Post #200!

We had 48° and rainy today, and they're predicting wind chill of 30° below tomorrow.

In completely unrelated news, less than a week until we're in Hawaii!

Mmmmmm

More astonishing culinary adventures tonight!

We went and checked out Sucré, a new dessert bar on the Capitol square. Oh my goodness. Very austere aesthetic - white walls, white leather upholstered booths, a little stainless steel here and there, slender waitstaff dressed in black. We had dessert. I had the Noir de chocolat, which was an incredible dark chocolate cake, with a truffle core and fresh raspberry sauce, and Anita had the Opera Tort, which was sort of like what tiramisu dreams of being when it grows up. A little glass of tawny port on the side, and it was just about perfect.

We're definitely going back. It's not cheap, but it's amazingly good. It's also the first place I've ever seen with absinthe on the menu. I may have to give that a try sometime, just to see.

Man, I love living in Madison.

Seemingly Old Timey

My Monday evenings have become unexpectedly free, and Anita's off at work, so I'm a bit at a loss for what to do with myself. So here's a little tune showing off the sad, spooky side of the baritone ukelele. (And coincidentally, a song where my utter lack of rhythm doesn't really matter.)

Head to Old Timey, Dammit for my rendition of Mike Agranoff's song "Gypsy Davey, One Year After". Gypsy Davey, of course, being the roguish hero of Child Ballad #200; this song takes a different look at the old story...

A glass of wine, a diuretic, and thou

I saw this bumper sticker on the way home today:

Pee for enjoyment, not for employment.

It took me a while to figure that one out.

A good day for pants

Fleece-lined Thinsulate pants, that is.

It's absurdly cold today. I think they're calling for a high of -2°. My car started, though, which was an unexpected victory.

Oh, and it turns out that the yellow slimy guys contaminating my Rhodobacter plates aren't just my problem. Roger, from the Donohue lab (who gave me the wild-type culture in the first place) says he occasionally sees them too. The weird thing is that they only grow on a plate close to the Rhodobacter, like they need something being secreted into the medium. I just can't figure out where they're coming from. Roger suggested doing my counterselections anaerobically, which might kill them off. It's worth a shot.

I know that was fascinating to you all. I'm going to go make tea.

And here we have the gourmand district...

Excellent discovery today...

We were making the rounds of the fancy pants grocery stores today, as we're wont to do whenever we forget how much food costs there, and found a new store right in between Penzey's spices and the Vespa dealership. Apparently it's the first Vom Fass store in the US, and it's amazing. Gourmet vinegars, oils, Scotch, brandy, and liqueurs, all available for tasting and mostly sold in bulk. We walked away with 100 ml of mango balsamic vinegar and 100 ml of pumpkin seed oil, but I expect to spend a lot of money there in the future.

Right next door is a new cutlery and kitchen supply store, too. Definitely an improvement over the "Chickadee Depot" tchotchke emporium that was in that space before.

Impact Factor

Through a fairly convoluted process of free-association web surfing, I ended up at the ISI Web of Science page today, checking the citation index for the various papers that have had my name on them over the years. Other than the fact that there are at least one cancer biologist and one psychologist publishing under the name "Gray MJ" right at the moment, guess what I found?

65 citations. Oh, yeah.

That's Mr. Eminent Scientist to you, buddy!

Seriously, though. That means somebody's read the darn things! That's so cool.

A Tale From The Past

I had a little free time this evening, and while perusing the little-used back directories of my computer, I found a whole bunch of stories, poems, plays, and whatnot I wrote in my impetuous youth. Some pretty weird stuff in there...

Many of you are probably familiar with the saga of Arnold von Winkelreid and the Time-Travelling Vikings, and some of you may even recall a certain Fairy Tale starring a giant named Beauregard and a mermaid named Lucille, but I don't believe this tale has ever seen the light of day...

Another Fairy Tale
by Michael Gray (age about 17, I'd say)

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, but not quite so far away so as not to get good television reception, there lived a handsome knight, a fearsome dragon, a beautiful maiden, and a large amorphous creature that thought it was an anemone, but was actually a jello mold with delusions of grandeur.

For a long time everything in this kingdom was happy and blissful. The dragon would abduct the beautiful maiden every Tuesday morning, carry her off to his cave to have his way with her, and every Thursday, after the dragon was good and tired, the knight would come and rescue her and carry her back to his castle. The beautiful maiden was doing pretty good.

In fact, late on Sunday nights, the beautiful maiden would often say to the jello mold, her very best friend, “What more could a girl ask for? I get to travel, and see the world, and every Tuesday, when my knight in shining armor is all tired out, I get abducted by a big strong dragon, who adds that touch of spice that the modern girl really needs in her life.”

The jello mold thought this was a fine life, and although it was not entirely sure whether it was a boy anemone or a girl anemone (although in fact, it was neither) thought that it would be wonderful to have a knight and a dragon and a cave and a castle of its very own.

So, as the years flowed merrily by, the jello mold became increasingly jealous of the beautiful maiden. Indeed, soon jealousy so consumed the poor jello mold that it no longer cared about how fine the television reception was, or how shiny the knights armor was, or even how many times the dragon was able to do it between Tuesday morning and Thursday night, which was mostly what the beautiful maiden talked about.

One day the jello mold decided that it had to do something. It squared its shoulders and said, “Am I a mouse or an anemone? It’s time to take action!” And with that, it leapt off of its table and scurried across the floor towards the door.

Now, also living in this kingdom, but unbeknownst to the knight, maiden, dragon, or even the jello mold, was a small cockroach. He lived under the refrigerator, with a nice girl cockroach and their 250 cockroach kids. They were a happy little family, but when the jello mold came scampering madly across the floor towards their home (The refrigerator looked a lot like a door to the nearsighted jello mold, who really didn’t know any better, but anyway...) the cockroaches were terrified.

“Oh my gosh!” cried the cockroach.

“Oh my gosh!” cried the nice girl cockroach, who hardly ever used such language.

“Oh my gosh!” cried all 250 cockroach kids, giggling madly.

“Now, children...” the girl cockroach started to scold, but her husband interrupted her: “Not now, dear! Get me the gun, and hurry!”

The girl cockroach rushed and got the gun down from its rack in the pickup truck. The cockroach took it and blew the onrushing jello mold into a million tiny little itty-bitty jello mold bits splattered all over the room.

Now, this was pretty gruesome, so of course the kids thought it was great. They ran out into the room and were jumping around, whooping and hollering, hooting and screaming, flinging little bits of jello mold innards at each other, making collages in the shape of Lyndon Johnson, using the bits to make that irritating squishy noise between their toes, and generally making a terrible, horrible, nasty, bloody mess.

The girl cockroach was mortified, and if you’ve ever tried to give 250 baby cockroaches a bath, you know why. She went careening out into the room, swatting kids with a rolled up newspaper, grabbing hold of them by the ears, and sent them all off packing to bed. There isn’t much worse than the wrath of a cockroach mom. This is why most cockroaches spend a lot of time out drinking with the boys.

But tonight, after the kids were sent to bed, the girl cockroach said, “That was very brave, Seymour.”

The cockroach, whose name was actually Lloyd, but who had never worked up the courage to tell her that, knew an opening when he saw one, and the two of them went off to bed together for a long, happy night.

Speaking of happy knights, right then the knight walked in. Now, being pretty squeamish, when he saw all that icky ex-jello mold splattered all over the room, he got pretty sick. In fact he got really quite incredibly sick all over his nice shiny armor.

Unfortunately, at that very moment, in came the beautiful maiden. The first thing she saw was her knight in shining armor vomiting his guts out all over the remains of her best friend, who was scattered hither and yon in a million icky fragments, piled up into little forts, shaped into a remarkably realistic effigy of Millard Fillmore, and generally not in absolute top form. This is not, according to most experts, the ideal romantic situation, and is bound to put a strain on any relationship.

Suddenly, in yet another remarkable plot coincidence, the dragon knocked on the door and came in. It was Monday, so no one was expecting him, but he needed to borrow a little paint to fix up his cave with. Now, being an unusually perceptive dragon, he realized that this was the big chance he had been waiting for. He snatched up the beautiful maiden, stepped on the knight, and flew off into the night, finally able to claim the beautiful maiden as his very own, with no competition from the knight, who he had never liked much anyway.

And so, all of them who were still alive lived happily ever after. The cockroaches finally had the castle all to themselves, the maiden got a little more stability in her life, and the dragon, though tired, was at least happy. Everyone else didn’t end up so happily, but those are the chances you take in a fairy tale.

The end.

I was kind of a strange kid, I think.

It's a song about a monkey!

Great googly-moogly! It's music!

Tromp on over to Old Timey, Dammit to pick up my latest musical expectoration! Just a simple little ditty to get the hang of the ukulele, with a little rythym fruit and official wedding kazoo to liven things up.

That Jesse Fuller was one strange dude.