Drat, no free car.

I applied for my new IC (it sounds so ludicrously commercial that they're calling them MyKad now; I wonder if folks back home still say IC though) when I visited home this past June. So I'm not eligible to enter the lottery for the MyVi.

Oh...never mind. It's an argly car.

Standard Operating Procedures

Long post...mostly quotations, though.

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A few Sundays ago, the sermon at the church I attend was about the rituals of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur in Hebrew). At that time, still flush with the thrill of having entered a Biosafety Level Three lab and the Animal Isolation Wing for the first time – if you were ever a Robin Cook or Michael Crichton fan, you’ll know what I mean – I was struck by how much the description of the high-priestly duties resembled the standard operating procedure sheets I had had to read so many times in the preceding weeks. They are similar even in their superficial forms, being step-by-step outlines of a process of going in and going out of a special place, sacred or profane; laid out and enforced by a higher authority. Failure to follow the steps meticulously could have (had) potentially lethal consequences.

And they both involve animal sacrifice. One of the verbs used for killing animals used in experiments – other than the ‘euthanized’ also familiar to pet owners – is ‘sacrificed’. It implies that the blood of the animal is used in exchange for...something higher, that although we value life, there’s something we’re seeking that is worth even that blood on our hands...whether mercy, or knowledge, or healing.

The resonance of these passages tells me something almost stunning in its unfamiliarity to my modern mind: God is to be approached with as much awe and trepidation as bubonic plague and avian influenza. Certainly the mediaeval Europeans being consumed by the Black Death thought they were suffering the wrath of God (if you want a bit of historical background to this, the First Pandemic of plague was during the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, the Second was the Black Death, and the Third Pandemic, although not so big of a deal thanks to sanitation and antibiotics, is ongoing).

The situations are parallel but opposite. Animal rooms are considered ‘dirty’ and therefore workers must strip off their regular clothes before entering and wash their bodies on exiting to prevent the contamination from infecting them. Whereas humans have to clean and cover up our filthy selves before going in to protect us from being decontaminated out of existence by the furnace-bright presence of God.

However, if we read further into the story of atonement, according the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, the ritual is no longer necessary. Not that the essence of the ritual or the reasons behind it have been changed, but that the need for repeated painstaking decontamination has been removed, because for those who want it, someOne has come who did the ritual to decontaminate us forever. (Which would be a really neat trick for infectious disease researchers if we could wrangle that in a non-metaphorical sense.)

We no longer have to strip, shower, and change into scrubs to enter the isolation rooms, so to speak. And I think – if you think of what a pain in the neck it is to have to literally do that every single time, and what a pain to the soul it is to have to go through a process of fasting and weeping and confessing every single time – the ability to come to God freely, in our plain clothes, is an amazing gift.

(This is a bit of a random parenthesis, but I didn’t think Mel Gibson’s Passion was a particularly good movie. My brain just doesn’t work that way.)

References: The standard operating procedure quoted is from the U.S. government lab where I work - and no, I dowan say where it is. The Biblical quotations are from Exodus 29 (consecration of the priests), Leviticus 16 (Day of Atonement), and Hebrews 9-10 in the New International Version of the Bible.

Note: “Select agents” is an euphemism for “nasty germs that could be used for terrorism”.

These procedures are general guidelines for the performance of specific tasks within the animal isolation wing (AIW). They are meant to guide, but not preclude, your own good judgment in preventing hazardous situations on a day-to-day basis.

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves.

Entering the Animal Isolation Wing: Place transport containers with supplies in the ultraviolet (UV) box before entering the locker room. All items that are to be used in the animal rooms and removed when you leave must be in sealable containers that can be easily decontaminated. The transport container must be left in the anteroom of individual animal rooms.

A tabernacle was set up. In its first room were the lampstand, the table, and the consecrated bread; this was called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a room called the Most Holy Place, which had the golden altar of incense and the gold-covered ark of the covenant.

Pick up clothing (scrubs and socks), as needed, from the storage area just to the left of the UV box. Additional apparel needed to enter an animal room, the service corridor and necropsy room is available in the anterooms once inside the AIW.

This is how Aaron is to enter the sanctuary area: with a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban.

Enter your initials, date, and time on the sign-in sheet posted on the door into the locker room.

Tell your brother Aaron not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die...

Remove shoes, clothes, undergarmets, and jewelry and place them in lockers provided in the outer change area. Put on clean scrubs if they were obtained from storage area that day.

These are sacred garments; so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on.

Take keys for areas where select agents are present (if needed).

But only the high priest entered the inner room, and that only once a year, and never without blood...

Entering animal rooms: Read requirements for entering the animal room that are posted on the anteroom door and pass through the first door into the anteroom. All additional biosafety equipment or personal protective equipment (e.g., mask, hoods, or breathing apparatus) listed on the posted sheet must be worn and will be available in the anteroom.

He is to take a censer full of burning coals from the altar before the Lord and two handfuls of finely ground fragrant incense and take them behind the curtain.

Put on minimum required clothing (safety glasses, gloves, waterproof boots, and coveralls). Follow all additional instructions concerning biosafety equipment or personal protective equipment that are posted on the door into the anteroom.

Take the other ram, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on its head. Slaughter it, take some of its blood and put it on the lobes of the right ears of Aaron and his sons, on the thumbs of their right hands, and on the big toes of their right feet.

Open the inside door leading to the animal room. As you enter, be alert for any unusual conditions (e.g., loose animals). Make sure door closes behind you.

He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head. ... The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.

Exiting animal rooms: Decontaminate the surface of all containers that you are removing from the animal room before entering the anteroom. Use 10% bleach solution in spray bottles or bleach baths.

It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

Place sample container(s) into the open transport container(s) near the inside door. Remove all exposed coverings (including gloves) used in the animal room and store. If clothing becomes contaminated place in biohazard bag and inform animal care staff.

And if any of the meat of the ordination ram or any bread is left over till morning, burn it up. It must not be eaten, because it is sacred.

Entering and exiting the service corridor: Step in boot bath when entering or exiting any service corridor. When exiting, leave boots and coveralls in anteroom. If coveralls are noticeably contaminated, place them in an autoclavable biohazard bag and notify animal care staff.

The man who releases the goat as a scapegoat must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water; afterward he may come into the camp. The bull and the goat for the sin offering...must be taken outside the camp; their hides, flesh, and offal are to be burned up.

Place all transport containers in the UV light box and set exposure time for 10 minutes. Record the length of time that UV light is used on the clipboard next to the UV light.

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

Enter the inner change area and remove all clothing and store in locker provided. When items become dirty or are no longer needed, place them in the hamper provided so they can be autoclaved and laundered.

Then Aaron is to go into the Tent of Meeting and take off the linen garments he put on before he entered the Most Holy Place, and he is to leave them there.

Enter the exit corridor and shower. Wash all exterior body surfaces, especially the hair, face, and nostrils with soap before entering the outer change area. After drying off, put on your street clothes.

He shall bathe himself with water in a holy place and put on his regular garments.

Sign out on the sheet posted on the locker room door and pick up your transport container from the UV box.

Then he shall come out and sacrifice the burnt offering for himself and the burnt offering for the people.

When exiting the TIB after hours and weekends, record the time you departed in the after-hours log book at the main entrance of the TIB.

Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

Poor widdle hamsies

Yesterday was not a good day to be a hamster, because we were drawing post-vaccination blood samples from them. Actually, SS (one of the microbiologists I work with) and I are getting quite the cekap with our phlebotomy skills. It only took us two hours to bleed twelve hamsters this time. Let me tell you, people who work with humans ought to be grateful, you just stick the needle into a vein and there's a veritable gush of blood...

Actually, yesterday wasn't a good day to be me either, since SS first stuck me in the right index finger with a needle - which had been in a hamster a few seconds previously - and then Hamsie #25 bit me on the left. What baffles me is that he managed to draw blood without breaking my glove, so I guess that's fine, the only things in the wound are my own native germs...

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My dad's friends whom I'm staying with for Thanksgiving have a copy of Anwar's The Asian Renaissance, so I read/skimmed it. Pretty okaylah, nothing that's particularly profound. Nothing that struck me as terribly hypocritical except this:

While ensuring that they are also well-entrenched in the traditional works, children must not continue to be force-fed a diet of trivia.

Students must not be fed solely on a diet of textbooks, but guided to explore ideas from the works of great masters, and to follow the disputes and controversies between rival schools and ultimately, enter yet greater treasure troves of knowledge.

This from the guy who instituted the Pendidikan Moral curriculum for non-Muslim kids when he was Education Minister...bangang sial. That's got to be the prime example of force-feeding a diet of trivia...eighty moral values YOUR HEAD. Someday I'm going to type up Amir Muhammad's NST column about his reading of the Form Five Moral textbook and post it on this blog. It was hilarious.

erratum and snippets

First off, read CatR's somewhat painful but very worthwhile comments on my previous post. I really should learn to stick to commenting on stuff that I know about and leave things I don't know about (i.e. anything to do with human beings) alone.

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On a lighter note, funny conversation snippets from the past week:

One of my housemates, SN, works in a "worm lab" - one that uses Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for experiments. I did a bit of lab work with them in college, but never got technical.
me: So, how do you tell the difference between males and hermaphrodites?
SN: Well, the males' tails are flattened, and they have a lot of little hairs on them to clasp on to the hermaphrodites, and they move around more...
me: Yeah?
SN: ...because they're always looking for the vulva!
As a comment on males, that's probably applicable to more than worms.

The following story happened to the person who inspired/instigated my rather incoherent "whore of Babylon" post a few weeks ago:
EK: I've got a girlfriend now.
friend: Yeah? Where on the Internet did you find her?
EK: -_-
friend: I'm kidding, man, I'm kidding. So where did you meet her?
EK: On the Internet.

JB is a Singaporean who spent about six years of his childhood in Malaysia. We occasionally have arguments over who is better/worse off, Malaysians or Singaporeans. I sent him an article about a guy called Eddin Khoo who's trying to save Kelantanese culture from PAS.
JB: Hey, I got your email. See, at least that proves that at least the opposition can win in Malaysia.
me: But it's an opposition composed of religious fundamentalists!
JB: At least they're the opposition, right. Here the religious fundamentalists are in power!
me: ROTFLMAOZEDONG

This one I heard from my sis when I told her I met someone whose father worked with Navigators: A bunch of Christian workers are driving around Singapore trying to get to a meeting.
A: Which way do we turn at this junction?
B: How should I know?
A: Well, you're the navigator.
B: I'm not a Navigator, I'm InterVarsity.

When JB heard that one he said, "For many years my grandfather thought my dad worked on a ship."

Let the paranoiacs die

If shame had a face
I think it would kind of look like mine
If it had a home would it be my eyes?
--Lifehouse

Earlier this year over twenty people in Sarawak died within weeks from an ancient and deadly disease. The epidemic, swift and horrific as it was, raised little outcry among Malaysians because the people were Penans and the disease was measles. The Penan are one of the last few nomadic tribes left in Malaysia (because the government is trying to assimilate all the other bumis into the Malay Muslim culture, ha) and anyway true autochthones like the Peninsular Orang Aslis and Sabah/Sarawakian tribes are largely ignored by city people on the Peninsula...who cares about all those savages running around in the jungle, right?

What I'm totally disgusted by is that they died of measles. Is this getting through to you? In the twenty-first century, in a nation that's supposed to be pretty darn good as developing countries go. They died of fucking measles. Where is the outrage?

My first remembered encounter with vaccines was in Standard One. They lined us up and marched us to the school hall where we each received a shot in the arm and a drop of sweet liquid on our tongues. No permission requests sent to parents, no questions asked. Everybody got the stuff. I was proud of myself because I only cried a little, but prouder still because my little six-year-old brain, already running in a biology-geek track at that time, was sure that I was the only kid in the class who knew what that precious liquid was - oral polio vaccine. (One of my favourite books at the time, for whatever twisted morbid reason, was David Werner's Where There Is No Doctor, a manual for rural healthcare workers.)

See, at the time, my father's secretary was a middle-aged Indian with a moustache we called Mr. Roberts (the secretary, not his moustache). Mr. Roberts limped with one foot on tiptoe and twisted inward at a strange ankle. It was explained to us that this was because he had had polio so one leg was shorter than the other. Also, my father is deaf in one ear because of the streptomycin used to treat the tuberculosis he had as a small child. So I didn't complain when five years later they lined us up for BCG jabs. (Although I did complain about how long it took the vaccine lesion to heal.) And much later, when I was in college, an elderly microbiology professor delivered the memorable line "The polio virus - not a friend of mine." He limps and has one eye that droops.

So all in all, vaccination is a wonderful thing. Free vaccination offered to all schoolchildren, too, is a pretty good thing in societies where many parents are too poor to shell out hundreds of dollars for their children's shots - i.e., most places on Earth. If you're an impoverished woman who got a free MMR shot at fifteen, ten years later when you're pregnant you won't have to worry about giving birth to a rubella-deformed baby. Unfortunately, it seems that some people don't think so.

Try doing a Google search for 'vaccinosis' and you'll come up with twenty hysterical sites about how vaccinating your kids with DTP or your dog against rabies (since dogs are the new kids) is practically child abuse before you hit a single sensible one. Rich people in America who refuse to vaccinate their kids because they think it's a conspiracy by the medical profession and pharm industry and it'll make them autistic are no better than imams in Nigeria who think it's a conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. In fact, they're even bigger morons than those barefoot imams. They live in a society where information is freely and easily accessible, and what more, they're living in a society and lifestyle that is based on the same technologies they vilify. Let the paranoiacs die then. Let them go and live in a society where almost no one is vaccinated and the ancient scourges run rampant.

Too add insult to injury, the relatively backward Penan would hide in the jungles whenever medical teams are dispatched into their area out of fear of being vaccinated.

I do not, however, put the Penans in this category, even though they ran away from the opportunity to be vaccinated. Imagine you've lived in the forest all your life as a hunter-gatherer. All the medicines you've every known have been plant or animal products. All the outsiders you've ever known have been poachers or loggers after your land. Then suddenly a team of strangers shows up offering to stick needles into you and your family members for no clearly explained reason. What sane person wouldn't run? It is a failure of outreach and education on the part of the people responsible for giving the vaccinations. Not so for the supposedly well-educated and well-off upper-middle-class US citizens who have internet access and pamphlets all over the pediatrician's office.

I think the term that economists have for people like that is 'free riders' (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Their unvaccinated kids aren't getting sick from whooping cough and mumps not because vaccines are unneccesary - they're protected by the herd immunity effect of all their friends who have had their jabs.

And you think of those people in the hills of Borneo...dying of a disease they could have so easily been saved from with a little more outreach, a little more education, a little more inactivated virus suspension...I could cry.

Links to stories about the measles outbreak:

• 14 Penan mati, Menteri tidak tahu-menahu
• Four more Penan children die
• Parliamentary proceedings: why there's no clinic in Penan areas.

These two aren't about the measles outbreak but might suggest one reason why the state govt isn't interested in helping the Penans that much.

• Penans stage protest against logging companies
• Special report: LOGGING IN EAST MALAYSIA

(Ir)responsible parties:

• Ministry of Health

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One last thought: in the prophecies of Ezekiel and their echo in the apocalypse of John it says that through the city of God there runs a river, on whose banks grow trees whose leaves serve for the healing of the nations. Christians believe that on some level, the kingdom of heaven is already here - that we are the citizens of the city of God. Why aren't there more Christians in biomedical research? Where are those beautiful trees? "Take care of my sheep...whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me."

Much noise, little signal

Sometimes I think I shouldn't be allowed in a lab because of my tendency to blur out, drop things, and do procedures backwards in fits of absent-mindedness. Then I find out that there are other people out there who really shouldn't be allowed in a lab. My intern/tech position has been occupied by several other people over the years, and there was one whom we shall refer to as NG:

-- During the first week I was at work, one of the microbiologists, J, was walking me through some simple procedure (I think it was making up agarose gels or something) and we had to - ahem - calculate how large a volume we needed for the number of gels we wanted. So J asked me, "What's twenty-five times three?"
Me: "Seventy-five."
J: "Excellent!"
Me: *glare suspiciously*
J: "NG couldn't do that."

-- The thingies you run DNA gels in are plastic boxes with an electrode at each end. You put the gel in the middle, fill the box with buffer, and pipette the DNA samples into little holes at one end of the gel. Then you plug it in and turn it on. If you put in the plugs with the wrong polarity, you're screwed because the samples are all going to run the wrong way and go off the end of the gel - DNA being attracted to the positive electrode. So they're colour-coded black and red, same like car jumper cables. So naturally I was baffled when the black and red electrodes were labeled with pieces of tape with the names of the colours written out.
Me: "J, how come these are labeled 'BLACK' and 'RED'?"
J: "That was for NG. Sad, huh?"

-- I'm not totally sure, but I think NG was also the person mentioned to be responsible for this paper. The existence of the paper, I mean, not the writing of it. My boss: "The person was recapping a needle and she got a needle stick. You're not supposed to do that."

Quantitative nerdification

Thanks to YY for pointing me to this.

Accio signal transduction cascades!

So I was flipping through the July issue of Science and came across this caption under a photograph of some fluorescent blobby things:

"Fig. 3. Monitoring biological signaling processes by MAGIC."

Geez. If Harry Potter can do it, why are we wasting all this money? Flipped back to the beginning of the article. Abstract goes like:

"Technologies to asses the molecular targets of biomolecules in living cells are lacking. We have developed a technology called magnetism-based interaction capture (MAGIC) that identifies molecular targets on the basis of induced movement of superparamagnetic nanoparticles inside living cells."

Well, Arthur C. Clarke did say sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...mira!

Sorrylah. I'm very easily amused. And scientists are probably just as vulnerable as other people to the temptation to make up smartass acronyms...although not as much as politicians. I still find it hard to believe that the USA PATRIOT Act is an acronym. Biaks! Pui!

*muax*

Well, maybe another part of why I woke up in a good mood Saturday morning was that I had another date with the fler from last week on Friday night and we kissed properly this time. Mm. "Manis mulut di bibir..." I hope I'm not getting myself into anything too "merbahaya".

Going off'f that, I went through some of my old mix CDs last night and realized that there are Zainal Abidin and Bruce Cockburn songs on almost every one of them. Aiyo.

Die herpes die!

There's a new non-prescription drug on the market called Abreva which is supposed to heal cold sores. Two-gram tube with 10% active ingredient goes for about $15, which sounds ex for such a tiny amount, but when you consider that Zovirax needs a prescription to get an equally teeny-weeny tube for $60, boleh tahan.

I looked up the active ingredient (docosanol, a long-chain alcohol) on PubMed before buying this since I didn't want to spend that much money on nonsense. Some studies said it's somewhat effective against herpes simplex labialis - a.k.a. cold sores, others said there was no effect (when tested on guinea pigs, not humans). It's thought to interfere with viral fusion and entry by messing around with cell membranes. Review of cell membranes for you non-biologists: they're basically made of long carbon chains, i.e. fatty stuff.

(search string "docosanol acyclovir herpes" if you want to see for yourself. oh, and PubMed can create RSS feeds of searches for now. pretty cool.)

One paper says it has a synergistic effect with acyclovir, which is a prescription ointment known as Zovirax and incredibly expensive. It's a nucleoside analogue that prevents the virus from replicating properly. Double whammy - die herpes die!!!

Anyway, the sore on my nose is almost gone. It showed up on Wednesday, I started putting Abreva AND Zovirax on on Thursday. It never got to that nasty crusty painful stage, just some small vesicles and a bit of redness and soreness. So, the 2-drug treatment is much better in terms of healing time than using Zovirax alone, which I was doing up till now. My cold sores usually took about a week and a half at least to go away. Not bad, hor.

When I run out of Zovirax then I'll try the docosanol alone...oh well. My cousin Nahum in England gets Zovirax free 'cos he's under 18, so my aunty usually passes on the extra tubes to my mum.

Hehe. What's really funny is that acyclovir is also used for genital herpes, so the little tube came with cautions to the effect that it might cause a burning sensation in the genitals. I got it my freshman year of college because all the stress and unaccustomed-to cold weather was getting to me and my left nostril looked like a small red fungus.

ANDRONICUS!!!

Just saw Julie Taymor's Titus on DVD. Very violent, very beautiful (except for a few special-effects bits that I thought were stupid), very sad.

Best line in the movie: (after the Empress Tamora has a baby with dark skin, so that her affair with the Moor Aaron is revealed)

Chiron: Villain! You have undone our mother!
Aaron: Villian, I have done your mother.

[He delivers this line without any emphasis on 'done' or any smirking, which I think is almost humanly impossible.]

I bet Shakespeare would be impressed if he was around to see this.

Aaron makes a particularly cool villian in this production. Yeah, he's evil - aren't all the Moors - but Harry Lennix's acting shows him as one who's willing to go down fighting, not whimpering in their pants like Chiron and Demetrius. In a twentieth-century movie, the part where he's brought into the Goth camp was just begging to be be turned into a Nazis vs. black man scenario anyway.

The one part I really couldn't stand was the idiotic angels with trumpets. What was Taymor thinking?

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Jonathan Rhys-Meyers: I like! JH and TA and I also saw him in the Patrick Stewart version of The Lion in Winter. At the time we were eating dinner and chatting with the movie in the background because the speakers on my laptop are fairly bad. War...nah...political intrigue...nah...gay kiss? That's when we started paying attention. Maybe they put him as Philip because the French are the nationality that English and Americans traditionally love to hate. Worked well.

Alexander is on my 'watch at some future point' list, because I like historical fiction. And he was Steerpike in Gormenghast? I didn't know there was a Gormenghast movie! Must see must see! Ahh! He's such a hot bad guy! Well, he was okay as the football coach in Bend it like Beckham, I guess. Malaysia's recently made a rip-off called Gol & Gincu ("Goals & Lipstick")

Ok, enough drooling. Between this and the post about my date on Saturday I've drifted well away from science/science fiction topics.

yeek

Talked to my sis flowermoonfish on the phone this morning (talk at bus stop, pause to put bike on bus rack, talk on bus, pause to take bike off bus rack, talk while pushing bike along sidewalk...'cos I don't have a headset). She pointed out that the 'whore of Babylon' comment I made in the last post sounds like it came from Bobbin.

So that's TWO people I managed to unintentionally mimic in one post. Argh.

Oliver Sacks gave a convocation speech at my college once and he said that when he finds a new favourite author, his agent can tell because he has to be scolded for copying their style. But I haven't been reading that much of webcomics...

stuff my parents don't want to know about

Ok, so you know how you're supposed to let your roommates know where you're going and don't let strangers give you rides home, and don't let people you meet on the Internet know where you live, etc.? My only excuse is that it was raining heavily and the buses stop running around 10:30...jackass.

I've figured out a few reasons why i like geeks: (reminds me somewhat of what TA said about living in the Computer Science house).
a) Geeks are safe. Most of the time, they're not at wild drunken parties with girls Jello wrestling (not that they don't drink, but when they do, it's not like frat boys for the most part). They're sitting at home playing computer games. Or reading comic books.
b) Geeks make for good conversations, because they read/watch interesting stuff. The downside of this is that sometimes it's hard to get them to shut up about their favourite topics and get a word in...
c) Geeks tend to be shy, which gives you the advantage of confidence if you're not the most scintillating conversationalist on earth.

Disadvantages:
a) See caveat to (b) above.
b) Geeks can also be kinda hard up, due to (c) above.

Least scintillating and most revealing conversation of the night (this was in the Karaoke Kid bar):
E: I'm not very good at this sort of thing.
me: What, karaoke? (he sang "It's the End of the World As We Know It" quite well earlier)
E: No, the boy-girl thing.

[and I'm thinking, and WTH do I look like, the campus bicycle? *roll roll eyes*]

Oh yeah and JH? Next time a boy you barely know asks if he can give you a goodnight kiss, say "Sure" and turn your face sideways. Ok, not that that worked quite as well as I thought it would, either...

So yeah, I'm trying out the casual dating thing...i have become THE WHORE OF BABYLON!!!

On the other hand, the idea of befriending someone just because you're bored and he's hard up is quite repugnant, so either we're going to be friends based on a common liking for movies and comic books, or it's not going to go anywhere. Men complain about women overanalyzing things, yah?

*kitty purrs*

Read the manual...dur.

I'm selling my copy of the Merck Index. It was a gift from the Merck Corp. after I did a summer student research thingy sponsored by them (extracting a kairomone from an aquatic insect larva, which meant a lot of fiddling around with bowls full of water and bugs and a lot more fiddling around with glassware, some of which I broke). It was sort of nice to have for college, but I only used it twice or thrice, and if I go to vet or graduate school, I'll be able to use school copies anyway. So I was looking at the Amazon.com listing, and it's only rated 4 out of 5 stars. Why? Because this one moron, posting anonymously as "A reader", gave it 1 star and wrote:

personally, I think that this index has the most innacurate information available. It never has what most people need and it's too hard to use.

Of course it doesn't have what most people need, you donkey. It's a reference for "chemists, biochemists, pharmacologists, pharmacists, and related professionals", who do not comprise "most people" by a long stretch. What the crap were you looking for, a way to synthesize cheap meth? Well, it's actually in there, if you know how to find your way through the incredibly arcane system of listing chemicals - they're in alphabetic order, imbecile...

Oh yes, and he/she spelled 'inaccurate' inaccurately. Picking on minor spelling errors is something I don't often do, but that was a particularly unfortunate one, especially when you're complaining about a major scientific reference.

So, if you're looking for a copy of the Index, I'm selling a nice new one (13th ed., the current one) on both Amazon and Half.com. The seller name is megabigblur on both sites. Buy mine!

Amazon finally got around to adding a "Log Out" button to their "My Account" page after having a page explaining why they didn't have a "Log Out" button for ages. Stupid. Ever occur to them that quite a lot of folks don't have an Internet connection at home and might need to buy and sell from public computers?

So much for roadrunners, huh?

Random browsing while at work - I feel sort of guilty about surfing even when there's nothing to do, so I do spend some of the slack time reading papers:

• Coyotes apparently like cheese flavouring.
• And cats feel like they have to be special.

Alive

There's one song that I always associate with cycling: Vivace. I don't remember the composer's name, but it's the Vivace with the melody that goes like "pum-pada-pum-pum pada dadadada, pum pada-pum-pum pada da..." (Okay, sorrylah, bad description.)

I'm not a hardcore cyclist; not for me that punishing effort, pushing the frame to the uttermost speed of human flesh. (Unless I'm late for work.) What the tune fits perfectly with is the gentle up-and-down of a ride at crusing speed, breezing down the road on a sunny day. It's a happy song.

What's funny is that although my family was never 'musical' in the official sense - we have about one classical music CD, I went for lessons for a few years and aborted when I decided my teacher was too bossy - we always sang a lot. Especially on car trips. Hymns, the dumb songs you learn in school for Music class, Doughnut Man songs, later Veggie Tales songs, pop songs (which really drove my father crazy), harmonies. I shudder to think that kids now rely on built-in DVD players.

In the deepening dark on the way to the library just now, I thought of 'Taps' (Pa was a Boy Scout; he got all the way up to King's Scout, actually):

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

Back to the drawing board

I'm doing NaNoWriMo. Day 1: 722 words in about 45 minutes. Yeah man!

If I can make it over the 150-page lower limit, I'm also going to enter it for Utusan's Novel Remaja contest. They specify A4 paper, but not what font, size, or line spacing [shakes head]. I'm just going to assume the standard Times New Roman, 12 point, double spaced, which gives about 45000 words, less than NaNoWriMo's 50000-word qualification.