Rainout

Today was supposed to be the last regular game of The Evil Dictator's baseball season. It has been raining hard on and off since last night. As of 11:30, we hadn't heard whether his game, scheduled for 1:00, was going to take place. I checked the website, and all the morning games had been cancelled, but not the afternoon games. My ex called, asking me if I'd heard from the coach. I hadn't, so I decided that since I we live only about a block from the park that his games are played at, I'd walk over there and look at the field. It was pouring rain as I walked out the door with my umbrella, the rain began to really pour. I had a feeling I already had my answer.

As you can see from the picture I took with my phone camera, the diamond was more suited to a swim meet than a baseball game. By the time I'd walked back home, the league had posted the cancellation of the 1:00 PM games on their website. Looking at the standings on the league website, I saw that none of the standings in the division could be changed by today's results. In all likelihood, the game will not be made up. The regular season is probably over unless we have make-up game tomrrow. On Monday, the playoffs will begin.

In his league, everybody makes the playoffs. The playoffs are single-game elimination, and the teams they play are based on their standings. The Red Sox, Adam's team, finished second in their division. They will play the Tigers, who they soundly beat when they played them in the season. If they beat the Tigers, they play the Yankees for the league championship, and go to the World Series. This would be a first for us.

The Yankees, who are coached by his coach from last year, have done well, with 11 wins and only 2 losses. They beat us twice this season, but just barely. Will the third time be the charm?

The Quality of Mercy

I read the other day that Susan Atkins, one of the idiots who followed Charles Manson and killed at his behest, is dying of brain cancer and has asked to be released to spend her last days in freedom as an "act of mercy." I am astonished at her chutzpah

This is the woman who entered the home of director Roman Polanski (who was not home at the time) and actress Sharon Tate and helped murder Tate and four other people. Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, begged for her life, asking Atkins to spare her life so that she could have her baby. Atkins told Tate she had no mercy for her and then stabbed Tate to death, tasted Tate's blood and used Tate's blood to write "PIG" on the front door of the house. In her trial she showed no remorse for killing Tate or for killing Gary Hinman, a young musician, two weeks before.

I have long opposed the death penalty, and am still opposed to it-- even for Ms. Atkins or even for the sociopath who murdered one of my closest friends two years ago. By not executing Ms. Atkins, we as a society have shown the unrepentant Atkins more mercy than she showed her victims. Atkins was sentenced originally to death, but her sentence was commuted to life in prison. Whether she died at 90 of a heart attack or at her current age, 59, of brain cancer doesn't matter-- she was sentenced to be in prison to the end of her life. She forfeited any claim to mercy when she murdered those people. She can spend her final days pondering, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the quality of mercy.

The Nearly Home Friday Random Ten

Turned in my Standard Plate Count lab online late last night after work, and now all that's left before Tuesday is my test on 75 pathogens, my lab practical, in which I have to do a gram stain of a bacteria and a couple of other procedures and turn in my lab report on my unknown, now known as E. coli. That's all.

And looking at my list of songs-- none of them younger than 20 years old-- it reminds me that I've got a bunch of recently acquired newer music I've got to load onto my ipod.

1. Beyond the Sea- Bobby Darin
2. Amos Moses- Jerry Reed
3. Breakdown- The Alan Parsons Project
4. Don't Look Back- The Remains
5. You Can't Get What You Want ('Til You Know What You Want)- Joe Jackson
6. Mission of Mercy- The Motels
7. Bad Company- Bad Company
8. Midnight Rambler- The Rolling Stones
9. How Many More Times?- Led Zeppelin
10. The Forgotten Years- Midnight Oil

Notes:
1. Love this one. They used it in a particularly creepy X-Files episode, and I now think of that when I hear it.
2. From sometime actor Jerry Reed.
3. Alan Parsons was a studio engineer with some big albums to his credit-- most notably Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album-- and formed a band in the late seventies. The singer on this song was the Hollies' Alan Clarke.
4. From the fabulous "Nuggets" collection of garage rock.
5. I associate this song with the summer of 1984.
6. A lesser-known but great song by the Motels, who had a few hits in the mid-eighties.
7. The eponymous song for this group.
8. One of the great albums and album covers from this group.
9. I posted last week about the other kind of Zeppelin. This group got its name from the Who's Keith Moon quipping that the newly formed group would go over "like a lead balloon."
10. Peter Garrett, who was the singer for Midnight Oil, is now a member of the Australian House of Representatives, for the Labor Party.

A Happy Ending

Good news, everybody-- the "butt" of my TSI slant turned yellow overnight in the incubator! It's an E. coli!

Oh, and my lab partners and I won the "Microbiology Jeopardy" game today.

Everybody can just relax and take a breath now...

Good News, Mr. Yen-- It's An E. Coli!

Last week, my lab partners and I ran various tests on both gram negative and gram positive bacteria and recorded the results. Last week we were each issued an unknown bacteria sample and we had to first figure out whether the bacteria was gram negative or positive, and then run the appropriate tests.

After determining last week, through gram staining, that I had a bacillus-shaped (rice-shaped) gram negative bacteria, I ran the gram negative tests on it.

As I ran the tests, I expressed the hope that my unknown was E. Coli, mainly because E. Coli has a unique result in the Easion Methylene Blue (EMB) test; the culture turns a really cool metallic green.

As you can see from the picture, I got my wish. When I took my cultures out of the incubator this morning, my EMB test was metallic green, indicating the likelihood that my unknown bacteria, whose current name is "Unknown #24," is E. Coli. This conclusion was bolstered by the fact that it also turned the McConkey agar dark pink, indicating a lowering of pH caused by the fermentation of lactose.

My Triple Sugar Iron (TSI) "stab and streak" test, which is a differential test-- it tests for multiple things-- mostly backed up my E. coli conclusion. The slant was yellow, indicating that the bacteria metabolized lactose and/or sucrose, which is consistent with E. Coli. The "butt" was not black, indicating no hydrogen sulfide production, again consistent with E. coli. and there were bubbles in the "stab" portion, indicating carbon dioxide production, again a sign that Unknown #24 is E. coli.

The only inconsistent finding was that the "butt" portion, the bottom of the test tube, was red, rather than yellow. If it is E. coli, it should ferment the glucose in that portion of the test tube and turn the agar yellow due to a change in pH. My professor said not to worry-- give it an extra day; it sometimes takes an extra day for that to turn.

Man, I love this stuff!

Occasional Forgotten Video: Scandal Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In the Heart"

Summer school is racing through its last week-- I've got two labs, a final test where I'll have to identify the pathogens of 75 different diseases (what causes Impetigo? Hah-- I know it!) and a lab practical. So time is limited-- I've actually been working on a couple of posts during breaks from work, studying, etc. But for now, here's an Occasional Forgotten Video.

Not all the great vids came out in the eighties. This one was from 1990. It was alternately wonderful and ridiculous. The song was a mix of a throwback to straight-up old school funk and the club mix/sampling that was all the rage back then. Appropriately, the bass was played by P-Funk legend Bootsy Collins (he's in the video too).

Singer Lady Miss Kier was also joined by Super DJ Dmitri (Dmitri Brill), Towa Tei (Chung Dong Wha), Rapper Q-Tip, and Maceo Parker. They sampled from several songs, including Herbie Hancock's "Bring Down the Birds." The song was a lot of things, but mostly it was a lot of fun.

The Wait Was Worth It

Those of you who read this blog regularly know about the renovations we've lived through. Starting about 9 years ago, my landlord, bless his heart, has been giving this two-flat, which was built in 1908, the once-over. Starting about nine years ago, with a new porch, there's been steady improvement in our home. The old tar-paper fake brick covering was itself covered with thermal insulation and much better looking vinyl siding. The old wooden windows, which leaked heat like sieves, were replaced with handsome, energy-tight windows. Central air was installed; now, for the same amount of electricity I was using just to cool my and my son's two bedrooms, we can cool the whole apartment.

Then came the real stuff. Last summer, the kitchen and bathroom were completely redone. The plumbing and electricity were upgraded (we can now turn the microwave and coffee maker on at the same time without tripping a circuit breaker!), new appliances and fixtures installed, which I posted about last summer. After a microburst flooded our (and many of our neighbors') basement, my landlord installed a new furnace and had his almost-new one hooked up to our unit.

The final stretch was the backyard. It was torn up in anticipation of being finished last autumn, but various delays kept that from happening. Finally, a couple of months ago, it was finished.

As I sat this morning eating breakfast with Kim in our beautiful backyard, I contentedly thought, my god, it was worth the wait.





































I love so many little things about the backyard. Yes, those are Concord grapes growing across the trellis. By next year, they should be growing all the way across the trellis, providing us shade. I love the way the statues of Buddha and "Uncle Ho," the three hundred-plus pound statue buried in the vines next to our neighbor's garage evoke the way the temples and statues of Angkor Wat were engulfed by the jungles of Cambodia. They've installed solar-powered lights which shine on the statues after the sun goes down. I particularly love the head of Apollo, which has become the spot our escape-artist black cat Helga hangs out when she's snuck past us to get outside.

The best part is that its given us a great excuse to have friends over. Bubs and Mizbubs have joined us back in the garden, as well as STPTT, his wife and kids (the gnome planter on our back porch was a gift from them).

This morning, I was talking to my landlady, who did the lion's share of the gardening work that made the backyard so nice, about the fact that next month is will be ten years since my son and I moved into this home. It'll also be, in September, three years since Kim and my stepdaughter joined us here.

I remembered that when my then-girlfriend (and now ex-wife) Cynthia and I were looking for an apartment, I nearly skipped this one. From the outside, the place looked ragged. It had, as I've mentioned, that awful tarpaper fake brick that so many of Chicago's old buildings were covered in back in the old days. The porch was sagging. But when I went inside, I saw a diamond in the rough-- beautiful old wood floors, handsome old fixtures.

Cynthia came and went. These days, she's got the husband, house and baby she wanted. After she left, I took in a roommate, who turned into a nightmare. After I kicked him out, I thought about downsizing-- moving to a place that was smaller and cheaper. As I looked around, I discovered that I was paying for a three-bedroom place what a lot of people in the area were paying for a one-bedroom. After a lot of consideration, the deal-breaker in moving was the fact that this was my son's home. His mother kept moving from one place to another in the same bad neighborhood. This was the place where my son had grown up, where a lot of his childhood memories are stored. I stayed.

My landlady mentioned that she remembered how much I worked in order to keep Adam here-- I was working full time as a teacher and working another 10-30 hours a week as a waiter. I felt like I was treading water.

Nearly three years ago, as I mentioned, Kim and Mel moved in. Things in my life got better at every level. They got to join Adam and I in living through the last and most disruptive renovations. But I think they all agree that it was so worth it. Just look at the pictures.

Toward A Future With a Little More Elegance

Last week, the New York Times had an article about a resurgence of interest in airships. Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei, which is the successor to the company that operated the infamous Hindenberg, has been successfully running operations with sightseeing tours over southern Germany.

Airships were popular in the 1930's. Interest waned in them after several disasters. The best-known was, of course, the LZ 129 Hindenberg, which was destroyed in a fire while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. What is less known is that the end of the airship age was also hastened by the destruction of two American military airships, the ZRS-4 USS Akron on April 4, 1933 and the ZRS-5 USS Macon on February 12, 1935. All three ships were of "rigid" designs-- they had aluminum skeletons inside. All three had mitigating factors in their destruction, warranting a re-examination of the concepts of airships, which have some significant advantages over winged aircraft.

As discussion over weaning ourselves off of hydrocarbon fuels goes on, use of hydrogen as a fuel keeps coming up. The Hindenberg disaster has made people wary of hydrogen. The image of the Hindenberg burning and the radio report of its destruction have become cultural icons. Yet, hydrogen may have gotten a bad rap.

A few years ago, Addison Bain, a retired NASA employee with a long-time interest in the disaster, the cause of which has never been solved, came up with an interesting theory. He was able to obtain an actual piece of the skin of the Hindenberg and analyze it. He discovered that the skin was fabric covered in cellulose acetate butyrate "dope," which was impregnated with iron oxide and aluminum powder. He realized that he'd seen this before, when he worked for NASA. It was very similar to the formula for the fuel for solid rocket boosters. In other words, the Hindenberg was filled with a flammable gas and covered with rocket fuel.

The Macon and the Akron, on the other hand, were filled with helium, an inert gas. Why hadn't the Hindenberg been filled with the much safer gas? The United States, the main producer of helium, refused to sell the gas to Nazi Germany.

What, then, destroyed the Akron and the Macon? The weather. Both were destroyed in storms that damaged their control surfaces.

Overall, airships had a good safety record. Germany operated about 100 airships for some time, losing only the Hindenberg. After the Hindenberg disaster, they changed the formula for the skin of the airships, which some people take as a tacit admission that the problem was the skin and not just the hydrogen.

Why airships? In his book "Heat," George Monbiot examines our energy future and concludes that in a future that avoids global warming, use of airplanes will be limited. What, then, is the advantage of airships over airplanes? Certainly not speed; an airship goes about 80 miles per hour, versus 200-600 miles per hour for an jet airplane. The difference is in energy efficiency. While an airplane uses much of its energy merely to keep its enormous weight aloft, in addition to propulsion, an airship gets its buoyancy from the gas. Its fuel use is solely for propulsion.

Regarding safety, the technology for weather prediction in the 1930's was nearly non-existent. It's not perfect now, but it's infinitely better than in the 1930's, with satellites, doppler radar and other tools-- undoubtedly enough to keep an airship from flying into a storm severe enough to destroy it.

But I believe its not just the energy efficiency and the consequent gentleness toward our planet that make the airship part of our future.

In the wonderful 1998 miniseries "From The Earth To The Moon," there's an episode called "Galileo Was Right." In one scene, there's a big, long meeting between NASA administrators, NASA scientists and astronauts over where to land Apollo 15. After many hours of discussions and arguments, involving issues of science, safety and experience, astronaut Dave Scott finally settles the argument, advocating a landing at the Hadley-Apenine Plain, a riskier landing, full of unknowns, but besides a greater potential for greater scientific discovery, it has one other advantage over the alternatives: grandeur. There's something to be said, he says, for exploring beautiful places.

On the way home from dinner with some friends tonight, Kim and I were talking about the news today-- the huge problems-- financial, energy, military-- that are coming to roost. This next thirty years are, its becoming clear, are our last chance to create a viable future. We are determining, right now, what kind of world our children will live in.

In 1912, there was a historic strike in Lawrence, Massachussets. Lawrence, Massachussetts was the center of the United States' textile industry. In a strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the Wobblies, workers, united across ethnic, racial and gender lines, marched under the banner "Bread and Roses Too." This slogan impressed me enough that I had it included, in Spanish, into my tattoo when I got it many years ago. I love the meaning-- that its not enough that we have what we need materially, but what we need spiritually. We need beauty, creativity and spark.

Reading the New York Times article the other day, a picture really grabbed me. It was a picture, below, of one of the aforementioned sightseeing tours over southern Germany. The new airships hold the promise of energy-efficient, safe modes of travel in the future, but the picture also had one other thing-- whimsy. I had a vision of riding quietly over a beautiful landscape, enjoying the scenery.

At 47, I've almost certainly got more years behind me than ahead of me. That and the fact that my oldest child is approaching adulthood, as well as losing one of my closest friends a couple of years ago, has really made me think about the future, both near and distant, and what I and my generation leave behind.

The fork in the path couldn't be clearer. What do we leave behind? A sustainable, creative, fulfilling-- and even elegant-- future, or a harsh, dirty, cold one, filled with a mix of a little extreme wealth and lots of grinding poverty, unfulfilled potential and violence? Is there any question?