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[tarigwaemir]

Stanley Hall on the Feast of St. Gaudentius

Not updating by email for once, but that's because this post should be short.

I recently subscribed to the RSS feed of Paper Cuts, a New York Times blog by the editor of the Book Review. I particularly enjoy the Wednesday feature, Living With Music, where different writers post up their playlists. Some put down a collection of their favorite tracks; others seem to be more thematic about it and construct actual mixes. Joshua Ferris included a book with each track on his playlist, which I thought was a nice intersection between fst and reading_mix.

Also via Paper Cuts, I found this interesting historical food blog, The Old Foodie, which is endlessly entertaining.

From emblem, the Crap Email from a Dude series, among which there are such priceless gems of idiocy like this hilarious name-dropping break-up letter, where the writer really needs to put down the psychology books before he hurts himself, and this oh-so-convincing argument about why the recipient should have married the writer instead of her current husband. (I'm not a huge fan of Jezebel, which I think tries a little too hard to be hip and angry, but these emails are immensely amusing.)

Yesterday evening, we had our last series of faculty research presentations, and one of the speakers was Peter Duesberg, a professor at Berkeley who is known for two controversial claims: (1) cancer is not caused by mutations but rather by aneuploidy and (2) HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He spoke on cancer during his presentation, and we were all trying our best to suppress our laughter. Iris and I couldn't stop cracking up while talking about it on the way home; Duesberg truly brings new meaning to the term "crazy old scientist". (I should note: aneuploidy is associated with cancer cells. But to assert that cancer isn't caused by mutations but by aneuploidy alone is kind of wandering off into the deep end. Also, the man was an expert in dodging questions: whenever asked for evidence of his claims, he merely repeated himself without actually citing any data. Let's not even mention some of the strange non sequiturs and analogies he came up with in the process.) Here's his website, for the curious.

(At one point, he went on a rant about the National Cancer Institute and commented bitterly, "Not that they've seen fit to give me any funding." Our response, "Shouldn't that be a sign?!")

My fifthmus assignment is awesome! (Much kudos to aishuu and mmmdraco for putting together the match-ups so quickly.) I think I'm going to write the first request because it intrigues me the most, but I like the other two as well. Speaking of which, issen4 started off a series of meta discussions on the character of Ogata here, followed up with posts from aishuu and aiwritingfic here and here. I have nothing new to add to the discussion, although I do mostly agree with aishuu: Ogata is a complete nerd, even if he drives a fancy car.

Yours &c.

Comments

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

You're the first person who didn't give me an "AISHUU IS EVIL" reaction to fifthmus.

And you agree with me because I am that AWESOME. Really. though actually, I think at some point we had a discussion about Ogata and came to the same conclusions...

[love_archived]

... I didn't say that either you know.

[qem_chibati]

But I mean that it the most brilliant kind of way!

[sumofparts]

Thanks for the link to the playlist on 'Living With Music'! I haven't listened to the songs or read the books but I really liked his description for the 3rd song he chose and wanted to thank you for pointing me to it. (Sorry for the random nature of this comment; I was doing a site-wide search for "Joshua Ferris" after finishing his book.)