"James Brown"

This is the moniker of a certain town drunk in Lexington, KY the town from which I hail. He goes around introducing himself as James Brown or asking for "bus fare" and the police tell you to steer clear because they think he's the sketchiest mo'fo around. They can't figure out why he's still alive because he's destroyed his liver and has a bunch of other communicable diseases that don't seem to bother him too. He's been arrested for public intoxication over 900 times since 1992. Whoa. But the strangest thing is that my friend who lives in CANADA emailed me about him ("maybe you have heard about this guy, he's from your area"). What the hell?!!! Apparantly Mr. Henry Earl (his real name) has quite a following, and this is......sad.

Another coupla great animal lists

I've already expressed my excitement at learning random lists of animals with certain features (ie. inability to endogenously make vitamin C). Here are a couple more.
Animals with relatively large stomachs:
Marsupiala (kangaroos and wombat), Artiodactyla (peccary, hippopotamus, chevrotain, camelids, Pecora and true ruminants), Rodentia (vole, lemming, hamster, muskrat), Sirenia (dugong, manatee), Edentata (sloth), and Primates (Colobus and Semnopithecus monkeys).
Animals with no gallbladder:
Horse, deer, elk, moose, giraffe, camel, elephant, pigeon, dove, lab rat, pocket gopher, whale, porpoise, dophin, llama.
Animals prone to Chediak-Higashi syndrome:
Children, mink, cats, beige mice, killer whales.

The sweet sounds...

...of spring include woodpeckers, scurrying leaves from squirrels rustling in them, and as I realized today: the chainsaw. Yes, I heard a chainsaw running today and thought for a second that I was on the farm, getting ready to go help my dad clear some horse trails or start on our first kudzu bashing day of the year. Sigh... I really miss home.

Chronic...inflammation?

Dr. B lectured only twice, but I can't wait til next year when we'll have him for an entire course. He stodders around, stutters some too, and has that crazy professor grey hair that's never exactly clean and sticks out at strange angles. Here are some of my favorite quotes from just a single lecture...
"Those costimulators, B7-1 and B7-2, are like pigs having sex. Long, good sex. Takes a while. They just stay hooked together"
"And these are some of the bacterial diseases: tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis...who here's got syphilis?"
"You know syphilis was the 'wages of sin' back in the day. Yeah, now AIDS has taken the place of that and we got all these religious crazy fanatics, 'oh, what is all this science shit,' people going around telling us that AIDS is the damnation for illicit sex that comes to get you before you even get to hell. Yes, God showed us not only that sex is bad, but also that delayed type hypersensitivity is good."
"It's so stupid to have this hypersensitivity. You get a splinter and your body just gets all worked up about it. And poison ivy! I mean, hell, every time you rub against some o' that--who cares?! what's the point of all this dumb hypersensitivity??!!! But then along comes AIDS that targets our CD4+ cells that are responsible for hypersensitive reactions, and it's all of a sudden it's gone. Sonuvabitch! Son of a bitch, it gets every last one of 'em, and then AIDS patients die of weird ass funny diseases that no one's ever heard of. Son of a bitch."
"I mean, you don't know jack shit about Fido and Fido's going to croak anyway, but don't tell the owner that or they won't come back".

Dream, 3

I had this huge yellow peice of string that I spent a really really long time knotting up in this very elaborate way. It became a huge loop with bumps. Maybe like webbing, but I had made it that thick by knotting it. I found a tall tree out by the barn at my farm with a limb 20 feet up that was thick enough to hang from. I threw the yellow loop up and around the limb and climbed it. Which meant that I climbed up the yellow string, climbed over the limb, and climbed down the other side, upside down. It was very technical. My friend, Oz, gave me a call and flew down from New York to join me on my string loop climbing fun. He was very impressed, and had a lot of fun climbing on it too. There were lots of colors in this dream, and the overall feeling was integral, intertwined, embedded.