pathogens".

The book is unexpectedly huge. You could choke a moose with it. Or equip an outhouse for months. I think I'll put it on the shelf above my desk, in case I ever need to fend off an angry mob or need a really solid doorstop. I guess I could even look up food biotechnology stuff in it, if it came to that.

Next, the world!

A High Point

So, the weekend was not a total bust. We went over to the High Noon Saloon last night for the Asylum Street Spankers show. Rollicking good fun, and a pretty good crowd for a Sunday night. Highly recommended, if they're coming through your town.

Man, I'm happy about the smoking ban. I can actually sit through an entire show at a bar now.

P.S. Well, what do you know? "Rollicking" is spelled with two "l"s. Huh. Of course, the spell-checker's second suggestion was "or licking", so maybe I shouldn't trust it too much. Either way, it did look funny before.

Something to look forward to

So, Nicole just had her thesis defence yesterday, and it turns out that the lab tradition for such an occasion involves champagne and a pinata. I knew I liked these people for some reason.

Only 3 or 4 years to go...

Downright unsettlin'

It's cold in the lab today. The morning cup of tea is brewing, but I'm not focusing well on science right at the moment. Allow me a moment or two to rant.

We finally went to see Serenity last night.

(For those who aren't enormous nerds, the rest of this won't make any sense. Just letting you know.)

We didn't like it.

We had just finished watching the series on DVD, and saw that the movie had come around to the second-run theater. We were very excited. Reviews were good, we loved the series, revelations were promised, mysteries would be solved and questions would be answered. The characters we loved would make a triumphant return.

Except that the movie didn't have any of the things that made the show actually good. Firefly was remarkable for humor and character development, for the intricate blending of sci-fi and the Western, for comfortable intimacy and roughness around the edges. The movie was nothing more than a mediocre science-fiction shoot-'em-up action film with shiny special effects and lots of blood, which would be fine if it didn't have characters we cared about caught up in it. No one smiled for the whole damn film. There was none of the humor, the revelations didn't make any sense, and River's "powers" turned out in the end to be the same old Buffy choreography.

I think, with 9 main characters and a story designed to be told over 5 years of TV episodes, the problem was simply one of time. Joss Whedon had to jam 4 seasons of events into an hour and a half. Of course there wouldn't be time for anything but cursory interactions and gunplay. It's a real shame, and it just didn't turn out well. I think he knows it, too. Movies aren't suited to the kinds of stories he wants to tell. The, um, finality of a certain event towards the end suggests to me that Mr. Whedon doesn't want to make any more movies. Firefly is done.

I understand why the movie got made, and I had hoped that it would be the capstone to a great series that should have been. Instead, it's a headstone, only showing what Firefly would have been if they had caved into the bland commercialism the studios wanted in the first place. I liked the way it ended better before. It was sad and incomplete, but it wasn't dead.

Stylish new look

Well, you all asked for it, so here's a picture of me with my super-fashionable new facial hair. :-) I started it for Halloween, but I think I like it well enough to keep. Reactions have been mostly positive, although some people seem dead set against beards. They're mostly married to other, hairless guys, so I pay no attention. Anita seems to approve, although she says I'm still kind of prickly.

The cat's opinion was not obtained, although shortly after this picture was taken he bit me on the arm. Which is more or less how he reacts to everything, actually.

Strange compulsions

I don't know if it's the weather, or the stupid technical failures at the bench, or the phase of the moon, or what, but I've been feeling a little depressed of late. No reason to be, really, just settled into some of the old gloom. Terrible place to be, really. Life's too short.

So I'm making a pie.

Apple, of course. I keep experimenting with other kinds, but inevitably I decide that I like plain apple pie better. I made pumpkin pie last week, which was good, but astonishingly labor-intensive. Dinosaur icebox or sweet potato pecan are excellent as well, but somehow, 2.5 lbs of fresh apples, 2.5 cups of flour, a stick of butter, and half a cup of Crisco comes together better. Something to be said for simplicity, I suppose.

Anyhow, 2 Gala apples, 2 Fuji, and 2 Jonagold. We'll see how it turns out. The Gala may have been a mistake, they seemed a little mushy when I peeled them, but hopefully it'll all even out. Should go nicely with dinner, which is butternut squash soup and fresh apple cider cranberry bread from Francois'. Fall food.

Am I the only one who combats depression with cooking? I bought a 1 quart measuring cup and a kitchen scale today, too. At least I can buy kitchen toys without getting glared at. Probably because I let her share the pie.

Quick Halloween Report

Loads of Science to do, but I should note that this was an awesome weekend before manacling myself to the bench once again.

Dan and Amanda came to visit us from North Carolina for the weekend, and a great deal of fun and excitement was had. Dan's new hobby is photography, so he has lots of extremely high-quality photos of the festivities, which I'll pass on a few of once I get hold of them. We spent most of the time going to good restuarants - the Great Dane, Francois' Cafe, Restaurant Muramoto, to name a few - and soaking in the last few nice days of the Fall. We stayed well clear of the State Street riots on Saturday night, but did go to a costume party on Sunday night at John and Autumn's place, at which we established that physics graduate students are even dorkier (on average) than microbiology graduate students. It was a good time.

Anyway, I must get back to work, but hey, if anyone else wants to come visit us, we've got a very comfy futon!

They'll turn me into a biochemist yet.

Chalk up another triumph for Mike's crazy technical skills...

See that big fat band all by itself in the right-most lane? That there is pure BluB protein from Rhodospirillum rubrum. It's also one metric buttload of the stuff, which means lots of good juicy experiments to do! The only problem in the whole wide world is that the stuff doesn't seem to like my elution buffer and crashed out after a couple of hours, but that's no big deal. I can make more and dialyze it into something friendlier.

Now, now I'm getting somewhere.

Oh, I'm rockin' now.

So, over at florn.net Mr. Adinolfi is preparing his 50th podcast, which is pretty dang awesome. I'm given to understand that he's soliciting sound recordings for said podcast, so I decided to get off my butt and record something.

Tune your internet-caster to Old Timey, Dammit for my latest musical extrusion. It's an old Appalachian dance tune called "Cluck Old Hen", has lyrics that make not one lick of sense, and is an absolute hoot to play. I need to find me a fiddle player, darn it. But first, I need to finish this beer. Mmmmm.

Time For The Happy Cloning Dance!

Spectacular success! The damn construct I've been wrestling with for 6 months finally came together, with all the pieces lined up and restriction sites just so. Need to stick it into Rhodospirillum and we'll have something really interesting to play with.

I've had more success today than all last week. Damn, it's nice when things actually work.

Not too much else to report, except that I despise grading exams. I recently bought a rubber stamp that prints "Complete And Utter Bullshit" in big red letters, and I've been sorely tempted to break it out, but grading is enough like shooting yourself in the foot as it is. I think I'll just settle for giving a penmanship prize. Positive reinforcement, right?

While We're On The Subject

Well, heck, while we're gossiping about martial arts...

About a month ago, I spent a weekend at the Western Martial Arts Workshop, which was in Racine this year. It was 3 days of fun and intensive training in all sorts of European historical fighting methods, and was generally a blast and a half. Great mayhem ensued, and I'm sorely tempted to go again next year, even though it's going to be in Dallas.

Anyway, some pictures:

Here I am taking a knife away from a very nice fellow named "Chris", I think. This was in Roger Siggs' class on dagger techniques from Marozzo's Opera Nova, written in 1536.

And here I am being cleaved neatly in twain by Rob Lovett, who is a very large, surprisingly graceful man, and who was teaching a class on Fiore Dei Liberi's Flos Duellatorum from around 1410.

I haven't had a chance to browse through all of the pictures they've posted, but at least in these two I don't look too excessively bald. Sigh. Ah, well. I suppose I wasn't all that good-looking to begin with... :-)

I do get to have fun playing with swords, though, which makes up for a lot!

Seasonal Mood Swings

Yesterday, it was 85° and sunny. Today it's 50°, grey, and damp. Ick. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Fall. I really do. However, I could do with some sort of even transition. I've made myself a mug of mulled cider, and I have a lap full of cat, so I believe I'm ready to face the rest of the evening, but still...

I could easily write a grumpy treatise on the miseries of the week, but that would be boring. So, in the positive column, I did have a jolly good sparring session at martial arts class last night. I'm starting to internalize some of that krabi krabong, much to the dismay of these JKD guys. I do, however, need to stop letting the jiu-jitsu players get ahold of me. Good fun had by all.

And now, it's time to adjourn the proceedings to a nice hot bath.

Planning Ahead

It is fairly certain now that I will be coming to NY to visit in the middle of March. (Spring break runs from the 11th to the 19th, I think.) I am, of course, planning on making the drive down from my parent's place to Ithaca. Who all might I expect to be around?

Obscure, but entertaining

Hey, anyone remember text adventure games? Turns out people are still writing them, and the Annual Interactive Fiction Contest just started. A couple of dozen free games to download and judge - it's actually kind of fun. If last year is any judge, there will be a couple of incredible duds, some laughable failures, some interesting attempts, and a handful of really good games.

Oh, and if you're interested in free text adventures that people agree are good, Baf's Guide isn't a bad place to start.

Where We Live Now

So, this is our new house. We live in #14, which is the left side of the building. The people next door are very pleasant, even if they do own a chihuahua named "Kiwi Martini".

Out back we have a little patio, and we bought a charcoal grill to cook with. (Thanks, Dad!) Grilling combines three of the finest joys in life: playing with fire, poking stuff with a stick, and eating tasty meat!


Two shots of the living room, trying to get the feel of the space. It's actually quite nice. Almost looks like real people live here. I, of course, had very little to do with the interior decoration, but I do try not to mess it up too badly. Upstairs we've got a bedroom and a study, and of course there's a kitchen, which is pretty nice. In the Department of Ridiculous Excess, we've also got 2 and a half baths, but that mostly just means the cats have their own bathroom to stink up.

Speaking of cats, here's our furnished basement, which we haven't really figured out what to do with yet. It makes a good retreat for cats and other folks trying to hide from the world. I keep my instruments down here, and while the acoustics are a little strange, it's a good place to keep to myself.

Regularly Scheduled Programming

One of the things I really need to get back into doing is recording music. I had a pretty good run going there, and then just sort of petered out. Time to get on the ball.

So, head over to Old Timey, Dammit for something I actually recorded a couple of days ago: an old sea shanty sort of a thing called "Adieu, Sweet Lovely Nancy." I learned this off of a John Roberts and Tony Barrand album, and for some reason it has become one of a handful of songs I typically sing unaccompanied. Now, I wasn't able to get the usual shower-stall echo effect in my "recording studio", but I think it still came out OK.

Let me know what you think!

Detente

Well, Anita and I had a good long chat last night, and I think we're more or less back on track. We've got a bunch of stuff we still need to work on, but things are better than they were. We'll see how it goes.

Of course, this may ultimately free up more time for blogging

There will be a delay in the promised new, improved blogging schedule while my relationship crumbles around my feet. Priorities, you know? I've got a drinking problem to develop and all. God damn it.

More Bug And Squirrel!

My friend Sharon lent us the DVD set of "Firefly", and I realize we're about 3 years behind the times here, but this is a darn good show! Even Anita likes it, and she was hard to sell on the whole "sci-fi western" concept. The crew does seem to get shot and stabbed a whole bunch, though... Hopefully, the movie will still be in theaters by the time we work our way through the whole series.

This is totally the way to watch TV. No commercials, no schedule, we get to watch the show in the order the writer intended it to be seen, it's good. All we have to do is resist the temptation to sit like zombies for hours, until our necks sieze up.

In other news, today is Anita's birthday! Yay! We're planning on going to Restaurant Muramoto for dinner. It's supposed to be very fancy. I shaved and I have a clean shirt with buttons to wear, so there's a decent chance they'll let us in, I hope.

The Adventures of Bug and Squirrel #1

I promise to be a better blog-boy in the future, I really do. Oh, and Comic Life is kind of a fun toy. More soon...

See, now this is what I was trying to say

Click here for an eloquent man expressing exactly how I feel about the current situation.

They're everywhere...

New Glarus, Wisconsin is an


extremely odd


little town.


They do make really exceptional beer there, though. Oh, and there was jousting. And the restaurant where we sold lunch had "wurstsalat" on the menu. There were also a lot of bikers, but I think that goes with the jousting, more than anything.

Further Adventures in Mad Science

It's gotten to the point where I can actually talk to Jorge without having him give me a new project, but occasionally we come up with something new and interesting to explore...

After sitting down and comparing some genomic data this week, we discovered something puzzling. After chatting a bit, we both agreed that the best way to figure out what's going on is to take random chunks of Listeria DNA and express them in Salmonella, just to see what happens.


Have I mentioned that I love my job?

Belated Blogging

Whew. Busy week. Lots of science and unpacking and whatnot. I will have bunches of before and after pictures of our spiffy new place, but first, it's time to do a little catching up!

A few weeks ago, my parents came to visit us in Madison. It was loads of fun. They stayed at the Chaucerian bed and breakfast downtown, and we spent most of the trip exploring the restaurants of Madison. Bandung (the Indonesian place) and the Great Dane (which serves a mean bratwurst) were big hits.

We also went to the Farmer's Market, which was (as always) a source of great amusement. We even bought vegetables! Here's a picture of me and my Dad sitting by the Capitol. Kind of eerie, isn't it?

Another fun thing we did was go to the Olbrich Botanical gardens, which are quite lovely. They were having a Thai cultural festival at the pavilion, and there was lots of entertainment, including dancing girls with extremely funny hats.


We relaxed a bit after the festival over in the new rose garden, and Anita and I went up on the funny little decorative tower while my parents cleverly rested in the shade. We did snap a picture of them from up there, though, which doesn't nearly do justice to my Mom's classy hat. Sarah and I got it for her, and she wears it to embarass us, but it doesn't work! Our upbringing has rendered us immune to mere embarassment!

More blogging excitement soon!

The Sad Saga of the Moronic Squirrel

(to the tune of "Charlie on the MTA")

Let me tell you of the story of a squirrel named Larry
It's a tragic and fateful tale
And it will serve as a warning to every squirrel who ever goes out
On the Atwood Bicycle Trail

Chorus:
Did he ever return? No he never returned,
And his fate is still unlearned.
Did he run into the bushes or did he fly straight up to heaven?
He's the squirrel who never returned!

Larry went out to the Atwood Community Garden
To steal some tasty snacks
And as he sat a-munching, a bicycle came rolling towards him
And Larry froze right in his tracks!

Chorus

He dodged to the left, and he dodged to the right,
Then he let out a little squeal,
Then he ran to the right, and faked to the left,
Then threw himself under my back wheel

Chorus

Larry disappeared, and his fate's uncertain
Does he live to frolic in the phlox?
Or did he climb right up the oak tree of Jordan
'Cause he was dumber than a bag of rocks?

Chorus x 2

Off To A Jolly Good Start

Oy. I have a bad feeling about today.

So, my new commute is a five-mile bike ride, which is normally no problem - good exercise, mostly on bike trails, a nice way to start the day. Ok, fine. Except this morning, about half a mile on, I swerved to miss some stuff in the road, and the edge of the sidewalk reached out, caught my front tire, and took me down. Many martial arts classes worth of falling practice paid off, and I came away more or less unscathed - a bit of the road in the palm of my hand, a serious grass-stain on the shoulder of a fairly nice T-shirt - but when I picked up the bike, I noticed something was awry.

Specifically, the handlebars were at a 45° angle to the front tire. Not ideal. Anyway, I walked back home, got a wrench, and after a great deal of muttering and puzzling, managed to figure out what needed loosening and what needed a good whack to get it all back in alignment. Tightened the thing back up, and hit the road again.

Arrived at work a good hour late, which is fine, except I need to purify a protein today, which I don't know how to do, and I was planning on lots of time to figure it all out.

Oops. speaking of which, I'd better go pull it out of the centrifuge. Remind me to tell you the sad saga of the Moronic Squirrel some time.

Moving

Movers have moved the stuff without apparent disaster. Cats are freaked the heck out - one is under the bed, one is behind the toilet. I am at the lab, working, dammit.

Will soon attempt to figure out how to bike to the new place from here. If no word in 3 weeks, please call the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Non sequiturs, etc.

Well, we've more or less recovered from entertaining my parents over the weekend. It was lots of fun, but tiring. I should have a more comprehensive report with exciting pictures soon. However, this week is devoted to getting packed and moving into our new place on the east side of town. It's a fantastic place, and we're very excited, but there's a tremendous amount of work to do. Pfui.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Kaiyo when he was just a little guy. (He is, of course, a rather larger guy now, but I've been scanning some old photos lately.)

More Distractions

So, I've been a bit busy lately. My folks are coming to visit this weekend, so I've been trying to get everything squared away before they arrive. However, for those of you who need more distractions in your lives, check this out:

Radio Memories is a podcast of some great old time radio shows: westerns, sci-fi, comedy, you name it. I've been listening to Groucho Marx while updating my notebook this morning, which makes for an interesting contrast.

I remember when I was a kid the NPR station in Oswego would broadcast all of these wonderful old shows from 9 to midnight every night. It was great. Jack Benny, The Shadow, X-Minus One, The Goon Show, all that good stuff. Hence my ability to explain in reasonable detail who Fibber McGee and Molly are, and how they relate to the Great Gildersleeve, while being utterly incapable of naming a single member of U2. I do have a certain amount of cultural literacy, it's just 50-80 years out of date, that's all.

Damn That Cotton Gin!

Hey hey! Tune your internet to Dan's webpage, where he once again features my humble banjo picking on his podcast! Thanks, Dan! I appear to be serving as a symbolic representation of timeless "traditional values", or some such thing. Perhaps I am the Anti-Techno! I have inherited a bit of a Luddite streak...

But damn it, Dan, if you're going to keep improving your production values this way, I'm going to have to figure out some way to make my recordings sound better.

(Um, actually, I hate to mess with your symbolism and all, but the "melodic clawhammer" style I'm playing in on that piece really only dates from the 1970's or so... A real old-time musician would never think of playing a melody like that on the banjo. That's what fiddles are for.)

Biffy and Laurence

Hey, look! It's the always-mysterious Biffy and Laurence (and Darlene, of course)!

I really do need to sit down and scan the rest of my old jug band pictures. There's some amusing stuff in there. We were all very skinny then. And damn did I need a haircut.

Stifling insanity!

Crazy, crazy weekend.

The heat, of course, is appalling. My brain stops functioning or being capable of sleep at around 85°F, so that's been fun, for starters. I've also had to work a lot this weekend - 5 hours yesterday, 2 hours so far today - which is actually not so bad, since there's AC and a -20°C walk-in freezer. However, it's still work.

Anita's been pretty stressed lately, too. Her boss is out of town, and there's been nothing but crisis after crisis at the clinic. She got a call during breakfast today about a cat which had been staying at the clinic being treated for diabetes which the kennel worker found lying on the floor outside of it's cage not moving first thing this morning. Of course, Anita had to go over to try to figure out what happened, and the clinic is an hour away. I haven't heard back from her yet, but whatever happens, it can't be good. So she doesn't get a break this weekend, either.

On the positive side, Hot Pants came to visit. He apparently had a conference in Chicago this week, so he called me up, rented a car, and cruised on up for the afternoon yesterday. It was fun. We wandered around town, caught up on old times, and drank more than we probably should have. The Italian restaurant on State St. turns out to be excellent. He applied peer pressure for another jug band reunion gig at Risley, since he missed the last one. I'm slightly dubious, since we don't know anyone who lives there anymore, but I expect I'll be back in New York sometime before next winter, so perhaps something can be coordinated. (Although I'd probably be just as happy with a good rollicking porch jam, honestly.)

Anyway, back to the salt mines. I'm debating whether the answer to all my problems is Tea or Sleep. Both seem reasonable, but they are more or less mutually exclusive. This is the kind of critical decision which drives my current existence.

Speaking of music

So, while I'm thinking about music... Some of you might be interested in the Open Source Audio webpage. Lots of good public domain recordings of music in just about every genre you can imagine. I've been downloading old-timey recordings from the '20s and '30s today (that's Clarence Ashley with the banjo over there), but I really need to poke around in their blues archive and see what's in there, too.

Getting plunky

Some great confluence of stars seems to be pointing banjo-ward of late, so I've recorded a little bit of melodic clawhammering for your listening pleasure... Point your internets to my music archive and you will find a little banjo picking under the title "Bonaparte's Breakfast."

It's a medley of two traditional tunes: "Bonaparte Crossing The Rhine" and "Whiskey Before Breakfast." I was going to call it "The Tendonitis Set", but thought better of it. There's a few missed notes here and there, but believe me, this is far and away the best take. Let me know what you think!

It came in the Cheerios

Anita bought Honey Nut Cheerios this week, and it came with these... We had a good time punching them out and trying to fit them together from the cryptic instructions. I imagine they're for some movie or another. I don't quite know what to make of the jive lion, exactly, but I sure do like the weird little kung fu penguins.

It's the little things in life, you know?

They said we were mad! Mad!

OK, I know I keep posting these things, but it's only because they're awesome.

Videos of NASA's Deep Impact probe blowing a great gaping hole in a comet. Cool engineering, the promise of some excellent science, and a large explosion around the orbit of Mars: this is science at its best.



*Edited sheepishly 7/6/05, to remove an extraneous apostrophe. Sorry, Mom.

So Patriotic I Can Hardly Stand It

Whew. Yesterday was a marathon of fun and excitement.

No pictures, sadly, but we started off going to the Farmer's Market on the Capitol square early in the morning so we could be sure to not be there when the annoying rental company people were going to come through showing our place for about the 30th time. (They're never going to rent it if they don't lower the price... Hell, we only rented it because we were desperate and had 2 days to find an apartment.) We bought basil, green onions, and snow peas, and discovered that it was Massage Fair Day, so we each got a free 10 minute massage. Anita used her keen detective skills to discover that the massage school in town has a student clinic where you can go to get your knots worked on by students for absurdly cheap. Something to check out later...

Then, we had breakfast at the Orpheum, which is this fancy old theatre with a restaurant in the lobby. They make a mean omelet and pretty good waffles. If the posters on the wall are to be believed, they also seem to do Rocky every week, which might be too much Rocky, but it's hard to say. You wouldn't have to go far for toast, anyhow.

Then on to a barbeque at Bob's place, where Anita and Kristi talked about horses while us menfolk watched MMA fights on the TV in the basement. (Bas Rutten is a hoot.) Kabobs and watermelon were had, and were good.

And we ended up the day at the Terrace, listening to blues by the Cashbox Kings (who are pretty darn good), and watching fireworks across the lake. Madison has the largest fireworks display in the Midwest, and it was, in fact, totally excessive. I like fireworks as well as the next guy, but once you hit the 20-minute mark, there really isn't that much more they can do. It must have gone on for half an hour or more, accompanied by bad blaring music on the loudpeakers (including that great patriotic classic "The Phantom of the Opera"), and I'm sorry to say that by the end I was just sort of wondering when it would all be over. We were across the lake from the actual display, so maybe it would have been better if we'd actually been with the 100,000 people in Warner Park under the fireworks, but it probably just would have been louder and more crowded.

No more adventures for me this weekend. Sitting here by myself in the lab is quite pleasant, really. I think I may have some sort of social allergy.

The Wonder of the Internet

You know why I like the internet? I like the internet because of things like the DogBlog, that's why.

I mean, otherwise I'd be forced to spend my time at work working, and nobody wants that.

Technical wizardry

Hey, Blogger just changed the image-posting technology for these things! This may not impress you much, but I always like it when I can just press a button and get it to come out looking nifty. Lord knows it's smoother than the hack-job I was using to get pictures on here before. It's also an excellent excuse to post a random microbiology picture.

That's Thermobifida fusca, a thermophilic actinomycete which is one of my critters. I should take a picture of it growing in a flask sometime. It's fun. It forms little fuzzballs in the flask. They're extremely cute, as bacteria go. They do smell kind of funny, but what are you going to do?

What I need today

Some of you may already be familiar with this website (Mom...), but today it seems strangely relevant. I think I need to invest in a hammock.

"Our Mission Statement

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely."

Whoa.

Latest Hubble image of Fomalhaut, 25 light years away...



(from New Scientist.)

Wacky Science #2

From Science:

A team of researchers went down to a deep sea hydrothermal vent, two and a half kilometers underwater, and isolated a bacterium with an.. interesting lifestyle:

"Reporting online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the first example of a photosynthetic organism that doesn't need the sun to live. As long as it gets sulfur and CO2, the bacterium--known as GSB1 for the time being--seems to get by on the kind of light provided by vent glow."

Vent glow being mostly the infra-red light given off by hot water. :-) Crazy little dudes, eh?

Flitting to and fro

Today was the day of pretending to be a social butterfly of the highest order. We went to two barbeque / picnic things today, one with a bunch of microbiologists and one with some co-workers of Anita's, so we both got to spend hours hobnobbing with people we don't really know and eating mysterious food of dubious provenance. Needless to say, we're a bit frazzled by the whole experience. Normally we don't interact with people this much in a month.

However, several important lessons were learned:

1. Soaking peaches in balsamic vinegar and rosemary and then grilling them is actually a really good idea.

2. I suck at kickball. Anita is a vicious kickball machine.

3. Veterinarians supply better beer at picnics, on average, than microbiologists.

4. Mustard stains turn red when you rub detergent into them, but then pretty much disappear after they dry.

I think I'm set for fun for the weekend. I intend to spend the rest of it sleeping, if it's all the same to you. Good night.

And I don't even like viruses!

There's an article in this month's ASM News which just blew my fragile little mind... A research group in France just sequenced the genome of mimivirus, which looks like this:



The kicker is that mimivirus is fully 400nm across, and encodes over 1200 genes. that is to say, it's both significantly bigger in size and gene content than a good number of parasitic bacteria. It has enough highly conserved genes that they were able to place it on the phylogenetic tree of all life as a fourth domain branching off near the root of the eukaryotes. I love this stuff.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

I got your "old-timey" right here

I just put up a new tune on my music webpage.

It's a very old tune called "Old Baggum". It's a variant of Child Ballad #18. (Beware of annoying MIDI music on that website.) Francis J. Child was this crazy folklorist who went around the English-speaking world in 1850's collecting all of the old oral tradition songs that he could find and writing them down. The oldest written version of "Old Baggum" is from the Percy Manuscript, circa 1640 or so. My version is of Appalachian ancestry, more or less. The lyrics I'm singing are from Joel Mabus' version, and the banjo arrangement is my modification and mashing together of some tablatures I found on the Internet.

It's a fairly grizzly little song, but it sure is fun to play! (Even if it is about half a step too high for me to sing... :-) Let me know what you think.

Must... Find... Motivation...

Gah. Too much heat, not enough sleep, too frazzled to think of anything interesting to say. Pfui. I'm going to go stand in the -20°C coldroom until my brain cools down enough to function. Hopefully I'll have something coherent to say this weekend.

Thrilling Adventures, Part 2

So, after delving into the Cave of the Mounds, we drove past Little Norway (which, we found out later, is a reenactment community featuring the transplanted "Norway" exhibit from the 1893 World's Fair. Who knew?) into the charming town of Mount Horeb, WI, "Troll Capitol of the World".

So, the deal seems to be that around 1993, a new highway bypassed Mt. Horeb, and the Chamber of Commerce decided they needed to come up with a plan to counter the foreseen loss of business. The plan they devised was simple: give the entire town a troll theme.

Simple, elegant, yet completely insane.

We came into town along the main Trollway, stopped for lunch at the Grumpy Troll Brewpub (and had a very tasty "Skogstroll" burger), and took our pictures with some of the carved wooden trolls which line the main street:




It seems like a nice enough little town. Heavy on the antique shops, but otherwise very pleasant.

I should note, though, that Mt. Horeb has more than just trolls... It is also home to the world's finest Mustard Museum.



Yes, in fact, the tourist literature of Mt. Horeb goes so far as to call it the "Cooperstown of Condiments", which may be pushing it a little, but they certainly have a lot of mustard:



As I'm sure you can understand, after that, we had had quite enough and drove wearily home to have a rudimentary dinner of leftover rice and frozen pork buns. It had been a long, fruitful day, and we collapsed gently into a deep sleep, dreaming only of swarthy trolls swimming in a sea of gourmet mustard...

(For pictures of our previous adventure in southern Wisconsin, take a look here.)

Thrilling Adventures, Part 1

It was a hot, sticky day, with threats of thunderstorms and hail, when we set out into the wilds of south-eastern Wisconsin for the first Adventure of the season. We managed to avoid certain death at the confusing intersection of Nakoma Dr. and Highways 18 and 151 S, purchased a peanut butter snack bar to sustain us, and cruised relatively uneventfully to the Cave of the Mounds, one of the foremost natural wonders of the Mount Horeb area.

It really is a lovely little cave, cool and cozy, and absolutely gorgeous. We shared our tour with a platoon of girl scouts, but they were pretty well-behaved. Sadly, most of the pictures we took in the cave turned out blurry, but here's one that turned out fairly well:



It was a perfect day for underground tourism. We managed to time our tour carefully to avoid the torrential downpour, and now my car is clean!

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we have lunch in Mount Horeb and are beset by trolls...

Science, by gum

You see that? That's data there! Ha!

Fun in the sun!

Well, it's Memorial Day weekend, and you know what that means: Bratfest!

Madison is home to the world's largest bratwurst festival, and Anita and I went down to make our contribution to breaking the world record for most brats consumed at a single event. Last year they sold something over 189,000 brats in 4 days, or enough to stretch from here to Waunakee.


As you walk in, you are greeted by the sight of a small army of brat-grillers.


Not to mention, the world's largest grill!


And, of course, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. No Madison event is complete without it.


Mmmm, tasty!