Technical Difficulties
A crow perched yesterday on my weather station's wind vane. The angle of the sun on the anemometer must have resulted in a flashing pattern as it spun, attracting his attention. In these pictures the vane is pointing east due to him spinning on it, even though the wind was actually coming from the north. As seen in the right shot, he reached down and physically stopped the anemometer with his beak and stopped it for a few moments before finally taking off to a nearby tree.
Taken from the kitchen, Queen Anne, Seattle, WA - July 30, 2007
Pig Will Eat Itself
Officially titled "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner". Harbor Steps, Downtown, Seattle, WA - July 28, 2007
Murder like clockwork
Every night, within minutes of 8:00 pm, flock upon flock of crows pass over our house flying south, toward what must be a very large roosting ground near downtown. It starts with a few birds cawing and soon turns into a swarm of black as hundreds of birds silently flap past. Wave upon wave of birds come over the rooftops to the north and swoop past the tree line to the south, on to their nightly endeavors. This lasts for about fifteen minutes, after which the air clears, the sun sets, and only the occasional late straggler caws en route to the gathering.
The pictures really don't do it justice. All taken from the back porch in Queen Anne - July 26, 2007.
On the subject of this site’s subheader…
The internet is a series of tubes. What's that, you weren't aware? You obviously missed Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)'s comments on why it is important to allow internet providers to regulate traffic - otherwise the tubes could be filled with junk like this website, and delay the delivery of important internets sent to you by friends.
See here for more, and links to the full speech.
Remember, these are the people who control billions of our tax dollars.
Planes, Trains, Automobies and Boats
Unassembled Boeing airplanes (in bright green primer), Burlington Northern rail cars (some carrying the planes!), many boats moored in Smith Cove marina, and of course lots of commuters traveling over the Magnolia Bridge and parked in the various lots. Taken from the back porch in Queen Anne - July 25, 2007.
Five albums I regret now…
...but didn't regret at the time I bought them. Some have since been sold. (in no specific order.)
- Creed - Human Clay
This one took about a year to really turn sour for me. I suspect a lot of people got pulled in by their seemingly rocking music and bellowsome lyrics, only to be miffed by all the pseudo-religious bullcrap that permeated all their interviews about it. It's one thing to be clear and unwavering about your music and its religious aspects like Jars of Clay was, but it's quite another to try and talk out of both sides of your mouth talking about how it's "not religious but well maybe spiritual but not necessarily about Jesus" and such. It reeks of the same crap that Intelligent Design stinks of now. - Jewel - Spirit
Yes, I'm admitting to waaay too much by acknowledging that I purchased this album. If it's any consolation, I seem to recall that I picked it up used, but still. The songs here lack the same innocence and airy quality that still gives some appreciation to Pieces of You, but at the time people were clamoring for new material and didn't care much about what exactly it was. This seems to happen to a lot of follow-up efforts to critically acclaimed albums. - Candlebox - self titled
I was stunned to discover a few months ago that Candlebox is still together and touring (at least here in their home region of the northwest.) This was one of the first CDs I purchased back when I switched to the format. I signed up for Columbia House (remember their awesome twelve CDs for a penny deal?) and snatched up a bunch of the one-hit-wonders that I saw on MTV back when they still aired videos. I was in a musical void at the time, stuck in suburbia with nothing but corporate "alternative rock" stations and no internet connection. Little did I know I was one of the lucky ones - in Buffalo we had access to most of the Toronto radio stations, and CFNY turned me on to a fair bit of actual decent music before I had a good filter to discern what actually was "decent". That said, this wasn't one of those. - Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I&II
Two more Columbia House purchases. When I first abandoned country music back in the early 90s (there's probably an entire separate entry's worth of commentary to show my progression to current music, but I'll save that for another time...) I turned to others to see what they were listening to. Most of my friends on the track and cross country teams were into metal and hard rock, and these albums popped up frequently. Toss in the endlessly repeated 'November Rain' video on MTV and VH1, and the albums were both must-have. Now they're much more must-cringe, but every once in a while cranking the volume up to 11 while playing 'You Could Be Mine' is quite cathartic, so they stay on the shelf. - Various Artists - City of Angels Motion Picture Soundtrack
I was among the many people suckered in by the constant airplay of the Alanis Morrissette song 'Uninvited'. Sure it was a decent song - epic in scope, dramatic to the point of near-absurdity, and full of orchestration at a time when that was limited to special appearances by bands at awards shows, but in the end this album was basically a collection of B-sides from a few famous names (Peter Gabriel, U2, etc...) and a bunch of instrumental filler to justify charging full price for what amounts to an EP's worth of music... and often phoned-in efforts at that.
I suspect that I realized many of these albums sucked fairly early on (the prime evidence being mix tapes that I made almost instantly with the one or two "good" songs from each placed on them), but it's hard to admit a mistake like this when you've just spent $15 of your hard-earned dollars when you're only earning about $50 a week. These days, with the advent of broadband internet and downloadable samples (not to mention *cough* other sources of musical material) albums tend to get a much more thorough vetting prior to purchase, both through my own previewing of material, and reviews from other trusted parties. Of course that doesn't stop me from picking up the occasional steamer, but those fall into a different category - albums I regretted immediately.
That said, I guess time will tell if some of the albums I've bought this year and enjoy now land in the regret category a decade hence.
Not quite a cure for cancer
Sometimes science experiments don't quite go as planned, for a variety of reasons. In the case of these two pictures, tools that I thought worked well turned out to not work as advertised and I didn't find out until later. Although the tools didn't work as intended, they still resulted in some pretty pictures that will never see the light of day in an actual science journal since they have no useful information to convey to other researchers, so instead I share them with you here.
The first picture (left- click image for a much larger version) shows a small portion of the dissected brain from an adult Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly). The red color comes from a fluorescent tag attached to an antibody that binds to the protein rhodopsin, which the fly eye uses as part of its vision system. The green color comes from a different fluorescent protein fused to an antibody that I thought recognized the protein I have been studying. Long story short, we have no clue what this antibody actually does bind to, but we do now know with certainty that it doesn't recognize my protein of interest!
This image (again click image for a much larger version) shows part of the adult fruit fly gut, where a specialized sack called der rectaldrusen (roughly translating to "rectal papillae") attaches which the fly uses to reabsorb salts and other essential nutrients prior to expelling waste. The green color here comes from a protein called Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which we thought was being expressed in tissues where my protein of interest normally expresses. In the case of this image, the GFP protein was always turned on in this tissue regardless of what protein's expression pattern we were attempting to study. Luckily this sort of problem is easy to deal with and we just found a different fly line that didn't have this problem and continued our research with that, instead.
People just keep going, and going, and going, and…
Gasworks Park, Wallingford, Seattle, WA - July 3, 2007
Caturday: How Much Is That Kitty In The Window?
Jasper and Delia in the bedroom window - March 6, 2007
