Five Things… I Like About My Neighborhood

1. Steady influx of juvenile squirrels, always needing to be shown that I’m not going to eat them and am, in fact, going to provide them with a little box full of corn and sunflower seeds (despite what it does to my flower bed).
2. Almost-decipherable echoes of high school games rolling from the stadium all the way to our front yard.
3. Trees that remind me that some of these “student rentals” were standing, much more isolated, decades before I was born.
4. Neighbors who put out food for scraggly cats so that they can get back on their feet.
5. Accessibility – by bike, foot, etc. – to Greenbelt, Library!, parks, shopping, campus…

Listening

I’ve been spending some time wandering through the CD shelves at the LIBRARY! and giving my iTunes an infusion of fresh music. Not sure, honestly, what the legality of that is. I mean, it’s at the library – if I’m not going to redistribute and/or sell it, is it okay to import it to my personal computer? One hopes, because one does…

Anyway, the iTunes are shuffling, and I’m listening to:

• Yo-Yo Ma on the Seven Years in Tibet soundtrack
• Tower of Power
• Shitake Monkey
• Bowling for Soup
• the Dave Matthews Band (not that I didn’t have them before, of course)
• Arcade Fire
• Onomatopoeia – easily the coolest named musical ensemble this side of the Boise River
• The Corrs
• Wilco (which, I maintain – despite what iTunes wants me to believe – does not belong in the country genre)
• KT Tunstall – specifically, Drastic Fantastic
• More Music From Northern Exposure
• a Dark Side of the Moon tribute by the Vitamin String Quartet
• and Blake Lewis, who was robbed

What are you listening to? What would you recommend to me? More importantly, what would you recommend that I can also find at the Boise and/or Ada libraries?

Not Sure Mermaids Would Approve of Tide Elimination, Though

Operating under the questionable assumption that one would desire a cure for lycanthropy (that being werewolfism, for those who didn’t do their homework before logging on this morning), the always bizarre and often wonderful Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posits three solutions:

So true, Engineer Friends. So true.

Hey, Shortie

Horsey Nose, originally uploaded by Kate & Ryan.

“Make sure you get me from my best angle, kid.”

Definitely Change I Can Believe In

(Image h/t Fisk)

I heard so many negative reviews of Transformers: ROTF (which looks like it ought to stand for “rolling on the floor,” not “revenge of the fallen”) when it first came out. The one person who stood by his positive impression was my man Fisk, who gave it three enthusiastic thumbs up.

Then I read a review of the film that made good sense to me, not the least of which because it’s written by a gal with my same name:

The only thing I have to say to critics who panned this movie is:

When you go to an amusement park to ride the biggest and fastest roller coaster you can find; do you leave your seat saying to yourself, “Gee, yah, that sucked. It had no story what-so-ever. There was no depth! Wahhhhh.”

Ever since I read that, I’ve heard more and more positive reviews (if by “reviews” I mean “casual conversations overheard around town or glanced at online”). Not in the “great work of cinematic literature” sense, but definitely in the biggest-fastest-roller-coaster sense.

Money’s tight, so I haven’t gone to see it yet. I’ve been wanting to, though, if only for the crazy sound effects they use for the transformation process. Love it.

So, if anyone out there is actually reading this… have you seen the Transformers sequel? What did you think? Leave a comment and let me know.

(Fisk evidently wishes his mallet would transform into a cookie.)

Seriously. Sunscreen and Shade. Parasols? Perhaps…

This is one of these things that is really “lovely” to read as a freckled, blue-eyed redhead with a birthmarked, blue-eyed redheaded sister.

Sweden’s Lund University has concluded a study that indicates that melanoma occurs with greater frequency in subjects with red hair – specifically, redheads with freckles. I guess that might be one reason that they say redheads are going to be extinct within the next century, right there with our general rarity:

just 4 percent of the world’s population carries the red-hair gene. The gene is recessive and therefore diluted when carriers produce children with people who have the dominant brown-hair gene.

The Swedish study isolates the gene that carries traits associated with redheadedness – hair color, obviously, but also eye color, freckles, low tanning ability, tendency toward birthmarks – and concludes that the relationship between malignant melanoma and this gene is pretty dang significant. Additionally, there is a strong tie between melanoma and the number of birthmarks a person has.

I found a 2004 article by Hans Rorsman, a (redheaded, for what it’s worth) scientist at Lund University, about the ginger gene. It’s pretty hard to plow through – guess I should have taken that semester elective in high school microbiology instead of jazz band – but I’m kind of piecing together some of it to make sense. I guess there’s something called 5-S-cysteinyldopa that is a “biochemical marker” of melanoma:

At our clinical department a melanoma patient with red hair exhibited rapidly progressing disease. We obtained excised metastatic tissue for analysis which proved that extracts of the metastasis contained a catecholic compound seemingly identical with the unknown compound we had previously observed. With the information available from Naples on cysteinyldopa as a precursor of phaeomelanin we concentrated our analytical work on 5-S-cysteinyldopa. All examinations performed on our catecholic compound extracted from the melanoma-produced evidence for the presence of 5-S-cysteinyldopa in the tissue.

Experimentation on (actual) guinea pigs, whose pigmentation chemistry presumably mirrors that in humans, found that the level of 5-S-cysteinyldopa was ten times higher in red guinea pigs than in black ones.

Even Wikipedia has something to say on the subject, complete with helpful links for us laymen:

Melanin in the skin aids UV tolerance through suntanning, but fair-skinned persons lack the levels of melanin needed to prevent UV-induced DNA-damage. Studies have shown that red hair alleles in MC1R effect increased freckles and decreased tanning ability. It has been found that Europeans who are heterozygous for red hair exhibit increased sensitivity to UV radiation.

Red hair and its relationship to UV sensitivity are of interest to many melanoma researchers. Sunshine can both be good and bad for a person’s health and the different alleles on MC1R represent these adaptations. It also has been shown that individuals with pale skin are highly susceptible to a variety of skin cancers such as melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma. Due to this sensitivity many people have advised redheads to wear sunscreen.

The American Academy of Dermatology asserts that melanoma is more common, not only in redheads, but in those with blue or green eyes. For those keeping track, the majority of redheads have either blue or green eyes. (A fair number have brown; I’m being highly unscientific here, but I imagine some have gray and hazel as well. Those featured in Stephanie Meyer’s upcoming YA vampire novel, Auburn Star, are known to have red eyes.)

I found an interesting Letter to the Editor from Jan. 1989 in the Western Journal of Medicine. In it, Dr. Dennis Clayson disputes a July 1988 article that misleadingly suggested that redheads were at lower risk for melanoma. He points out that the original author’s assertion doesn’t take into account the statistical scarcity of red hair:

In a study of the projected images of hair color, a survey of the population of seven American cities including Denver and Salt Lake City showed that 57.2% had brown hair, 25.7% were blonde, 11. 1 % had black hair, and only 6.0% were redheaded.2 As can be seen in Table 1, the authors’ data actually show that redheads are more than twice as likely to have a malignant melanoma as would be expected if hair color were not a factor.

The original article’s author, Dr. William Robinson, responded in agreement:

Regardless, we agree that persons with red hair are at higher risk for the development of malignant melanoma than those with other hair colors.

I was brought up to wear sunscreen and stay out of the sun, and have of late taken to using a face moisturizer and powder that include SPF sun protection even when I don’t plan to be outdoors much. I know that there has been buzz lately about the inefficacy or potential harm of sunscreen use, but what are you going to do? It’s all about the hats, long sleeves when you can, seeking out shade, and keeping an eye on any change in your skin texture.

We Could Totally Do This ALL DAY

We Could Totally Do This All Day

Originally uploaded by Kate & Ryan

Paisley Responds to the Cody/Aaron Video

Paisley Responds to the Cody/Aaron Video

Originally uploaded by Kate & Ryan

Hopefully this works…

Aaron and Cody Play Ball

Aaron and Cody Play Ball

Originally uploaded by Kate & Ryan

Perhaps the funniest thing about this video is that Paisley is off screen barking and whining (because she’s not the center of attention) and when I play the video on my laptop, she gets very concerned. Usually she ignores videos on the computer (unlike those on TV, which she watches intently and enthusiastically). This, though? She gets as close to the speaker as she can, tilts her head back and forth, and occasionally talks to herself. Very funny. I wonder… hmm. May have to try to get THAT on camera!

Fun with Train Stations

A friend shared a video on Facebook that I thought ought to be spread around. Rather charming:

The first few minutes reminded me of this: