The nicest day of the year has rolled in on this fine Friday morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and my Munchkin Face Kitty is cackling through the windows. The thermometer says 72, but it feels more like 90. A fine morning indeed, waking up to the sweet sounds of Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine, which is my favorite Jeff Buckley song. Then, come to find out in the NYT Arts Section, a movie is being made of this young deceased singer/songwriter.
Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on Saturday about the Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and George W. visiting Graceland in Memphis last week. The photo pictured on CNN website is a tame, welcome-to-graceland shot of the happy family. But the real story was when they were inside the Elvis Museum, and Koizumi started doing, as Dowd puts it, “Thin Elvis air guitar, and Fat Elvis karate chops.”
Everybody loves Elvis, naturally. A couple of weeks ago, Eliot and I were watching the Travel channel. It was a program about night life in Japan - which beats NYC by a longshot! Clubs are open all night, and some don’t even open until 6am. Businessmen and laymen alike share in the fun of drinking at these cozy bars, really the size of a kitchenette. And they all do Elvis Karaoke! The only thing missing from the special were shots of the Robots at the hot dog stands - that’s what I want to see.
The 4th of July came and went like the wind, but not without a few spectacular moments. I woke up in the morning with flashbacks to the morning of Rosh Hashanah, when Eliot and I slept through services. It was 9:30am, and we were supposed to have met my parents at 8:30 at their house. I got right on the phone and we hustled to make the drive up to Gloucester. With fears of the parking lot filling up, we still managed to get Cigarettes, Beverages, Dunkin Donuts coffee, and Egg and Cheese bagels! And we made it to the beach in plenty of time to get a parking spot.
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It was a good day for the beach, and a good beach for the day. Wingaersheek beach in Gloucester has a lot of sand bars, keeping the shoreline very long and shallow. So, no big waves to play in, but having the will to stay in the water for a long time and play catch and actually go swimming is just as good.
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We left the beach when it starting raining, and in some kind of technology-deprived mental state, Eliot and I decided to go to Jordan’s Furniture in Reading to see Superman 3D. What a trip! And I’m not talking about Superman. As you walk in to this white concrete building, you are immediately bombarded with insane amounts of stimulation. This includes, but is not limited to, people flying on trapezes, larger-than-life structures made purely out of Jelly Beans, and a wall-size Green Monster robot that is eating a full-size Yankees player. Very weird, but super awesome in the scope of things!
In other related news, some super smart physicists at Stanford are half-seriously studying the physics of Superman. From Slashdot, “The article tells of ‘a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.’ Do they have human sized centrifuges?”
But speaking of regenerating strength in humans and animals, Stem Cells are still the best forward solution to most diseases, including MS.
From the National MS Society
The nerve cells were transplanted into several groups of rats with spinal cord injury. Some rats also received injections of a drug called rolipram (an agent that also helps to overcome myelin inhibition of nerve regeneration), and some also received cells that specifically secreted the growth factor GDNF (glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor) into the spinal cord. Three months after transplant, rats that had received all treatments — stem cells, rolipram, dbcAMP, and GDNF — had several hundred new nerve fibers, more than any other group. The nerve fibers succeeded in connecting with a lower leg muscle, and the rats showed significant improvement in hind limb grip strength. No other group showed improvement.
On this same thread, I recently read in the NYT that the Roman Catholic church is working to excommunicate scientists who engage in Stem Cell research. I thought this was the “culture of life”. But it seems that to the church, life not yet lived means more than life living.