For love of the game

As I stated in a previous post, I finally got GTA: SA. It really is the coolest game ever. I have absolutely no idea how they are able to cram so much game into a single disc but I’ll go with it. The map is at least four or five times bigger than the previous game, Vice City and Vice City is gigantic. It’s almost as if the creators of the game sat around and said, "Okay, what would be cool to see in a game?" And then they just did it. I even went home during my lunch break just to play it for a while. I seriously cannot stop and I love it.

In case some of you have never played it before I’ll tell you some cool stuff you can do. I’ve won $1.8 million so far on video horse racing. I made a couple more thousand pool sharking at local bars. I starting dating some crack-whore I saved from a building I torched. I made $2000 in one night after I sold some stuff I’d robbed from peoples’ homes. I started my own gang. I broke into a major recording studio and killed the guards who had my homie’s rhyme book. I robbed six crates of weapons and ammunition from the National Guard. I own two homes so far. I’ve started working for a crooked cop who closely resembles Mace Windu. I’ve done all of this in the time since Christmas.

I’m still in the town called Los Santos (Los Angeles) but eventually I’ll get to San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas). I have a feeling that this game is going to be in my PS2 for quite a while. I can’t believe how much more game there is to play.

Sorry for the small post (again) but I’ve really just been to busy to think about anything else, as you can tell. If I ever break through this haze of "videocy" I’ll try and remember to blog something but until then go buy this game.

Movie: The Godfather Part 3

Better to give than to receive a ton

This has to have been one of the best Christmases ever. I gave my fiancé a list of stuff and she gave me a list. Well let me tell you I got everything I wanted, from her and also from both our families. Here’s what I’ve gotten so far-

• the new Incubus DVD, Incubus Alive at Red Rocks, from my parents
  
• Ann Coulter’s book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter, from my parents
  
• $200 cash from my grandparents
  
• a $500 check from my parents
  
• tons of food gift certificates, including some for my true love; Quiznos
  
• a stocking full of candy and stuff
  
• Napoleon Dynamite DVD from my fiancé
  
• The Godfather Collection (Special Edition) from my fiancé
  
• Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, from my fiancé
  
• an American Eagle track jacket from my future in-laws
  
• a pair of pajama pants from my parents
  
• a pair of pajama pants and a pajama shirt from my fiancé’s grandma
  
• a new sweater from my grandparents
  
• $20 + an ASB Discount Card (very cool), from my aunt, uncle, and cousin
  
• a basket containing a bottle of sparkling pear, sparkling raspberry, and spiced punch drinks, two regular wine/champagne glasses and two heart shaped wine/champagne glasses that will have our (my fiancé and I) name’s and the date we get married inscribed on them
  
• and last but not least I finally got Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from my wonderful fiancé
  

Not to shabby, huh? I couldn’t believe it either. It’s a ton off stuff, but I know I’ll put it all to good use. And don’t start thinking I’m a jerk now because I got people some pretty good things too. For my fiance I got a new Melie Bianco purse, a bottle of Dessert Creamy, a $75 gift certificate to Forever 21, a new pair of sun glasses from Tilly's, and three new bras from Victoria’s Secret (she’s a 30D if you can believe it. They don’t even make that size!). For my parents I got a new cordless phone (the old one was dead). For my sister’s family I got (mostly for the kids) the Veggie Tales: Ultimate Silly Songs Countdown. And for my brother I got a $25 gift Certificate to Best Buy.

I spent most of Christmas with my fiancé and her family, although I did hang out with my family for a few hours on Christmas Eve. I watched some great Christmas movies too, including Home Alone, Prancer, A Christmas Story, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (which I was a little disappointed in). If you’ve read this far, let me know how you made out this Christmas, now, before you change your mind.

Movie: Napoleon Dynamite

It's beggining to look a lot like Quansa!

Believe it or not, not too much has happened since I last posted. I actually had time to post yesterday and chose not to because I had nothing good to say. But I know that you figure I’m just being lazy. There was a rumor that the coveted meeting would happen today but we still have heard no official word yet. But don’t worry, it’s gonna happen. Maybe after the show on the 15th.

I finished all my Christmas shopping last night and I did it all at Best Buy. I love that place. I normally would have had to wait in a line that practically went around the store, BUT I was smart and paid for one of my gifts online. Then I walked in found the rest of my stuff, got in the customer service line (to pick up my online purchase) and paid for everything right there. I was in and out in less than 15 minutes.

I can’t believe how fast this month is going by. There’s only three days until Christmas. As much as I want Christmas to come, I know that soon it will be gone and that part sucks. I love the whole holiday season. All the lights and all the presents (giving & receiving of course) make everything feel so nice. I’m just happy that I actually had enough money to pay for presents and still be able to pay all my bills. I even have money left over. This whole two/three jobs thing really pays off. I hope things don’t change in that respect. In the next couple weeks I have to pay for car insurance, rent, car registration and cell phones. All together it’s about $600 so I have to start saving now.

I know that this update isn’t that interesting but hopefully, very soon, I will have a great announcement to make. The only one I have right now is that my intern job at my friend’s studio is going to turn into an actual job. I just talked to him and he’s thinking that after he moves to his nicer house (within the next couple months) he’s gonna slightly up his rates and start paying me like $10 an hour. That would be awesome. Anyways, check back soon and Merry Christmas, you filthy animal. And a Happy New Year.

Movie: Casino

Holidazed

I know, I know I suck at posting. Sorry. Lots has happened since my last real post so let’s begin with the most important news (because you really care).

Universal Records wants to have a sit down meeting with us sometime in the near future. This news comes through our contact lady with them. When I first heard this I didn’t know what to think but the more I think about it, it seems like it could be a very good thing. Let me give to opposed possibilities.

#1 – They heard our demo and liked it. Then the lady that we know saw our battle of the bands show and really liked us. She reports back to work with a glowing review and admonishes an A&R guy to come and check us out at our next show. She also reports that a tentative meeting may be in store (as is customary?) if the A&R guy also likes what he sees.

#2 – They heard our demo and liked it. Then the lady that we know saw our battle of the bands show and really liked us. She reports back to work with a glowing review and admonishes an A&R guy to come and check us out at our next show. As the A&R man looks at his schedule, he decides to not only see us live, but (depending on how he likes us) bring us in for a meeting to talk about our futures together. He reports this to our connected friend and she in turn tells us.

I really hope that something promising comes from this meeting because I’m getting tired of the daily grind. As you may know I have three jobs. A morning job from 6-8am, babysitting/getting to school three kids. A daytime job from 8:30am-5:00pm, office work. A night job from 5:30-10:30pm, bussing at a restaurant. As of this week the kids have three weeks off. So that’s $300 dollars a month I’m not making. Then my office job told me they were going to be doing some "restructuring" which included cutting me back to two days a week in the office and two days a week back at my old position as a janitor. This will possibly be the same amount of money in the end but it really messes with my schedule. Luckily the restaurant wants to give me more hours but that dramatically cuts into band practices. It works for now but this is definitely gonna be temporary.

Thankfully my Saturday morning intern hours/recording work with Joel have remained a possibility. He is in the works to move to a nicer part of town. His new house would be much more "recording friendly". He has also talked about starting to pay me when my hours are done, because he has a number of clients lined up. This is the real direction I would want my non-rockstar career to go in and it looks like that could be a possibility in the future. We’ll see.

With Christmas right around the corner, I’ve turned to online shopping. It really is the way to go when you have zero free time. So far I’ve only gotten my fiancé’s stuff but I’ll soon get the rest and hopefully I’ll do it all without stepping foot in a real store. As for myself, I should be getting most of the stuff I asked for this Christmas including San Andreas (please oh please oh please oh please!). Look for my next post to hit sometime next year. Just kidding I think.

Movie: A Beautiful Mind

Pin the Tail on the Stem Cell

First, I'd like to apologize to my faithful reader (No, that's not a typo. I really only have one.) for the non-posting period. The holidays and all, I guess. This is not really a post however but I just wanted to show you something.

I read an article today on The Drudge Report and found it very intriguing. So I memorized it, verbatim. To prove my memorization skills I've typed it up for you.

OF MICE, MEN & IN BETWEEN
Scientists debate blending of human, animal forms

By Rick Weiss
Updated: 1:14 a.m. ET Nov. 20, 2004

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.

In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.

In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls.

These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses.

Living test beds
Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact — not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments.

But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?

The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying the issue and hopes to make recommendations by February. Yet the range of opinions it has received so far suggests that reaching consensus may be difficult.

During one recent meeting, scientists disagreed on such basic issues as whether it would be unethical for a human embryo to begin its development in an animal's womb, and whether a mouse would be better or worse off with a brain made of human neurons.

"This is an area where we really need to come to a reasonable consensus," said James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health's Stem Cell Task Force. "We need to establish some kind of guidelines as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not to do."

Beyond twins and moms
Chimeras (ki-MER-ahs) — meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in a single body — are not inherently unnatural. Most twins carry at least a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb, and most mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they have born.

Recipients of organ transplants are also chimeras, as are the many people whose defective heart valves have been replaced with those from pigs or cows. And scientists for years have added human genes to bacteria and even to farm animals — feats of genetic engineering that allow those critters to make human proteins such as insulin for use as medicines.

"Chimeras are not as strange and alien as at first blush they seem," said Henry Greely, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University who has reviewed proposals to create human-mouse chimeras there.

But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making humans human.

In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, "there is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on the animal.

Greely and his colleagues did not conclude that such experiments should never be done. Indeed, he and many other philosophers have been wrestling with the question of why so many people believe it is wrong to breach the species barrier.

Does the repugnance reflect an understanding of an important natural law? Or is it just another cultural bias, like the once widespread rejection of interracial marriage?

Many turn to the Bible's repeated invocation that animals should multiply "after their kind" as evidence that such experiments are wrong. Others, however, have concluded that the core problem is not necessarily the creation of chimeras but rather the way they are likely to be treated.

Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech and an enhanced potential to learn — what some have called a "humanzee."

"There's a knee-jerk reaction that enhancing the moral status of an animal is bad," Streiffer said. "But if you did it, and you gave it the protections it deserves, how could the animal complain?"

Unfortunately, said Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, speaking last fall at a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics, such protections are unlikely.

"Chances are we would make them perform menial jobs or dangerous jobs," Sandel said. "That would be an objection."

A research breakthrough
The potential power of chimeras as research tools became clear about a decade ago in a series of dramatic experiments by Evan Balaban, now at McGill University in Montreal. Balaban took small sections of brain from developing quails and transplanted them into the developing brains of chickens.

The resulting chickens exhibited vocal trills and head bobs unique to quails, proving that the transplanted parts of the brain contained the neural circuitry for quail calls. It also offered astonishing proof that complex behaviors could be transferred across species.

No one has proposed similar experiments between, say, humans and apes. But the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 allowed researchers to envision related experiments that might reveal a lot about how embryos grow.

The cells, found in 5-day-old human embryos, multiply prolifically and — unlike adult cells — have the potential to turn into any of the body's 200 or so cell types.

Scientists hope to cultivate them in laboratory dishes and grow replacement tissues for patients. But with those applications years away, the cells are gaining in popularity for basic research.

The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ.

Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today.

But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras — say, mice — were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse.

Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result.

"What would be so dreadful?" asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done.

But others disagree — if for no other reason than nothing else out of fear of a public backlash.

"Certainly you'd get a negative response from people to have a human embryo trying to grow in the wrong place," said Cynthia B. Cohen, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a member of Canada's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which supported a ban on such experiments there.

How human?
But what about experiments in which scientists add human stem cells not to an animal embryo but to an animal fetus, which has already made its eggs and sperm? Then the only question is how human a creature one dares to make.

In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey L. Platt at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has created human-pig chimeras by adding human-blood-forming stem cells to pig fetuses. The resulting pigs have both pig and human blood in their vessels. And it's not just pig blood cells being swept along with human blood cells; some of the cells themselves have merged, creating hybrids.

It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, Platt said, because he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patient's cells. Now scientists know the risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two cells fuse.

In other experiments led by Esmail Zanjani, chairman of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada at Reno, scientists have been adding human stem cells to sheep fetuses. The team now has sheep whose livers are up to 80 percent human — and make all the compounds human livers make.

Zanjani's goal is to make the humanized livers available to people who need transplants. The sheep portions will be rejected by the immune system, he predicted, while the human part will take root.

"I don't see why anyone would raise objections to our work," Zanjani said in an interview.

Mice and men
Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system — an animal that has proved invaluable for tests of new drugs against the AIDS virus, which does not infect conventional mice.

More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. By dissecting the mice at various stages, the researchers were able to see how the added brain cells moved about as they multiplied and made connections with mouse cells.

Already, he said, they have learned things they "never would have learned had there been a bioethical ban."

Now he wants to add human brain stem cells that have the defects that cause Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other brain ailments — and study how those cells make connections.

Scientists suspect that these diseases, though they manifest themselves in adulthood, begin when something goes wrong early in development. If those errors can be found, researchers would have a much better chance of designing useful drugs, Weissman said. And those drugs could be tested in the chimeras in ways not possible in patients.

Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human architecture — a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness — they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research.

So far this is just a "thought experiment," Weissman said, but he asked the university's ethics group for an opinion anyway.

"Everyone said the mice would be useful," he said. "But no one was sure if it should be done."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Crazy, huh?

Movie: The Virgin Suicides