Lifting weights while watching kiddie cartoons

(Don't google "bodybuilders". Yikes.)
Which of the following does not belong in this group?

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On the weights floor at the gym today, they had Arthur on television. A bunch of muscular men were lifting weights and watching this children's cartoon starring an aardvark!!! Tell me this is not insanely funny.

Here is another instant laughter-inducer. I laughed out loud at the Baker Institute talk yesterday remembering this:

But this is actually photoshopped... They probably made sure to tell the oldest two boys to be very very very careful.

Microbio facts and laughs.

Couple of fun facts I learned in class today:

- In the E.coli outbreak last year in Germany, more women were severely affected than men. 70% of hemolytic-uremic syndrome patients were women. Presumably because women eat more salads.

- Oseltamivir, or Tamiflu as it is marketed (take when you catch the flu to keep symptoms from being full-blown), requires as its precursor shikimic acid isolated from Chinese star anise. Chinese star anise is produced only in four providences in China and grows March to May. These limitations of Chinese star anise is what ultimately causes worldwide shortage of Tamiflu!

- One of the most effective treatments of Clostridium difficile infection is fecal bacteriotherapy. This procedure is more commonly called a "stool transplant". This transplant can restore the patients' guts with healthy bacteria flora.

Lessons:
1. Don't eat too much salad. Eat some grilled steak, well done.
(I finally made it out to Jerry Built Homegrown Burgers with B who was in town a few weeks ago. The burgers were del-icious. The bun was soft, chewy and just perfect. And the fries- sweet and savory. It was really crowded when we went on a Thursday night, but Saturdays seem somehow less busy.)

(Picture from Yelp)

2. Stop personal stockpiling Tamiflu.
3. Don't resist treatments because they sound gross. They can save you.

Yesterday while running I stopped by an acacia tree and took a deep breath: so overwhelmingly sweet I almost choked. There is a tree right outside my door too and it makes me so happy to begin each day smelling these beautiful white flowers.

Finally: Menil Collection and Rothko Chapel

I finally made it out to Rothko Chapel. A friend from work who is new to Houston enthusiastically agreed to check this out with me, so off we went. The weather was gorgeous outside and there were people sprawled out on the green lots around the museum buildings.

First: Rothko Chapel.

The building sort of looks like a bomb shelter from the outside. It is tiny for a museum. And of course, there is The Broken Obelisk in a rectangular reflecting pool outside the building. Heading into dark the chapel, I pushed the glass doors, turned around, and saw this:

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Um.
The black cushions are seats for people to sit closer to the art and think. There were books for spiritual reading on the benches outside the exhibit space.

We walked over to the Menil Collection couple of steps away. I didn't know this was an entire museum.  They had galleries of ancient artifacts: pieces with wood or human hair stayed preserved for hundreds of years!

This was my favorite piece: 6-30 by David Novros. While looking for pictures, I came upon this article: the piece that I saw is actually a replica of the decaying original.

The special exhibit of Richard Serra Drawings was interesting. Many of his drawings used paintstick, which I learned is thick and sticky almost like crayons. Some of his paintings that looked similar had wildly different titles.

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A note about abstract art: it gives you nothing to think about. What I think when I am looking at these pieces: This is too much. Or maybe this isn't anything. Am I not feeling enough? Am I just not getting something? Wait, did so-and-so text me back? And my thoughts wander off to whatever has been lurking in my mind. Maybe this nothing isn't the absence of something, but the presence of this thing called nothing.

But I do love surrealism. ("Is that gin bottle part of the exhibit? What about that chair?") Like when we used to drive on I-275 over the ocean to the Dali Museum in St. Pete. The seven mile stretch over the ocean with turquoise water on both sides was part of the experience too.

Easter weekend: immortality in some form

This quote from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

Francie came away from her first chemistry lecture in a glow. In one hour she found out that everything was made up of atoms which were in continual motion. She grasped the idea that nothing was ever lost or destroyed. Even if something was burned up or rot away, it did not disappear from the face of the earth; it changed into something else- gases, liquids, and powders. Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.

I recently got into watching the miniseries Dating Rules from My Future Self. The main character's future develops an app that sends texts to herself. At a team brainstorm meeting, Kelcy initially thought about developing an app that "creates" you (or who you wish to be) 10 years from now, who would answer your dilemma questions.

With Facebook, Twitter, and Google already gathering so much personal information on individuals, I think it would be very easy to create an immortal persona of anyone. People dying is sad partly because every knowledge they have becomes buried forever. But if a model was created of a person: ("When someone posts this status, you would respond with this sorta thing." "When this kind of picture is posted of your sister, you would comment this.") you could essentially interact with others and live forever.

This reminds me of P.S. I Love You or Incredibly Loud & Extremely Close, cases where someone who has already passed on continues to have a huge impact on someone's life.

Also, something about facebook: when someone passes away but hasn't deleted their facebook yet, their walls filling up with memorial posts? I think it's a little weird...

Heathen matters: this weekend has been delicious so far: our department threw a crawfish boil and I made a batch of delicious yellow cake fudge for N-cakes whose MCAT is next Friday.

Everyone is away for the long weekend - maybe if Rice was a Catholic institution?

Be like Charlie: observations.

I live in a nice neighborhood thanks to my second job and while running around the neighborhood yesterday I had to smile at three boxes of pizza piled outside an almost-immorally-big house. Because 1) they live in this beautiful house but ordered $5 boxes of chain-store pizza? 2) Three boxes. That means enough people live in this house to maybe justify its size.

I got an email from Joe Biden titled "Saturday night". As soon as I clicked and waited for Rice's slow webmail to load, I regretted it- it had to be spam! (It wasn't). I also got an email from Barack and Michelle Obama! Campaign season.

You know the farmers market spinach I was so excited about? I dug out a small orange frog out of my dinner last night. I poked at it because I thought it was a bean or something! It was smaller than the nail on my pinky. Sorry little frog.

I miss Village Inn. Of all the delicious meals and beautiful restaurants I've been to, this is what I was craving yesterday. Because they have the most wonderful pies in the world and the most attentive waitresses. I hope I can find somewhere as comfortable as this diner next year.

Also speaking of my second job, what is up with all these "elite nanny" craze? NY Times and NPR picked up feature stories about expensive nannies who are paid six digits a year. It sounds like a lot, but same logic for any other job: you are being paid for your time... so if you need to be constantly on call and not have any freedom of your own, then your hourly wage is probably low.

And this comment made me LOL, because I do the same thing and keep re-considering changing the station every time NPR talks about something crazy:

Ellen Whitton (EllenKW) wrote: My alarm clock is set to the station that plays Morning Edition. I guess I was sleeping pretty soundly this morning because I thought I'd had this really weird dream, and woke up shaken. Now I see that I actually heard this. Maybe I should set my clock to a music station.

I got an unwanted suntan from Beer Bike this weekend! Two hours in Houston sun means I need to make the switch in foundation to summer shades if I wore foundation. Also very dehydrated from junk food and free sauna, slept all day all weekend and tried very hard to focus at today afternoon's meeting.