Elis & Tom

I just got a great CD from a friend at work.  She’s from Brazil and so I’ve confessed to her my deep love for Brazilian music of the 60’s and 70’s.  She knows I consider Jobim to be a god of songwriting.  Well, she just came back from Brazil with a great album called Elis & Tom that is known by many to be one of the greatest bossa nova albums of all time.  This was not known by me or I would have surely already owned it.  Anyway, it’s really really good.  Elis Regina is the singer, one of the most popular brazilian singers ever and her voice is perfectly suited to the music of Tom Jobim.  Check out this youtube video of the most popular track from the album, Aguas de Marco.

Watch this movie: The Sterile Cuckoo

I stumbled upon a great movie tonight on TCM called The Sterile Cuckoo.  It’s from 1969, a story about a straight-laced guy and a crazy bitch and their doomed romance. Think The Way We Were, but 4 years earlier and less mawkish.

Liza is the crazy bitch.  I don’t need to tell you her last name.  She’s extremely young and extremely awkward and a really interesting character.  I’m immune to the effect of Liza as a gay icon. For whatever reason she just doesn’t do it for me.  Her brand of crazy just seems a little too chaotic for me. I don’t think we could be friends in real life. Therefore I can tell you with all objectivity that she really is great in the role. Her character is this social reject who wills her way into a relationship with a quiet and kind of awkward guy. Their portrayal of being young and in love was so convincing, it actually made me feel things.  The writing is fast and smart, the music is great.  It has a sixties look to the color and texture of the film that may be a turn off to some, but it’s nostalgic to me so I like.

So if you’ve got the nuts to sit through a Liza movie, give this one a try.  You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s some clips courtesy of the youtube pirates in case I’ve piqued your curiosity.

Here’s a short clip from the beginning before she gets really nuts:

And another from later on:

Who died?

I’m not dead. Just took a couple weeks off of writing anything. I’ll spare you the litany of excuses. That’s not why you’re here. But I’ll let you know what I’ve been doing to get you up to speed before I return to celebrity bashing and book reports on science news.

A lot has been going on lately, professionally and personally. I’ve been struggling to get my lectures together for the spring semester. It’s all new stuff that I’ve never taught before so my self-doubt has turned into wicked procrastination. I’ve finally turned a corner on it though and I should be able to meet my printing deadline. It’s ridiculous that I have to have all of my lecture materials prepared months before I’m going to give them, just so they can make a billion copies for the students. Where’s the spontaneity and energy in something that overly prepared? Anyway, what I’m teaching is the neuroanatomy component of the dental gross anatomy course. I’m pretty psyched about the subject. The muscles and bones of the body are interesting, but the nervous system is how it all actually works so you can go a lot deeper into the meaning of the anatomy. I think it will be alright if I can just strap myself down to my desk and finish this shit.

I started piano lessons again. It’s been almost ten years since I last took lessons at Concordia. It’s fantastic to be in it again. I’ve been playing quite a bit in the last ten years thanks to a very productive collaboration with a friend who is a great singer. We spent a few years making music together – stuff from all genres of the musical world, except gangsta rap and bluegrass. When she moved last year, that marked the unofficial end of my standing accompanying gig, so I thought that whenever I got my shit together, maybe I’d take lessons again and try to take myself to another level with the instrument. I never did actually get my metaphorical shit together, but J and I got a house and a pretty nice rhythm to our lives, so there suddenly seemed to be room for something else – something just for me.

It just so happened that J was working with a gal who teaches piano professionally (she works at the blood gardens in the mornings for extra cash). She was taking new students, J mentioned that I played and had been thinking about taking lessons again, next thing you know, I’m talking Bach with her over a pair of grand pianos in her home.

A big part of why I wanted to give this a try again was that I feel like I’ve changed so much in the last 8 years and I wanted to find out if I could approach the piano with a different perspective and be more successful with it. I think I’ve always had talent and a good musical ear, but problems in the motivation department. Part of me wondered if my growth and maturity as a scholar and teacher would make me a better student and a harder worker. Also, could my extreme knowledge of the musculoskeletal anatomy of the hands and the neurological pathways behind learning somehow help me think about the instrument and learning new music in a entirely different way? So far, I think the answer to all of the questions is yes. I’ve had more fun practicing the last few weeks than I think I’ve ever had preparing for lessons in years past. I don’t think I’ve been at it long enough to know if I’m actually getting way better or not, but in terms of sheer enjoyment, it’s a great success.

So that’s what’s new with me. Expect some excellent social commentary soon. I’m kind of over the whole election thing, so forgive me if I don’t weigh in on that one. Thanks for reading. Below is a quiz for all you pianists and anatomists out there. Which images represent which thumb movements – Abduction, Adduction, Flexion, Extension, Opposition?  Which movements are used in the passing under of the thumb in scales and long passages?

Chick Wins a Million Dollars on Wheel of Fortune – What?!

Attention all people who thought Wheel of Fortune was no longer on the air! Last night this chick won a million bucks on that show! Wheel used to be the lamest of TV game shows with contestants rarely winning more than 50K on an episode. All that changed this year with the addition of an extremely complicated million dollar space on the big wheel.

I imagine that I am one of the only people who still watches Wheel of Fortune, at least one of the only ones under 65 years of age. I understand that it is comically boring, the contestants are typically half-wits, and the Pat and Vanna shtick is definitely dated. But I am really good at solving their puzzles, and sometimes a little ego boost is just what I need in my 6:30 time slot.

So anyway, they added this new piece on the big wheel that is a normal size piece divided in thirds. The two outer thirds are bankrupts and the middle part is a million dollars. Okay, so if you happen to land on that middle part, you get to pick up the piece and put it on your little podium. You then have to not get bankrupted for the whole rest of the show. Then if you manage to get the highest money total, you get to go to the bonus round and spin the mini wheel (which has sealed envelopes containing prizes like a trip or a car or 30,000 dollars, there is one slot on the big wheel with 100,000 dollars). If you have the million piece, then they replace the 100,000 envelope with a million dollar envelope. If you happen to have picked that envelope (1 in 25 chance) and you solve the bonus round puzzle, then you win the million. When Pat first explained this a couple weeks ago, I assumed no one would ever win it because it’s so complicated, but sure enough last night some lady beat the odds and took home the million.

Way to go Michelle, it was awesome to see the explosions of confetti and her Vanna hug. But seriously, it would have been even more cool if she hadn’t been able to solve and then opened up the envelope. The whole world would have wept. At least the senior citizens of the world. And me.

Below I pasted the video of her bonus round from youtube. See if you can solve the puzzle and win a million. If you can’t, there’s something wrong with you.

Time Stands Still

I think the Hallidron Collider did in fact create some kind of distortion in the fabric of space time when they turned it on last month, it just only got to Iowa City last week. Last week was one of those weeks that I will forget before the following Monday is over. Seriously, almost nothing of significance happened. Granted I spent much of last week in a strange anxiety bubble which prevented me from making anything of significance happen, but usually things at least happen to me, or around me.

My suspicions were confirmed this morning when I checked the box office results from last weekend and there it was: Beverly Hills Chihuahua is number 1 at box office for the second week in a row. There’s no good explanation for that other than a rogue black hole. Industry analysts suggest that this is evidence of tough economic times leading to increased consumption of escapist entertainment. Possible, but I looked at the other films in the top 10 and I gotta tell you, it’s all looking pretty escapist. Nights in Rodanthe? Please, Diane Lane and Richard Gere could only be coupled in the most obscene of fantasies. Quarantine? A predictably jarring trailer, but hardly high art. Isn’t another good explanation that the intelligensia has all but abandoned movie theaters, leaving the multiplex to be little more than a playpen for minors and their least-common-denominator films? Aren’t the new status symbols of a film buff the length of his netflix queue or the number of downloads on her home computer?

Anyway, it’s not just the movie world that got sucked up by the black hole. There was no elimination on DWTS last week either, with olympic volleyballer Misty May-Trainor inexplicably rupturing her calcaneal tendon in a dance rehearsal. Project Runway aired the dreaded “part 1″ of the season finale, a.k.a. all the crap leading up to the big fashion blowout finale without the fashion and without the blowout.

This weekend, I even raked the carpet of pine needles threatening to choke out the grass beneath our three stately pines. I then burned them into oblivion in our sweet fire pit. Hours were spent raking, burning, staring into the thick, white, mashed potato-ey smoke and wiping my inflamed eyes. This morning, the pine needle carpet was born anew.

Here’s hoping that this week something actually happens and the mini black hole that briefly descended upon me will find its way somewhere else. Somewhere harmless. Somewhere where they need for nothing to happen for a while. How about Wall Street?

Thank god for the clarity of Simon Cowell

Clay Aiken came out of the closet this week. Big wow. The fact that a celebrity coming out of the closet (in Clay’s case, an invisible closet) still warrants a splashy front page of People magazine declaring, “Yes, I’m Gay” is disappointing, although it’s clearly an intentional nod to the truly groundbreaking coming out of Ellen Degeneres on the cover of Time Magazine (“Yep, I’m Gay”). I just hope they don’t have to do it again and again when Ricky Martin, Anderson Cooper and Tom Cruise decide to face facts. I do think it’s great though that there’s a gay celebrity out there who isn’t hot at all. Kind of lowers the bar a bit for all us real people out here.

Of course American Idol host Simon Cowell can be trusted to cut the shit and say exactly what the majority of America is actually thinking about this news “bombshell”:

“Wow. That’s a shock. It’s like being told Santa Claus isn’t real. Unbelievable. Good for him. If he said it, it’s the right thing for him. … I don’t think anyone cares. Let’s face it. It’s 2008. You know. Who cares?”

Thank you Simon.

Ticklish?

Today for lunch, I decided to figure out what it means to be ticklish. I’ve always been curious about it. I’m not super ticklish, but I can remember more than one time laughing so hard from tickling that it hurt. Over the last few days, I have been thinking about laughing and thought about writing about the biology/anatomy of laughing but it just became too big of a story for the amount of time I had today. So tickling it is.

First of all, there’s two kinds of tickling: knismesis, which is the weird ticklishness you get when someone lightly strokes your skin, or a bug is crawling on your skin, and gargalesis, which is the full-on crazy ticklishness most people have in their armpits and soles of the feet. Gargalesis is also my new favorite word. Although the sensations are similar, the mechanisms behind them seem to be very different.

Knismesis is theorized to be a serve as a protective function of the skin, alerting the organism that something foreign is on the body. The sensation is mediated by neurons that mediate pain and neurons that mediate touch, so in cases where one type of nerve modality is damaged or removed, ticklishness can still remain although in a weaker sense. In general, this type of tickling does not result in laughter. You can induce the knismesis response in yourself if you lightly rub the roof of your mouth with your finger. Careful when you do it though, it’s kind of intense. This type of ticklishness has also been well-documented in animals, and widely studied in cats.

Gargalesis is similar to knismesis in that the same neurons seem to be activated in response to the “heavy tickling” stimulus as were activated by a “light feather” stimulus. However, it is different from knismesis in that it is found only in specific sites of the body. The most common sites are the armpits, soles of the feet, sides of the torso and ribs, neck and knee. Gargalesis is also different from knismesis in that it is generally not possible to induce the response on yourself. I think that’s pretty obvious to most people. When you wash your armpits in the shower you don’t laugh hysterically. At least I don’t. However, the issue is more complicated than that. In studies where subjects used a joystick to operate a tickling robot on themselves, researchers found that the subjects did not laugh in response to tickling. So, even though the tickling stimulus was coming from somewhere else, simply anticipating the stimulus is enough to dampen the response. The cerebellum seems to be the source of this cancellation of self-produced gargalesis. Conversely, if subjects were blindfolded and the tickling robot was operated by someone else, they would respond with laughter as though they were being authentically tickled by a person (so it’s not just that the robot sucks as a tickler). I tried in vain to find an image of the tickling robot used in these studies but I’m not sure it exists on the web, so until I find it, I’m going to assume it looks like this:

So what’s the use of gargalesis? There are several popular theories but no one knows for sure why. One theory suggests that it is a defense mechanism, since most of the commonly ticklish areas are areas of particular vulnerability to injury during hand-to-hand combat. The reflexive pulling-away that most people get during tickling would be a boon to survival. Another theory suggests that maybe the ticklish spots developed in utero and were used as a means to reflexively orient the fetus’ body correctly in the womb. Yet another theory posits that tickling is in fact rooted in the need for social connection and rough play during early development. The laughing and smiling reflex to tickling serves to encourage the tickler to continue.  Most people’s first experiences with tickling are with their mothers, maybe ticklishness is a way to enhance the mother-child bond. Of course at the end of the day, these are only theories and no one really knows for sure why it exists.

It is interesting that gargalesis is much less common amongst animals, and has only been well-documented in humans and a few primates. Recent work though has shown that rats can be tickled and even laugh an ultrasonic laugh (~50Hz) that can only be heard with special equipment. Apparently the rats go totally bananas, rolling around and playing, in fact actively begging to be tickled. Bearing that need for an ultrasonic listening device in mind, who knows what other animals are laughing, tickling each other, and developing complex relationships without our awareness. Certainly bonding is no unique thing to humans, so that would tend to fit the bonding theory of tickling’s origins.

After all of this exploration, I hope that this enlightens your view of what it means to be human and I haven’t ruined for you the simple pleasure of getting tickled.

Blakemore SJ, Walpert DM, Frith CD (1998). “Central cancellation of selfproduced
tickle sensation”. Nat. Neurosci. 7:635-40.

Panksepp J, Burgdorf J (2003). ““Laughing” rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?“. Physiol. Behav. 79 (3): 533–47.

Selden ST (2004). “Tickle”. J. Am. Acad. Dermatol. 50 (1): 93–7.

Fun Facts About Pepper

I like pepper. And I don’t mean Sandy Denton of Salt n Pepa. But I really don’t know anything about where it comes from, what the different kinds are, etc. At least I didn’t until 10 minutes ago when I started a procrastination-induced research project on the topic. Here are my findings.

Pepper is a little round berry from the pepper plant (Piper nigrum), which is a flowering vine with big, deeply veined leaves. It can grow in a pot or in the ground provided winter temperatures stay above freezing. To make those darling little berries into peppercorns, you start by briefly cooking green unripened berries in hot water to break down the cell walls, which will accelerate the drying process. As it dries, the fruit part of the berry shrivels around the seed giving it the peppercorn its dark, wrinkly appearance. To make white pepper, you let the berry soak in water for a week and the flesh of the berry decomposes, leaving only the white seed. Green peppercorns are similar to black peppercorns, except the unripe berries are made to stay green by chemicals or freeze drying.

The different colors of peppercorns have different flavors/aromas due to their different composition. The “heat” of pepper comes from a chemical called piperine which is found in both the seed and outer fruit, so both white and black peppercorns are hot. The heat factor of piperine is about 1% of capsaicin, the chemical that gives chili peppers their heat. The outer part of the berry contains a variety of terpene compounds that mostly contribute to the aroma of pepper. Thus, black pepper, which retains the outer dried berry flesh, has a more aromatic quality than white pepper. Green peppercorns taste more like black peppercorns, but with a supposedly “fresher” or “fruitier” flavor. I’ve never had one, so I’ll have to trust the folks at www.bulkpeppercorns.com.

These flavor and aroma compounds are very sensitive to light and air, so once a peppercorn is ground, it will soon lose much of its heat and aroma. This is why pepper mills are often used at the time of cooking or consumption to get the most flavor out of the peppercorns.

Incidentally, bell peppers and chili peppers are not really related to “pepper” other than that they are all plants. Bell peppers were misleadingly called peppers by Columbus when he found them in the New World, because at that time pepper was a very expensive and highly valued spice.

Props to wikipedia, toptropicals.com, and bulkpeppercorns.com for their fun fact resourcefulness.

McCain camp declares war on folksy language

The McCain-Palin publicity machine has launched an all-out media blitz against Obama and his use of the colloquial aphorism “you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” I am huge fan of colloquialisms as a way to make an abstract point visual and immediate, so I consider this a war on some of my favorite words. If John McCain takes away my “lipstick on a pig” then who’s to say he won’t take away “you can’t polish a turd” or one of my personal favorites, “you can call a piece of shit a birthday cake, but you can’t make me eat it.”

This debate is stupid and intended to keep voters from focusing on the issues. That McCain’s anger is totally insincere goes without saying. He and probably just about every other politician has used that exact phrase to make him or herself seem like a “real person,” and of course there are numerous recorded examples now circulating of McCain using the phrase even to describe Hillary Clinton and her health care policy. What’s hilarious is that Barack Obama used the phrase in reference to John McCain and his supposed “change” from Bush administration policy, not at all in reference to the much-maligned Sarah Palin and her well-documented lipsticks.

This war on words is done for me. For future reference McCain camp – don’t even think about touching “the cat’s pajamas” or “that’ll go over like a fart in church.” Please feel free to comment below if you have colloquialisms you’d like to declare as off-limits to the McCain campaign’s war on words.

My thoughts on the Sarah Palin media frenzy

I think it’s pretty cool that a woman is on a major campaign ticket this year.  I’m happy when I get to see the world and society evolve in my lifetime.  I watched some of Palin’s RNC speech last night – only the highlight reel, I can’t tolerate the endless applause breaks of those big venue speeches.  She’s a funny lady for sure.  She’s got a good sense of sarcastic timing that a speechwriter simply can’t create for you.  But for all the effectiveness of her attacks on Obama and the Democratic party, I can tell you one thing that she isn’t is inspiring.  Somehow I figured that the woman who would break through this barrier in the Republican party would have to be larger than life, someone who even the most sexist and repellent of old, white, republican men could appreciate. To me she just seems like another lady in power – smart, slick and totally self-aware.  I’ve met quite a few women like her in my life as a scientist.  A lot of the most successful women scientists tend to be a lot like Sarah Palin – vivacious, attractive, effective speakers who the old white men of the community are happy to watch and listen to, but who may or may not actually get taken seriously by said old white men.

I watched a lot of the Hillary Clinton speeches during the primary season and I’ll tell you I had a totally different response.  Hillary wasn’t quite as effortlessly beautiful or sassy, but I really felt inspired by what she had to say.  I believe that she had substance over style.  A lifetime of work, her heart and mind devoted to changing the world.  She had power and authority in her words – she did seem larger than life to me, and obviously to so many others who either endlessly adored her or vilified her.  Ultimately the Hillary phenomenon wasn’t undone through any fault of her own, she just got steamrolled by a much larger phenomenon that appealed to many more people in a slightly different way.  Hillary Clinton appealed to me as an intellectual.  Barack Obama kind of appeals to me in an intellectual way, but much more as a leader of a national spirit – something that is much easier for anyone in this country to tap into.

Leaving all personal politics aside, I don’t feel even a fraction of that excitement about the possibilities of Sarah Palin being the number 2 governmental official in this country.  She just doesn’t seem as deeply motivated, not as willing to throw herself down on the tracks for the United States.  Maybe I feel this way because I didn’t know she existed a week ago and maybe my feelings will change over the next couple months.  In the meantime, I would suspect that if you asked anyone on the street whether they would like to see Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin in the white house, everyone’s most passionate feelings, positive or negative, would be about Hillary.  You either love her or you hate her.  As far as Sarah Palin goes – meh, she’s alright I guess.