Christianity
Topic: Religion
Well, I attended the closest thing that I'll get to in regards to a religious service (not including weddings) at my parents church. It was an interesting evening. This place, the church, is a crazy beast of a thing. They have a bookstore and coffee shop attached! I was impressed by their obvious growth in a relatively short time. I'm intrigued by religion and the ability to get people to give up their hard earned money in things that are so obviously supreficial. Very christlike. The best quote of the evening was a thanking of god for giving the talents to all the people who we saw performed and for, basically, everything good. He gets credit for everything good. Must be nice. I didn't do any of the good stuff just the bad stuff is my fault. Nice.

BTW, this guy is christlike.




Also today we visited Jerome, AZ. It was very nice. We climbed 6000 ft, by car, to get there. Mountains and desert, very nice day.

A New Movie
Topic: Movies
My brother has turned me onto a great movie called Rockers which is the greatest compilation of Roots Reggae musicians in a movie of all time. Really excellent. IMDB has a great plot outline:

"Harder They Come meets Hard Days Night. No real plot just lots of reggae."

The movie stars Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, possiblity the greatest Reggae drummer of all time.

Check it out!

On another note, I'm in Phoenix. It is over 100F in the shade. Yikes.

Star Wars and life sucks
So I saw the starwars movie, number III. I'd say that it is appropriate because it ranks number 3 in my starwars movies behind Empire and then New Hope. It beat out Return so it ain't all bad. I enjoyed it, just was disappointed by a few of the scenes. The acting sucked but what can you do. Go see it.

On a personal note. An important chapter in my life seems to be coming to an end. A close friend, so close that he is more like a brother, is leaving. My wife and I will miss him terribly. U2, we love you man, and you will always have a home with us.

STAR WARS
Well, I'm about 2 hours away from seeing the new Star Wars movie. How exciting! Actually, there are a few good spoofs made on Atom Films to wet the whistle. I'll check back tonight to let you know how it went!

On an unrelated note, I just wanted to give a science update similar to the Mad Scientist. Todays NY Times has an article about the female orgasm and it's evolutionary significance. The scientist quoted for the book, Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd claims that the female orgasm is an evolutionary remnant, as vestige of the differentiation of the male from the female. She equates it to the fact that males have nipples which serve no biological purpose. Her biggest support of this is that many sexual encounters do not involve a female orgasm (well, not in my house but - who da man!). This apparently is evidence that women do not need to orgasm to procreate. Kind of a simplistic argument, but one to be studied...I suppose. Some interesting issues related to this that I've thought up are the fact that women generally orgasm before the man (if they do) so there probably isn't a physical component. Women tend to become more orgasmic with age which to me seems counterintuitive to an evolutionary argument. Perhaps, as some scientists in the article suggest, is that the orgasm helps a woman pick a healthy male, which would be genetic selection!

Canadians miss the point
Okay, I live in a fairly well educated town and have a typically well read group of friends. Therefore, I was shocked at coffee this morning to hear that my two canadian colleagues had not heard about the crazy and offensive statements of Vincente Fox. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the Mexican immigrants travel to the US to take the jobs that even the Blacks aren't willing to take. How's that for an in your eye bit of racial stereotyping there. Well, the truth is for this black he was right, I won't do those jobs. Still, that was an impressive bit of insulting. I'd call it Bush-esque but even Dumbya wouldn't go that far. Worse, he had to apologize to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, two great black heroes. Funny the canadians missed this...

Speaking of presidents, it sound like the PM of canada, Paul Martin is in trouble. Thank goodness all those canadians don't have any stones.

Stories
Okay, I have a story that I told at our department retreat which was evidently shocking. I think it was interesting, and, to be honest, it was from college and certainly isn't my most shocking experience. That being said, my dear droogies, here is the story, judge for yourselves...

My first two years in college I lived in what was the largest all male dorm on the east coast. I'm not sure where there was a bigger all male dorm but our building housed about 1500 horny college men. All for the most part were straight, mildly homophobic and total alcoholics. At least my friends. We lived on the 7th of 14 floors and I later learned that our Hall was designated the worst on campus for that year. I'm not sure if that is bragging but I can say that I witnessed some very shady happenings.

Okay, that sets the scene. It turns out that we were a fairly young bunch who ended up drinking so much at night that we never made it outside the dorm. One of the past times that we engaged in was watching pornography. Now I'm not necessarily a porn conossieur but we did seem to have a nice assortment spread throughout the group of boys. Watching porn with a group of men is generally a fairly silly affair but we discovered ways to make it more interesting.

These days were in the early nineties during the beginnings of the internet. Downloading videos was a long way off so we were dependent on the movies that could be bought or rented. Surprisingly, the majority of these films featured a large number of women but a relatively short list of men. This enabled us to play a rather interesting drinking game.

The porn purveyors developed a set of videos called "C#m shots" which were montages of the money shots from many different films. For those who don't know, the money shot is the final part of a porn film in which a man ejaculates onto something/someone. These clips were short, about 30 seconds, didn't show the male faces, and would generally feature anywhere from 5 to 10 men randomly throughout the video. This sets the stage for our games...

It turns out that an erect penis is quite recognizable. At the start of the film we would each choose a penis and then throughout the film we would celebrate when our penis made an appearance. The winner was the person whose penis appeared with the greatest frequency. I have to say, for a bunch of slightly homophobic teenage males, this game was quite popular. I guess that says a lot about homophobia. Anyway, that was the story, we could recognize male porn stars by their penises. Now the story is officially on the books so my boss can stop talking about it. Hope you enjoyed...

Catching up
Today we had a fairly long argument about the fact that american interrogators might be using religious icons during sessions with prisoners at Gitmo. Personally, in regards to this issue, I was pretty surprised the people rioted over and, worse, found it worth dying over. My feelings are that the reality of an interrogation is that a person has to use whatever psychological tools available to break down a suspects defenses and get at the truth. Race, gender, sexual preference, religion... these are all issues that people feel so strongly about that challenging them can cause a person to give up. Interestingly about the discussion, all of us hate Dumbya but the Americans didn't have a problem with this, the internationals did.

The Basenji
While surfing a came across another kind of dog that looks interesting. It's called a Basenji and is a central african breed found in villages. They are smart and about the right size. My fear with the Basenji is that they are a bit too energetic and might not fit too well into my future houselhold. Still searching...

Lab Plans

Okay, you are lucky enough to be given the chance to be a PI. What do you do first? Well, I don't know the answer but this is one of the problems I have been presented with. Above is my space that I have been allocated. How do you make a decent working environment out of it? Can't say I know the answer, stay posted. For advice I'd say think pretty hard about the things you need. Walk through a couple of labs to check out things you like and dislike. You may not have a lot of choices but you will have some so make the most of those.

Here is a picture from the war torn streets of Iraq. The look on this Iraqi child's face says it all. He is part of the small Jewish minority trying to piece together a life in the apocalyptic streets of Baghdad.

Bush attacks!
Boston.com, which is the internet version of the Boston Globe has a headline "Grenade attack on Bush foiled". What is that crap? The grenade evidently didn't work, was never within a football fields distance of the Great White Wanker, and is a grenade not a time bomb! I can't believe they are supporting this crazy guy who can't use a sentence without adding free or liberty into it. Well, Georgia, congrats, you are a beacon of liberty and your "Rose Revolution" came long before the "Purple Revolution" (Bush's words) in Iraq.

Continuing on this mode. Why do you now have to register online for the news on Boston.com? I realize they aren't the first to do this, the NY Times and Washington Post have been doing it for years, but still...

On another note, found this article about a performance artist giving up on everything...just about. Very weird. Her name is Melissa Ichiuji and she doesn't seem very committed to here art, taking breaks and having stuff she claims to have given up. Can't say I'm impressed but I suppose if you can get paid to do it why not. The picture is from her online journal. The jars are for urine during her 36 hour silent performance.