The Last Candle

I may or may not have mentioned on my blog recently (too lazy to go back and check — yeah, even a few posts, which would span the last six months) that I’ve figured that by buying a few particular movie collections, I can literally stop buying movies for the rest of my life. Do I exaggerate? Well, will the future bring any films as fine as those brought to the silver screen by the following actor and directors?

• Humphrey Bogart
• Akira Kurosawa
• Hayao Miyazaki

Okay, I do exaggerate about the whole “never buy again!” thing. But only partially: I really do think that I can get away with buying very few movies in the future — at a rate of one film every five years or so, say — by purchasing the greater part of the libraries available from the aforementioned. (As for movies in the past that I could up on: Yeah, lots more of those. On the Waterfront, for instance, just for Brando's car scene. But he’s not going anywhere.)

Accumulating the films of those three, one actor and two directors, will be no small task: Kurosawa’s lent his eye to over thirty films alone. And while he and Bogie are no longer directoring or acting (Kurosawa continues to write), Miyazaki has a fine library himself and is still making films, even in the face of his continued threats to retire.

This time last week, my quest to collect these films hadn't taken a single step. Today, however, the adventure is furthered with a giant leap.

I still have African Queen to pick up — the incredible combination of Bogart and Hepburn on screen at the same time can’t keep me away for long — and To Have Or Have Not is soon to be watched. But talk about a beautiful beginning!

Some of the most amazing paragraphs ever written, for multiple reasons (via Instapundit):

Investigators led by Douglas Cowan, PhD, a cell biologist in Children's Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, wanted to create a biological substitute for the AV node that would work in patients who have defective atrioventricular conduction [read: they need a pacemaker]. “The idea was that rather than using a pacemaker, we could create an electrical conduit to connect the atria and ventricles,” Cowan says.

Cowan’s team, including first author Yeong-Hoon Choi in Children’s Department of Cardiac Surgery, obtained skeletal muscle from rats and isolated muscle precursor cells called myoblasts. They “seeded” the myoblasts onto a flexible scaffolding material made of collagen, creating a 3-dimensional bit of living tissue that could be surgically implanted in the heart.

The cells distributed themselves evenly in the tissue and oriented themselves in the same direction. Tested in the laboratory, the engineered tissue started beating when stimulated electrically, and its muscle cells produced proteins called connexins that channel ions from cell to cell, connecting the cells electrically.

When the engineered tissue was implanted into rats, between the right atrium and right ventricle, the implanted cells integrated with the surrounding heart tissue and electrically coupled to neighboring heart cells. Optical mapping of the heart showed that in nearly a third of the hearts, the engineered tissue had established an electrical conduction pathway, which disappeared when the implants were destroyed. The implants remained functional through the animals’ lifespan (about 3 years).

The cutting edge of medical science — hell, pretty much any recent medical science — never fails to boggle. But let’s give a little credit to the physical form, too.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Vagabonds of the Internet: I have an announcement to make.

In the year's duration I've lived in my apartment, the window in my bedroom leaked like a sieve when rainstorms worth any notice passed through. Now, however, a new age has begun. After recent repairs to the window, which, concidentally, took place on my birthday, today's frequent torrents of greyness has confirmed what I once thought was a mirage:

My bedroom window no longer leaks.

No longer do I have to banish myself to the living room when the storm comes, eluding the terrible and continous pit pat pit of drops sneaking into my abode to splatter on the sill. Fat, heavy clouds on the horizon are no longer foreboding offenders, and the cold vist of rain is no longer a destested intruder. They are once again nature's therapy.

I'd like to thank Westwood Apartments and their maintenance staff for their careful and coordinated planning over the past year and the smooth execution of the repairs. There is no doubt that the past three-hundred and sixty-five days were spent poring laboriously over schematics, material comparisons, labor incentives and the lot to make the process and result the absolute best for me, the humble lessee.

I'd also like to take this moment to announce that I have succumbed to the popular Internet and begun a MySpace profile.

Back from sunny California! Been back for a few days, actually, and California is truly sunny.

Sunny, and extremely pleasant. Visiting my sister Beck, brother-in-law Dan, and handsome nephew Charlie was a plain, full-out excellent time. This wasn't a trip like to, say, Washington DC, where you spend all waking hours of the day staring at polishing marble and through glass cases at olde artifacts. For the duration of our five day trip out to San Luis Obispo, the "iternary" (if you could call our lax daily ritual that) was full sight-seeing of the local land, visits to costal parks and places, countryside breezing looking for wineries, meals at midday and strolls to the coffee shop down the street, fab fun wrestling with the nephew, catching up on my Calvin and Hobbes through my sister's collection…and so on. Just all-out generally very, very relaxing and lovely.

And I have pictures. Oh, lots of pictures, yes. But here's the bad news (assuming the pictures part is good news): My main computer, the fun computer that manipulates photos with ease, is toast. The power supply up and died last night after a particularly rowdy game of System Shock 2, and I am currently awaiting Antec's reply on how to get the box humming again, either by support or by replacement. My backup machine is in full stride at the moment — as full a stride as a 750 Duron can make — but until I get organized on it, with software and whatnot, it'll be a few days before the gallery is prepared.

But believe this in the meantime: while the pictures will be fine and dandy and fun, they won't match up the actual grand experience spend in California this past weekend. "Yeah, of course," you say, but really: what a great time it was!

Leavin’ for California in about, oh, ten minutes to see my sister, brother-in-law, and my dashing nephew. The place of reckoning is sunny (like most of California) and peaceful (not so much like California — not the southern part, at least) San Luis Obispo, where the Pacific Ocean is only a few minutes away.

There may or may not be pictures to show off when I get back next Wednesday. We shall see!