John & Belle Have A Blog

Dreams

When my little sister wished me good night as a child, she would say cheerfully: "don't dream!" This is because both she and I had horrible vivid nightmares all the time. (I'm quite certain I've written about this before, but let's pretend I didn't) I actually did Freudian analysis three times a week for a year or so to get rid of this (really, lying on the couch like in a New Yorker cartoon and everything). It worked! So, if you're troubled by horrible nightmares and have lots of money, I have a solution for you. I thought it was common gospel, though, that other people's dreams are boring, which I why I was surprised to read this NYT article on people forming dream clubs. Basically like a book club only with the members describing their dreams rather than reading a book. As it happens, my own dreams are really interesting. (I know you're thinking everyone thinks this about their own dreams). They sometimes take the form of awesome space operas, like one in which I entered a colony ship in which all the inhabitants were frozen, awaiting revival at their destination. To populate the new world they had created various environments in the unimaginably vast ship. One of them was the pre-Cambrian era, in which I stood on the bare rock and peered queasily into the teeming ocean. Anyway, I came to realize that the ship had made an error, and they had overshot their destination and had now been asleep for thousands of years. I revived them all, and was trying to explain the truth of the matter to them, though they were all very skeptical. Finally I led them to a huge window to look at the completely unknown starfield, which included a bloated red giant, and they contemplated it in silence and horror as they recognized it didn't resemble the view from their destination solar system at all. See, interesting, right? To be fair I haven't had a dream quite that great in some time, but it happens. Anyway, I thought the stereotype was someone else is narrating their dream to you and it's all "and my brother was there, but it wasn't my real brother, and then we went up to this crumbling tower, and blah blah blah." Do you generally feel this way about people's dreams? My helper Tena always wanted to scour mine for numbers to bet on the 4D lottery. Don't think she ever did any better than SGD250 on that, but there you go.

So True

Funny Onion Sports Network video: "Nguyen Thi Buch Thuy: 'Just give me the damn sepak takraw ball.'"

And He Liked It

How much would straight men's homophobia have to die down to get to the point where hot guys would make out at parties and bars in an effort to attract chicks? Not before I am a dirty old woman, right?  I mean, I have known guys to do this, but more because they were wasted and feeling experimental. I brought this up to John and he questioned whether women would think it was hot. My response was a deadpan, "I figure there's got to be room in there for me somewhere." More seriously, yes, women think gay guys getting together is hot.

Buzz

What happens when you give cocaine to bees? I bet you've always wondered.

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.

What’s more, bees exhibit withdrawal symptoms. When a coked-up bee has to stop cold turkey, its score on a standard test of bee performance (learning to associate an odor with sugary syrup) plummets.

“What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse,” said Andrew B. Barron, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia and a co-leader in the bees-on-cocaine studies. “It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.”

This strikes me as a slightly odd way of approaching things although the premise of research in this area is sound. If they could engineer a chemical reaction that made doing cocaine not be fun, then people who had taken this antabuse-type drug wouldn't have fun when they took cocaine? Is that the idea? Or is the thought that it would still be fun but they would stop your brain from just tripping out on how fun it was, thereby engineering non-addictive cocaine? Because it seems to me the result of that would be...more people doing coke now that they're not afraid they'll get hooked? Anyway...

The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, advances the knowledge of reward systems in insects, and aims to “use the honeybee as a model to study the molecular basis of addiction,” said Gene E. Robinson, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author with Dr. Barron, and Ryszard Maleszka and Paul G. Helliwell at Australian National University.

The researchers looked at honeybees whose job is finding food — flying to flowers, discovering nectar, and if their discovery is important enough, doing a waggle dance on a special “dance floor” to help hive mates learn the location.

“Many times they don’t dance,” Professor Robinson said. “They only dance if the food is of sufficient quality and if they assess the colony needs the food.”

On cocaine the bees “danced more frequently and more vigorously for the same quality food,” Dr. Barron said. “They were about twice as likely to dance” as undrugged bees, and they circled “about 25 percent faster.”

The bees did not dance at the wrong time or place. Cocaine only made them more excited about the food they found. That’s like “when a human takes cocaine at a low dose,” Dr. Barron said. “They find many stimuli, but particularly, rewarding stimuli, to be more rewarding than they actually are.”

OK, this just cracks me up. So on the human side, you wouldn't suddenly get into music that was really, you know, bad in some sense, like Supertramp, but you might take some music that is just OK and then think it's the greatest thing ever. Carl Craig, maybe, speaking hypothetically. Or, you wouldn't suddenly be best friends with someone whom you outright dislike, but you might take some aquaintance and decide they were your new bestest friend ever, is that where we're going here? Cue coked-up bees: "OMG you guys these flowers are so killer you've got to come check them out right now!!! Seriously, this will blow your mind! I'm dancin, I'm dancin..."

Now, scientists are studying whether bees begin to crave cocaine and need more for the same effect, like humans.

The testing occurred in Australia, and, Dr. Barron said, “my dean got extremely twitchy about holding cocaine on campus. It’s in a safe bolted to a concrete floor within a locked cupboard in a locked room in a locked building with a combination code not known even to me. A technician from the ethics department has to walk across campus to supervise the release of the cocaine.”

That, Dr. Barron said, for a bee-size supply of “one gram, which has lasted me two years. One gram, a human would go through in one night. I’m not like the local drug lord.”

This reminds me of a story I think I've told before: my stepmom got accidentally scratched on the eye by our dog and when she finally saw the doc at the hospital they dropped some liquid in there and she got instant, total relief from pain. "Wow, that works great, can I take some of that home?" Answer, no, because its liquid cocaine.  Silly anti-drug hysteria. These people don't even want bees getting high. (And yes, I'm aware they're worried more about scientists and grad students, but Dr. Barron's right he's not fuelling a campus-wide party with a gram.)

Out of the Mouths etc.

Now that I explained to Zoë how credit cards work she wants to know why I would ever use one unless I was buying something online. "If you're going to pay it back later you could just buy it later and then it wouldn't cost extra!" Oh sure, she's little miss delayed gratification in the abstract...

Free-Falling

I kind of idly keep track of houses and house prices in Takoma Park, Md, where my mom lives. It's like fantasy life shopping--what if I lived...there? I do it for a few places. We're starting to see some serious reductions, like this four-bedroom house for $225,000. There was nothing in this range a year ago. Sad to say it's slipped into foreclosure during the time it's been on the market and is now a bank-owned REO. Some people haven't gotten the message, though, so we have someone offering a merely OK 1500 sqf house (on a big lot) for $619,000, while just a few blocks away (in Silver Spring, admittedly) you could get a huge, really attractive house built in 1918 for the same price (virtual tour here). These links are likely to decay, so you might have to take my word for it...and looking more closely I see the lot for the one house is 3 times as big as the other. I guess it's nice to have a big yard; my mom's place is on a double lot too. It would be good if you wanted to expand. I don't know, does the land around your house have a lot of value in the context of buying on a city street like that? Maybe it's not so crazy. The takeaway message is that both are still overpriced and should cost $450,000, based on nearby rentals.

Bad-Ass

Bruce Lee can play ping pong with nun-chucks. Real or fake? I think it's real. Via the Derbsterino.

It's Like Hidden Valley Up In Here

...RANCH! This house in New Zealand looks as if it were the model home for a development in say 1965, and then someone's grandma moved in and never changed anything. Not just that, but it is as clean and clutter-free as can be conceived. People, I want this house. John points out that there is likely a similarly preserved ranch home somewhere in his neighborhood in Eugene, which I very much believe. It even sort of looks like John's house, from the exterior. Via.

Anyone want to hear this new Henry Mancini album?
What's that you say? Well, let me just set this orange phone down and check in the 1960 edition of the World Book Almanac, and I'll let you know.
Who wants thirds on mom's famous salad? Cottage cheese, canned pimientos, celery, lime jello--it's all in there.

Gaga

Today I was trying to organize the mysterious piles of stuff that one generates, and I ran across a cute cookbook that my aunt made for us a few years back, with family recipes and reminiscences. Thus I give you the tale...of Gaga.

Martha Crouse Parsons, known as Gaga, was your grandmother Nanny's paternal grandmother, so your great, great grandmother. She was born in Akron, Ohio, where her father was a US Congressman. When he died, she and her four sisters and one brother each inherited a million dollars. (Where did it all go?!?) Gaga went to Smith College and was an avid student. She told Nanny that her college days were her happiest. "In later years," Nanny writes, "Gaga read foreign language books--German, etc.--before lunch. Each evening she finished a mystery novel." [My kind of woman!]

She married Dr. Thomas Parsons, an eye, ear and nose specialist, and they lived in Rochester, New York, in a big house with a lovely, grand garden. She loved her flowers and her gardens. Nanny's father, Tod, was their only child. In 1913 they took him out of Hotchkiss for a year and traveled the world while their house, 974 East Ave., was being built.

According to Nanny, "Gaga loved to take rides in her Cadillac. Each afternoon at 2 o'clock her chauffeur would drive her for about two hours. Sometimes Gaga came at lunch to pick me up with Dickson at the stick of an old electric car. The car was luxurious inside, and had two sconces fitted with cut crystal vases which were always filled with flowers from her gardens or greenhouses."

OK, that's awesome. That's also a long time to spend in the car every day just for fun, but I guess when the sconces are full and Dickson's driving you around, it's all good. This made me think. My paternal grandmother's family lived in Greenwich, CT at this time and also had a chauffeur, whose name I am sadly unable to recall. I heard it because my grandmother Henrietta was very fond of him and he taught her how to drive; I hope my dad remembers. My maternal grandfather's family had some changing retinue of drivers from East Hampton to Cap Ferrat, leaving only my paternal grandfather's family, whom I know almost nothing about. They were not all that rich, though, so they may have had no driver at all, surely a shocking state of affairs in the teens and twenties. The recipe is from Frieda:

Frieda von Bargen was Nanny's family cook. She came from Bremen, Germany. Frieda was one of Nanny's favorite people growing up in Rochester, along with Dickson, Gaga's chauffeur, and Almuth Keller, Allie, her nurse.

Frieda let Nanny help out in the kitchen where she made delicious soufflees, homemade strawberry ice cream, and cookies. She took Nanny skating and was her teenage confidante. Frieda stayed with Nanny's family until Nanny was 17.

Chocolate Cake
1/2 c shortening
1/2 c brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 c granulated sugar
3 squares chocolate
1 1/4 c flour--1/2 teaspoon soda--1/4 t salt--1/4 t baking soda--sift 4 times
1/2 c sour cream
Beat shortening to cream, add sugar and 2 well beaten eggs (not separated), melted chocolate, sour cream. Then add flour etc a little at a time. Put in buttered tins with flour in them. Bake 350 for 20 to 30 minutes

I can't help but feel butter would be better than shortening, but I haven't tried the recipe so I can't say.

Just Got Paid Today/Got Me a Pocket Full of Change

The graphic illustrating Matt's post reminds me of something funny. Have you ever actually burned money before? There's a kind of sick fascination and thrill. I can recall my dad and I having the dicussion of whether there might not be $10 worth of entertainment in the burning of a $10 bill. You think of all the things you could buy and whether it's too late to snuff it out as it curls up into oblivion. I think I have even burned a $20 at some point, while wasted, but only to freak someone out. Wait, I'm not sure that makes it more rather than less comprehensible. See, I wanted them to think I was crazy! Anyway I believe I've just confessed to a crime, but hopefully the Fed is distracted elsewhere. In related news, there's a lot of great ZZ Top songs out there, and you should probably be listening to more of them: Neighbor, Neighbor; Old Man; The Balinese; Pan Am Highway Blues; She's a Heartbreaker...the list goes on and on.