Sometimes, like just now when I was researching how tenofovir can be used to treat both HIV and now Hep B even though HIV is an RNA virus and Hep B is a DNA virus, I miss being a scientist.

But if I were still I scientist I wouldn't have any funny stories to tell you about how we made the UPS guy blush this morning with our shipment of 30 cases of condoms.

The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives.

The rules of the meme: bold those you have tried, strikethrough those you wouldn't eat on a bet:

*Okay, let me preface this by saying that this list is The Omnivore's Hundred and I've been a vegetarian longer than I've been wearing a bra.  So while I will include the dead-animal foods that I can recall eating during the first 11 years of my life,  there are going to be quite a few things crossed out.

Watching all the swimming on the Olympics makes me really miss being able to do laps in a pool.  The only place that I can think of in New Orleans that has such a pool is Tulane and that is all the way the frick on the other side of town.  Sigh...

Blood flows in the streets; rain comes to wash it away.  Everyone gets fed up and makes plans to leave, but we never go anywhere.  This is August in New Orleans.

I don't know what it says about me or the company I keep that I expected the person who grabbed my ass while I was riding home from work last night to be a friend.  But as it turns out it was not a friend, nor someone I had ever seen before in my life.  It was some dude on a bike who was giving me a skeevy grin.  I narrowed my eyes at him and yelled at him to fuck off.  He turned forward and peddled a little faster to try to get away from me, but I was having none of that.  I followed him in close pursuit through the French Quarter screaming about respect for women in English and Spanish.  I didn't bother to follow him once he turned back up toward Rampart, but I do think I scared the shit out of him so maybe he will at least think twice before he tries that crap on someone else.

...seems to be too busy to tell you about what happened here yesterday, so allow me.  Or rather, allow me to quote an article from the local paper:

The catastrophic spill occurred early Wednesday after a 600-foot Liberian-flagged tanker named The Tintomara collided with a barge being pulled by a tugboat near the Harvey Locks. The barge -- which was carrying 400,000 gallons of thick, tar-like No. 6 fuel oil -- was split in half, sending its contents into the river.

On the national TV news this morning I heard a very brief mention that "an oil spill in the Mississippi River" is one of the reasons that John McCain isn't going to that off-shore oil rig today.  What they didn't mention is that said oil spill occurred in the bend of the river where New Orleans is located.  Nor did they mention that water supplies for all points down river are unusable. New Orleans municipal water comes from slightly up river so we aren't affected...yet, but towns just across the river and down river are quickly depleting their emergency supplies.  I also heard on the news that 29 miles of the river were closed.  This was true yesterday afternoon.  This morning the total is near 100 mi. (basically from the point of the spill to the Gulf of Mexico).  And I don't think I've heard anything anywhere about how 10,000 barrels of #6 fuel oil is going to affect our already dying wetlands.  Yay, fossil fuels.

*Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that in addition to polluting the water, this oil spill has made the city reek like an oil refinery for the past 24 hours.  Yesterday was really bad, but today it still smells like the floor of a mechanic's shop.

So I was biking down the street today, saying "good morning" to random strangers as I passed them ('cause that's what you do here).  Admittedly I wasn't paying much attention to the road or anything on ground-level.  And then, for a brief moment, there was a bird in my lap.

It must have flown up to either get out of my way or the way of the man walking towards it, and somehow in the process it ended up in my lap.  It flapped around for a second and then flew away.  I didn't even get a good look at it.  All I saw was a brown blur.

So does that mean anything in any set of superstitions, a bird landing on one's lap?  Does that sound like it would be a good omen or a bad omen?

Happy Birthday, bilum!

The Agua Pura Salvavidas truck is coming to bring you the gift of a pathogen-free digestive tract!

I had good morning because I to go to a meeting up the street this morning.  It was nice that they gave us free coffee and donuts (impressive accommodations for non-profit), but I was more exited that the meeting was located in such a place that I had to drive right past the ghetto Rite Aid at Canal and Broad on my way back to work. 

What is so exciting about the ghetto Rite Aid?  It is the only place in the Gulf South that I have ever encountered that sells Poland Spring water (aka "the best bottled water ever").  I have a sneaking suspicion that the only reason why they still stock it is because demented yankees like me will make up excuses to go to the ghetto Rite Aid just to get some delicious bottled water that originates from some municipal water supply in Maine.

Due to the fact that I have no computer and no internet at my house and that I am unable to upload things at work, the Guatemala pictures will be slowly trickling on to my Flickr page during the next week or so. Which is just as well really, because who wants to look at 400 photos all in one sitting? So the first 88 are up - mostly of the cities of Xela and Zunil. More to come one of these days.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Cross out the ones you started but didn't finish
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)


I'm not surprised by how few of those books I've actually read.  I do read, but I am not a voracious reader.  I am a very slow reader  both because of the time that it takes me to finish a page, and the time that I can sit still and concentrate on the same book.  But also - I just don't read that much fiction.  If I had to guess, I'd say that I have read 1 novel for every 3 non-fiction books.  I remember very clearly an exercise that we did in reading class in 8th grade.  We had two passages of equal length to read: one was a fictional story and one was some technical article.  The whole point of the lesson was to demonstrate that we read things faster if we are more engaged with the subject matter.  Except the text book clearly said something like "You finished the fiction passage in a shorter amount of time than the technical document because it was more interesting."  To which I thought "No I didn't!  No it wasn't!  Screw you, textbook!"  I can enjoy a work of fiction a great deal either for the beautiful prose or a touching story (or both, James Baldwin), but when I am in a library or a book store I tend to head for the non-fiction first.

Alex texted me earlier to tell me that the power company came and installed the gas meter this morning.  We have gas!  For hot water!  And cooking!  So now that I can take hot showers on a regular basis, I can chop off all of this hair that's grown on my head since I chopped it last summer.  Actually I think my last haircut was in March or something but I need to make it a summer length.

And when I cut my hair I can take a picture of it on my New! 10X! Zoom! Camera!, which arrived to the office today.  Not quite sure how I am going to upload the photos, but I'm sure I could borrow someone's computer and save them to my external HD.

So when I turned on the TV news this morning and heard that there had been levee breaches and catastrophic flooding in Iowa, I have to admit the first thoughts that came to my head were snarky: "Oh gee, are they going to rebuild?  Let's see how you guys like dealing with FEMA."  But then I saw the video footage of murky brown water invading homes and washing away bridges and it brought me back to watching the same footage of my neighborhood (at that time, Mid-City) once I had managed to get a few hundred miles away to a working television set. 

So, people of the flooded parts of Iowa and Wisconsin and whatever else is  underwater  up there - I know what you're going through.  I'd offer you a place to stay but a) it is hurricane season and b) some of our own flood victims still don't have a place to stay, so I don't know if we've got space to offer you.

The latest in replacement camera news:  I decided to try something new and go with the Panasonic.  I am cheap and picked free shipping so I probably won't have it until next week. 

The latest in credit card replacement news: So far only my new corporate card has showed up.  This is good because I need to use it this week to buy my plane tickets for my trip to DC in August.  But I really, really, really would like my new check card so I can put gas in my car before it hits $5/gallon.

House: is getting there... slowly.  We're still trying to install the basics (like a TP holder and an armoire rod) and find places for all our crap.

It really bugs the hell out of me when people sent work related e-mails from their personal e-mail accounts.  So unprofessional!

Another crane collapse in Manhattan?  Remind me to bring my hard hat the next time I visit.

"My thumbs are not opposable. Yet I oppose everything."

via cuteoverload