Really bad Battlestar Galactica/Indian joke

You know how you think about random things in the shower...

So you know the Tory Foster character in Battlestar Galactica, President Roslin's aide? The actress who plays her looks Indian, right?


Well, maybe she's not really Indian. She could be Cylonese.

:ba-dum-TISH:

Showers

I have a hang-up about taking showers. This is why I always end up wasting a lot of time on the Internet until late at night, because I'm procrastinating on showering. (I just spent half an hour browsing Etsy.com and a previous half hour reading everything in my "Comics" and "Funny stuff" bookmarks folders.)

I think it's a combination of hating to be cold, and being paranoid. Sure, the water is heated, but it's cold when you take your clothes off and cold when you come out of the tub. Also, when I was a kid, since all 4 of us shared a bedroom until I was 16, the bathroom was the only place you ever found yourself absolutely alone and shut off from all other human beings. I was an anxious kid with a hyperactive imagination and was always scared something would come out of the tub drain and digest me alive or something.

Of course there was that one time in Seremban when a snake REALLY poked its head out of the floor drain*. I ran out of the bathroom naked and soapy and rinsed off in my parents' bathroom.

Anyway, I'm never going to watch Psycho, otherwise I will be the most unhygienic person on earth.

OK...going to shower for real now.

*Americans: in Malaysian bathrooms the entire floor is tiled and you just stand on the floor to shower. Also, because many houses have septic tanks rather than being connected to a sewer system, "greywater" from sinks and showers is piped to drains that empty into rivers. So you can see how a snake could show up in there.

Kitty bites you

me: [reading The Daily WTF with my right hand (mousing, stupid) and rubbing the cat's head with my left hand]
cat: [purr]
me: [moves hand over an inch]
cat: [leans over and pushes her skull back into my palm]
me: You are sooooo demanding.
cat: [purr]
me: What happens if I withdraw my hand?
cat: [bites me in the wrist]

The massacre at Eulau

Oldest nuclear family 'murdered'
By Julian Siddle
Science Reporter, BBC News

All adult bodies were buried facing south
The graves contained mainly women and children

The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany.

I'm reading the PNAS paper that this comes from and it's making me cry. The two skeletons at the top of the photo are a man and a woman, buried facing south as was the custom in their culture. Their two little boys (confirmed to be their sons by DNA testing) were buried facing their parents.

In another grave lay a young brother and sister, and an unrelated woman with a baby girl in her arms. The boy had been buried with a man's axe blade. I can imagine some Stone Age man patting his son on the head saying "While I'm hunting, take care of your step-ma and little sisters, okay?" and coming back to find them slaughtered.

I don't know why this makes me so emo. I recently read a book about the civil war in nothern Uganda and yeah, it's terrible, but I didn't have an emotional reaction to it. And these people died over four thousand years ago...

Mutton smell

I'm wondering if there's something about ovine meat that, besides the stereotypical aroma - or reek, depending on your acculturation and tastes - of mutton (adult sheep), there's also some component that's undectectable to the human nose but still strong.

I had a lambchop for dinner last night (bought from the UW Meat Science department store) and saved the piece of bone in the middle - don't ask why, you'll find out later. I scrubbed all the remaining bits of marrow out of it and soaked it overnight in 10% bleach. Bleach is a very powerful oxidizing agent - in layman's terms, destroys lots of things. Then I left it soaking in a cup of water on my desk to get the bleach out when I went to work.

Mistake.

When I came back during lunchtime the cup had been overturned, there was water all over my desk, and the lamb bone was lying there. Fortunately my computer didn't kena. My drinking glass next to it had been untouched, so...whichever naughty kitty tipped it over had definitely been in pursuit of the mutton bone.

The funny part was, when I picked it up and sniffed it, all I could smell was still the faint chemical stench of bleach. It didn't smell palatable or attractive at all any more.

Then, when I got home again a little while ago, I picked up the bone from the windowsill where it had been left to dry and laid it on top of my computer. A few minutes later Karen said "There's a cat on your computer". I looked into my bedroom and heard a CLUNK and saw a striped tail retreating under my desk.

Cats like mutton...go figure.

BSG groaner

Battlestar Galactica, season 2 episode 7:

"We know it as lymphocytic encephalitis. The disease is carried by rodents - rats, mostly - but a couple hundred years ago humans developed an immunity. Now, I can create a simple vaccine that will dramatically reverse the effect of the virus on the Cylons. But they have an antibody in their blood that breaks down the RNA of the vaccine. So they will need regular, close-interval, injections of the vaccine, or they will die."
- Dr Cottle on the Cylon-killing virus (similar to LCMV in real life)

*groannnnnnn*

OK so presumably since the vaccine has RNA, it's some kind of live attenuated or replication-deficient version of the Cylon virus. So if the Cylons can form Abs that can target ("break down"???) the viral vaccine RNA, why the hell aren't they immune to the wild-type isolate from the Earth beacon then?

Also, if a vaccine is chewed up by the immune system before it can mount an effective response against the target antigen, it's a pretty frakking useless vaccine and I don't see how it could possibly "reverse the effects" of the virus.

(in real life anti-RNA antibodies are found in patients with autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis, and synthetic anti-RNA Abs are being made for various purposes. I don't know if you get anti-viral-RNA Abs in nature.)

Chinese names

MAJOR PET PEEVE: Why do white fiction authors like to create Chinese characters identified by the literal translations of their Chinese names? The absolute worst offenders are science fiction and fantasy authors...much as I like the genre, it has a lot of stupid tendencies with regard to making up "exotic" stuff.

Recently finished reading Card's "Shadow of the Giant" and was really really bothered by "White Tiger". How come he and all the other guys get bizarre names but Han Tzu, a main character who's a member of Ender's jeesh, doesn't? Maybe because if you translated "Han Tzu" literally it would just be "Chinese Guy"...

Also was recently reminded of the really, sickeningly saccharine name of "Wind Blossom" (minor character in Anne McCaffrey's Pern series).

Of course Chinese parents take meaning into account when naming kids, but so do most parents speaking any language. When you meet someone you're not going to be thinking about their name so much unless it means or sounds like something really funny. If you meet a guy called Peter you don't think of him as "Rock".

If real life worked like this I would be walking around going "Hi, I'm Pink Cloud Poem". *groannnnn*

Holy cows

Things that are sacred to Americans:

• football
• meat
• home ownership
• cars
• lawns (corollary of home ownership)
• freedom of speech
• unlimited credit
• making fun of the French
• pets
• kids
• frozen food
• the "right" to have to pay through the nose for basic healthcare
• cheap food
• making fun of Canadians
• apple pie
• huge amounts of candy
• beer
• states' rights
• television
• eccentric handicrafts ("reborn" baby dolls are really freaky)
• holiday decorations
• "working out"
• vacations, whether or not they actually turn out to be relaxing
• customer service
• free drinking water
• bathtubs

This is by no means an exhaustive list and is not ordered by any particular criteria. Some things on this list I think are good, some I think are bad, and some I think are amusingly trivial but characteristic. Let me know if anything else should go on here =)

Funny things people said in lab

So we recently this mycoplasma contamination issue...we were discussing things to try like getting new cell stocks, trying antibiotics, decontaminating everything.
Adam: The lab I was working at in Germany had mycoplasma too, and they had to decontaminate the whole place.
Diana: Everything?
Adam: Yup, they just gassed everything.
Brock: Those Germans, that's how they solve problems. They just gas everything.

Last fall when flu season rolled around, Angela and I were talking about going to get our shots at University Health Services when Brock walked into the room:
me: Hey Brock, we're going to get our shots after lunch. Wanna come along?
Brock: What are you going to do after that?
Angela: We will come back here.
Brock: Isn't it going to be weird if we're all drunk in the lab?
me: FLU shots, not SHOTS shots.

Diana: Hey guys, look at this! [explosion]

Adam: I need to shut down total immunoglobulin production.
me: Why?
Adam: To overcome immunity to the vector.
me: So let me get this straight, you're going to cure Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome but you need to shut down immunity to do it?
Adam: Well...

Joe [who used to work with cows]: Why can't you just stick a needle in a vein and pull out ten mils of blood?

Brock: Would you believe me if I told you my name was short for Brocktholomew?
me: Noooo.
Brock: I told Sarah that and she believed me.
me: That's because she's blonde.
Angela: Shi-Hsia! That's so mean! I thought you were a nice person!
me: [...spluttering...]
Angela: That's the kind of thing *I* would say.

me [holding up a six-week-old cockerel from our chicken study]: Joe! Look at how big this cock is!

The old woman

Today is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church.

BBC: An Indian Christian villager at a relief camp in the eastern state of Orissa after her house was torched and her son burned alive by Hindu hardliners.

We who have it so easy find ourselves too lazy to remember our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world (and for Malaysians, even in other parts of the same city we live in) whose freedom to worship, bodily integrity, and very lives are threatened.

I remember going to an IV conference in college and being shown a Voice of the Martyrs video of a girl somewhere in Southeast Asia. My jaw dropped when I realized that she was an Orang Asli girl, speaking Malay, describing how at a SU-FES (Scripture Union-Fellowship of Evangelical Students) camp they had been attacked by police who threatened their lives. None of my camping experiences had been like that. Growing up as a middle-class, suburban Chinese Christian meant that I had a totally different experience from this girl, my compatriot and coreligionist. I couldn't stop crying both in sorrow for her and in shame at my own ignorance.

We who have it so easy - nice house, nice church, nice school, nice Christian friends - should be ashamed at how much we don't know and don't care.

One last note: violence against Christians should never justify violence back. I pray for the martyrs but I also pray that some hot-headed young idiots from persecuted communities won't take retribution into their own hands as happened in the Malukus (Moluccas) in Indonesia some years back.)

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Completely off topic - as someone who's interested in body modification I think it's cool that the old lady in the photo above has multiple ear piercings as well as facial and hand tattoos.

The new system

I'm a voracious reader and have absolutely no self-control when it comes to clicking on one link after another reading the news on the Internet. "Just a few minutes" on Facebook or the BBC or New York Times or The Malaysian Insider results in me going to work at 9:30 or bed at 2 a.m.

I'm going to institute a new system of using a kitchen timer set to 10 or 15 minutes (or my sports watch, while at work) to delimit my Internet reading time so I can get other stuff done like science, food, reading books, and sleep.

Can has information?

I'm trying to find out WHAT exactly Tan Lian Hoe said to piss off Penang UMNO and the Majlis Belia so much and in the process am crystallizing one of my major frustrations about the way news is reported in Malaysia.

This is how it always happens:
1. Some politician or public figure says something at a speech in a meeting or press conference.
2. Some other person (usually a politician, but can be some other type of VIP) complains about #1 and demands an apology/retraction.
3. The press reports on #2.
4. #1 and his or her organization issue an explanation/clarification/backpedaling.
5. The press reports on #4.
6. Repeat steps #2-5 ad nauseam.

At NO POINT in this process is the actual content of #1, what the original fella REALLY SAID, reported so that the public at large can figure out what the hoo-hah is about. #2 is always assumed to be complaining on behalf of some demographic group that was insulted, but we never see an ordinary member of the public complaining about #1 until after #2 creates the big media storm about it.

The MBM claims that Tan questioned the special position of the Malays. Tan claims she merely made a historical statement and was trying to make the point that race should not be politicised. Without being able to read what Tan said in her speech, how are we to judge who is right?

By the way, this is not just a problem with the mainstream media, the Malaysian Insider also didn't quote Tan's original speech in their stories. I believe this stems from a fundamental problem with the concept of "primary source" lacking from Malaysian education, from Standard One and up. Ciplak, salin, tiru, hafal, but we never learn how to research.

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Also, I was trying to find out about this other fella from the Young Malay Graduates who also complained about her. When you Google "mahasiswa melayu", the first hit is a porn site =P