Um...are you sure you're a doctor?

This sign (you can click on the pic to make it larger) was posted on the door of a nearby conference room at work. It hung there for about a week - notice there is no date on the sign - and was the absolute first thing I took a picture of with my new camera.

Ah,science. Wooing the ladies with questionable, handmade signs since last thursday.

Oh, SNAP!

I was tentatively thinking of titling this post "Bobby Digital," and then reflected on the fact that nobody does or should get RZA jokes. That being said I bought a digital camera for my trip. I went to B and H, which is the largest camera store in the world and was certainly a sight to behold. Oddly, it is staffed almost entirely by orthodox jews and also the whole store is connected by conveyor belts. The staff guy I talked to was SUPER helpful, so I guess he earned this cheap plug I'm presently putting in. Go to B and H!

Con(cert)ey Island

Last night yours truly could be found in Keyspan Park, home of minor-league baseball team the Coney Island Cyclones. Oh, and the Shins and the White Stripes were there, too.

I was treated to a fabulous concert as I stood in center field; a stage was constructed in the outfield, and was open in the back to let in the night sky and the breeze coming off the Ocean.

The first band, M. W. something, was terrible. The Shins, however, were solid and terrific. They performed a lot of their hits, but, truth be told, were so very much themselves as they are on their albums that it doesn't really make sense to see them live. It's exactly like listening to their music on mp3.

The same could not at all be said for the White Stripes, however. The difference between the music of their albums and the music of their live show last night in Coney Island is like the difference between seeing a tiger in a zoo and seeing a tiger devouring a gazelle in the wild. Jack White is a maniac, a Robert-Johnson-esque guitar devil who must be seen to be believed. He flew from instrument to instrument and from song to song, stopping only to take polaroids of himself and Meg (which he then threw out to the audience) and to make a few suitably bizarre comments like "This morning Meg had breakfast with Dennis Hopper. (pause) No, that's not true."

Speaking of Meg, she is far more impressive a musician than anybody gives her credit for. With a very proper air about her, she's able to keep up with and adjust to Jack's almost feral perfomance. When Jack broke a string for the second time, he merely tossed aside the guitar he was playing and picked up another and started playing a totally different song, then, when his roadie has fixed the string, Jack took up his now fixed guitar and continued the first song where he'd left off. This was done without pause, and Meg never missed a beat, despite there passing no apparent cues between each other.

Even the songs from their newest album that I don't like sounded incredible last night, to the point where I was made to think "oh, that's what that's supposed to sound like." Score another one for the Detroit music scene...

Oh, hey, that's just great.

For months - months! - I have been laboring over this problem at work. I have two mice, each with a different genotype. PCR done by my coworkers shows one mouse has a transgene, the other does not. However, I keep getting results over and over again that say that both these mice have the transgene. So either the tests I'm doing are wrong, or something's going on with these mice. I assumed it was my tests that were failing somehow, and I felt stupid and like a really bad scientist.

Today I learned that the both mice have the transgene, and that our PCR method of genotyping gives false positive results. So, there's no way I could have gotten the results I was hoping for. It is these sorts of time-wasting experiences I sincerely hope will not find their way to the forefront of my mind as I lay on my deathbed...

Regarding my boy Kanye, Paul Krugman, and President George W(hitey) Bush

Now that I have found a way around paying for the NYTimes' stupid "Times select" program for Op-Ed content, I tremendously enjoyed reading Paul Krugman's new column about the effects of race on the response to Katrina.

Personally, though, as happy as I was that Kanye said what he did when he did, I think he may have been dangerously oversimplifying the matter. George Bush doesn't care about black people, but his record would seem to show that he doesn't really care about anyone other than his big rich corporate friends. Why else would he offer FEMA and HUD positions as favors to friends, rather than qualified professionals? Those are vitally important gov't agencies, who primarily serve the people who need federal assistance (i.e. those other than rich white men). This gets me back to the problem, though, which is that if the public gets fixated on this notion of its being largely an issue of race that slowed the Katrina reponse, we won't fixate on all the factors that led to a slow Katrina response. Thoughts?

Der Kommissar IS in town. I know, I partied with him last night.

My first clue was running into my debutante socialite friend there. You know, the one who knows all the fancy New York people and introduced me to the correspondent from Al Jazeera. By the end of the night, I figured I might just be in the running for 2nd Fanciest American; you know, silver to ole' Jimbo's gold standard. Why so fancy? Well.....

Last night I attended a special invitation-only soiree at the Guggenheim, held to celebrate the opening of an exhibit of never-before-seen-outside-of-Russia collections. There were performances by musicians and dancers, as well as free drinks (including some kind of vodka that's apprently not even on the market yet. How very.). As for the art, some of it was incredible. The icons - which I came to learn made up the most expensive part of the collections and were from as far back as the late 12th century - were breathtaking. Some pieces of the later work - in particular this mixed-media sculpture piece of a man on a train - were fantastic. Some others, not so much.

I like dressing up, I like art, and I like weird parties. Check, check, and check.

This is amazing

This clip right here shows MSNBC newsman Olbermann saying what needs to be said. You should really check it out!

Now and for the rest of my life...

...I'm on hold. A stupid jerk at the medical center broke an instrument I need to use, then went on vacation, and now the stupid jerks at tech support have me on hold. The real problem, though, is the hold music. A terrible sax solo "da dum dee doo dweeee!" plays, and then a message interrupts to tell me my call will be answered in the order it was received. Through some cruel glitch, this message re-starts the hold song. "Da dum dee doo dwee!" over and over again for the past 20 minutes.

SOMEONE MUST PAY.

Brooklyn, number one!

The largest parade in North America is held a few blocks from where I live. I went last year, and darned if I was going to miss it this year. The West Indian Cultural Festival Carnival Parade is a gigantic costumed extravaganza that stretches on for as far as the eye can see. Giant flatbed trucks covered with speakers blast dancehall reggae music while ornately-decorated performers dance their way along. It is nothing short of incredible. Of course the streets are packed with spectators, but everyone seemed really well-behaved, the food smelled terrific and the pageantry was unmatched. I have it from a reliable source that this event is a major one in the world of competetive carnival dancers, and contests are held in Trinidad, Jamaica, and elsewhere just for the right to come to Brooklyn to show their stuff. DO NOT miss this event next year if at all possible!

the name is a swear word.

MotherF*cker is one of NYC's biggest dance parties. Held every sunday evening of a three-day weekend, it has been brought to my attention on a number of occasions by a great many different people as something I had to try. I was jonesing for something like the Bang at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, so I had high hopes going in.

Stepping into Mf'r was like stepping into the NYC you only see in movies. The NYC where all the pretty scene people get together to have decadent parties and get on one another. I didn't think this actually existed, but I have been there, and I have seen it. The event was held on several floors of this club that was entirely too small for the hundreds of people there, and the music was ridiculously good.

The problem, however, was that the event was made to get people orgiastic and sloppy drunk in a very tightly packed venue. Right about the time I could feel my Caged Animal Syndrome getting worse, some guy passed out onto me. I caught him, picked him up and leaned him against a pillar on the dance floor while his friend giggled. "Are you okay?" I asked, only to be greeted with that glazed-over forty-yard stare I know from my Emergency Room days. "Your friend is messed up, you'd better get him some help." I tell the giggling scenester next to me. "Oh, he's fine" the guy says, as his friend slumps down against the wall. This goes on for several minutes, my checking on the passed-out-with-his-eyes-open guy and pleading with his stupidly grinning friend, who has taken to dancing with the guy's arm a la "Weekend at Bernie's."

I tell one of the event staff about it on my way out the door a few minutes later, and he sends a bouncer over as my company and I head for a diner. Granted, the music had been fantastic and a completely attractive stranger told me that we might be soul mates because she had a boy scout shirt like the one I was wearing back at her home, but I'm played out on that stupid-kids-who-can't-take-care-of-themselves scene. It wasn't fun in college with the frat kids, and it isn't fun now.

I'm going to be on national TV!

By now there are people in this city who know I'm always game for strange adventures, and one of these fine cats forwarded an e-mail to me asking for volunteers for an "experiment" to be televised on ABC. And so it was that this past wednesday I went to ABC studios on the west side for a taping for ABC Primetime.

The "experiment" was supposed to consist of looking at pairs of images depicting three-dimensional geometric shapes, and trying to discern whether the two shapes were the same. We were to write our responses to ten of these questions, and then to speak our answers aloud to an additional twenty such problems while sitting with five other people. It took a bafflingly long time for me to get called in to be tested and taped, and I soon found out why. They weren't really testing all six people in each group, they were only testing one - the other five were there to provide peer pressure. The other five would all give the same answer as each other, and were right 50% of the time. The idea was that the group could pressure a person into picking the wrong answer.

The theory behind this experiment is actually pretty interesting: apparently the areas of the brain involved in visual perception are colocalized with those involved in conformity, and the doctor who was running this experiment postulates that enough pressure to conform can affect visual perception. The area of the brain involved with nonconformity, the amigdala, is also the fear center of the brain.

I was one of two who tied for highest scores on the test, and my scores actually improved when the group was trying to lead me astray. Unfortunately, others who were tested did really badly, so on the day the accuracy dropped to something like an unspeakable 5%. I just hope this is not the only thing talked about on the TV show. I don't know when it's going to air, but they said it should be on in the next few weeks. I'll let you know.

P.S. There's another story involved with this one, about one of the participants hiring mercenaries to extract his daughter, who was stranded in New Orleans, but I'll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say, the day was very strange on the whole.