your reading for the day
sorry, i'm still piled high with lab work. the last two protein purifications i have attempted have failed (think: can't start real experiments without starting material) so i am working on the third. gave lab meeting this morning. generally, a very busy girl!
i bet you didn't know the
history of mother's day.
i've been reading the fascinating words of
mark morford in the san francisco gate for years. don't write back till you've read his most recent
column....
whew
sorry i've been away so long. i lived in the lab the past month or so, gearing up for the conference i just got back from. i am glad it's over! i have a few more experiments to do before i can start writing up a manuscript. and once that is submitted, i have to write my prelim! so, this is a hectic time until my prelim is over, and when that will be depends on how much experimenting/writing i get done... so don't expect too much from me for a while.
take back the night
in other news, i am a road-blocker for a women's march tonight. if you are a local, be at West Side Park at 7pm!!! it will be super cool except for the thunderstorm forecast. the rally is called
"take back the night" and is just a small part of an annual international march for women to feel safe to walk down the street at night without having a man to "protect" them. my job is to stop traffic at certain intersections for the march to pass by, and then run up to my next intersection and stop some more traffic. in total, it looks like it might be a mile or two long, but that's fine, i need the exercise!!
just for your curiosity and education, here are some
myths/facts about violence against women, and a
story from a guy who didn't know what rape was.
i know i am supposed to be a scientist, but
how can you start your weekend without reading your
alcohoroscope?
or for the more serious astrologer, as long as you know what time of day you were born,
astro.com rocks the house.
you should be ashamed
how could you have not voted for a man who is not only wonderful but can work lyrics from "the gambler" into an
interview?
what are you waiting for?!
if you haven't had a chance to go see
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind yet, then i suggest you drop whatever pitiful thing it is you are doing and get yourself to the theater!! i haven't fallen in love with a movie this way since i saw
hedwig and the angry inch. i am not going to recap the movie for you. i went in knowing nothing except it had jim carey and kate winslet, and that one of them was erasing the other from their memory, and the other one was pissed about it. really, that's all you need to know. but something about that movie got right inside me and still lingers there. i saw it sunday but i haven't stopped thinking about it since then. if i had a few free hours i'd be back at the theater. damn this stupid poster not being done for the conference next week. if any of my experiments had gone right the past two months i'd be done already!!! pooh. so go see the movie.
if i had a digital camera
this is probably the kind of crap i would use it for...
you remember peeps, the little marshmallow nasty snacks that used to only come out around easter time. lisa sent me a strange picture with legions of quintuplet peeps coming out of a blue marshmallow sea. it's surreal but probably part of the manufacturing process or something. it reminded me of other great and strange things people have done with peeps. my favorie peep research to date is the
surgical separation of conjoined quintuplet peeps. coming in second would have to be
peep solubility.
very scary, indeed
so right now, there is an openly hostile takeover of the sierra club in progress. leaders of decidedly anti-immigrant and white-supremacist organizations (
FAIR,
center for american unity,
white politics inc.,
project USA,
national alliance,
national immigration alert, and
VDARE, who even
blames immigrants for causing childrens' autism) have encouraged their memberships to join the sierra club over the past few months, to be able to participate in this year's election for directors. they are running under the premise that immigrants are bad for the environment. we are overpopulated already, so why let more people in? rather than addressing lower emission standards, alternative energy sources, decreased logging, etc, they thinly veil a very racist agenda to take advantage of the organization's large membership and decent reputation. if they care so much about overpopulation, why don't they promote contraception or having less children?? hmmm, now there's a thought.
PETA is also trying to promote an animal-rights agenda on the sierra club board. i am a vegetarian, no doubt, but PETA's tactics are extremely hostile, juvenile, and poorly rationalized. yes, factory farming pollutes, and overgrazing detroys topsoil at an alarming rate, but PETA's tactics should be unwelcome in a mainstream organization dedicated to the environment.
each year, five new members are elected to a three year term, for fifteen total directors. apparently five anti-immigrant directors have been elected already. i have been worried worried that the information i've received about which people are actually honest is trickery. so today i took a little time to make sure the postcards i get in the mail encouraging me to "vote for these five candidates" isn't really telling me to vote for the "bad guys." so, i just found a useful article on alternet, which i read often, called
siege of the sierra club, and confirmed it with a recent
new york times article. *sigh of relief*
paul watson, one of the "accidents" to be elected to the board already, claims "we are only three directors away from controlling that board. and, once we get three more directors elected... we'll change the entire agenda of that organization." this quote is on a postcard i received from
groundswell sierra, a group trying to get the good word out to the membership of the sierra club. the reason it's easy for the white-supremacist faction to work their way in is that only a very small percent of sierrans actually vote in the election. if you are a member, i urge you to go to the
election page with your ballot and vote for
aumen, karpf, o'connell, ranchod, and renstrom. i am sure there are other decent people on the ballot, but it doesn't help to divide our votes!
since you "asked"
i often get googled accidentally for "pink chalk bag" as i have mentioned my beloved possession in numerous climbing tales. i don't have a photo of it, but it's a krieg chalk bag, and the design is apparently called "disco sequins." it looks exactly like
this one, but dark pink! fear the pink chalk bag of power! it assists me to great heights! girls hit on steve when he borrows it! (ahem.) you just can't go wrong!
it's a democracy. or, sometimes i say dumb things, #5382
i got exit-polled by the local newspaper after i voted yesterday morning... and i am
not very eloquent at 7:30am. heh. especially on 4 hours of sleep, staying up late grading the biochem quizzes to give back tuesday morning. some very creative, but extremely
wrong answers made grading take 2.5hrs instead of the predicted 30 minutes. no, you
cannot "synthesize iron from mRNA" and "transferritin" does
not "transport excess Fe bound to the iron"!! holy crap. did you glance at the
periodic table when you took chemistry?! yes, you are the future dietitians of america. giving nutrition advise to the obsesity-plagued nation.
so, as the writer mentions, i
did have my camera! it was beautiful out, wet snow sticking all over everything, including the chain linked fences. i actually said a lot more about kucinich--it's funny what she extracted from my ranting. it somehow sounds that i just decided to like him after listening to him speak monday night, which is pretty funny to me. and not true. but has no consequence anyway.
and i AM most emphatic that it is our job as citizens to vote! can't be a
democracy [government by the people] if the damn people don't participate!
notice that there are five definitions of democracy in that dictionary link. one of them is explicitly about our participation: "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people
and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections." or at least the 10% of us that go out to vote. hooray, apathy!
but i found definition #5 fascinating: "the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges." absolutely fascinating. i don't think our current leaders read that far down the page. i mean, those who can read beyond
the very hungry caterpillar level.
god's not so much into seafood
i strive to learn something new every day. i realized pork was unclean. but apparently
so is shrimp. which still doesn't mean a flying flip to a vegetarian such as myself.
what i find fascinating is the religious right's opinions on which scriptural laws should become United States laws. not laws regarding food choices, or financial practices, just regarding marriage choices. oops, i mean
gender of your marriage choices, not whether or not you stay married. 'cause far as i remember, jesus wasn't too fond of divorces either. i don't think you get to pick and choose which laws of any particular religion you get to follow? "oh, i never did like that commandment about killing. let's bomb the fuck out of iraq!"
the framers of our constitution weren't interested in deriving our laws from religious texts, you know, that whole bit about separation of church and state. seems like it would have imposed on that one little amendment about freedom of religion....
