Come together, electrostatically, as one

How do 2 proteins come together to form a complex? Although we can sometimes determine the crystal structure of a complex, this only gives us a static picture, the end product of a dynamic process.

To provide a glimpse into how two proteins come together, Tang and co-workers, in the paper "Visualization of transient encounter complexes in protein–protein association" Nature (2006) 444:383, devised a brilliant scheme to capture the alternative ways that two proteins bind together in solution.

They studied the binding of the N-terminal domain of enzyme I (EIN) to the phosphocarrier protein (HPr). The figure on the left shows EIN on the left (mostly blue). HPr is the protein on the right (green). In the experiment, they attached Mn2+ ions (3 red balls on the far right) onto the surface of HPr.

The key idea is that these Mn2+ ions induce a magnetic response in EIN where the magnetic response (ΔΓ2) of the backbone H atoms in EIN depends on the distance of the H atoms from the Mn2+ ions. The magnetic response ΔΓ2 (red dots) for each backbone H atom in EIN is plotted below:



The black line in the figure above is the ΔΓ2 calculated from the crystal structure of the complex of EIN bound to HPr. The measured ΔΓ2 (red dots) show a number of peaks that deviate from the black line. These peaks correspond to transient binding sites of HPr to other parts of the EIN surface.

From the results of a series of similar experiments, Tang and co-workers reconstructed the most likely transient binding sites of HPr to EIN. The alternate conformations of HPr are shown as a density map (green) in the following image. The actual binding site of HPr in the crystal structure is shown in blue, and EIN is shown as an eletrostatic surface map (red is positive, white neutral, blue is negative):



The alternative conformations of HPr bind to positively charged parts of the surface of EIN. However, near the actual binding site, there are few alternate conformations, even though the surface around the actual binding site is also strongly charged.

Tang and co-workers conclude that it is very easy for two proteins to stick together, drawn by simple electrostatic attraction. But this binding is weak. To explain the absence of alternative conformations around the actual binding sites, they argue that once the HPr binds close to the actual binding site, there is a large energy funnel that forces the HPr into the actual binding site.

This is the first study to show, experimentally, that two proteins can transiently bind anywhere through electrostatic interaction, a truly significant result.

Looking at the surface of a membrane

What does the the membrane that wraps around our cells look like? We know that the membrane is choc-a-bloc full of proteins, but we can't see them directly because the level of detail is too small for our electron microscopes to look at, without destroying the cell.

Is there a way to re-construct the mosaic of proteins that normally stud a membrane? In "Molecular Anatomy of a Trafficking Organelle" Cell (2006) 127:831, Takamori and co-workers studied the synaptic vesicle - a little bubble wrapped up in membrane that carries neuro-transmitters from one synapse in the brain to another.

This is a synaptic vesicle as seen with electron microscopy. You can't go into any more detail. Instead, Takamori and co-workers determined the precise composition of all the proteins that float in the membrane of the synaptic vesicle. With this information, they built this delightful model of a synaptic vesicle:



This image is somewhat reminiscent of the vibrant watercolors painted by David Goodsell, which were created using some deep intuitions about protein density and oodles of artistic license:

How to tell if a relationship is over

Short film (90s) at depict.org. I learnt heaps.

The Outsider Chronicles

If I were to tell you that recently, I went to an experimental modern dance piece , you might raise your eyebrows. If I were to tell you that the piece explored trans-gender issues in a social activism festival, you might even start to smirk. And if I were tell you that it was brilliant, you would roll your eyes around and around until I could only see the whites of your eyes. Well, I went to, saw, and vastly enjoyed Sean Dorsey's "The Outsider Chronicles", as part of the ManiFestival (Dance Brigade's Festival for Social Change) in San Francisco.

"The Outsider Chronicles" is a loosely biographical collection of consists of 6 short pieces. The stories revolve around the theme of sexual identity. Before the show, I was a little afraid that this was going to be a niche piece. The audience was not your typical theater crowd, mainly lesbian couples and trans-gender folks. Would the piece speak in a secret code of the trans-gender community, impenetrable to the ears of an outsider? Fortunately this was not the case. "The Outsider Chronicles" spoke in a universal language. It spoke in the form of story.

The most significant artistic choice that Dorsey made, was to perform the dance pieces over a spoken word performance. I had never seen this fusion of spoken word and dance before. By engaging the audience through a series of beautifully written story, Dorsey had highlighted a fundamental problem with most forms of dance that I have seen - although kinetically enthralling, most dance is intellectually dis-engaging. To fully engage in a scene, I think it is imperative that we get under the skin of the characters on stage. Dance alone cannot tell such stories. With spoken word, character and dialog are refracted onto the movements on the stage.

The miracle of the "The Outsider Chronicles" is that Sean Dorsey is every bit as good a spoken-word performer as he is a dancer. There were six beautifully written stories, full of vigor, life and humor. There was a piece about the first time he kissed a girl. Another was a poignant piece about the drive of a couple to have an emergency meeting with his father. These spoken word pieces could easily stand on their own. Here, they formed the platform on which the dance unfolded.

The stories and the dance dove-tailed as we see flying bodies act out the conflicts and confusions of the relationships embedded in the stories. The spoken dialogue gave flesh to the movements. Movement and intention become one. I could felt the stories wash over me, kinetically, bodily. Reflecting on this, I realized that the vacuity of much of traditional ballet was due to the inherent limit of dance to convey rich emotional experience. Whereas seasoned ballet enthusiasts already know the story of the ballet that they will see, and hence can interpret the actions on the stage, there is no such recourse for a novice. In "The Outsider Chronicles", Dorsey cuts through that incomprehensibility by merging voice with dance.

I was also enthralled by the lighting and staging. The staging was spare, allowing the rather imaginative use of light to cut through the space. Slabs of light were used to conjure up a conjugal bed, another to project the interior of a car free-wheeling on a road-trip. In another scene, a wash of vertical light conjured up a bath-room on the front of the stage.

Dorsey examines the line from desire to the fulfillment of a fully-realized self-identity. His stories document his struggle to engage with the world, though specific to trans-gender issues, there is a universal dimension to his story. The strength and compassion in the way he recounts his past, makes his struggle heroic. In the last piece "Creativity", Dorsey laments a moment in his youth where he missed a chance to seize the moment and declare himself, and pit himself against everyone around him. But if he failed in that moment in the past, he has more than made-up for it in sublimating his story into a muscular work of art.

The Penguin who Goes Shopping

I know the cute factor to this video will drip through your computer screen and onto the carpet. But I really, I couldn't resist posting the daily adventures of penguin shopper, Lala-chan:

Credentials to run a South American country

I was just reading about Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the current president of Chile. Her biography is phenomenal (from wikipedia):

Bachelet—a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist with studies in military strategy—served as Health Minister and Defense Minister under President Ricardo Lagos. She is a separated mother of three and a self-described agnostic, which sets her apart in a predominantly conservative and Catholic country. A polyglot, she speaks Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and French.

How could anyone so talented become the head of state of any nation?

Stop motion animation genius

Iraqi voice

When you are inside the political circus of the United States, it's easy to forget that the victims of the spasmodic American war machine in the Iraqi war are actually living, thinking human beings, some even brilliant bloggers: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Movable comment system

I love the comment system invented by those guys at reddit.com. It's a genuine innovation by bringing together a couple of simply ideas, resulting in an elegant way of visually structuring a conversation.

Reddit started with the idea of ranking comments, form sites such as slashdot and amazon. Each comment in a thread is scored, whereby comments in a thread can be rated with an unobtrusive up-or-down arrow. The innovation is that the comments in a thread flow up or down a page in terms of the comment rating. Those that are popular float to the top of the page, and those that are unhelpful sink to the bottom.

It's a remarkably intuitive system that rewards good contribution to the conversation, without resorting to draconian censoring measures. Bad comments are not hidden; they just sink to the bottom of the page. If you feel inclined, you simply scroll down to the bottom-feeders and see the shit. Good comments are not just rewarded just by brownie points, but they get to be read first simply in lieu of being at the top of the page. This provides a genuinely useful service for other readers.

Having threaded comments is also important. Replies to specific comments get attached to the parent comment, and they move up or down with them. However brilliant rejoinders to a shitty comment deserve their day in the sun, and whole threads get moved up if the replies are rated higher than the parent comment.

On reddit.com, the cream does float to the top. But if you really want to, you can still lick the scum at the bottom.

A real australian christmas

This was seen in a display window of the Myers department store in Melbourne, Australia. As an Australian expat, I believe it demonstrates the true meaning of Australian mate-ship, marsupial-style:



Party-poopers claim the hydraulics was "broken", in a brokeback mountain kind of way

Talking in (another) tongue

I'm of the opinion that more people should know at least one other language. I'm not talking about some kind of cheesy tourist phrase-book or a I'm-trying-to-pick-up-girls-at-a-summer-course kind of thing.

I'm talking about honest-to-god bilingualism. I'm talking about being in a place where you have to use the language just to survive. I'm talking getting the power cut-off if you can't explain to the guy on the phone that your papers are in actual order. I'm talking about being able to order the food that you actually wanted. It's hard, it's difficult, and it'll turn your world upside down.

Being able to talk in another language means that you'll end up thinking differently. It's a strange thing to slip in and out of one language. Strange associations jump out at you from different angles, as you begin to understand different idioms. Each language has its favorite phrases and pronouns. By choosing that slightly different alternative to say the same thing - you start seeing the world in slightly different ways, with profound effects on what you easily see, or don't see. Speaking in another language, textures your world much more than a character mod in a DOOM extension pack.

There's also nothing quite like the loneliness and frustration in being stuck in a land where no one can communicate with you. People who are generally smart will feel the pain of being slow and retarded. Your tongue will feel thick and unwieldy. Whereas once you were always quick with a witty rejoinder, you are suddenly reduced to monosyllabic responses. Yet there are subtle joys. As you feel your language skills click up a gear, you will feel the pleasure of rediscovering latent social skills.

But more importantly, once you realize that, what was once your monolithic world, is but one of many worlds bound by your native vocabulary, you will realize that it is just that - only one world in a vast universe of possible worlds.

What is a molecule?

I am a computational biologist. I compute molecules. I sit in the darkness of the computer lab and sculpt molecules by wielding the sharp scalpel of my mouse. Inside the computer I manipulate the coordinates of a molecule (currently the PDZ domain) and surrounding bath of water molecules. I apply force-fields, mathematical descriptions of the interactions between atoms, to my molecule, and hopefully, I coax the molecule into doing something remarkable: a flip, a rotation, a clamping of the active site - an action that might explain a chemical reaction in precise atomic detail.

This kind of precision is beguiling, and it engenders a kind of arrogance. That's why I often have to pinch myself hard to remember that, even though I might know the behaviour of these molecules down to the sub-Angstrom (0.00000001 m) level, I barely know anything about the molecule.

Chemicals start off as something in the ground, or in the ground up substances of animals. I rarely know whether the molecules that I study inside my computer comes from an animal, a plant or a bacterium. And what if I did? I still have to know how to squeeze that particular chemical out of the carcass of, say, a dead cow. This requires expertise in the manifold arts of physical chemistry, whereby you separate, from the rough and guts of a ground-up cow, the millions of different chemicals that make up the once living cow. Understanding a chemical requires not just in knowing how to find it in nature, but also how to purify it till it's purer than the driven snow. But to truly understand a chemical, you have to know what it does, how it reacts with other chemicals, and under what conditions.

In biochemistry, the problem of knowing what a chemical has taken a rather strange turn. We actually possess a rich source of important biological chemicals, but no way of knowing what these chemicals actually do. This source is the human genome, which exists as a publicly available database. As we know quite a lot about the grammar and syntax of DNA, a computer scientist can trawl the database for sequences of DNA that code for a completely novel biological molecules. It's then a simple matter of sending in an order for a biotech company to make the molecule from scratch.

But how to figure out what the molecule does in our bodies? We don't believe in mysterious life forces any more. We believe that all of life's processes, from digestion to respiration to the way old people lose their memories must rest on some kind of chemical process. Every chemical extracted from living things could potentially have an important function in the living process. But given a molecule picked out at random from the human genome, we have no way of knowing where the molecule should be found in the body, what biological processes that it takes part in, and what other processes it depends on. The human genome remains silent on such issues.

The precise knowledge of the 3-dimensional coordinates of a molecule is probably the last thing that scientists get to know about a chemical. 3-dimensional coordinates are finicky things, and knowledge of them normally comes at the end of a long investigative process. By then, much of the chemical properties of the chemical are already known.

Sculptor in Conversation

The other day, we had the world's greatest sculptor, Richard Serra, visit the UCSF campus where I work, in Mission Bay, a former industrial area south of downtown San Francisco, which was a dead zone that the local council was in the process of converting into a biotechnology park.

A solemn man, Richard Serra's face is permanently set into a metaphysical scowl, yet he dressed in casual gear - jeans, comfortable dark-blue shirt, and sneakers. He had been commissioned by UCSF to build a sculpture, and thereby, was obliged to come to UCSF and talk about his piece. The piece, "Ballast", consists of two huge flat metal plates, 50 feet high and 14 feet wide, that lent in slightly off-horizontal off-vertical directions. If you stand at the base and look up, you will see a disorientating curve in the metal.

The meeting was held in an auditorium in our new community center, a striking building designed by Mexican architects Ricardo and Victor Legorreta, which was bathed in a bold earthy red, which balanced the lego-like austerity of the form. The community center building stood out from the surrounding beige-ness of the other buildings.

I was keen to see how they would set up the talk. In the auditorium, two comfortable sofa chairs were set up on the stage with a black curtain backdrop. The talk was going to be conducted as an interview in a PBS special. I didn't know who the interviewer was, but a friend later informed that the interviewer was a local construction magnate. I had always known about the symbiotic relationship between obscene wealth and high-end art, but I had never seen it in the flesh like here in the auditorium, where a very rich man doubled as the probing interviewer of an artist of very expensive modern art.

The entanglements of moneyed interests and art was more intricate in this case, as the piece was commissioned by UCSF, which was investing in a very large construction project at the Mission Bay campus, which necessarily involved complex construction and real estate interests. So it made sense that a construction magnate would interview the artist, who was patronized by a scientific institute that was rapidly expanding its building infrastructure.

Serra was a brilliant interviewee, crisp, articulate, and was an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, which involved the suitable name-dropping of everyone from Phillip Glass to Jasper Johns to Charlie Mingus. Because Serra was born and raised in San Francisco, he recounted many childhood reminiscences - baseball games in the local park a couple of blocks from the campus, climbing through old warehouses - typical experiences of a nascent internationally acclaimed sculptor.

Later, he moved on to more familiar territory - a standard narrative of how he became the sculptor that he is today - from English lit major, to embryonic painter/drawer, to studying art history at Yale with abunch of soon-to-be-very-famous artists, and then onto a fellowship in Italy, and finally to New York as struggling artist. It was an absorbing story, which illustrated how the contingent factors of his biography inevitably coalesced into the choice of large-scale fabricated steel as his media of choice, and "weight" as the leit-motif of his artistic vision. This was as deft a piece of self-invention if I ever heard one.

The sculpture was described as the "centerpiece" of the new UCSF campus at Mission Bay by the UCSF chancellor, Michael Bishop, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. Such was the occasion that Michael Bishop himself gave the opening address to the interview, thus completing the on-stage triumvirate of the interaction of science (Bishop), art (Serra) and money (construction magnate/interviewer).

Still, what surprised me was how the interaction between the work of art and the science at UCSF was virtually non-existent. Michael Bishop did not interact with Serra at all, on-stage, but more to the point, the purpose of UCSF - medical research - played no part in the design of the sculpture. Serra described his process: when during a visit to the site, he realized that the campus was an immensely flat landscape. Wouldn't it be interesting to put up something completely vertical? Serra had already done a vertical metal plate piece in Germany(?), so he decided that for this piece, he would explore the interaction of two such vertical standing pieces.

Science played no part in the design of the piece. And as I looked around the auditorium, which was very well attended, I realized that there were very few grad-students or faculty from the medical research facility next door. Instead, the audience was made up of architects, art patrons (including the former owner of the Bank of America), and students from the nearby College of Creative Arts. Though fetching that female art-students often are, as an art-loving scientist, I felt very lonely indeed.

*Madame* Speaker of the House

So Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco (the seventh circle of hell for bible-belt americans) will be the Speaker of the House, the third highest political position in the USA. Maybe one day the USA will join much of the Islamic world in electing a woman head-of-state.

To the Founding Fathers of the USA

All praise to those brilliant men who conceived of the Constitution of the United States of America. They foresaw the inevitable tides of fascism that roll back and forth every few decades and constructed a system of government that keeps it at bay. The system of checks and balances works, slowly, but it works. The Democrats have taken back the House, the Senate is tied. The Executive is next. The world can take a deep deep breath.

words for a friday

xenolalia - speaking in a language that you don't know the meaning of

The future of work

This article ostensibly talks about a Walmart first, the whole staff of a Wal-mart store walking out. Given Wal-mart's aggressive anti-union, anti-labour policies, what drove these, mainly hispanic workers, to take such a drastic step. It was the implentation of a new company policy, that is a sign of indentured work in the future to come:

moves to cut the hours of full-time employees from 40 hours a week to 32 hours, along with a corresponding cut in wages, and to compel workers to be available for shifts around the clock.

In addition, the shifts would be decided not by managers, but by a computer at company headquarters. Employees could find themselves working 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. one week and noon to 9 p.m. the next. "So workers cannot pick up their children after school everyday, and part-timers cannot keep another job because they can be called to work anytime," says Vasquez.

In addition to scheduling changes and reduction in hours, workers are now required to call an 800 number when they are sick. "If we are at an emergency room and spend the night in a hospital and cannot call the number, they won't respect that," says Larosa, who has worked at the store for six years. "It will be counted as an unexcused absence."

Nostalgia in Hindi

I went to India 7 years ago, and it was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. Music and vibrant primary colors saturate every pore of your skin.

The songs of a blockbluster movie are released months before the movie is released. These songs are broadcasted over every little tin-pot battery radio receiver held by every grizzled shopkeeper in every roadside stall in every dusty streets in the state of Utter Pradesh.

And so the songs of the hit of 1999, "Taal" has sedimented somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my travelling memories. The movie stars the scrumptuous Aishraya Rai, former Miss World (who only lipsynchs). It was the only film I saw in a cinema, somewhere in Delhi. Although I didn't understand a word of Hindi (namaste), I got the gist of the 3 1/2 hour story, and a kindly doctor explained the story to me a week later. Well i had though those memories lost, that is, until I found on Youtube, a music video of "Ishq Bina", the hit-song from the movie, a gorgeous fusion of Indian lyricism with some western flourishes. Enjoy.:



Note the product placement and displaced sexual metaphor in the last frenzied minute of the film clip.

In the prophet's own words

Why do earnest spiritual seekers often find it necessary to learn to read spiritual texts in the original language? We have middle-class white buddhists contorting their hands around sanskrit letters, young black muslims coughing out arabic glutturals, biblical scholars struggling with declensions of aramaic and ancient greek, and of course, young american jews struggling with the hebrew of the Torah in downtown Manhattan.

Learning languages is hard. I lived in a foreign country and it took me over a year and a half to learn the basics. That's only to have a non-idiotic conversation at a party, talking about where I come from. It takes at least double that time to achieve the proficiency to read complex spiritual texts. So why the bother?

Most religion wrap themselves around a holy book. There's something majestic and authoritative about marks on papyrus. And ultimately, theology in written form is just more transportable. In the days before the printing press, books were much more precious commodities - laborious to make, expensive to finance, and difficult to make accurate copies of - books were expensive treasures for the rich and indolent, and the scholars that they would patronize. Even today, with the technologies of the printing press and the word processor, a beautifully produced book still possesses the qualities of a magical object.

Religious books in America are less exotic treasures and more of a marketable commodity. There is a whole cottage industry of translating religious books. All you have to do is march down to your nearest esoteric book store, and you will find a gazillion different translations of the Bhagavad Gita, all printed on cheap india paper in dirt cheap ink-type, that is thick and heavy, and hard to read. Differences between translations are enormous. Some translations translate difficult terms literally, keeping the phoneticisms of the original language. In other translations, english words are appropriated in awkward sounding ways, like the use of that clunker, lovingkindness, in South-east asian buddhist texts.

However, in many different traditions, it is taught that the earnest seeker must learn the original language that a holy book is written in, before they can truly understand the meaning behind the books. Why watch a grainy video shot by a handicam inside a noisy cinema when you can experience glorious 75 mm film in dolby surround sound?

If you've ever met earnest beginning spiritual seekers, you will find that they generally tend to be insufferable puritanical party-poopers, full of pointless trivia, and prescriptive to the hilt. Like the cool kids, they'll wear the right gear, say the right things, and rain down a stream of do's-and-dont's. To join a new religion is to deny one's original culture. It is an act of identity recreation. Speaking a new language, is the final erection of the new self.

But what is to be gained in reading the original book in the original language? The simple reason is that the great holy books are often, also great works of poetry. Spiritual power is poetic power married with spiritual insight. And poetry transmits meaning not just in the simple meaning of the words, but through shades of meaning and technical effects of rhyme, rhythm and meter. The Koran contains a myriad of puns and in-jokes, in arabic.

And because spiritual writing is poetry, it suffers the same difficulty in translation. Poetry is notoriously virtually impossible to translate. Most religious translations are made by earnest religious scholars, not linguistically adept poets. That is why teachers of religions find translations tinny and stilted. When religious teachers complain that a translation misses the spiritual essense, they are really saying that it lacks poetic fluency. So when a spiritual seeker takes the long and arduous journey in learning the original language of a spiritual text, they are really taking the world's most painful poetry class.

Guest blog from Warren Longmire

Live and direct from the marsh cafe, this is warren longmire bouncing light across the keys of one BASCO HO's macbook. Lovely keyboard indeed I must say. There is something sexy about a nice keyboard. But I digress...

Check out my search for the san fran god scene at www.ascatteredlight.blogspot.com. It's the hotness. Be well. Be merry. I'm out.

bic runga does jacques brel

Trawling on youtube, I find an extreme example of pan-national cross-cultural fertilization. Bic Runga, new zealand singer of malaysian chinese descent sings in french - "ne me quitte pas" the signature song by belgium's greatest export, jacques brel. It's the torch-burning song, and Bic gets to shows off her singing chops, on-stage emotional histrionics, and command of the french language:

Art Schools versus Science Schools

Today, I had a conversation with two friends, an architect and a painter, and we started talking about psychologically disturbed people to be found in art school. (They both went to the former CCAC, now known as the CCA).

At the end of an anecdote, my painter friend concluded that there must be a lot of people with border-line personality disorder amongst art-school students. My architect friend added that, when she went to the CCAC, the psychological distresses of art-school was so severe that the CCAC had round-the-clock counselors to service troubled art-school students.

That got me thinking, whilst studying physics, I didn't meet many border-line psychotics, but I did know a lot of socially dysfunctional people. Boys who couldn't interact with normal people, who couldn't emphasize with other people's emotion, let alone recognize emotions, or make eye contact. In short, in science schools, there was a surfeit of borderline autistics.

In conclusion, one can say that art-schools breed border-line psychosis, whilst science schools breed autism.

A Poetic Form: The Pantoum

I was introduced to a new poetic form the other day. It's called the Pantoum, and it's one of the most brilliant forms I've encountered. It originates from Malaysian, often used in song form, and it goes something like this:

First line
Second Line
Third Line
Fourth Line

Last Second Line
New Second Line
Last Fourth Line
New Fourth Line

.
.
.
.

Last Second Line
Original Second Line
Last Fourth Line
Original First Line

The structured repetitions produce a hypnotic trance state. I will try to find examples of them.

What no American man has

"He could almost have been an American, but I could tell straight away that he wasn't. He had what no American man I've ever met has had, and that's intuition."

~ Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

Self-referential promotion letter

Recently (as in the last two years) I published papers in the journals, BMC Structural Biology and Protein Science. It appears that BMC Structural Biology trawls through the authors of Protein Science, and spams these authors to get them interested in their journal, BMC Structural Biology. I got one of those emails:

Dear Dr Ho,

We noticed that you recently published an article in Protein Science. As an active researcher publishing in the field of structural biology, have you considered publishing in BMC Structural Biology?...

Who is BMC Structural Biology?

BMC Structural Biology boasts a wide, international readership. More than 4,900 users have signed up to receive email alerts, and last month alone articles in BMC Structural Biology were accessed over 3,500 times from our website, and many times via the PubMed Central website.

Seems a reputable journal. But it's open-source. It's too new. To assuage my worries and fears, BMC Structural Biology sent me a worthy example of one of their popular recent articles:

For example, this article by Ho and Brasseur has been accessed 205 times in the past 30 days:

Research article
The Ramachandran plots of glycine and pre-proline
Bosco K Ho, Robert Brasseur
BMC Structural Biology 2005, 5:14 (16 August 2005)

This article looked vaguely familiar. That author Bosco K Ho, he looks like ...

Why, that's me!

They were trying to entice me into submitting an article to them by showing me an article that I had already written, for them.

...Why not submit your next research article to BMC Structural Biology?...

Why not indeed.. oh, I already have.

hipsterotica

The latest blog that has captured my rapt attention is hipsterotica. I see hipsters all around in the Mission, here in San Francisco. They're like pigeons, pecking crumbs off the ground and swarming away when little kids try to catch them. Imagine if they had sex.

U2: With or Without You

U2's "with or without you" is one of the greatest song ever written - it's a song that tears at your heart and then shreds it into a thousand pieces. I've seen various versions of them performing it, but never quite like this. If rock-stars are the gods of the secular era then the girl that was pulled-up unto the stage, got to make love with a fallen god, in front of 50,000 people. Cry girl. Cry.

Les livres françaises

Je suis recemment allé à Montreal où j'ai pu achêté des livres françaises. C'etait vraiment un longtemp que je peux le faire. Après une grande peine de reflechir, j'ai choisi:

• Marcel Proust, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
  
• Iegor Gran, Ipso facto
  
• Jean-Pierre Changeux, L'homme neuronal
  
• Jacques Derrida, L'écriture et la différence
  
• Shan Sa, Impératrice
  
• Marguerite yourcenar, L'Œuvre au Noir
  
• Nelly Arcan, Putain
  

Best title in a Science magazine article, ever

Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing
Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist
Science 8 September 2006: 1451-1452

Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity. In three studies, we explored what we call the "Macbeth effect"—that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away

Only in San Francisco

A while ago, a friend dragged me off on a Friday night, out to the burbs, to see a show that had San Francisco plastered all over it. It was the Peaches Christ "Midnight Mass", an alternative religious festival to coincide (fortuitously) with the Christian festival of Easter.

Who is Peaches Christ? She is a transvestite cabaret performer, a consummate entertainer. She is her own institution, a dynamo of sneering attitude and arch campness. She is a large woman, with, obviously, the frame of a man, and with a huge hairdo, and thick garish makeup, she was more god than human. She owned the stage. In the show that I saw, she entered the stage but bursting out of volcano, complete with flames and crumbling plaster.

Every year, Peaches Christ puts on a number of movies that score through the roof on the camp scale. As the movies are shown at midnight and involve a pre-movie cabaret show, the cinema which hosts the event is waaay out in the outer Richmond, and we had to get there by taxi (taxis in San Francisco are not all like taxis in nyc, they are expensive and infrequent).

That night's show was based on scenes from Showgirls and also involved a free lap-dance at the end of the cabaret act (more on the lap-dance). The cabaret show took crucial scenes from the movie - in this case, it was the masterful dialogue from screen-wright Joe "My adolescent sex-fantasy" Ezterzas - and took the scenes to their logical conclusion. The one that stuck in my mind was where the feuding show-girls were reminiscing about their childhoods where one of the girls admitted that she was once so poor that she had to eat dog-food. "You too," squealed the other show-girl, as they shared their stories about their favourite dog-food. Peaches Christ and friend then replayed the scene which ended up with the two of them eating dog-food on stage and then fisting each other under strobe lights. You get the idea.

At the end of the cabaret set, we were treated to the real draw-card of the show, the free lap-dance for everyone who had a box of pop-corn. Shamefully, I have to admit that I had to hide my box of pop-corn, because the thought of getting a lap-dance from a heavy set bearded transvestite was somewhat unsettling. Call me a prude if you must. Except it was much much worse. We were first asked to raise our box of pop-corn. About a hundred people raised their pop-corn, there was going to be a lot of lap-dances a coming. Then the lap-dancers were brought up. The first one was what you might imagine, a femmy looking transvestite, that thin sleek androgynous looking tranny in tight tight clothing.

After that, my mind was blown. The other lap-dancers included: an abraham lincoln look-alike in suspenders and pants, a large person in a suit and wearing a bunny head, large bearded men, someone in a green martian suit, some very drunk people in stripped stockings... and so the list went on. And just when you'd seen it all, the very last lap-dancer was introduced, who made everybody in the audience gasp. This lap-dancer was a short stocky woman in a full burkha.

Glimpse into the glorious past (1665) of science

The Royal Society of England, the most venerable scientific institution in the world, has just release online, the archive of their journal, Philosophical Transactions, which dates back from the year of our lord, 1665.

They will allow free access for non-sciencey peoples for the next two months. So check out those musty pdf's. Guardian blogs have provided links to some classic papers that can be found in the Royal Society archive.

Culinary desire

This is a writing exercise that I didn't know what to with, except to post it here:

If I don't eat at the French Laundry my life would not be complete. But how to get there. I don't have a car. It's not near public transport. Nor do I have filthy lucre, I don't have a sugar daddy. The mechanics of the deal is simple. Ring up exactly 6-months to the day that you want to go, and book a table. Keep ringing and ringing until they pick up the phone. But it seems so far away, some undetermined time in the future, like some kind of spy-thriller novel, "Igor, I will meet you on the Steps of Rome, in 6 months time". It's a restaurant for god's sake, not state secrets of inner Siberia. Perhaps I can with Igor. I've got to go with someone. Someone, preferably, no necessarily, with a car. For that drive up to that place up in the middle of the country-side. People with cars, who like to eat. You know, maybe I should just advertise on Craigslist, and offer something in return.

Time-lapsed video of 160 hot-air balloons

This is beautiful and wonderfully ridiculous at the same time

A Smear of Blood

Whining, you wriggle in my nose
You loop in my ear canal
Striking always in the moments before sleep

I can't take it

I want to snatch you up
Smash your face
Just like that
Then crumple you with my fingers
into a mixture of pus and blood leaving a tiny little stain of red
I rub that smear of insect paste into my cheeks Like rouge
I feel the cool of new death on my skin

It is not unpleasant

It calms
It feels like sacrament
Like the fist time I touched a dead body, I have violated the living
The breathing and the dead are separated by a film so thin but impenetrable
I run my fingertips along its surface
before long, I can longer tell
where my warm body begins from where the dead insect ends
My blood coagulates
The tracery of my veins harden into marble

New York

Standing hunched over keyboard in this apple store
Tap tap tapping away before they catch me
Spinning words on the fly, stolen
From the crackled energy of this city

I look up to see buildings whoosh up from the ground
The trees here are not kings but servants
They serve but to green the
Feet of the true masters of this city
Those glorious scrapers of the sky
Shaving off the majesty of high flying birds
And flinging it back down onto the masses below

I see potent mixes of blacks and whites, olive and brown
All packed in the ovens of the underground
The subway so hot that everybody perspires
Their sweat melts, merges and pools in
The hidden arteries from Harlem to Soho
To Wiliamsburg from the hispanic busboys
To the dolled-up girls of fashion school
To the grizzled Italian bar-man serving
As much attitude as alcohol

And the beating thudding heart in that
Neon black-hole of times square
A bear-trap for the epileptic
It ripples and flirts and entertains
I see dancers and singers and poets
And tourists looking for that elusive something.

Godless Sight

The eye that I see God with
Is the eye that God sees me with

~ Meister Eckhart

I am the eye
The all-seeing eye
Worlds fall in my ken

Who then sees through that
Shiny plastic screen
Screwed inside the cone of the cramped cockpit
Diving screaming
From the vacuumed air above
Into the thickened smog below
A vertical prayer
From eye to screen to cross hair
To the phosphorescent green trace below
A trace with legs scrambling
A headless chicken
Your daughter's head
Scrambled at the sight of you
You squint harder into the screen
And with greater resolution it might even show
The creasing of the skin
As their face contorts at the moment of sweet impact

I see with pure electricity
The wires that fall away
It is an action as easy
As banging a cartridge into the hole
Joining hardware
to software
to joystick
To hand
To eye
You see through the eyes of another
Carrying some oversized triple-barrelled double-loaded shot-gun
Spraying pixelated bullets in technicolor death and fury
It is a pure expression of the soul
It is a divine handshake
It is an armored tank on threaded tracks
The hand that slaps the ground
And leaves plutonium dust in its wake
That corrodes the lining of the lungs of all who pass by

I see with eyes bloodshot from desire
Just as he, our god, desires
Not from on high
But from below
Like a trick in a peep-show
He shoves another coin into the greasy slot
The window opens
He watches
It is the dance of the seven veils
As each piece of fabric falls to the ground
Another patch of skin is exposed
Luminous and white
That burns into his far-gone eyes
And then the glass rises up again
The circle is complete
The cycle ended
Until the next coin drops

I see the stars through a telescope
A slivered tube of metal
That cups a piece of frosted glass
Calibrated crystalline
It scatters my vision amongst the stars
Grains of light
Balls of fire
Touching off a finger of corona
A strange filigree of light stretching
From star to telescope
Filling my head with starlight
Bursting my skull, a throbbing migraine
The pain
Reminds me that I
Are here but also there
The same point but far apart
The lord giveth the lord taketh away

To see is to perceive the naked
Peel off the eyelid
With a rusty potato peeler
Expose the viscous fluid to the corrosion of the air
Do you see better?
Unending sight
Blinkless
Without interruption your
Inner eye reflects off
The surface of the outer eye
The two converge
The light becomes the dark
You must realise
It is darkly
As it was in the beginning,
and ever shall be.

The Soul of the Box

Sometimes the body just sits there, floppy
Cupped around that second-hand sofa
The bones jutting into rusted springs
The eyes dangling on
The face twisted to face the television set

There is a relationship, symbiotic in nature
Between man and cathode-ray tube
The two joined in communion
Through physicality and intent
The electromagnetic waves fizzes and spurts
through the air from miles away

But we would otherwise be so much colder
Than now, transfixed by another episode of friends

Blood Theater

The Chainsaw Massacres - The Stage Show.

Yes. It can be done. You can depict chainsaw weilding flesh-flaying, gore-inducing action in a stage show, and look good in the process.

Recently I went to Cell-space, a kind of community-based theater/performance/gallery space, where everything from new-age hippie conferences to pyro-technic gore theater is put on. It 's a bare-bones kind of space with exposed girders and cement.

Whilst I had a little inkling of what was to take place there, the plastic-sheets covering every square inch onf the floor and walls should have given me conisderable fore-taste of what was to come.

The idea is redicuously simple. Construct a simple genre pliece that enables plenty of opportunities to dismember body parts in front of a live evidence, and use that as an excuse to spray the audience with as much fake blood as possible. The blood, really some kind of watermelon kool-aid had a sticky sweet consistency. And considerable ingenuity must have taken place to design the squirting equipment, because there was definitely method in the madness of gushing blood. No part of the audience was spared, as the blood was squirted to all corners of the room.

Of course, I had bought a plastic bag to be safe, but even then the bag couldn't keep the blood out. I walked out of the theater with streaks of red all down my eyes and splotches that looked like chicken pox covering my face.

Asian-americans breaking through the entertainment barrier

America is a white-bread nation, at least culturally, and on television. Sure, cultural others are shown on television, but they are often parded out as cultural stereotypes - Indian grocer, Chinese over-achieving academic automatons, Japanese ninjas, black gang-members, gay-queens.

But over the years, certain groups have managed to detach themselves from being token stock characters, to becoming normalized - acceptable as real characters on television, where their experiences as people trumps their experience as a minority group. Think Bill Cosby and Will & Grace.

The next break-out group is the Asians. My question is then, where are the mainstream Asian-american acts?

Well, I think I found them - on NBC's show "American's Got Talent.", a variety talent show, a kind of uber-vaudeville where the judges include Brandy and David Hasselhoff (think Baywatch for you younger readers).

They are At Last, an asian boy band from LA. They sing great, have great charisma, and are poised to win a major American talent show. They are on the brink of stardom, and if they do, my bet is that they will finally normalize Asian americans on TV.

But best of all, they innovate: they sing accapella harmonies, barber-shop quartet style, fused with human beatbox, and crazy rythmic vocallings.

Can Americans finally embrace Asian-americans culturally?

From the June 26th semi-final (Aint No Sunshine):



Pay attention to the interview that captures their rupture from the old asian stereo-type, and embracing the american entertainment big-time:

"Our family and friends were really suportive of us, in the beginning they were a little hesitant because they wanted us to pursue profession careers ..in law, in medicine, and stuff like that.. but now they're our biggest fan club."

Bonus: watch Brandy's reaction when the boys start singing. Priceless.

The semifinal on July 20 (Let's Stay Together):

The Peace that Passeth Understanding

I swallow it
Without hesitation
It is a squat sausage
Mottled pink and brown so thick and juicy
You would want to suck it down In one desperate gulp

But it is not easy to swallow
It gets stuck somewhere between the stomach and the gut
Caught in the windings of the intestines
The body knows too well
To welcome such pleasure so easily

It has a sharp metallic aftertaste
Like the blood of the body of a child
Crumpled up beside a road made of asphalt
Melting in the noonday sun
The tarry sludge covers your tongue
Licking the staleness of a spent bullet

Though temptuous its tough fibres
Can only be digested strand by strand
Infiltrating the marrow the bone until
The body cannot be said to be a body anymore
But a frame to hold an idea

Mix n' match music

Here's two of music's most uncomprising uncomprimising female performers covering one of the great testosterone tracks of rock n' roll, the Stones' "Satisfaction" - a jarring meld of the avant-garde squeals of Bjork to the rumbling menace of PJ Harvey. Truly brilliant.

Infogami, hosting served just right

I've slowly been transferring my web-site from my academic research group's server (with the rather unweildy url of http://www.dillgroup.ucsf.edu/~bosco , which is now defunct) to my new infogami web-site (http://bosco.infogami.com).

And I've really enjoyed the transition. For what I want to do, infogami fits the bill. Perfectly.

I don't really want to build my own server, I just need somewhere free to store it.

I don't want to write fancy html/ajax/flash widgets, I just want to write text in an attractive template.

I don't want to register a domain name, I want someone to give me a sensible one for free.

Infogami fits all these requirements.

Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have to host it. Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have to register a domain name. Yes it is a wiki, but you won't have to write one single linux shell script. Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have figure out how to install it.

But unlike a wiki, infogami makes it very easy for you to change the template. To make it look good. It's really hard to change the look of some wikis - and boy are they sometimes ugly. This is because Aaron Swartz is a damn fine programmer who keeps it simple, who knows how to keep the templates in infogami simple and flexible.

To all those people who say infogami is just a glorified wiki, you've missed the point about infogami. Infogami aims to cut-out all the headaches involved in setting up the wiki on some computer.

But what I like most of all is the text editor in infogami - it's bare-bores functionality is precisely it's strength. The text editor always sizes to the window size. i like that. I never have that window within a window scrolling rat-race. I love the mark-down format - it's power wrapped in simplicity - it can handle clean text and embed complex html.

I use to be a total coding monkey - I'd spend hours writing code for recreation. Now I am more interested in writing prose - which is, contrary to popular geek wisdom, a much harder thing to do than programming. Very few writers can write to the level of a typical New Yorker article.

Now I just want a web-site where I can put essays and articles up with a minimum of fuss, and which allows me edit easily. The wiki format makes it so easy to edit a file. No more save and ftp on some random computer, requiring multiple clickety-click steps.

Like a good English butler, Infogami serves me when I need something and dissappears into the background when I don't.

Why AMBER sticks a finger in its users eyes.

I use molecular dynamics packages - complex computer software that simulate the action of very large molecules. There are many such packages, but the big ones are amber, charmm, xplor, gromacs and namd.

I have now used namd and amber, and based on that example, I have to say that amber's input files are a piece of shit.

My complaints are:

1. In the input files for AMBER, why do they use crappy variable names for the pre-historic days of FORTRAN naming conventions. No, I really don't what the variable ntxb. It's the 21st century, variables can be longer than 8 characters. They can even be meaningful. They shouldn't give you eye-sore and send you running to the manual everytime you read the input files 1 week later.

2. If you use input files to start a simulation, why do you also have to add up to 10 command line gcc style options? Why can't you have keywords in the input file to convey the same information to the program??? Everything is in one place, and stored? How friggin' hard is that?

3. Putting positional constraints on different atoms is a great idea. In NAMD, you submit a pdb file, and NAMD will read the constraints from the B-factor column. Great idea - simple to use, complete flexibility for the user. And AMBER? You must enter the positional constraints in the input file via a very special "restraintmask" string, and it's not even defined in the right place in the manual - because you have to run to the appendix where they give you an anemic language to describe what atoms you want constrain, using the very special amber numbering convention. Except that you really have to go back to the beginning of the manual to find that you only have 80 characters to describe constraints.

Poke my eyes out please.

Dance around the world

There's something transcendentally beautiful about this video. It's a little like the first time a cosmonaut looked upon the earth and saw that it was a beautiful globe with no boundaries.



more info: wherethehellismatt.com

migrations

Last weekend, I went to the ODC theater with Kim and friends to see some dance. Although there were only three pieces on offer, I saw one of the best, and one of the worst dance performances of my life.

First the good, Paco Gomes Dancers produced one absolutely breathtaking piece. Five dancers and four frames, of differing heights, this was a beautifully flowing piece where dancers would move frames, and frames would move dancers, in order to produce a walkway on stage for the dancer in the black flowing dress. This was a kinetic piece where points of movement would flow back and forh between dancers and across the stage. The choreography struck that perfect balance between the chaos of the dancers manipulating the frame, and the focus of the walker along the imaginary walkway.

The bad was a horribly stilted mixed media piece called the Red Shoes, which used projected video, pillows, and pebbles, lots of pebbles. There was surprisingly little dancing for a dance piece and lots of poetry. Bad poetry. It was this continuous babble of colourless words delivered in a monotonic drawl. Sometimes the movement on the stage seemed to almost connect with the dialogue. Almost. Not that the words made any sense. The beginning was promising, a pile of pillows, from which a dancer emerged. But throwing piles and piles of pebbles on stage, and then sweeping them around in vaguely geometric waves does not a conceptual art piece make. And random images of huts and rocks and beach become wearing after the 10 minute mark.

Forutunately for us, the evening ende dwith Paco Gomes, and we left the theater in high spirits.

butoh in the dark

The other night, I bumped into Paul who was going to Adobe Books to find a travel book for his road trip. Having nothing better to do, I joined him in the hope of passing some time browsing books. Instead, I was to stumble onto one of the most riveting performances I had ever seen in the Mission.

So we putter inside and I noticed a musician playing a clarinet at the counter. We struck up a conversation. "Oh," said Paul, "I used to play soprano sax, but I've always wanted to play the clarinet." The musician replied that he too, used to play the sax, but switched because the clarinet was a much more versatile and flexible instrument. "After all," the muscician said, "you can make a clarinet sound like a sax but you can't make a sax sound like a clarinet. But guys, you should stay hear to watch the butoh show coming up."

So Paul and I sat down and waited for the show to start, not that I had any idea what "butoh" was, except that it sounded vaguely Japanese. The musicien started playing the clarinet, a vaguely oriental sounding melody with any manner of shuffling changes in tempo. As the music trailed off into silence, the room was doused into darkeness.

From the platform that was raised above the entrance of the building, a figure crept out from behind a board, holding the candle in her hands. In the candle light, the face was hideous lit in an overdone chiaroscuro (full body makeup is one of the characteristics of butoh, which made the figure look ever so creepy). Her movements slow and ponderous. She first explored the top of the platform, using slow in careful movements, where every scrape of the floor, every rustle of clothing could be heard.

Very slowly she made her way down the ladder, with a reptilian grace. At one point, one of her headdresses caught on fire. She quickly pulled the piece of flaming clothing off and smacked it onto the ladder until it went out. Once she got to the ground, she made her way slowly down the shape of the bookshore. Adobe books is a small and disorganised space. It had a long narrow shape with pot-plants, sculptures and sofas scattered throughout the length of the shop.

It took a glacial age for her to make it to the end of the room. She would take slow, deliberate steps, sometimes pausing to explore all the objects in the room. She brushed past us, the audience sitting on the sofas as if we were ghosts. She would roll her frenzied eyes over objects in the room as if seeing for the first time.

Finally, she got towards the end of the room, and the clarinet came back to life. She disappeared behind a bookshelf, and I lost track of her. She then ran around the room, her quiet steps making her a moving target that was difficult to pinpoint. This was accompanied by improvised clarinet and some low-level lights. She ran through the room with a primal energy, like a coiled banshee, at times collapsing in the middle of the room, and the springing back up as if a puppet master pulled on a hidden spring. Screaming, crying, staring, I felt I had made contact with an elemental being.

Finally, after a round of traumatic collapsing and rising, the show ended. With barely a flourish, she snapped back into normalcy. The lights go back up.

What had I seen? I recall the chapter on Masks by Keith Johnstone and it seemed that "butoh" is a form Mask work, which encompases commedia dell'arte, voodoo possession, and classic clown work. In mask work, the wearing of the mask shocks the mind into more primitive states of being.

Heart work

My heart is ready to explode
Pumping hard against my ribcage
A rugby player kicking his way out of a sack
With every kick my sternum rattles
Wind rushes into my overworked lungs
Hungrily sucking in oxygen
Softly absorbed by the tendrils lining the surface of the lung
I feel collapse creeping over my limbs
Crimson-scented flow of blood flush my face
I must look like a tomato
I stop
Breathe
Breathe again

"Say It's Possible", copies

I've been watching a spate of youtube, and one of the most wondrous discoveries, apart from some amazing lip-synching, are videos of every boy/girl and his/her guitar rocking out to cover their favourite songs, and dumping them onto youtube for all the world to see.

Now I know this phenomena because I play guitar, and I've had my dreams of being a guitar rock god. However, I've disabused myself of this notion, now facing the third decade of my life, as I now possess a more measured appreciation of skills that I have not. I know that I do not have a good voice. Yet that never stopped me from belting out my songs as if I did.

I'm sure there are thousands of covers on youtube, but I'm interested in this one song, because the song is so new, it's not even been released. The original could even be classed as a homegrown amateur song. The song, "Say It's Possible" was written by one of my favourite californian songmeister, the effervescent Terra Naomi, a singer from Los Angeles, who I discovered from browsing the jungle of music known as cdbaby. I'd even had the pleasure of seeing Terra play live in San Francisco, admittedly not a difficult feat since she is still not so widely known, so much so that all 10 of us showed up to her gig at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco. So if you go to her website, you will find that she is unable to tour the States this summer, and instead, she's exploited the technology available now, in our it wonderland, with youtube, and dls, and digital cameras, and she's put together a virutal tour.

It's a seductively simple idea, Naomi records a song every few days for the whole of summer and putting it on the web. It sounds so simple, but it is probably one of the most fiendlishly ambitious projects an artist can think of: recording in the bedroom, using workable but by no means fancy equipment: this is exposing the singer in all her nakedness - no mixing, no processing, just her voice, her guitar and a digital camera.

One of her songs "Say It's Possible" (and at this moment of counting, she's recorded 14) has managed to make it viral, hitting the front page of youtube at one point, and has received 300000+ page views.



So listening to it, I was surprised to find that within days, had attracted the cover efforts of a bunch of people.

Here's PJsurfs, June 24:



Here's Mac1302, June 26:



Here's briennalauryn June 24:



Here's kol28, on June 27:



Added on June 27, 2006, 11:45 PM
by tlee0129 (3 videos)




Indeed, the youtube flowering of the song has even encouraged the indefatigable Naomi to record a "How to Play" video for the song, and as she says, "It's a really simple song, and some of you have been kind enough to point out..."



Expect to see more attempts in the future. Hmmm, I need a digital camera so I can try my version ... I'm thinking a reggae version, which, it must be said, requires a big hit of the ganga ...

Update: I've created a page to store all the videos, and I'm going to keep it current...

A Rose by any other Name

I was at a bbq yesterday in SF with a bunch of musicians. Asking one of them what band he was in, he said he was in the "Poontang Wranglers."

"The Poo.. what?" I ask.

"The Poontang Wranglers."

"The KooKang Bunglers?" I ask.

"No. The Poontang Wranglers."

"I still didn't get it?" I ask.

"The Poontang Wranglers."

"Oh. The Poontang Wranglers." I finally said.

Then he added, "I think our band name recently got voted onto the AV list of worst band-names."

Colbert's Advice for the Young (tm)

"Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blinder, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us."

"Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. Yes is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes."

~ Stephen Colbert, 2006 Commencement Speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.

notes on filming tv

I recently stumbled onto the filming of a TV pilot, and saw some behind-the-scenes stuff that perhaps you might be interested in.

I found out that the opening credits, where the audience are screaming the host into existence, are actually filmed in the middle of the show. This is because the audience is not actually warmed up at the beginning of the show but will be by the half-way mark (at least you'd hope so).

On TV, when you see the host rush out in front of the audience at the top of show, it's actually the second time that the host has rushed out. We were told this, at the half-time interval by some bearded guy, who was not the MC but popped out onto the stage, who proceeded to explain the filming of the opening sequence to us.

We were told to scream like a bunch of rabid monkies, and, of course, being a bunch of celebrity-starved attention tools, we cheered on the host back on stage to welcome us once again.

The icing on the bike

What is the most important thing on a bike? Well I was recently talking Lizzie, an avid bike-rider, about bike accessories. We were at a party at my place, and she and I and a couple of other people were gathered around the bikes parked in our apartment, where she pointed out the features of her bike. Being a bike-enthousiast, Lizzie's bike was a labour of love, a hand-crafted, custom-made work of art, built around a bright blue Bridgestone frame.

But then she said that it wasn't quite perfect. Not perfect? She pointed me towards her handle-bars. "There," she said, "Can you see that I've only get one set of brake handles". It had one of those curvy handles that look like ram horns. The brake handles flared over the edge of the horns.

"What I really need is to have another brake handles set over the top," as she pointed to the top part of the handles near the fulcrum joining the handle to the frame.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"It's much easier to smoke a cigarette with when you can hold the top of the handlebar with your other hand."

Great 10 min Short Film

Watch this short film - brilliant concept with a unpredictable twist at the end. So good, I watched it again immediately as soon as it finished. A super-super tight script, which may not be apparent on first viewing.

The Preview Bait-And-Switch

Have you ever gone to see a movie, and after watching it, felt utterly cheated because the movie looked nothing like the preview. How was it possible that the only funny thing in the movie were the 3 jokes in the prevew? How was it possible that the preview seemed so much more funny, exciting, scary than the actual movie itself?

Here's how. Devious editors, armed with a magician's sense of misdirection, can make dog-turd seem like a steamingly hot delicious meat-loaf.

The proof? Here's two previews that have been floating around the net, showing how one can cut a classic into a completely different genre, using some brilliant moves on the cutting floor. Watch how music, pacing timing, and montage, can make light into dark, and dark into light.

1. The first is "The Shining" [redux] as redemptive family comedy:


2. And the second, reversing the genre-switch, is "Sleepless in Seattle" as horror:

He Got Game

So I was out on the town with Kim and Petrice, our beloved 6" 11 (I exaggerate somewhat) Nubian Princess. As we were just about to walk into the AMC Van Ness cinema complex, a sultry voice called out behind us, "Hey you, wait, wait a second."

Not knowing who the voice was addressing, we all turned around to see a tall fresh-faced young man, flashing a thousand-dollar smile in the direction of Petrice.

"I justed wanted to say that you are a beautiful woman," he said as he moved towards Petrice, looking straight into her eyes.

A royal flush appeared on Petrice's face.

"Anyway, that's all I wanted to say," he said as he made the most casual of gestures, brushing her elbow with the tips of his fingers. He paused for a fraction of a second, before turning around to leave.

Squealing like a teen-age girl, Petrice cried, "No! No! Wait. Hold on." as she grabbed for his hand, desperate to prevent him leaving.

At this point, I and Kim decide to prudently enter the building, leaving Petrice to tete-a-tete with the stranger. As soon as we got inside to a safe enough distance away, we turned around and tried to make out what was going through the glass doors.

We see the two of them in animated conversation, at one point, he kicks his legs out sideways, eyes a fluttering, whilst she is lost in the glow of male attention.

Then he ups the ante - he kisses her, first on one cheek, then slowly, the other.

They swap numbers and he leaves.

Petrice joins us inside the theater with a self-satisfied smile painted on her face.

"Well what happened?" we asked. "What did he say?"

"Hurrumph," answered Petrice, composing herself, "he said that I was the most beautiful spoken word artist that he'd ever seen. That's interesting becaused I haven't performed in *quite* a while."

"No no no. Tell us what line did he use to make you let him kiss you?"

"Oh," giggled Petrice, "he said my dimples were so cute that he asked if he could kiss them."

Asking to kiss the dimples, oh my, did he have game.

museum of freaks

I while ago, I visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York - this was a disturbing place, where all sorts of under-handed racially offesnsive displays were mounted. Anyway, it's taken me a while to gather my thoughts and photographs, but I think I've polished the piece enough to tell the peoples about it. In this museum, you will find pornographic displays in the name of science:



and displays that play a little bit hard and fast with fantasy:

I, web-designer

This is San Francisco, where cyber-savvy geek-girls sip lattes with the shiny-new-ibooks in seattle-style cafes located in the hispanic neighbourhood. So I guess it was inevitable that I would put together a web-site for somebody. In this case, it was for the lovely Jennifer Hale, girlfriend of roommate Dan. I had to get down-and-dirty with html so that the world can get to see the photographs of Miss Jen Hale. I say: go look at her portrait series, and you might get a sense of what low-down-sf-hipsters look like.

And if somehow you are some big-wig looking for a photographer with style-and-panache, then don't hesitate and contact Miss Jen Hale.