Iratefans.com

For any of you familiar with the Pittsburgh Pirates blogging circuit, you've already come across this. For those of you that were unaware there were people who devote an incredible amount of time to blogging the Pirates, well, here's your in.

So, a few months ago now, an idea was hatched on the OnlyBucs.net forums on the subject of a protest organization that would hold the Pirates ownership and inept management accountable for the continued misery of Bucs fans everywhere. As a result, iratefans.com was started, and has recently been featured by WPXI in Pittsburgh and by a sympathetic note on Deadspin. Get a t-shirt from their eBay store and have a good time.

16-9?!

Three things today.

1) The Pirates. I could take last night's loss (Rockies 5, Pirates 4) and still feel pretty happy with what the team's been doing in the past few days. The Rockies have been doing better so far this year than they were last year (they're 29-30 this year over 59 games, while last year they were 20-39), and I can handle the loss given the level of play before, say, the San Diego series. Today's loss just made me very angry at Oliver Perez. When you give up nine runs in two innings of work in what turns out to be a 16-9 game, that's something that's going to happen though. I understand the guy gets really upset really easily and completely loses it, but allowing this to happen over and over again doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

2) The Pennsylvania House voted to implement a ban on gay and polygamous marriages in the Pennsylvania constitution. In order to be amended to the Pennsylvania constitution, it will have to achieve a majority (of 50) in the Pennsylvania senate, and then do it again in the next session of the General Assembly, and then hope that a majority of the electorate. A few issues.

• I find it nonsensical that the proposed ban includes both same-sex marriage and polygamist marriage, as they're two separate cases. No, they're not as simple as "Oh, well they're both some sort of weird fetish, so they're the same," as William Saletan attempted to demonstrate. Including polygamy, however, does increase the likely hood that it'll pass, which is the only reason I can think it was included there.


• I find it unbelievable that this is something we're seriously talking about changing the constitution over. The federal marriage amendment failed earlier in the day, which I think is a plus, as at the very least this should be a states rights issue, but I think I'll have to defer to Lewis Black on this:
  
  "On our list of national concerns, gay marriage should be on page six, right after 'Are we eating too much garlic as a people?'".
  
  I, personally, think that marriage by the state between same sex couples should be allowed. No church should ever be forced to conform to a marriage definition they don't agree with, as that's absolutely ludicrous, but if Bill and Ted are 40 year old guys who are in a committed relationship, I find it hard to say "No Bill, you can't have visitation rights when Ted has a heart attack." Whichever church you believe to be the Truth doesn't want gays to get married? That's cool. Your church of choice doesn't have to let gays get married (and shouldn't have to, and won't have to as long as this whole "avoiding political influence in religious customs" thing stays on track). I just can't for the life of me figure out why that means that Bill and Ted, who are not members of your church, but of a church that allows for gay marriage, or not members of a religious denomination at all, should be denied the legal rights afforded to them if Ted was named Tina.

So, while I agree that it's a state's rights issue, I'm sad that Pennsylvania legislators appear to want to go ahead and pass that. It's absurd that we're considering amending even the state Constitution to make sure that dudes that like each other can't enter a committed relationship with the same legal rights as they could if Ted were named Tina. I find it absolutely laughable that the legislators that have been hammering on this for the past few months are trying to pretend this isn't partisan posturing to attempt to reclaim a base of voters or simply to remind voters which team they're for (as I have trouble distinguishing anymore between how people relate to political parties and how people relate to sports teams), or to try to appeal to new voters based on a one issue stand, or, in PA's case, to get people to try to forget about the whole pay raise/unvouchered expenses thing. The President was correct when he said that the constitutional amendment probably wouldn't pass given the fact that the Defense of Marriage Act still exists, and allows states to not recognize out of state marriages despite the "full faith and credit" clause. If I were a backer of said plan to ban gay marriage, I'd feel used at this point, I think, given the zeal with which it was pursued until 2004, at which point it was dropped, only to be picked up again (without the context of the mayor of San Francisco giving marriage licenses out on his own and in the face of the banning of gay marriage in the past two years by everyone) right before 2006's elections.


3) Living in Chicago means I'm around a lot of Chicago sports fans. Cubs fans mostly, as I live on the north side and most NU students who didn't have a team before tend to default to the Cubs. And while most of my feeling bad about things time is spent on myself and the misery of being a Pirates fan, you'd think that this is probably pretty disheartening to most of them. Poor Kerry Wood.

U-r-s-p-r-a-c-h-e

I really don't understand all of the to do surrounding Spelling Bee's recently. Perhaps that's the pain of being in sixth grade and not knowing how to spell "rheumatism" talking, but I just don't get it. Still, the evidence is there that people are somehow enthralled by kids that get on a stage and try to spell words, considering recent cinema, musicals and the fact that kids dressed in white stalling for time, spelling things and winning $42,000 if they can avoid screwing up for longer than anyone else is now worthy of prime time ABC (though, considering the prime time schedule when there aren't hundreds of kids in Polos spelling "euonym", I guess that shouldn't be that surprising).

So out of curiousity, I checked the news last night to find out the final word.

And it angered me.

I, for one, like it when I have no idea how to spell a word that's winning someone a boatload of money. If, in 2004 you'd asked me to spell autochthonous, which means "indigenous", but which I'm going to pretend refers to the Cthulhu mythos, I'd have had no clue where to start, other than a vague notion that it might start with the letter A. If I were asked to spell "chiaroscurist", meaning "A painter who uses light and shade rather than colour to create the illusion of volume," I'd have been lost and confused, uncertain of what to do other than physically attacking whoever decided that that word was needed and should be that complicated. But last night's final word "Ursprache"? Come on now. "Ur-" is a common enough prefix that it should be recognized (as in "Urfaust", the first draft of Goethe's Faust). "Sprache" is one of the first words you learn.

Then again, I minored in German, and she's like fourteen. So that might be why.

Still though, I mean, good for the winner and all, but "Ursprache"? It's not 1984's winner, "luge", which had been in the Olympics for twenty years at that point, but still, I can't help but think that the people who come up with Scripps' list could have done better.

Moment of Silence

I keep regretting checking Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths", mostly because I'll stop in to see what minor author from Bulgaria has passed on, or to check on the status of someone that's notable and whose sickness is so widely broadcast that I feel some kind of duty. And it's quick. Just that one little link, and there you go.

Then, sometimes, I look and I'm actually taken aback by one of the deaths, because either I earnestly believed tha the person in question had died by now, or because it's someone that has actually had quite a bit of influence over the things I listen to, and their passing does more to accentuate what feels like an era coming to an end. It happened last year with Laurel Aitken and yesterday with Desmond Dekker.

That's not good.

Conquering Ayn

So, I've gotten into the habit of amassing what will comprise my reading for the summer. I've got this weird little habit, actually, of balancing a book which is perhaps less up there on the hardcore intellectual fare with one that actually does carry some weight so that I don't get weird looks from the cashier at the book store. It's dumb, but somehow, purchasing a comic book about zombies seems less dumb when it's paired with an introduction on Heidegger. Who knew.

This summer, I've decided via my last few purchases, is the summer I'm actually going to sit down and figure out what the hell Ayn Rand was on about. Having read Atlas Shrugged and not being able to force myself to read Anthem, I've got a taste of her ideals, but it always seems like any kind of moderate stance that's been presented has been taken to the extreme by some, particularly the Ayn Rand Institute, which, to me, seems to warp what could be reasonable philosophies into ultra-right nutjobbery. So, in an effort to finally come to an opinion on Ayn that stands up to intellectual scrutiny, I've gone and bought The Fountainhead and Philosophy: Who Needs It?. We'll see how long that holds itself together.

A bit about this development. I, for one, think that the Senate could probably be doing better things with their time than making English the "national language." I'm not confusing the terms there. The vote is to make English the "national language", not the "official language", which appears to afford it a similar status to the "national bird". I just don't see a need for it. It's already obvious that in order to attain much success in the United States, you're going to need to be pretty good with English anyway, and not knowing English is probably going to relegate you to a service role. Everyone acknowledges this. That said, I can't imagine what voting English "the national language" is meant to accomplish, as it doesn't actually do anything. Then again, I'm not a big fan of making English the official language (as I don't see the point seeing as how English is the de facto official language, will be for the forseeable future, and bilingual and polylingual states do just fine, it seems, even when they're officially polylingual) and can't understand why one should not know at least two languages functionally.

Similarly, this kind of stuff is nonsense. I actually dig on the metric system, but it's absurd to fine people for selling produce by the pound.

The Northwestern Soccer thing.

I tend not to get around to posting about news stories until they've been thoroughly gutted by the press, and the backlash has already occurred. That's not purposefully done to try to somehow get the last word on a subject, as I'd much rather blog about this kind of stuff when it's still going on, but because I'm trying to get these syntheses to work and because I've got the attention span of something with almost no attentions span, it's somewhat difficult to get around to typing something out.

But here we go anyway.

As most of you know (as the people that read this blog tend to be people that know me personally), I'm doing my thing at Northwestern University, which has been, if you hadn't seen, in the news a bit lately for the actions of one of the sports teams. Namely, the girls soccer team. During some form of event about a week back, the girls soccer team apparently blindfolded and bound the hands of the freshman players, drew things on them in marker and evidently had them do vaguely sexual things while remaining clothed. Someone posted those pictures on the web, and since then have been the subject of most of the coverage of Northwestern sports. Said photos have sinced moved elsewhere, and the entire soccer team has been suspended.

My opinion:

Sure, no one got hurt, and, according to at least one player in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, no one was forced to do anything and in the pictures everyone's smiling and happiness was never borne out quite so perfectly as when one is trashed and has phalluses written on their cheek. Or something. The problem here is twofold, for me. First, they know there are hazing regulations that the University enforces. It enforces them for a reason and by agreeing to be a member of the sports team, they're agreeing to abide by the University's policies. So I honestly don't understand the shock at being suspended for this. If the policies had been voted on and never announced, or if they hadn't existed but the University decided to come down on everyone anyway, then maybe some shock. As it stands, they should have known at least not to post pictures of what they were doing where people that might care and punish them could find them.

The second bit is that i disagree with hazing across the board, and support zero-tolerance policies where hazing is concerned. Was anyone forced to get drunk and have stuff written on them against their will? Probably not. But hazing tends to have a way of forcing people to conform to what everyone's doing without saying much at all. It could even take the form of an event in which the participants are told they can sit out. People being hazed are simply more likely to go along with it to avoid looking like someone that couldn't handle the task in front of their friends and people they respect enough to be in a situation where they could be getting hazed in the first place. While in this case the hazing appears to be relatively innocuous enough to the point that yes, the hazed were probably fine with being given free alcohol, the practice itself has a way of transforming into something that not all of the potentially hazed are okay with over time. While that would seem to constitute a slippery slope fallacy, caution, in the case of enforcement, must be the rule. Some may contend that this is about political correctness. Not wanting to make anyone feel bad, and so banning the practice of hazing outright, while it still may serve a function of binding the hazed together as a result of their ordeal. I do think that organizations that make a big deal about having to be humiliated or beaten to gain entrance to things should be held accountable for beating people, this is something that's much easier to have be a self policing kind of thing. That is, either the organization can elect not to do it on their own and use that as a selling point (in the case of Fraternities, who are competing for members), or kids can wake up and realize that getting beaten up/running around naked in the cold is something they don't have to go through, and that the organization that's going to do that to them may not have their best interests in mind. Let me then personalize this, move it away from the realm of policy enforcement and get to why I disagree with hazing.

For those of you who don't know me but are reading this blog and haven't been able to piece together from the links on the left side there that I was in a Fraternity in college, I was. It was good times and, if you can find a chapter that's worthy of having you as a member, I highly recommend it. And yet, because of the strict anti-hazing policy the Fraternity took, I never felt as though I was being pressured to do something against my will or in any way separate from anything that was being done by the seniors in the Fraternity. Bonds and brotherhood were formed, in the case of my class and those that preceeded and will follow (hopefully, that stance won't change) was necessarily left to discussion and the way any other friendship is formed, rather than through unification to get through an ordeal. I could never understand why, as a new member, being beaten with a stick or made to drink in a dark room (or whatever these kids are doing now) was something I would elect to go through to join a group. That is, possibly, a relic of the fact that my chapter had been recently reformed, and so there was a lot more pressure on the Fraternity to sell itself to prospectives, but I just can't understand why I'd elect to run around naked with a bucket of gasoline or something when I could just as easily tell this group of people that want my money or athletic skill to eat it.

To summarize, if you want to be in a Greek organization or soccer team or something, that's cool. You shouldn't have to jump through any crazy hoops to get there. Testing devotion of new members is pointless through hazing, I think, as it can be done in much more efficient ways that don't isolate the new members and beat up on them.

Then again, I must be missing something, as a lot of these kids seem very willing to undergo bodily harm for the organization of their choice.

Oh, addendum.

When are people going to learn to stop putting up pictures of being general schmucks up on the internet? I can't read a news site anymore without hearing about how so-and-so hazed their freshmen/did massive amounts of drugs/burnt down buildings/whatever, took pictures of it and then posted the incriminating evidence on their damn Myspace. Here's a tip kids. Just because you're posting something on your own private computer, in your own private dorm room with your private door shut or, alternatively, in your own private basement/apartment/account on an computer in a library doesn't mean that that content is somehow not available to the entire world now. Don't want to get caught for having thirty pounds of marijuana? Don't post pictures of it on your Myspace now that it's common knowledge that law enforcement officials browse it to find idiots that post pictures of things they shouldn't.?

Acid ate through my glove.

As I sit here waiting for my Reaction that Will Not Finish to come to an end, I get these incessant little popups on the lower right hand corner of my screen. I'm down with that, as they're mail alerts and let me know when to check this thing to see who we're holding a Meet the Speaker for (this week, it's K. Barry Sharpless, who won the Nobel Prize in 2001 and, incidentally, who I'm sitting down with tomorrow to chat about chemistry) or when I should respond to a comment that Rory's left on my blog. So that's all well and good. Except for the several emails a day that get through the gmail filters. Cutting the spam I actually see down to about ten a day is a pretty good feat, and it's mostly taking care of things that go on about the wonderful medicinal benefits of "V1@gr@" and "\/\/|-|@73\/3R D@mn Th!ng" they're trying to get me to buy, but I do have to register a complaint.

Dear Filthy Spammers,

Having a subject informing me that you've "acquired" my email does not make me want to open your email. It makes me want to break your things.

It's not so much the fact that the spam's getting in the way (as hitting the "Report Spam" button is easy enough), but that it's incredible the lack of creativity that's going into these things. Perhaps it's just that in order to get around the filter, it's better to have an email that actually seems like it could be related to some kind of business venture, or whatever the hell the good people at Google Labs think I do.

In other: My intramural Softball team "BSalsa" (playing in Northwestern's "White League", which is evidently a little more competitive than the Co-Rec league but less than the "Purple League") beat the No. 1 seed in the second round of the playoffs today. They were a team that was undefeated through the four game regular season and had not won a game by less than ten runs. So, though not expecting much, it was incredibly nice to be able to put them down, 14-8. Props to third baseman Jim on a spectacular unassisted double play in a bases loaded, no outs situation after two runs had scored in the inning. We'll be proceeding along to play in the third round, Sunday.

C&J, Spending, Pirates, Something

C&J-

Being Chicago and Jenna. She's been here this weekend, and it's been good times. We tried to kick around Chicago looking for a compromise in living arrangements so that neither of us has to spend seventeen hours on the El, but I'm not sure that's happening. She's going to UIC, which is about center on that map, while I'm still whiling away the last bit of my youth at Northwestern (the Noyes stop on the map there.) As you can see, we will be working not quite at opposite ends of the city, but far enough away from each other that the living thing tends to become annoying. The only decision thus far is that we're not living in Uptown near Wilson. And while Wrigleyville and Lakeview are nice, both mean being around more Cubs fans than I'd like.

I kid. But not really.

-Spending

I've spent quite a lot over the weekend, and so we'll have to go back to eating sandwiches comprised of whatever I can find in my kitchen. So wasabi and oranges, I guess. If you're in Chicago at some point and feel like heading somewhere interesting that knows a bit about wine, try Volo a wine bar that's nice if you're in to feeling pretentious, and somewhere I might be able to afford to go once every, say, five years. The rest of the weekend's purchases were mostly musical, as I found License to Ill for $8 at Virgin Mega, and threw in Del tha Funkee Homosapien's "Elektra Years: B-Boy Handbook" and Danger Mouse and MF Doom's "The Mouse and the Mask" in for good measure. Everyone knows License to Ill, so I'll just comment on the other two.

"Elektra Years" is a small compilation of some of Del's earlier works (most of the tracks come from "I Wish My Brother George Was Here" (1992), and from what I've been able to listen to in the few hours since I've purchased it, is pretty enjoyable. It's witty, flows, and is well produced. The only real thing that bothers me about it apart from realizing that it's fourteen years old, and I was nine when it was made is that that age tends to rise up in a few places, and I'm left with visions of the truly awful music videos of the mid 1990's. Lots of neon. Though I think that's because I hunted the "Mistadobalina" video down on YouTube. Perhaps it'll pass.

"The Mouse and the Mask" is being sold with at least some attempt to draw in on the success of Adult Swim, though for what it's worth, I'd be happier if they left Meatwad rapping off of the damn thing. A formidable record in its own right, it's incredible how the music twists around the samples from 1970's cartoon soundtracks. Still, if they eliminate the Adult Swim crew from talking over the beginning and end of most tracks, I don't think anything would be lost.


Pirates-

I'm really glad most things I own are books, and are therefore pretty resistant to me throwing things at them. The MARLINS? We lost a series to the MARLINS? I didn't get to watch Zach Duke's outing yesterday, but Ian Snell today... I... So here. I'm of the belief that Ian Snell will eventually come around and show the control he's shown in his previous four starts every time. I think the kid needs to play in the majors, and I really do believe that he's going to be a factor in the Pirates rotation at some point. Color me hopeful. But today's 1 1/3 inning start in which he gave up 7 earned runs isn't making it easy for me to keep that sunny disposition up. Magically, after he was pulled, Vogelsong put together two more outs, and then Cota was no where to be found, having been replaced by Ronnie Paulino in the top of the third. Why is it whenever Cota's in, we seem to stink with such force? It could be an artifact of his status as Perez' personal catcher, and the fact that Perez is terrible this year, but yeesh. I have no idea. It's getting really hard for me to watch this continually.

On the subject, I bought a book over the weekend in the hope that I'd somehow remember something of teams I'd never seen play, when Pittsburgh baseball wasn't such a joke as to be avoided by commentators as just too easy. The book in question is Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, and while it's not nearly as suspensful as the things I've been reading (the things I've been reading being thrillers and sci-fi), it's very well written, and is an interesting experience for this fan who wasn't alive in time to see Clemente play by about eleven years.

I'm going to sleep now.

Moved

So, I haven't been updating recently. The O'Halloran lab has moved from the dark confines of part of the K wing of the Technological Institute to a ground level crowded little spot in a building across the way. Unfortunately, this has meant that over the last week, all research has been forced to a halt, which I'm not a big fan of as I'd like to put something together to justify the fact that I'm in grad school. And that moving has been an enormous pain.

If I find a digital camera, perhaps, I'll get some photos of this place.

But, moving on.

I'm not going to be too upset when, as I'm leaving this place pretty soon for home, I'm not watching this Pirates-Mets matchup. Maholm has been getting out of jams through the first few innings, but has walked in a run and the best performance in the world isn't going to help if the opposing pitcher (Tom Glavine tonight) is throwing a perfect game through four. Sanchez got the start again, and though he did rush a throw to first on a Glavine chop and was charged wtih an error, I'm glad they've gotten him in to the lineup again. Necessary. Hopefully, they can pull something together to take away from the sting of the 12th inning loss on a walk off homer.

I've finally caved and bought the Da Vinci Code, and I'll be done with it tonight. It's certainly not the revolutionary (in the literary sense) masterpiece I've heard it called, but it's all right, and about up to my expectations for anything that I find in a supermarket at 2am for $8. Then again, a guy that owns Half Baked probably shouldn't be too critical of the media put before him, so I'll leave it at that. I do have two criticisms. 1) If you're going to have 105 chapters in your book, you're probably making the chapters too small. I can't help but feel that they're kind of forced. 2) If you're going to try to sell me a book using the word "since", I'm more impressed by "since the Second World War" or "since Dostoevsky's time" than "since Harry Potter." Nothing against the Potter books, as I haven't read them and so can't comment, but if you're using the word "since" in a context that's supposed to impress me, you're going to have to go back further than 1997.

I might comment on the Moussaoui thing later tonight, but mostly, I'm just going to go home now.

Blogging as a Writing Block

Those of you who write on blogs, whether you've started in the more recent explosion of blogging (this one started in Spring of 2005, and is by far the longest lived of my attempts at blogging) or you've been doing this for years and have amassed an empire of loyal readers (think BoingBoing), will be familiar with the problems that go along with them. It, I think, is an extension of pure vanity to check counter statistics, try to keep semi-regular updates to keep what little audience you (you = I in this case) have managed to gain, to make sure the words you type correspond with what you're actually trying to say, and to worry about being at least marginally witty or, if all attempt at wit is being abandoned, to at least get across your point.

Recently, a blogger who'd evidently been doing such for five years shut down her blog and wrote a happy little Slate article about it. It's an interesting perspective, and probably worth at least a quick glance. I have no intention of finishing Murphspot in the near future, but it's interesting to consider the mortality of these things once in a while.

The Unbearable Lightness of Swerving

So here's the problem with riding a bike from my apartment in Edgewater to my workplace in Evanston, other than the 5.5 mile drive is a wee bit tiring. Mostly, the downside comes not on the way there, but on the way back home. In the morning, the sun is shining, and the ride along the lakeshore is incredibly beautiful when there's not wind blowing you into things. You arrive at work with a feeling of accomplishment.

On the way home, however, it's usually rather dark and the drive is more aptly described as "damned creepy" if I follow the route I followed in the morning, which goes through the more residential bits of Evanston. Today, however, I rode down Chicago Ave., Evanston's most densely populated North/South thoroughfare. That wasn't so bad, though there was some prick that cut me off at South Boulevard. The problem, as it were, came at the intersection of Chicago/Clark and Howard, where I was forced into the other lane by some schmuck in an SUV that did the whole "right on red" thing in a manner which can only be justified if there's a woman in labor in the car. If there was, it seems that they were stopping at GameSpot before heading to the hospital.

Which means I'm taking the residential route from now on. I did, however, find that there's a Hollywood video a few blocks west on Granville, which resulted in the purchase of Corpse Bride, Capote and Good Night and Good Luck. I've never seen the last in the series, but I've heard good things and besides, it was three DVDs for $25 (the price on each individually was $14.99, so bonus.)

In other news:

My IM Softball team got around to winning our first game of the season (which is now three games old; the other two games being a loss in the opener and a tie last week), whomping some group of gents with a jackass pitcher. Our right fielder was a cricket player and, from what I could tell in the hour since I met him, a fine fellow who picked up the game surprisingly well for having never played it before. He did kind of bring the bat with him to first on a hit, and a fly to right fell in for a double, but I was able to cover him on that and, to be honest, he tried a whole hell of a lot more than Jeromy Burnitz does. I say the Pirates should recruit him, and start him in right.

Also, the lab is in full "movecore" mode, meaning we're packing our possessions for the long and terrible journey three hundred yards away in another building. Good times.

It's late!

So now that I’ve got a moment to write in this thing, Blogger’s down. C’est la thing.

Some updates in what’s going on.

I’ve just given my group meeting, which means I can stop freaking out about giving my group meeting until, oh, late September. There are some things I’ve got to work on, but overall, things are going well with research. Until this weekend. We’re moving, you see, to the building across the way where I’ll have a seat next to a ground floor window, a desk much closer to where I’m actually doing research than I’ve got set up right now, and the most incredible lab chairs in history. The downside is that the next week is going to be somewhat hectic as we try to pack up the entire lab and move it, while cleaning. And that this weekend, vacuum lines were shut down, meaning I couldn’t do much. Sadness. On the upside, once again, chairs.

I have quite a lot to complain about with my current domicile (and will probably have about the same luck when I move into a new place this September) but at least the Earth has not yet opened up to devour my building. Knock on wood. Or particle board. Whatever the hell this thing is.

It appears a new petition has been drafted calling for what would essentially be a revival of the Federal Marriage amendment though this time it’s not evangelical Protestants, but Catholics that have signed this petition, which seems like it's a bit of non-news, at least in the sense that yes, we were already quite aware that same-sex marriage is against the beliefs of several churches, and that's cool. While I understand and certainly respect the right of those that believe homosexuality is evil to hold that belief, I just cannot comprehend the idea of then effectively legislating that belief. I have absolutely no problem with individual churches deciding that they’re not going to grant marriages to same sex couples. Any law that would grant homosexuals the right to marry one another that would force any church to do so is clearly unconstitutional, and that’s not what anyone’s talking about. That’s entirely their prerogative, and if it’s their belief that to do so would be directly contradictory to their faith, that’s cool. They’re not hurting anyone, really, as in becoming a member of a church, you're accepting its beliefs, and if one of their beliefs is that gays can't marry (or form relationships), it's kind of nonsensical to call yourself a part of that church and then prattle on about them being discriminatory. By somewhat, I mean completely. If you're not down with how a church views gays, then don't be a part of that church. I have, however, yet to hear a solid argument that entirely avoids both the arguments of religion and tradition and gives me a good reason why Jack and Bill shouldn’t be able to get the whole power of attorney deal.

Why would I require that the reasoning be non-religous and non-traditional? Because atheists get married all the time as long as they're of opposite sexes (as do billions of people of any number of faiths, so tying it to a single faith or even a subset is silly), and when you start applying tradition to things like who's allowed to date whom, things get prejudicial.

I’ve heard arguments from both sides, and I just can’t get past the whole “legislating religion” deal that must go along with this. It’s not a matter of letting people run rampant with all sorts of crazy marriages. Presumably, just the opposite, allowing homosexual marriage would allow for at least some shedding of the conception of gays as people who have sex with anything and everything. As William Saletan argues, it’s not akin to allowing polygamy, as marriage between members of the same sex is not the arbitrary decision to stick marriage at “two” but rather to put it at “one”, as in “devotion to one spouse”, which is what it is now. Frankly, I’m not so sure banning gay marriage is about that so much as it is the ability to control and wield power over a decidedly small portion of the population. In the political sense, not the religious sense. In the religious sense, it’s simply “we don’t do that.”, and I’m down with that.

Summary: Some religious leaders have petitioned for the banning of same sex marriage. I support their right to do so, believe it’s a perfectly rational extension of their beliefs. I think they’d probably be remiss if they didn’t. At the same time, I don’t believe that banning gay marriage is the right course of action, at least from a completely secular, "go down to city hall and they let Frank visit Alexei in the hospital when Alexei falls ill" standpoint. To me, from a strictly non-relgious standpoint, it appears to be the same as being allowed to marry anyone else. And I can't quite see how chromosomes (or genitalia, though I'm not certain about what the current legal state of marriage between a man and a male-to-female post-op transsexual is) should decide whether one can put one down on their insurance.

Baseball:

Damn Pirates. I don’t know what kind of state of mind you have to be in to consider putting Jose Hernandez at third over both Joe Randa (who has had some good defensive work this year, and hasn’t been sucking out loud at the plate really) and Freddy Sanchez (who I’d like to see out there from the start, so that the first inning is only a three run Astros lead, as Berkman doesn’t reach on something Hernandez would have had if he weren’t daydreaming about why Jack Wilson is so completely non-photogenic. Going onto the Pirates message board on MLB.com right now is like entering into a battlefield. A battlefield with incredibly low morale where the infantry has decided to shell itself for kicks.

Who knew.

I’m going to bed.

The Worst Franchise?

ESPN.com's Page 2 is searching for a new punchline to fill the place of the L. A. Clippers, and as such are conducting a reader poll to determine the Worst Franchise in Sports. The Bucs get a mention that's painful to read if only because it emphasizes the fact that we've just extended Littlefield's contract, but I doubt they'll make it as the worst franchise after the poll is concluded. For some reason, I think "Royals" sticks out in the minds of the general populace more readily, and that with the remainder of the sports added in, the Pirates will finish out of the top five. In the top ten, certainly, but not the top five.

Not for the Faint of Heart

I’ve not been updating this much recently, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I really would be seven kinds of shocked if one couldn’t glean that from both the timestamps and the fact that I open every one of these now with the apology that I’ve not been updating recently.

So we’ll continue.

In Murphy News:

• I was not meant to be a butcher (hint: if you really don’t like animals dying for scientific studies, skip this). It’s funny that I’m sitting in a Subway eating a meatball sandwich while I type this, but I really don’t know how cool I am with killing an animal myself. Case in point: I’d like to do some metal studies involving the hippocampus. Not the human hippocampus, of course, but a rat hippocampus. Which means getting a rat brain. I didn’t actually have to extract the brain, of course, as I’d never done it before and would probably have ended up injuring the rat and causing, in a roundabout way, the beginning of a new species of superrat which would subjugate us all. So I watched the physiologist do it. Step One: Knocking the rat out in the desiccator filled with inhaled anesthetic. I’m fine with that. Step Two: Dissecting the rat. Ok. It wasn’t in pain (so she said) and it’s over now. Rat done. Step Three: What’s she doing with that knife? Step Four: She’s not… Step Five: She is. Step Six: Rat head in a jar.
  
  I’m not cool with doing that. I accept that these kinds of things have to be done so that we can more fully understand the chemistry of life, but I think I’ll sit back and let someone else decapitate the rats.



• Busy week this week. Group meeting on Tuesday afternoon, which I’m quite nervous about, and softball game on Monday. In case I’ve not said this, I’m involved in a softball team now, which is fine, but the manager signed us up for the wrong league such that instead of playing the Computer Science graduate school, we’re playing SAE tomorrow. Color me all kinds of mercy rule.

Pirates:

• I’m encouraged by what I saw from Duke’s outing on Saturday, and a bit discouraged by Snell’s today. Conflicted about Casey’s injury as he was hitting moderately well and we are paying him more than anyone else on the roster, but at least it gets Craig “Thor” Wilson some playing time (it should be coming over Burnitz, but it’s playing time nonetheless), which is providing us with everything that looks like offense recently. Mostly, I’m just waiting patiently for the first day off, Thursday, so that the relievers can get a modicum of rest. On that note, someone came up to me yesterday to ask why the Pirates have played more games than anyone else. I laughed a little. And then looked sadly at the schedule.



• I realized that I’m not sure what style of announcing I like. Cubs announcers tend to be a little too high on themselves, the Reds announcers were kind of static, saying something only when something happened such that a sizeable chunk was dead silence, but I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than Pirates announcers chatting about their pets and silverware.



• 4-10 isn’t where I wanted to be right now, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Pirates fans in the Pirate Q & A and on message boards have been calling the season lost since the first game. While I’d be surprised to see enough change to get us to .500, it’s just damn depressing listening to the talk of fan revolt.

Keaton and Optimism.

Nearing the end of the 8-3 loss to the Dodgers at the Pirates home opener this afternoon, this appeared on the Pirates front page. I'm calling shenanigans. While I'm certainly not calling the season as lost after eight games, and was unable to watch the game due to work today, it certainly seems like quite a bad outing from Duke in addition to the inability to put together a run when we need one. Or five. I'll be the first to admit that building for the future is a more pressing priority. There's just something about 1-7 that I'm not quite fond of.

PREPOSITIONS USED TO END SENTENCES!

Ironic that they included the bit with Michael Keaton (who threw out the first pitch) and the Batman/Rivers Cuomo picture after he made some less than sunshiney statements to the press.

Revelations

1) It takes a very long time to get a cheap bike that's intact in the suburbs of Chicago. Walmart's selection is iffy and I'd have had to spend more than I felt like for what's going to be used probably relatively rarely, and compounded by the fact that the Walmart in Niles is a pretty interesting experiment in anarchy and that when a bike's going to be placed on the top rack, it's probably better to print the price in something larger than size 5 font. So off to Target. Reasonably priced bike there, but the gearshift has been snapped off. They've got another, but it's going to be ok because there's one in the back. Unfortunately, that had no front wheel (which, I've found, is at least somewhat necessary). They sent us off to another Target, which, we were told, had eleven of the same bike (or did that morning.) Our arrival to the bike department was marked by the last of those bikes being sold, the explanation of the Target employee in the bike department that they're the top seller in the Western Hemisphere or something, followed by some more yammering, and finally, price matching another bike. It's a bit heavier than I'd like, and not as standard-road-bike as I'd like, but it's what I've got. So there's that.

2) I live too far away from the school to ride there. I found this out after doing just that this morning, and I'm incredibly tired. So I apologize if this makes no sense.

3) A win for the Pirates. From Victor Santos? From what I was able to see, it was a pretty solid ball game, with Santos throwing a solid game with sufficient run support. I'm hoping Hernandez closing isn't something that's going to go on consistently, but still, he put together a reasonable 9th (that is, he succeeded in his charge, which was closing out the game). Nice jack from Jack, and I'm glad we're not going into the Home Opener 0-7.

85 game winning streak, starting now. I'm calling it.

I'm not poisoned

Quick note while I'm waiting for my solvent to come off.

My blood mercury: 4 ng/mL
Normal blood mercury: 10 ng/mL
Toxic blood mercury: 50 ng/mL

My blood cadmium: <0.2 ng/mL
Normal blood cadmium: 1 ng/mL

My health=fine.

Adventures in Glenlake.

So here's the day.

At about one-in-the-afternoon, myself and Meera (the other Infected) jet off to Evanston Memorial Hospital for a quick blood drawing, some tests and the hair metal that plays on a loop in the lobby of Evanston Memorial. Alas, the office that would do our work for us there is open on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (promising!) from eight-in-the-morning until eleven-in-the-morning.

That's right. Nine hours per week this place is open for workers comp claims.

So we're required to drive to Glenlake, IL for the tests at a facility out there. I must have fallen asleep at some point (I've been up at this point for about 19 hours), because I really can't recall the point at which our surroundings ceased to be at least mostly suburban and became cows. The surrounding area led me to believe that it's not someone who has cows because they need cows, but someone who has cows because they really dig on the concept of having cows.

Driving Driving Driving.

We arrive in Glenlake, at the proper site for them to steal my blood. After a quick check-up, I was given two (2) tests, one of which ruled, while the other whimpered meekly. The one that ruled involved being locked in a sort of sensory deprivation chamber (that is, a tiny soundproof booth) with a set of headphones and a buzzer. it was very Win Ben Stein's Money. Or 21. Whatever. Thing is, I apparently dig on being locked in small, soundproofed booths, hitting a buzzer whenever a note is played.

The less awesome test was a simple vision test, which I sucked at because I hadn't brought my glasses.

So that's all well and good. The Good Doctor prescribed for us 10mg/kg/day of a chelating agent (DTSA) as a prophylactic treatment, and sent off to Walgreens (specifically) to pick up the prescription, which we were assured would be covered by Workman's Comp. Before we were released, they robbed us outright of a bit of hair (they robbed Meera of quite a lot, actually, though it's unnoticeable unless you want to annoy her) and blood. The guy that stole my blood was an embittered Cubs fan that I hope won't ever take my blood again, if only because you're not supposed to be angry when you're doing that job.

Anyway, off to Walgreens to fill these prescriptions. We were given the prescriptions, and a form and nothing else. This absolutely baffled the pharmacists, who did not believe that the Workman's Comp organization existed and implied that we might have been trying to scam the pharmacy out of their DTSA (it is known to have hallucinogenic effects if smoked by people that would think that I'd want to scam a pharmacy out of a chelation therapeutic.) Perhaps, I think, it's because he admitted to not having a clue what it was the prescription was asking for (that is, he'd never heard of this drug). After some calls to the organization, the pharmacist continued to refuse to fill the prescription, and so I'm not starting that therapy quite yet. He seemed to feel a bit bad about it after we told him the chemical with which we might have been contaminated, but overall seemed not to care enough to actually give us the medicine we were supposed to get.

I'm leaving lab now.

Tests.

Note: That "27 pills/day" was misstated. It'd be 9 pills per day. Unfortunately, the pharmacist refused to give me the medication, which you'll hear more about in the next post.

Damn it.

When it really comes down to it, I have not the expletive.

Slideshow.

On the subject of the baseball season beginning, Slate has a nice little slideshow of baseball worldwide.

Pirates?

It's about time for me to get back to work.

But before I do, I'd just like to note that today's Opening Day for the Pirates, playing at Milwaukee. While I probably could have hooked up some kind of "me getting to Wisconsin", I've got group meeting in two weeks to prepare for, I've got no car, and I really probably should just be at Northwestern. Particularly after spending most of yesterday waiting for the White Sox/Indians game to come back from rain delay.

But that's cool. I'll just check out the Brewers/Pirates series in late July or something.

The problem with today is that the game starts at 1:05 Central, which is five minutes after an appointment I've got with the Workers Comp people. Turns out I've kind of got to get a blood test to determine whether or not I've got mercury poisoning. It seems that when you stumble upon some sealed NMR tubes of a certain chemical (a very common NMR standard for mercury in the sense that it's remarkably good in that purpose, and essential to the research considering our group's MerR work) in the lab, and then are six feet away when one is broken, you've got to go in, even if you've bolted from the room. It was stored safely, and posed no real threat to anyone as it was, and it was simply in the act of disposing it that a tube cracked. It's almost certainly nothing, as the ventilation kicks around here and no one actually came into contact with it, but it's something we've got to get checked out, and I'd like the peace of mind of knowing that it's nothing.

In a related note, here is a very well constructed telling of the tragic Karen Wetterhahn story. I'm not familiar with Wetterhahn's work, and from all accounts I've heard she was a world-class chemist, and hers is a story that should stand out to any student of science as the reminder that with the rewarding bits comes quite a lot of risk.

The Beginning of Audioblogging on Murphspot

Feel free to give some pointers and overall opinions. I'll be deciding later whether or not I'd like to continue doing it based on a) general reception from the three of you that read this b) whether I feel like it c) whether it's actually free.

NYC

And lo, the requisite "I'm back from that three day vacation thing" post. Which I'm never sure how to right other than being just a record of what the hell's gone on. So we'll do that I think.

Thursday: March 23, 2006:

I fell asleep at about 4:30, and woke up at something like 7:40, which is about ten minutes after I'd wanted to leave. We'll get back to why leaving at 7:45am (after throwing on what happened to be clean) for a 10:59 flight was hilarious in how ample a head start that is. So. Red line to Roosevelt, Orange Line to Midway. Sunrise, sunset. And, after making it through security, having a nice gyro and what not, I'm on a plane to New York City. I'm really not entirely clear why I'm not allowed to listen to an mp3 player during takeoff, but whatever. I'm glad I was eventually allowed to use it, such that I got to fall asleep to whatever the most calming music on there was, rather than having to either a) listen to nothing, which isn't fun, or b) procuring a set of headphones, which I'd have to pay for, to listen to the in-plane music, most of which seemed to be either top 40, Country, or an entire station of U2. And while I know that flying is remarkably safe, I'm glad that I get to listen to music of my choice while I notice that the wing really is moving up and down a lot more than I'm comfortable with for something that's called "fixed wing".

Arrive: LaGuardia Airport: 1:50pm. Relatively smooth flight, with little turbulence. I do have to note here, that while I've got pretty much nothing but positive things to say about this trip, LaGuardia ranks pretty damned low in my opinion of Airports. Maybe the gate I used was the only example of a crowded, broken, aging gate, and maybe the slashed seat covers and broken ceiling tiles happened that day. But it just seemed to, you know, show its age, which is another theme I'll be talking about in a bit. Anyway, less than impressed with LaGuardia. Whatever. Hopped on the m60 bus toward 125th St., felt like I was going to fall through a window on some of the turns on the way to getting to somewhere that I could catch the 6-train, just as Jenna directed. It's interesting, incidentally, re-experiencing that feeling of not knowing where one was, really. I've had it a few times in the rural bits of Pennsylvania in a car, though that's lessened because there's usually the option of driving until one hits civilization again and the only real worry is running out of gas, and then when I got to Chicago, though that was alleviated after about a week of exploring, which appears to be enough to get my bearings so that, even if I don't know where the hell I am, I've gotten better at looking for ways to figure out how to get somewhere that I do know. Anyway, yes. 6 train to Astor Place, then quick walk to Broadway, down to 4th St., then to Washington Square Park, where I sat reading the heaviest book that I think I've bothered to read for the sake of boredom and waited for Jenna's class to end. Met her, went back to her apartment, realized that I really don't like dorms at all, and put down my stuff. Good times.

Jenna and I, happily reunited, proceeded down past her school to look for something to do. We ended up at Yummy Village Sushi (I’ll be plugging these places when I deem them decent enough for mentioning, and when I remember). I had some sushi, Jenna had some spicy chicken because Jenna never remembers that she’s always overwhelmed by spicy food, and it was good times. I was somewhat tempted to go for their “Eat 52 pieces of sushi in 20 minutes and we won’t charge you” challenge, but as the upside is that I get to be sick for free and the downside is that I get to be sick and they charge me something like $70, I passed. We proceeded to Bleecker Bob’s to look at some records, including some hilariously decorated album covers for rather “rare” recordings before wandering around for about an hour, eventually ending up about where we started, at the Cedar tavern before heading back home.

End Day One.

Friday, March 24, 2006.

Late start. Left the apartment at about 2pm, and I have decided that even a one hour shift in time zone is pretty significant. We started with the required museum run, checking out Met, which I’ll have to say I was impressed with. The geography of the building is a bit confusing, and it took us quite a while to figure out where the Musical Instruments section was, but if you’re going to stare at Benny Goodman’s clarinet, that’s something you deal with, I suppose. We ate at a diner before going back down to Bleecker St., where we met up with Andrew at Le Figaro Café, which had moderate White Russians, bits o’ right-leaning French daily covering the walls. Leaving there, we returned to Bleecker Bob’s on Andrew’s suggestion, and eventually made it to a little café with a few chairs and some post cards. Good times. We met up with another of Jenna’s friends, Lisa, and proceeded to the smallest bar I think I’ve ever been in that wasn’t also in an airport. The V Bar looks from the outside as a standard dark bar where people congregate to have goatees. Lots of candles and black curtains being held back from the windows by stainless steel chain. Mediocre. Until, that is, it was revealed that they had a bunch of board games. I was pleased with that, but then I remembered Sorry! being a lot more fun than it is. Maybe it was the fact that I was less than ecstatic about the apricot flavoured “Magic Hat #9”. Either way, we departed, found a diner with overpriced undercooked mozzarella sticks and went back to sleep.

End Day 2:

Saturday, March 25, 2006

My last full day in NYC, but unfortunately, Jenna was scheduled to work four hours that afternoon. Which meant that I’d have to find something to do. We had lunch at a small Afghani restaurant on 26th St. and 3rd Ave, which was really quite a pleasant experience except for the fact that I couldn’t feel my legs afterward because of the floor seating and got bits of a chicken that had about twelve times the number of bones of an average chicken. But then I sound like a stodgy 22 year old, don’t I? Finishing that, Jenna and I walked to her place-of-employment and I was finally free of the oppressive gaze of Jenna, what with her unceasing er, alone. And what does one do when one’s alone? Why, walk 33 blocks south through Manhattan. Of course.

Fairly standard from there. Only got somewhat lost occasionally, and happened past some sort of Falun Gong thing in Union Square. A woman with a pamphlet asked me to stop the Communist regime in China, which I’ll get on the next time I have lunch with China. For some reason, despite my enormous sway with mainland China, I’ve just never worked up the courage to say “You know what? Enough with the human rights violations”. But more importantly, I eventually did make it to my destination, Forbidden Planet, which I was excited about only secondarily because it gave me a chance to pick up some enjoyable zombie comics. Primarily, however, it marked my visit to a landmark in 3rd wave ska, as Robert Hingley was asked in the early 1980’s to travel to New York to manage the store (including firing the entire staff and hiring new work), and it was from Forbidden Planet NY that the Toasters were formed. So it’s got that going for it. Another 40 block hike, two crossword puzzles, some Jamba and a few hours later, and I met up with Jenna again. After pizza near her house and watching any hope that I’d win my office NCAA pool vanish with Memphis’ loss, we proceeded to Union Square to poke around in the Virgin Megastore and what not. Unfortunately, I was once again unsuccessful in convincing Jenna to purchase a copy of William Shatner’s The Transformed Man.

Here’s where the old thing comes in. From this point onward, I’m not sure why, perhaps because I was tired, but I really felt very old. The Caliente Cab Co. bar was part of it, as I really wasn’t all that into hearing “My Humps” blasted over the soundsystem (though it was entertaining to watch Jenna deal with the Sno-Cone-cum-margarita she ordered), and we returned home.

I checked the computer.

I realized I’m incredibly bad at entering numbers into my phone. And as such, my night was not over.

Armed now with the proper number, I was able to get in contact with a remarkably energetic member of the Rum and Monkey forums who I’d threatened if I somehow left Manhattan without meeting him, if only because, dammit, if I’m going to discuss the relative merits of Land of the Dead as compared with earlier Romero fare, I’m going to meet them, damn it. So Jenna and I went back down, met up with Mani, and hit up a diner that was reasonably priced and actually very good. I couldn’t help but feel old, was the problem. Perhaps because it was 2:00 am and I was convinced that, given enough of a running start, Mani could very well have run headlong through the wall. Not that that’s a bad thing; on the contrary, it reminded me of myself about five years ago. Hopefully, my current state of slowmoving is a passing phase, brought on by just having gone through a week of finals and, more probably, having just walked about 6 miles. Which only goes to argue more strongly toward me getting outside more. Maybe if there were some sort of treadmill that made Dave Littlefield make better decisions.

Overall, the result is that I’ve got to thank Mani here for being a goddamn fireball and making for a very interesting 2:00-4:15 am.

Still, after some film discussion, a visit to another café (Esperanto Café) and resolving the complications arising from the apparent contradictions in most quantum mechanical systems (which I wrote on a napkin that, unfortunately, was left at the café and subsequently stolen by [insert the name of whoever figures out everything]), Jenna and I said goodbye to Mani and returned back to the apartment.

We fell asleep.

Damn it.

My flight was at 8:00am, and the plan was to stay up until 6:00, get a cab to LaGuardia and that’ll be that. Unfortunately, we got up at 7:00, which led to me forgetting my belt and phone charger on the way to grabbing a cab, paying the cab to drive really goddamn fast to the airport and being remarkably nervous as to whether it was possible to get through to my plane in time. It was. Good times. I read more of that pretentious GEB book, fell asleep several times, and, lo, I’ve returned to Chicago.

Read most of the Walking Dead series. Slept for a long time.

Blogged.

End.

Majoring in Florida

So here's the thing. I'm not a big supporter of Jeb Bush, usually. I'm not so sure that's the case in this specific instance. Quick overview, Jeb wants to start having high schoolers declare a major.

Schoolers? Is that right?

Schooners.

"You know what? There is no Easter Bunny! That over there's just a guy in a suit!"

Ok. Back to the task at hand.

On the one hand, this could very easily turn into a lot of stress for a lot of kids, mostly in pressure from parents who want their kid to be a doctor, and so force the young'n to major in bio or, if they're particularly awesome, chemistry. And that's not good times.

On the other hand, I think that students should be allowed to self-design their curriculum as long as certain minimum criteria are still being met. I like the concept of having to have a minor, so long as that minor is in a field disparate from that of the major. I really do support the concept of a liberal arts education, and think that I benefited from having to go through all of that German/Econ/Psych junk at Allegheny. I disagree with Jebuchadnezzar that this'll stop, or significantly decrease dropouts, but I'll let him have that. If implemented properly, I don't see how it would be much different than the already existing vocational programs, except that it would allow kids that are really into chemistry study more chemistry, those that are really into english focus on that and those that are really into machining work on machining.


Then again, college students can be really stressed out, and many probably don't need that extra pressure. Those that are really driven to study whatever are going to do that regardless of whether there's an actual system designed for them (and they shall weep when I fail them on their lab reports, and such), and they might be successful at that (e.g. R. B.) or they might have an anyeurism, but that's independent of what's going on here, I think.

Final Verdict: Interesting experiment. You Floridians tell me how you like that.

Planner

I don't think I get it.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't get it. It, of course, being the reason that I'm just not really coming up with much to write about in this blog lately. I try. Really I do. I'll get in little fits of ambition and cruise Fox News and CNN, only to learn that I really don't care about the Ports deal and think that, while natural disasters appear to occur more or less round-the-clock, there's not much to say about them. Yes. They're bad times. But more than that, they don't make for very interesting blogging.

I will say that I am excited that I'm finally done with Winter Quarter (though my grades aren't up yet, Northwestern. As you're reading this, you big anthropomorphic degree-granting institution, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know how I ended up doing in Bioorganic. Thanks. Now, if you'll remember, "I'm done".) So I've only got one class left, got out of this one alive, and can finally get some actual progress on the synthesis of these probes.

It just seems that I'd have something, not always witty, but at least something last summer, when this blog really took off in earnest. Maybe McDonalds is thousands of times more exciting than Northwestern (It's not. If you're at McDonalds, I'd advise you to instead move to Chicago) or maybe the diminished social interaction that goes along with working these damned hours is to blame (again, not likely as I'm a hermit at home too). Perhaps I just have less time recently to poke around on the internet until I find something worth commenting on.

But enough of that for right now.

On to the interesting things.

In fads, culturebox examines the appeal of Whole Foods, which, if you're not familiar, is an "organic food store" that is prohibitively expensive for, well, me, and is capitalizing on the craze over organic foods. Some reasonable points are made (Any ecological benefit derived from using a more earth-friendly fertilizer is effectively negated if the chemically fertilized stuff is from Jersey and the earth-friendly stuff is from Chile due to transportation, that if these foods really are better for us, increasing their price so drastically is akin to elitism, and that really, the claim that a vast majority of organic farmers are family farmers is playing with semantics), though for the most interesting point to my mind you'll have to go somewhere else. Namely, that you can call something "organic" if everything you put on it, in it, around it, or through it is found somewhere in nature.

So that quite a few of these additives are synthetic (not that there's anything actually inherently wrong with synthesized products).

Smoking cigarettes is really a disgusting habit that kills you, and I understand the importance of second-hand smoke legislature. Hell, I'll even go as far as to say I'm down with Chicago's recent ban on smoking in public buildings. Chicago's specific ban includes a restriction on smoking outside in one place, resulting in the bizarre march of the smoker, up and down the alley so as not to be in violation of standing outside a building and smoking, but Calabasas, I'm afraid I just can't agree. Sure, relegate cigarette smoke to a strictly private affair in one's own domicile or one one's property (so long as that property isn't right up against some public property), but this bit's a bit rich:

Smoking in one's car is allowed, unless the windows are open and someone nearby might be affected.

Nicotine addiction is a disease. Smokers are not within their rights to threaten the health of nonsmokers by smoking at them. But the fact that they're now forcing smokers to confine said deadly toxin (for slow release into the atmosphere through the ventilation of the car) in such a small space is just further damaging the health of the person who's smoking. Moreover, they're doing it in a big polluting metal machine. One wonders if they're not banning the smoking in cars thing such that the nearby person can enjoy the fresh, wonderful smell of car exhaust.

V/WBC

So then there's that.

Finals are, for all intents and purposes, complete, though I will have to turn in a report on my work. So it goes. More importantly, two things:

Following my last final today, Bioorganic Chemistry and grading for a few hours for the undergraduate sophomore organic chemistry course's final, I had the pleasure of not having to pay for dinner for once. That is, Northwestern picked it up for me, as I'd been given the nod to take the prospective graduate students out for dinner with NU picking up the tab. Sometimes, I can dig it. Burgers at Nevin's is a good time. But that's not what inspired me to write this post. What did was what I did afterwards, which was, unfortunately, not picked up by Northwestern as it wasn't at all related to the students. I saw V for Vendetta, and enjoyed what I saw. Without regarding what it maintains the line of the comic books or not, I found it to be quite interesting, and an exciting action movie. Good for that.

What I'd like to take a second to respond to is the amount of bloggers and imdb.com message board patrons that are somehow twisting this into being a decisive attack on conservatives, others callling it an explicitly "anti-American" movie. Honestly, I have no idea what to make of that, mostly the second one. I'm not entirely surprised. Star Wars Ep. III was boycotted by some who viewed it as an explicitly anti-Bush film. Precisely the same sentiment appears to be popular now about V for Vendetta. I'll give them a bone here. At least V for Vendetta is actually somewhat political, and I believe it's mentioned somewhere that John Hurt's "Sutler" character was at one point a member of the Conservative Party of Britain (though two seconds later it makes it clear that he either left or was forced out, invented his own party which overtook both the Conservatives and Liberals in the UK, which is, if anything, a parallel to the NSDAP). Star Wars is Star Wars. But that doesn't justify the comparison. I know many really want this to be anti-American or anti-Conservative, as it then becomes another piece of the vast liberal plot to brainwash children out of making up their own minds, but it's just not. The big bad guys aren't conservatives. Or liberals. They're fascists. They're Big Brother. The Party. Singular and without distinction between conservatives or liberals or anything in between or outside of the relatively narrow conservative-liberal spectrum. It's Big Invasive Government. V's call for revolution against the militaristic, dictatorial and, here's the kicker, fictional government is nothing more than the demand that the citizens of a nation hold its Government accountable for what it's doing, not have to live in fear of being threatened or abducted by the government, and that maybe we shouldn't beat people with rods. The corrolary to that that I've seen in several places, that the movie is a movement for the Gay Agenda (now existing in a theater near you!) because it shows the beating and imprisonment of homosexuals by the government. Two points here. 1) Valerie's imprisonment is in the comic books, so it makes sense to include it here. 2) The point of the scenes with Valerie's letter isn't to convince people to flip their gay switch on, but to suggest that maybe we shouldn't beat people with rods and imprison them for digging on certain types of people.

The allegation that it's anti-American is just plain incomprehensible to me (unless one would like to make the claim that America is a fascist nation or that it should be and this negative depiction of fascism is clearly an attack on what America should be) or that V is a communist (mostly because the term communist has lost essentially all of its meaning because of its general application to people that one disagrees with. The interesting thing here is that I ran into a blog claiming this exact thing which attempted to use the posters as proof that V is a communist. Which is just ridiculous. They're propaganda type posters, but that's really more of a reference to the Big Brother type government. No. the fact that so much red is associated with the posters and imagery is not relevant either, as the V symbol and all the red and black is very clearly a reference to the symbol and colors of the general concept of anarchism. Which isn't communism.)

Furthermore, the "War" that the movie charges America with starting... I'm not counting that as an "anti-American" bit in the film or the book, nor am I willing to give credence to the conclusion that it is the current "War on Terror", more likely deferring to the fact that it more or less makes America a non-factor (which is important to the focus on why the UK is alone in all of this) and adds to the dystopia by tying up the US in civil war.
So:

Good movie.
Action. Some knife throwing. Natalie Portman's in it.
It's not anti-Conservative or anti-American. It's pointing out that totalitarian fascism probably isn't awesome. Essentially, 1984.
V's not a communist. He doesn't propose any other system of government, just that it'd be nice to be able to walk around without a curfew, and that citizens have a duty to hold their governments responsible for their actions.
I don't believe that anarchy is a viable system of government. Don't do it.
Proposing that beating homosexuals probably isn't cool doesn't make this a Gay Agenda (TM) piece.

So that's that.

Now. The important thing:

How the hell is the US out of the World Baseball Classic?! We're not supposed to lose. We did, essentially, everything we could to rig the damn thing, putting ourselves in an opening pool with Mexico, Canada and South Africa and structuring the tournament such that we wouldn't even have to think about facing any of the really threatening Latin American teams until they'd killed each other off. I just... what the hell.


That said, this thing is amazing. I'll be watching it until the end, and loving it.

Finals!

It seems it would be a decent time to post about not being able to post. Unfortunately, finals are upon us at Northwestern which tends to lessen the time I've got available to write here, so, while I'll try to keep this updated, it might tend to fall behind until at least next Friday.

Some points before I get back to bioorganic:

I'm firmly convinced that a picture of this gentleman on one's desktop is good luck when one's giving a presentation. Moreso when the professor for the class gets a kick out of it and gives one a decent grade on the "15-percent-of-your-grade" presentation.

And who says soccer games get to start all the international incidents?. I've actually found the World Baseball Classic strangely compelling, if only for the Canadian upset so far. I would not at all be averse to this continuing, especially if it's on a four year cycle.

Sony. For You.

I've finally submitted to the inevitable, though to my credit I held out for nine years after its inception in 1997. Mostly because for the great majority of that I've been much too strapped for cash to actually afford to submit to this particular inevitablity.

That's right. I've finally bought an mp3 player. Or rather, ATRAC player.

The player specifically is this kidney shaped thing. I caved for the 1GB model,and as yet have not had any trouble with actually using the thing (it's relatively intuitive). It's a nifty little flash-based player, and I've yet to actually use the thing enough to test the claim of 50 hours of battery life. I'd rather I could change the playlists without plugging the thing into the computer and cracking open SonicStage, but I'm willing to live with that. Overall, something that should make it possible for me to forget I'm surrounded by hundreds of carcinogens at most times. More when I'm at work rather than eating fast food.

ZING.

Bonds and Crossdressing

I usually don't login to post about one topic, and I can't actually say why that is. But this, this I can't pass up.

If any of you are regular readers of this blog or know me ("but then I repeat myself"), you'll know I'm from Pittsburgh. And being from Pittsburgh, I've been, since about 1993, been carefully conditioned to disapprove of everything Barry Bonds stands for. He's pompous, he's got that ridiculous martyr complex thing that doesn't make any sense, and he won't stop whining about how people hate him for being an all around jackass. He's become emblematic of a very real scandal in baseball, and I can't get behind his fan's assumption that it doesn't matter whether or not he's on 'roids, because "power's not the only thing that hits home runs". That's true, but if all we're talking about is accuracy and ability to judge a pitch, Jason Bay might have broken the "zero" barrier in last years HR Derby.

But right now, in this moment, that's ok. Why? Because for the first time in quite some time, Barry Bonds showed he had a sense of humor at Giants camp yesterday. I still don't like the guy or what his playing means and has meant for baseball. But good lord, Barry Bonds-as-Paula Abdul is just comedy gold. I've no doubt that this reaction is exactly what they were looking for from the public.

But Barry Bonds in a dress isn't' something you see every day. If you're lucky.

So yes. That said, good for Bonds for showing a bit of humor once in a decade, and I think we'll all be happy to just go on with our lives, trying desperately to block that image out of our minds forever.