The NHPP held a forum on the homeless with the Nashville mayoral candidates this week. They all agreed to do the NHPP’s “urban plunge” by August 2nd. In addition, there was a survey, the results of which are below:
I got Rufus Wainwright’s new album, Release the Stars. Like most of his albums, it took me a while to warm up to, but it’s pretty damn good. “Going to a Town” is pretty awesome, and melancholy (shocker), and hey, also he totally hates on America! Seriously, Rufus, if you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave!?! Oh right. I guess he did. In fact.. other song titles: Sanssouci, Tiergarten. Gee, do you think he’s been living in Berlin? Anyways, it’s good, pick it up. I have been listening to it on repeat the past two days. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’m gay for him, but I might possibly be gay for him.
Anyways, in keeping with my “something is better than nothing” approach to blogging as of late, here’s a mishmash of other things I have been listening to:
Last night we sent B to beertown. Er, beantown. We sent beer to Beantown. We .. uh.. yeah. There’s an old barcrawling habit I have which basically boils down to “never pass up an opportunity to order beer from a waitress, because you never know when you’ll see her again.”
This strategy backfires, however, when you’re at a place with phenomenal service like the Lipstick Lounge. They’ll shovel booze to you as fast as you can drink it and still have time to make you a burger.
Had a lot of fun as expected. Mad props go out to Katherine for the best performance of the night.
And guys, friends don’t let friends take pictures drunk. They look all artsy and fancy, right? But you guys don’t get to see the reject pile. Why did I take a picture of Shauna’s feet? And, did I forget where the focus ring is? Cameras need a “drunk” mode. Hm. I’ll be right back, I gotta head to the patent office.
Question for the locomotive engineers in the audience (come oooon, I know you’re out there!):
When you see a train idle on the tracks, you hear a clicking noise — sounds electric, like the noise that you get when you click two ends of jumper cables together when they are hooked up to a battery (don’t make a habit of doing this). It’s an irregular pattern, though, with erratic delays and speedups in the frequency.
What is this noise?
I’ve always had an irrational (I thought) fear of walking over the various grates, vents, sewer man-holes, and access panels that dot the sidewalk in a any urban area. Or at least, I thought it was irrational:
As PhilNed Ryerson said, “Watch that first step! It’s a deeooooozy!” Nice to feel vindicated, but I hope no one broke their leg or anything.
Last weekend, right before I went out to mill around and take pictures at the Luis Palau festival, I entertained myself by drinking a few beers and watching the whole of the debate between evolutionists and Kirk Cameron, who claimed he could prove (without faith; with SCIENCE!!) the existence of god. (Hey, we all have our hobbies.). You can watch the first part here, but be warned. There are 18 of them. It’s excruciating at times, and hilarious at others. The best parts are the expressions on the evolutionist girl’s face as she tries alternately not to laugh or to explode in frustration. The evo-guy, on the other hand, had a pretty good poker face up until about halfway through, at which point he had obviously given up the pretense of having a rational debate. So, in light of that, it’s interesting to encounter this:
Via Rev, via In the Pipeline, we have a cool example of evolution as demonstrated via whole genome analysis. Literal, actual documented evolution:
The spread of multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains in the clinical environment has begun to pose serious limits to treatment options. Yet virtually nothing is known about how resistance traits are acquired in vivo. Here, we apply the power of whole-genome sequencing to identify steps in the evolution of multidrug resistance in isogenic S. aureus isolates recovered periodically from the bloodstream of a patient undergoing chemotherapy with vancomycin and other antibiotics. After extensive therapy, the bacterium developed resistance, and treatment failed. Sequencing the first vancomycin susceptible isolate and the last vancomycin nonsusceptible isolate identified genome wide only 35 point mutations in 31 loci. These mutations appeared in a sequential order in isolates that were recovered at intermittent times during chemotherapy in parallel with increasing levels of resistance.
I’ve always wanted to write a blog post with “Staphylococcus aureus” as tag.
The Y has some sort of swim team that holds practice from 7-8 in the pool. Today I got there at 6, and was hard-pressed to cram in my easy-does-it mile in to the time I had. So, that hurt.
Then there’s the fact that they are all lounging about, glaring at you, waiting for you to be done. Yeah, I’m that guy. “I know that time it is!!! 6:45, mother fucker!! I have 15 minutes!!”
But, let me tell you, there’s no motivation like an entire swim team staring at you looking unimpressed to keep you from lollygagging. I think I may have overdone it. Ow. It’s cool, though, I never really liked raising my hands over my head anyway.
Some of you may have noticed a slight decrease in actual writing around here lately. Allow me to demonstrate with a graph:
Cool Things
