sugar, tats, Johnny Football, bats and viruses

i really enjoyed this NYTimes article regarding sugar cubes, particularly the quote, "The Rads might well be the Pierre and Marie Curie of beverage-sweetening". i knew that sugar cubes were used as a delivery vehicle for polio vaccines (which might have actually been bad for the vaccine), but had no idea they had LSD connotations (i'm not tossing that one through google).

Moreover, i really appreciated a NYTimes article about the NBA team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. It has a few decent one liners: "Meteorologists in Oklahoma are basically rock stars", "The mayor of Oklahoma City told me that he thinks Oklahomans are humble because of their proximity to Texans, who will never stop bragging about anything." (Raises an eyebrow.) It features Wayne Coyne, beloved frontman for the Flaming Lips and a fantastically colorful character (a pair of those hands may have been mine) . The article mentioned that Kevin Durant (formerly of the University of Texas), has hidden tattoos. There's a lot of speculation as to why these are hidden; i agree with the commentary that these are no one's business but his (despite curiosity for the tattoos themselves).

Speaking of college sports, my alma mater's fooball team is actually, semi-shockingly winning this year. Quite a bit of the credit is being granted to the redshirt freshman quarterback Johnny Manziel, christened "Johnny Football" by fans and of whom there's Heisman speculation. Huh. My true interest lies with basketball; we'll have to see how my boys fare in the SEC.

In brief, Holly's teaching a freshman bio-type class this semester, and designed a class activity wherein a group of about 5 students are given roles like epidemiologist, research scientist, science writer, medical doctor, or wildlife biologist, and must piece together bits of information from these jobs to stop an unknown epidemic. She needed to a group of people to run through this for her and so a few of us were drafted; i got to be the wildlife biologist. This somehow was twisted into whale biologist - possibly by Tyler based on a recent viewing of Futurama featuring a whale biologist. Kelly AT heard about my new role, and mentioned, 'Oh, like in Seinfeld?'; i had to look that one up, too.
As it turned out, my main sample set was bats (if you're looking for viruses, assay the bats. Seriously.).
(via gchat)
me: also, what the hell is a whale biologist doing catching bats?
Holly: YOU were the one who said you were a whale biologist
me: someone said whales
    it wasn't me
Holly: bats are like tiny flying land whales
me: i could've sworn it
  there's a Calvin and Hobbes towards that
Holly: there's a futurama whale biologist episode
  so it was probably Tyler

I do have a very large soft spot for bats, so not terribly out of character. It was actually a really fun activity though Jack and Bryan ended up having an entirely too intense conversation regarding the treatment of encephalitis with steroids and an involved conversation about pig wrangling and various resultant fluids. Also, this all went down in a Panera at 11am on a Saturday morning. We didn't get thrown out, i'd like the record to state.