FreakyTrigger » Geeta Dayal

Reasons I’m Glad I Don’t Eat Meat, #295835

Geeta Dayal — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 04:55:00 +0000

SOFIA — Bulgarian customs stopped a 75-ton shipment of beef meat from Ireland that may have been frozen since 1984, local media reported on Monday.

See set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=qw1138626901641B214" onclick="urchinTracker('/outgoing/www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?_br_/_set_id=1_038_click_id=29_038_art_id=qw1138626901641B214&referer=');">here for more.

Infrasound

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 23:01:00 +0000

Cool piece by Rod Smith in the Seattle Weekly this week on sub-bass frequencies and the military. This subject always makes me think of Throbbing Gristle–most notably the time that TG tried to force a band of transients off their property in Hackney with the power of sound. Monte was tantalizingly vague, but offered a few pearls of wisdom. (Pick up the book for more details.)

Rod discusses a lot of the bodily correlates of infrasound–that very low frequencies might have, shall we say, a laxative effect, and far worse. He doesn’t really have the room to get into the neurological correlates of infrasound. What’s happening on the level of the brain when you’re exposed to very low frequencies?

There was a cool scientific study published in the journal Physiological Behavior in the year 1978–or on the TG timeline, between Second Annual Report and 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Researchers exposed rats to infrasound, and found that the levels of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine had been altered. That’s not too surprising, because your body releases norepinephrine when it’s under stress. But the study gave early credence to the idea that your brain chemistry could possibly be altered–temporarily, at least–in response to very low frequencies. Norepinephrine’s interesting because it’s not only involved in stress, but it’s also involved in creating new memories. (Another study two years later gave rats tranquilizers, and then exposed them to infrasound.)

Animal behavior is one area where infrasound gets studied a lot. In 1990, researchers in Frankfurt found that there were actually special infrasound-sensitive neurons in pigeons that respond to frequencies below 20 hertz, in a region called the cochlear ganglion. And one explanation why a tiger’s roar is so scary for other animals (including humans) to hear is that part of the sound of the roar lies in the netherworld of infrasound, below 20 hertz; parts of a tiger’s growl can be 18 hertz and lower. This was only substantiated pretty recently, in a 2000 study by a group of bioacousticians who measured the sounds that 24 tigers made over a period of time.

Another interesting thing: there’s a gender difference in how people respond to these sounds. Women are apparently more attuned to these sounds than men are. There could be evolutionary reasons why this might be so.

Interesting research on the music/brain front from the London Tube,

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:53:13 +0000

Interesting research on the music/brain front from the London Tube, where, according to the Guardian, “tube bosses will use recordings of Pavarotti recitals, Vivaldi, and Mozart in a battle against anti-social behaviour at 35 stations in the District, East London, Metropolitan, and Hammersmith & City Lines.

The initiative, announced yesterday by Metronet, LU’s maintenance contractor, follows a trial at four east London stations which prompted a 33% drop in abuse against staff.

An LU spokeswoman said: “This is aimed at youths, mainly young teenagers who hang about at stations. The science seems to be that the music is unfamiliar to them and also that it’s considered uncool.”"

This deserves a full-on Proven by Science shredding (“The science seems to be that the music is unfamiliar to them”?! Egads!) but here are a few quick thoughts. It’s interesting that the trial took place in East London; I’m immediately getting fanciful visions in my head of ragtag grime crews being forced to listen to Vivaldi and scowling. This is all a little suspect, isn’t it? The brief article quotes a psychologist–or rather, paraphrases a psychologist, putting any potential fragments of actual science into the most vague, general terms possible:

“Adrian North, a psychologist at Leicester University, said there was evidence from nightclubs, doctors’ surgeries and dentists’ waiting rooms that playing calming music could could have an impact on behaviour.”

“could have an impact on behavior” — everything has an impact on behavior! The question is, what kind of impact? What kind of behavior? What relationship is there between said impact and said behavior? Why the tenor bellowings of massive-lung’d Pavarotti, of all people–opera can be intrusive and oppressive, it’s hardly the most “calming” form of music, I would venture to say–along with the baroque stylings of Vivaldi and that bad boy Mozart, the unwitting father of the (almost entirely discredited) “Mozart effect”?

The ’33% drop in abuse among staff’ figure is also suspect. How many numbers were used to create a 33% figure? If there were 3 incidents total, and it was curbed by 1, then the sample size is so small as to be totally meaningless and arbitrary. Meanwhile, I’m guessing that the ‘thugs’ in question will just turn up the volume on their headphones.

Mark S’ excellent experiments in cooking (see the post directly below this post) — especially his adventures in gingerbread-making and theories about raisins — remind me greatly of J.J. Thomson’s slightly bonkers

Geeta Dayal — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 00:48:33 +0000

Mark S’ excellent experiments in cooking (see the post directly below this post) — especially his adventures in gingerbread-making and theories about raisins — remind me greatly of J.J. Thomson’s slightly bonkers “plum pudding” model of the atom, which was always the atomic model I had the most fondness for. Boring old Rutherford and his ‘gold foil’ experiments (gold foil with NO CHOCOLATE INSIDE, i might add!) and the others never came up with an atomic model that was NEARLY as pleasing as Thomson’s.

Happy holidays, everyone, and eat lots of positively-charged pudding!

Economic Temple of Doom! Monkey Brains Solve Game Theory

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:35:57 +0000

Economic Temple of Doom! Monkey Brains Solve Game Theory

I am wondering if this headline (loosely based in recent neuroscience, even!) beats Tom’s latest.

Huge article

Geeta Dayal — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 19:44:23 +0000

Huge article in the November issue of Scientific American asking (cue doodly synth music) “What is the secret behind music’s strange power?” I’m a sucker for music/brain articles–it’s one of my favorite subjects to obsess over–but for once, I’d like to see a piece that isn’t just a research summary. The article is a laundry list of studies, mostly focusing on neuroimaging (“Is there a center for music processing in the brain?” etc etc ad nauseum). I also get disappointed that so many of these experiments revolve around classical musicians or use classical music, and are done in lab settings that bear little or no resemblance to the environments where people actually experience music.

Mmmm…Legos.

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:34:34 +0000

Mmmm…Legos.

An engineering experiment that pushes all of my buttons at the same time: chocolates, Legos, and totally geeky (i.e. awesome) DIY projects. You, too, can follow the progress of the 3D chocolate printer, built out of Legos.

Science proved what I’ve always suspected

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 14:18:36 +0000

Science proved what I’ve always suspected — that humans have been eating cereal since the beginning of time. Well, not the beginning of time, but 23,000 years ago, which is, um, within some orders of magnitude of the beginning of time. What kind of cereal were they eating? Well, judging by the picture, it looks like they were big fans of Kelloggs Honey Smacks.

Tracer Hand requested that I post this

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 18:30:56 +0000

Tracer Hand requested that I post this:

“It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,-I say it is very curious to see how science is catching up with one superstition after another.

There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology. It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in living beings, and more especially in animals. It is found that what used to be called lusus naturœ, or freaks of nature, are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures…

Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at least trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose beliefs are disturbed thereby…”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table,” J.M. Dent & Co., London. 1872.

The Russian army has rescued 10 tons of beer trapped under Siberian ice!!

Geeta Dayal — Wed, 26 May 2004 03:58:31 +0000

The Russian army has rescued 10 tons of beer trapped under Siberian ice!! “The lorry carrying the beer sank when trying to cross the frozen Irtysh River, and a rescue team of six divers, 10 workers and a modified T-72 tank have managed to save the load, but not the truck. The driver managed to jump to safety before the lorry sank.”

Go Team Russia!

It’s rare that a book review makes me this incensed, but Dick Teresi’s

Geeta Dayal — Sun, 16 May 2004 04:35:55 +0000

It’s rare that a book review makes me this incensed, but Dick Teresi’s smug throwdown of the new tome “Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids” in the New York Times Book Review this week did just that. While the book itself might be too sweeping in its dreamy sci-fi “soon we will all be cyborgs” rhetoric, the review is even more sweeping in its urge to carpet-bomb attack. Teresi constructs the most tired straw-man argument possible, wheeling out old chestnuts of roboticists as reductionists, near-automatons who work in realms of numbers and not “feelings.” It reminded me of how irritated I got waiting in line at the post office recently, as I eavesdropped on a conversation between two women–one, an American woman, and the other a Chinese immigrant. “You see, in America,” said the blonde woman in an exaggeratedly slow, condescending tone, “the emphasis is not on math; it’s on the humanities. In this country, we emphasize creativity.” The quiet Chinese woman nodded her head politely. But math in its purest form is creativity so fine and distilled that you could pour it on the rocks and drink it; privileging one discipline over another is just stupidly myopic.

Consider the hideous trainwreck of flawed reasoning in the second paragraph of the review:

The biologist makes no distinction between human and nonhuman life-forms. The roboticist takes this a step further, refusing to distinguish between living and nonliving objects. An object is the sum of its behaviors. Duplicate the behavior of a person and your robot is human. Out of this obtuse worldview come simplicity and the singleness of purpose required to build metal-and-silicon men.

One of the most painful things about reading reviews like this is that they attempt to attack things for lacking nuance by using the least nuanced, most overgeneralized arguments possible. You can condemn technology for being too cold and black-and-white, for lacking the grey areas of humanity and the ineffable, but it doesn’t help things any to use the broadest, most obtuse strokes possible, to use empty binaries in an attempt to denounce exactly that which you’re railing against.

The grand conclusion that this review draws is that it is impossible to construct robots that match the endlessly complicated wonders of human beings. Sure, but so what? Any fourteen-year-old in biology class could have told you that much. But how can robotics help us to develop our understanding of what it means to be human? It’s a shame that the review didn’t take the time to actually analyze anything in depth, to grapple with ideas of consciousness in a thoughtful, informed way. Instead, we’re treated to an arrogant, half-formed repudiation of half-formed ideas; kneejerk reaction in place of any meaningful action.

PRINCIPLES OF GENETIC ANALYSIS

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 06:46:13 +0000

Selected lines

“They have female external genitalia, a blind vagina, and no uterus.”

“His skin became very thick and formed loose spines that were sloughed off at intervals. When he grew up, this “porcupine man” married and had six sons, all of whom had this condition, and several daughters, all of whom were normal.”

PRINCIPLES OF GENETIC ANALYSIS Richard Lewontin, David Suzuki, et al

Cute cover with a cheesy computer graphic of fruitflies with DNA and pedigrees. Glossy pages, and the text is set in a rather stuffy Garamond-looking font. There are plenty of pictures, but you need to poke around for the really cool ones. Don’t buy this textbook if you, like me, just wanted to learn how to genetically engineer mutant human beings; this book won’t tell you the answer. But there is a silver lining. Skip the rest of the book and only look at chapters 2 and 3 for fascinating pictures of genetic disorders, like the pictures of people with six fingers and the men born with female genitalia and all that. Those chapters alone save the book, moving it from a measly 1.5 to a more respectable 2.5 on our scale.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Juicy quotes:

Geeta Dayal — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:26:14 +0000

Juicy quotes:

The reviewer died of boredom while attempting to find interesting lines from this book.

MACROECONOMICS Olivier Blanchard.

Okay, so the link between ‘economics’ and ‘science’ is pretty thin. But here we have it: the cover appears to depict the planet Earth as a gear with several other, presumably economics-related gears turning it, which conjures up some rather disturbing economics-God-complex implications. The book passes the glossy paper and color standards, but fails miserably on the level of the text, which is dry, boring, and deep-sleep-approaching-death inducing. Large portions of this book could probably be read with near-lethal doses of legal and illegal stimulants. It will also probably depress the gentle reader to know that the word ‘people’ is used perhaps twice in the entire 600-page or so wasteland of bad derivations.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars.

Juicy quotes:

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 07:29:26 +0000

Juicy quotes:

“At the time, prefrontal lobotomy or orbitofrontal undercutting — a less radical
method of treating severe mental disorders — might have been useful in treating
severely psychotic patients without causing more disruption.”

“While the patient was unconscious for fifteen minutes, the lobotomy was
performed by jabbing an ice pick through the bone above each eye and wiggling
it back and forth.”

COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE: THE BIOLOGY OF THE MIND Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Ivry, and George Mangun.

Wow. Now this is what every textbook wished it could be — it just screams ‘suave’ with a post-modern (ho ho) sensibility. We can only assume that the cover art is an ironic comment on the place of optical illusions in our pre/post-apocalyptic society, and the title’s set in high contrast black-on-white, with slick, modern typography. Flipping through the pages, we notice a pleasing pastel color scheme, with several large, interesting color pictures of brain sections, Picasso art pieces, and photographs of famous scientists sprinkled generously throughout. The writing is at once highly informative, professional, and scientific, with just a dash of pleasing asides and colloquialisms. As for the color scheme, periwinkle, eggplant, slate, and oatmeal dominate, oddly reminiscent of colors of loathsome ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ sweater merchandise, but peculiarly becoming in a textbook setting. Each chapter contains a thought-provoking interview with a prominent neuroscientist. What’s next for this textbook, reviews of German minimal techno 12″s? It’s hard to see how this book could get more hip than it already is.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.

After a miserable morning

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 01:22:27 +0000

After a miserable morning of standardized exam-taking in Brookline, Massachusetts, I happened upon a combination Russian grocery store and cafe. The cafe, on the second floor, is a giant space, with bare white walls, a massive skylight, and white-finished hardwood floors adding to the overwhelming emptiness. Then again, it could have also felt empty because I was the only person there.

Not that the place was without decoration, though. Charmingly cheesy gold tinsel garlands were wrapped around pillars, and there were a few stern-looking Russian paintings around. The Roland XP-50 and the white baby grand piano that were tucked in the corner made me certain that the place was was all one big hallucination. Great. I must have gone insane after the Analytical Section.

I was handed a menu by a kindly and extraordinarily surreal Russian waiter, who seemed to disappear and reappear out of thin air. As I had expected, the one page menu contained mostly beef, cabbage, and potato dishes with several charming misspellings. ‘Dear Guest, this menu represents the most popular items serving for lunch in Russia. We hope you will find your meal delicious. Bon appetite [sic]!’ Items on the menu included ‘Blintzes Stuffed with Meat: Very Russian”; ‘Chicken Cutlet ‘Pozharsky”, (which was described as ‘Breaded ground chicken meat with our special sauce’); and ‘Ground Meat Cutlet ‘Russian Village’: Our special…just yami-yami’ (?!) Borscht was described as ‘famous Russian soup rich of red beats [sic], potatoes and carrots.’ I tried two of the four non-cow things on the menu — the cabbage pirozhki appetizer ($4) and potato vareniki ($5). Cabbage pirozhki were phyllo dough pastry puffs filled with a wisp of cabbage and what appeared to be approximately one pound of melted butter. Vareniki were enormous potato dumplings topped with fried onions, swimming in butter. I couldn’t really handle the pirozhki; they were so heavy that even though I was nearly dying of hunger, I couldn’t manage more than a few bites. The vareniki, on the other hand, was possibly the most well-executed Eastern European potato creation I had eaten in a long while. I couldn’t finish that either, though.

They didn’t have any of the desserts listed on the menu, except for the fruit salad with ice cream, which I thought would be boring. It ended up being kind of interesting, actually — presented by Surreal Waiter with a flourish as a rather unconventional mixture of finely chopped fruit in a flower-shaped wafer bowl, topped with strawberry ice cream that tasted rather oddly and pleasantly of bubble gum (I had ordered vanilla ice cream, but the cook ‘didn’t understand,’ according to Surreal Waiter, who apologized profusely. I told him I didn’t mind.) With whipped cream and those little colored sprinkles on top. It’d been about ten years since I’d eaten anything with colored sprinkles on it.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why I love this place. Maybe it’s because of the intermittent sounds of people screaming in Russian over the intercom, which made me nostalgic for my childhood piano lessons. Or maybe it was the Louis Armstrong piped over the speakers, oddly calming and yet strangely incongruous with the whole Russian cafe concept. (The abrupt transition from Louis Armstrong to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, though, was incredibly harrowing.) The big mirror ball hanging from the skylight, and the dodgy hours that the cafe is open (Tuesday to Sunday, noon to 3 pm) made me wonder if the whole cafe concept was really just a front for some sort of underground Russian discotheque. And, shit, I can’t think of many things more suave than Russian disco. Take that, hipper-than-thou hipsters!

After it was all over, I walked outside. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining intensely. I walked across the street to Gimbel’s and bought a bottle of whiskey.

The exam soon became a distant memory.

A new series — punXoR science textbook reviews

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 05 Feb 2004 19:24:15 +0000

A new series in Proven by Science — punXoR science textbook reviews!

Juicy quotes

“The behavior of norbornyl systems in solvolytic displacement reactions were suggestive of neighboring-group participation.”
“Attack by acetate at C1 or C2 would be equally likely and would result in equal amounts of enantiomeric acetates.”

ADVANCED ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Francis A. Carey and Richard J. Sundberg

The book is a frighteningly large paperback, about the size and weight of a David Foster Wallace novel and less readable. The cover color borders between inviting fuchsia and cold purple. The text appears to be completely set in Times New Roman, tipoff number one to the gentle reader that this book is serious and traditional. A quick flip through the book reveals all black text on white paper, with no pastels to be found. The paper isn’t even glossy, and all of the pictures — of molecules, spectra, and various reaction mechanisms — are in black and white. What’s up with this? The text is dry, but earnestly written, and the drama of the carbonyl group and its spicy leanings leave enough for the eager student of chemistry (or psychoactive drug experimenter) without necessity on the author’s part to sprinkle in several gratuitous photos of handsome, aloof Werner Heisenberg in his early 20s to hold the reader’s interest. Read this book, and learn important words like “homoaromaticity” and “cyclopropylmethyl singlet diradical” to spout nonchalantly at your office’s next cocktail party to confound and impress your colleagues. Alternately, they’ll just think you’re a pretentious bastard, but they probably thought that already.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars.

The United States government has boldly (ha ha)

Geeta Dayal — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 17:08:44 +0000

The United States government has boldly (ha ha) banned Courier New 12.

“In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared “Courier New 12″ – the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years – to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1.”

What will they take next? Our children? Is nothing sacred?! I don’t think I know my country anymore!

Settled into one of my usual neighborhood diner haunts this weekend…

Geeta Dayal — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 05:13:47 +0000

Settled into one of my usual neighborhood diner haunts this weekend, as I normally do, with a copy of the New York Times and a cuppa coffee. One of those real American kinds of diners where you can get eggs made fifteen different ways and the chocolate malt is something that’s made by instinct. Now, I’m great at making breakfast, but on Sunday mornings I like someone else to make it for me. It’s the little things, you know. Anyway, so I’m sitting there reading the paper and a smile is playing on my face as I watch two horrifyingly skinny girls walk in and ask the poor waitress if she could adjust their menu choices to “not have any carbohydrates in them.” I’m always bemused by this particular request (particularly at DINERS!) because to me, someone with a chemistry background, it’s kinda like asking if you could get your food made without esters in it, or without polysaccharides or proteins (“tertiary-folded proteins are fine, but no quaternary ones!) “Can I get my organic compounds made without carbons, hydrogens, and oxygens in it?” I guess I’ll never fully understand people, but this is also, I suppose, why I’m not into marketing. Or crazy anti-carbohydrate diets.

Super Bowl Halftime Show: Play-by-Play

Geeta Dayal — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 04:56:53 +0000

Super Bowl Halftime Show: Play-by-Play

My scrawled notes, typed out for your amusement!

-J. Lo and other celebs instruct us in cautiously neutral tones to “choose to vote,” to soft U2 cocktail-party background music; any potential political impact of said commercial immediately defused by cheerleader leading the call “Choose to paaarty!” Fuck off, CBS!
-Okay, so Janet Jackson’s outfit: a sort of swashbuckling pirate motif? What’s with that white ruffly flouncy thing in the back?!
-Haha P. Diddy! As stilted and wooden as ever! This is much better than Janet though
-TONI BASIL!!!!!!!! Hey Diddy you’re so fine…my brain has turned to rice pudding
-It’s a medley with Nelly! GENIUS!
-Nelly makes everything else look like amateur night. Wow. I hadn’t heard ‘Hot in Herre’ in a very long time (after hearing it nonstop for months, obv) and it still sounds like the greatest song ever penned.
-Kid Rock is wearing an American flag cut into a poncho. Yes, a poncho. I am going to cry now.
-Okay explain to me why Justin Timberlake (who is way cuter when he shaves, I might add — that stubbly thing ain’t doin’ NOTHIN for him) gets to laze around on stage in a t-shirt and baggy khakis, looking like he’s about to head out to play Gamecube with his buddies, while Janet has to robo-dance with pinpoint razorsharp precision in an exceedingly uncomfortable-looking patent-vinyl catwoman gladiator corset job: WE WANT FAIRNESS HERE!!
-But then Justin redeems himself with THAT MOVE!! Hahahahahaha!

Additional notes:

-Monster.com job search commercial featuring sped-up version of “I Feel Love”: YES YES YES!
-All SUV commercials can fuckin’ die already
-Message to America’s frat boys: Budweiser will NOT get you laid
-Commercial for new sitcom featuring girl who can “talk to God”: please God make it stop
-Unfortunately the car commercial featuring ‘Metal Machine Music’ and giant spiders only existed in my fevered brain!!

A new science curriculum proposed in Georgia…

Geeta Dayal — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:25:49 +0000

A new science curriculum proposed in Georgia for high school teachers has been edited to avoid all mentions of the term “evolution.” Republican state school superintendent Kathy Cox backs the changes — it’s a crusade of hers, in fact — and she has described evolution as “a buzzword that causes a lot of negative reactions.”

Now, there are a few states — mainly in the “Bible belt” — that have skirted around the evolution bugbear, but this is ridiculous. These changes will make Georgia the first state to actually remove the word “evolution” from lesson plans after having it in place for years. The plan also conveniently “forgets” about topics such as fossil evidence, the emergence of single-celled organisms, and even the life of Darwin.

All vanished from the curriculum with nary a trace — it’ll be up to Georgia teachers to teach evolution, and there will be no state guidelines in place to even make sure that high school students learn about, say, Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments, crucial to understanding how genes make up life to begin with. Truly a tragic state of affairs.

But X-ray crystallography is totally punk rock!

Geeta Dayal — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 20:23:16 +0000

But X-ray crystallography is totally punk rock! Analytical chemistry methods in descending order of punk rockness:

1. X-ray crystallography
2. NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy
3. MALDI-mass spectrometry
4. Column chromatography (elute with bad-ass solvents obviously)
5. GC-Mass spec
6 Anything involving radioactivity (it’s in the air for you and me!)

Not punk rock: Those wussy biochemical experiments with pastel-colored buffer solutions, gel electrophoresis done with pre-poured polyacrylamide gels, high-performance liquid chromatography (just lame), experiments done in those dreadful tiny 96-well assay plates (live a little, people!)

KYLIE – ‘Slow’ vs. KELIS – ‘Milkshake’

Geeta Dayal — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 06:52:07 +0000

KYLIE – ‘Slow’ vs. KELIS – ‘Milkshake’

I’ve gotta say I’m pretty disappointed with that new Kylie single ‘Slow’ — it sounds like she’s trying too hard to be sexy. I like her better when more is left to the imagination, when she’s in hot-high-school-English-teacher mode, when you feel strangely attracted to her fembot-ness but you know not exactly why. But this song — it’s like overpoweringly strong perfume. Lipstick all done up in an effort to look ‘pouty’. Hair that’s been ironed and severely sculpted for that tousled, ‘just-got-out-of-bed’ look. I just can’t get into it. Kelis’ creepy-queasy-seasick-loping ‘Milkshake’, on the other hand, is way sexier than ‘Slow’. It also scares the bejesus out of me (reference point: Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’?!) See, she doesn’t want you. Damn right — it’s better than yours.

‘I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.’

A Japanese study

Geeta Dayal — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:50:03 +0000

A Japanese study published last month in the journal Physiologic Behavior has indicated that kissing might reduce skin allergies in certain patients with rhinitis and dermatitis. It makes you wonder whether labcoat-clad scientists were watching the kissers through an observation window, while writing serious notes in their notebooks critiquing the subjects’ technique. The experimental design sounds bewildering — to quote the abstract: “The subject kissed freely during 30 min with their lover or spouse alone in a room with closed doors while listening to soft music.” Before and after kissing, the subjects underwent various skin tests and had blood drawn so that levels of various neurotrophins could be measured from their plasma. The author also noted this of the subjects in the study: “they do not kiss habitually.” Hmm.

Our generation’s love of all things retro knows no bounds:

Geeta Dayal — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 08:02:28 +0000

Our generation’s love of all things retro knows no bounds: Medical therapy employing the use of live maggots is gaining popularity again!

Invalid redux!

Geeta Dayal — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 00:48:30 +0000

Invalid redux! I think I have found the un-meat food for invalids, and no it’s not Mrs Beeton’s fright-movie cuisine. Tonight for dinner I had a bowl of steaming vegetable udon soup, a few pieces of vegetable sushi with loads of wasabi (clears the sinuses!) and some fresh ginger soda made by the nice Japanese restaurant down the street. Ginger ale made from freshly grated ginger root is massively potent, burning and stinging your throat in an an oh-so-good way. That plus the giant mouthful of wasabi made me feel a hundred times better now than I did yesterday, when my brain was pounding and my throat felt like gravel. Now I just have to find a place that has good wasabi-flavored ice cream. Mmm, wasabi ice cream.