06/06/06

Merry AntiChristmas!

The above has been a paid commercial announcement by the Bush Administration.

I've Rediscovered...

The Joys of Writing Fiction.

You know, the creation of allegories out of the grist of your life. Getting back at all who have slighted you like George Orwell and Dante Aligheri did, and changing the names of the innocent. Fashioning yourself into that Savior that will make Michiko Kakutani wet her pants with glee and get you on Oprah, so you can ensure that you will be banned for life (without having to do something completely Gay like jumping up and down on the couch.)

Yeah, wow, I haven't written on this thing for six weeks and see some of you still check in. Sorry, I've been busy. I thought about about the Bloggin' A Novel thing but decided I was too Old School for that.

Let the rabbits wear glasses! Can I get a Hallelujah?

Summer Movie Preview!

One would think that after a pleasant vacation I should be serene and rested, but I'm not. Rather I'm more restless and antsy than when I left. I think the only consolation I have is that I'd be even more restless and antsy than I am now had I not gone. But then, is this really a bad thing?

I keep on playing over and over in my mind Howard Beale's beautiful mad rants (God bless you, Paddy Chayefsky), they are truer now than they were 30 years ago. I've watched Network again a few times. Yes, "First, you've got to get mad!"Network easily ranks up there with the greats like Citizen Kane as far as timeless twisted beauty goes, and is as prophetic as Terry Gilliam's Brazil (shopping, plastic surgery, torture and terrorism, anyone?) Sadly enough, if this keeps up, the next prophetic movie we'll see coming true sometime soon will be Soylent Green, but hey, at least then the Baby Boomers will start pulling their weight for once.

Paying my taxes the other day I was accosted by a group called "Mothers Against the War." Do you know where your tax dollars are going? they cried. "Yes, I do and I'm none too thrilled about it," I said. But, it's either pay my taxes or go to jail, or have my wages garnished for a lifetime, unless I can get rich enough to hire someone to find the loopholes to evade paying my taxes legally. I don't know about you but paying for an arrogant war of occupation and pigheaded greed under the banner of freedom on the cheap is by no means cheap. Not only are we putting ourselves in a hole by many billions to maybe a few trillion dollars more to our lenders the Chinese and Japanese and the Saudis, but we're also paying for it by squandering the lives and limbs of thousands of American service personnel, along with our reputation by living up to the image of the Global Bully our violent fanatical critics have bestowed upon us. So, where did my tax dollars go the other day? Maybe to buy a couple hundred or so American flags made in a Shanghai sweatshop which will be used to drape coffins curiously avoided by camera lenses.

It boils down to the slogan I've seen more and more "Support Our Troops: Impeach Bush." We can only hope, right? Is the world mad at us for our freedoms, or is it mad at us for allowing such an irresponsible and disingenuous foreign policy to continue? This isn't about conspiracy theories anymore. It's about what it's always been: Opportunistic Deception with a Smile and God's Blessing. We're following more and more in the footsteps of our forefathers the Romans: a great, noble people laid low by inbred and closeminded senior management parroting patriotic ideals and offering idiotic entertainment to appease the fear of the plebs to get them to go along with the raping of the nation's future. Yep, sounds like the evening news to me.

Home again, home again...

I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I ever went away on a proper vacation by myself, if at all. There was the one time I went to New York when I was 19 and lived on the streets for a few days and "slept" at the Port Authority. There was the eight months I went tramping around Europe. There were various trips since then but they were either working vacations, business trips, going to see family, or I was with someone else under the influence of drugs.

So, in short, I haven't had a vacation in a while and needed to get away, be by myself, away from the Ant Colony, clear my head, and do nothing in style. My best friend's mother (who bless her heart sees me as another son I believe) allowed me the use of her place on Martha's Vineyard for the week. I also took an email, Internet and TV vacation. I didn't want to go someplace where I "had" to see anything, and given the fact the island is just beginning to wake from its winter slumber, there was practically nobody there! Seeing that I came from New York, I was outright giddy walking through a town center last Sunday (Oak Bluffs) in the middle of the afternoon and not seeing a single other soul around. It was neutron-bomb-a-riffic.

So, what did I do? I read. I didn't pay mind to a clock. I walked a great deal. I rode a bike practically everywhere else and got more cardiovascular exercise than I have all year. I wrote. I had uninterrupted stretches of time in which to think. I stared at the super clean water. I chilled out at several lighthouses. I gazed at the STARS again. I napped on a hammock while waiting for my clothes to dry on a clothes line. I watched parents let their children run around naked like animals on a chilly beach. I spied a woodpecker and watched birds like a Roman. I rode a bike through Correllus State Forest loudly ranting to my deaf god and laughing like a madman high on life, adrenaline and good blood circulation. I walked five miles on a pitch dark bike path during a lightning storm that made me hoot with joy. I smiled at everyone I came across and said 'hi' to them for no good reason.

I had a good time. And I had enough of it. With all due respect, it's easier to find a good pulled pork sandwich in downtown Teheran during Ramadan than it is to find decent nightlife in Martha's Vineyard in April.

Paul Dana's in a Better Place

Oh, yeah. There was this, too.

I saw the video this morning (and can't find it on the Web, sorry) on CNBC and shouted a very audible "Fuck!" at 8 am in the newsroom when I saw Dana buy it. Wow. Fuck this in my sleep shit. That's how I want it. Excitement. Breathing in. Comparable to a childhood Wheeeeeee!

You know, I like what I do. But Paul Dana is now my hero. Fuck this flying a desk shit. Paul Dana is to journalists what Pat Tillman was to football players.

The Art of Plate Spinning

The climate at work changes weekly. We are a Dynamic and Successful desk, and we are Expanding. Out of the eight or nine of us who started it, only four of us remain, yet we've expanded to over three times our original size in less than two years. There is constantly a new influx of people, and I am relieved from having to train them because I have other responsibilities ever since I basically lost my right hand who handled the majority of biotech, while I handled pharma and devices.

I'm basically the reporter who does drugs so the others don't have to, and for this, I am loved and revered like a gonzo doctor of journalism. I spare others the anxiety of having to wade through double-blind clinical trial data and p values, and figuring out the difference between an FDA priority review and fast-track status. I'm the kind of guy who can rattle things off like "And as everyone knows with atrial fibrillation there's thrombosis," and say "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" ten times real quick. I eventually unravel the Gordion knot of clinical data that goes into HIV trials where reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitors, and integrase inhibitors are seemingly thrown together by Tom Cruise into HIV cocktails and tested head to head, for God knows what the bottom line is. And somewhere I find the time to write the songs that make the whole world sing.

It's been busy lately. I'm a Batman with out a Robin. I had a seemingly relaxing weekend where, like Peter in Office Space, I did nothing and it was everything I'd imagined it to be. I napped, I didn't drink, I read pretentiously caustic contemporary French novelists, I spent time at the Cloisters. That probably explains why I'm exhausted after one day back at work.

And, oh yeah, the assault against business journalism heated up, the FDA bitchslapped minor biotechs one and two on Friday, and I'm sure my stab at greeting card writing ~ "As Wall Street gurus change their ranking/We're sad to see your stock is tanking!" ~ made it here.

Enough of this;)

I Want My KFC

An interesting article from the L.A. Times rebutting the migratory birds theory for the spread of bird flu.

The theory that industrial poultry production, that is, cheap chicken, amplifies the spread of disease among birds is hardly surprising. What happens when a sick kid comes into one of our overcrowded classrooms, or when an office worker with a bad cold "bravely" comes into work because sick days are scarce? That's why industrial "animal farms" often pump their "crops" with more antibiotics than most third world villages will get in a year. And all antibiotics will do (as in your antibacterial soap and your antibacterial tissues and your antibacterial paper towels) is breed a hardier, more evolutionary robust bacteria that will end up going through your immune system like Panzers through Poland.

Then again, antibiotics won't do anything for bird flu, which is a virus. The solution to this, they say, is vaccinate all the birds. But, if you still keep them penned in like Tokyo subway commuters at rush hour, you're just putting a Band-Aid on the gunshot wound, because viruses, hardy little bastards that they are, will mutate into something that survives.

The one thing about bird flu is that it took much of the media attention away from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease. Remember that? That became a big deal because we wanted cheaper beef, so we penned cows into food farms, and to cut down on the cost of their feed, we fed them parts of their dearly departed brothers and sisters that McDonalds had trouble marketing, like brain and spine tissue, which transmitted the disease. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy: it's what's for dinner!

And if you're a vegetarian, don't feel left out, we got something for you too. While we in the U.S. seem not to have too much of a problem eating genetically modified foods (excepting those of us who pay a premium for the flimsy security blanket of shopping at Whole Foods), our European counterparts are still having a wee bit of a problem.

Why? The GM seed companies tell us the stuff is safe, but then, they have no other allegiance except to their shareholders, and the companies have legal departments to protect themselves from any stock-crushing liability. So, just say that 20 years down the road we find that eating genetically modified foods produces some unwanted effect, like, oh, sterility, it's too late. You can't stop 20 years of cross-pollination. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle. Some of those who developed Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human version of Mad Cow, because they ate infected beef didn't find out until a decade later.

So the question once again becomes: How compatible is unbridled market capitalism with the survival of the species, namely, ours?

Poisoning Pigeons In The Park

"All the world seems in tune/On a spring afternoon,/When we're poisoning pigeons in the park./Ev'ry Sunday you'll see/My sweetheart and me,/As we poison the pigeons in the park."--Tom Lehrer

I've always maintained that Autumn was my favorite season. But that has changed. Now it's Spring. I think this is a change for the better. While not technically Spring yet, the fact that it was sunny and in the 60s this morning was enough to get me out of bed and outside to just walk around and breathe the air.

Spring is not only the time of rebirth but it also begins the Roman season of War. The month of March, after all, is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It must have something to do with that added kick of testosterone. As Tennyson wrote in 1842, "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." I believe a 2006 translation would go: "In the spring a (young) man just wants to fuck anything that moves."

Spring also marks the end of the cold and flu season, but as one of my analyst friends told me, migratory birds didn't get the memo. Beginning in October, any tiny little biotech company that made any development toward an H5N1 bird flu vaccine or treatment had their stock jump. Most of these stocks, which I lovingly refer to as "Chicken Little stocks," have retained their value so far, stoked by reports of the global spread of the virus.

It's not a stretch to say that H5N1 will make it into American bird populations by next year, or even this year. Then, you'll want to short your shares of Tyson and Perdue because they'll be too busy investing to turn their operations into something resembling a computer clean room, because you have to be very hungry or an undocumented worker to want to work around chickens that can potentially kill you.

So, for those of you that thought today's blog title was a tad bit sick, wait until someone finds H5N1 in one of those winged rats that paint New York City with their white poo. Adds a new twist to the term "carrier pigeon." It will be an unrelenting, but merry, slaughter with Tom Lehrer as the soundtrack.