Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, my friends, Romans, and fellow countrypersons. Whatever your nationality, whatever your beliefs, and whatever your traditions and cultures, let’s all pause for a moment to be grateful for the many blessings of our lives. As I’ve said before, thanking others for what they do for you (big or small) is a lost art. Say thank you to your families and friends today. Count your blessings. Whatever our trials and problems, there are folks with way bigger challenges out there. In my experience, those are the most thankful people, too. So let’s all appreciate what we’ve got, in whatever form it takes.

May your Thanksgiving holiday be bright and cheerful and full of friendship and family. May your turkey be scrumptious and may you not beat yourself up about the few extra pounds you put on thanks to the pumpkin pie.

I leave you with a patriotic ditty: America’s “national hymn,” so they say, “God of Our Fathers” performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It’s quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve heard them perform.

To friends and family near and far, I wish to you a Happy Thanksgiving.

To You And Yours

Feast!

This is a day for family and friends and for giving thanks for those things that are really important.

After that, watch football and recover from your tryptophan poisoning! ;> Enjoy the day, my friends!

- joe

In celebration of the local harvest festival Thanksgiving, the day on which people eat way too much meat, carbohydrates and sugar, Held Action is taking the day off. Any time after 2:30 PM EST or so, you’ll find me stretched out on the couch, groaning slightly.

I just mentioned this aspect of the site in the Ask the Olfactory Rescue Service page, but then thought it might not be a bad idea to feature it. In the links towards the bottom left, there’s a Comments RSS link. This comes in handy if you have a news reader for blogs and want to make sure you don’t miss all the discussions going on here, especially as some of them occur on very old threads people may not be subscribed to. I’m not an expert at this stuff, but the way I have it set up is I have an iGoogle page where you can add modules to it to create your own personalized version of Google. One of the modules is a Google Reader which you can add blog and news feeds to read them all at once without having to hop all over the place. Of course my guess is there’s probably other ways of doing this that are more convenient or useful, perhaps a search on blog reader will turn up some other options or anyone who has any ideas is encouraged to share how they do it i in this thread. I can also follow comments from the WordPress dashboard, although I’m not sure how to set this up without moderator status.

As you may have noticed, reviews and features have all but ground to a halt lately here at HeiBräu. Fear not, however – we’re just spending extra time prepping our year-end and decade-end lists. We’re looking to roll out fresh content in the new year and we’re very excited to announce a series of upcoming vodcasts. Stay tuned!

Hello good peoples,

I know some of you hit this site specifically to enjoy the daily round-up of weird and wonderful food-related links. And I appreciate your traffic. However, it being US Thanksgiving this week, most of my sources of links have all become obsessed with turkey.

I’m also having some personal issues (rushed a sick dog to the vet earlier today), and have some things going on over at TasteTO.

So, Food For Thought is on vacation for the rest of the week. It will return next Monday once the food sites can talk about something other than turkey and cranberry sauce.

I’ll try and come up with some original content posts in the meantime (I KNOW… what a novel idea!).

Cheers,
Sheryl

Angela from Organizational Bliss will be at our meeting on December 3rd.  You won’t want to miss it! 

Angela C. Murphy
Organizational Bliss
“The Busy Family’s Professional Organizer!”
www.organizationalbliss.com

Throughout this year we’ve often been reminded that in America’s republican politics it takes the consent of the moderates to get most things done. One side, whichever one it may be, needs to convince the moderates of what it wants done in order to push forward their own agenda. Such is the case in the health care debate. Some may wonder why the Democrats can’t just pass a bill in Congress and simply have it sent off for the president’s signature in no time. After all, they do have a majority in both houses and control the presidency.  However, it’s not that simple.

The House has already passed a health care bill that many would argue is very partisan. However, even in the overwhelmingly Democratic House, they still had to remove funding in the bill for abortions, a big win for Conservatives. The Senate is a much different picture than the House. Yes, there are 60 caucusing Democrats, however there are only 58 true Democrats. Two of the Senators who caucus with the Democrats are really independents. Both have signaled resistance to the current health care reform bill proposed by the Democrats. Other Democrats who represent more conservative areas have also signaled some resistance to the current legislation that is proposed. The Democratic leadership is quickly understanding that it needs to convince the moderates within its own party and beyond that health care reform is what our country needs.

Convincing the moderates was the way the republican system was designed. Madison argued that we needed a government in which no one side could easily dominate the other. The system of government is set up to allow a well though-out course of action in response to a problem, in addition to allow proper time to debate. Some may say it is an inefficient system. Yet, any legislation as large as health care reform should take time to pass and be well thought out. Convincing the moderates can sometimes be hard. But that is the original intentions built into our government, and it’s a step the Democratic leadership will have to figure out how to take in order to get the legislation passed.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/22/health.care/index.html

I’ll be rolling out reviews and notes on:

• Sampler Notes on Ancient Forest (rolling this one out today or tomorrow), Nippon Kodo, Sorig, Lhundup, Maroma and others.
• The final installment of Nikhil’s flavored champa line up (Pineapple, Strawberry, Vanilla)
• Various Nag Champas from Goloka, Nitiraj, R-Expo, Raj Laxmi, Shantimalai, and a couple others
• Various Flora incenses including Sai Flora, Sai Deep, Sai Leela, two from Anand and Darshan Flora
• several more installments in the Primo series (Night Queen, Patchouli, Ruh Khus, Sandalwood, Spice and Yellow Rose in the next one)
• several more installment in the Fred Soll series (mostly the patchouli blends up next)
• cones and ropes from Triloka
• Stupa’s Buddha sampler set
• continuing installments in the Shroff Channabasappa line up (next up 5 more dry masalas)
• Puspa Green Mogra/Parekh Great Himalaya/Mysore Gateway to India
• Lots of Pure-Incense Absolutes
• and a unique Top 20 coming from Ross and I next month

…taking us a ways into 2010. I’ll be breaking from reviewing the last half of December during the holidays (not to mention Thanksgiving weekend coming up) but will still be taking out time note taking and sampling when I can.

Our post today is just a reminder to let everyone know that you can follow our listings as we get them on our twitter account. Access the Clark Real Estate twitter by going to twitter.com/clarkrealestate/. You can then access new listings on your phone, or the web.

If you need any help with twitter, we’re happy to help.

Clark Real Estate

It’s Thanksgiving break!

That means that I get to spend time with the family, the kid, and some family members who come in from out of town.

Yay!!!!

And all I have to work on is two presentations, a paper and about three dozen insects to sort through.

Seriously…I love insects, I really do. They were my first introduction to science and they have some of THE coolest adaptations to life on earth.

Did you know that some Chironomids can actually survive being freeze-dried?

Did you know that some male parasitoid wasps need to develop as parasitoids inside female wasps…eventually killing them?

Did you know that the viruses which disable the immune systems of caterpillars infested by braconid and ichneumonid wasps actually do this by forcing the caterpillar to produce proteins which mimic proteins used in innate immunity and downregulate the immune system by tricking it into thinking nothing at all’s happening?

They’re the most incredible animals on earth!

But, honestly…taking 17 hours at a time sucks. It SUUUUCKS! I can’t say that enough.

Still, though…it’s really rewarding. Like when you look over your grades from one of your classes and realize that you’ve only missed one point in the whole damn lab. Or when you bring up a random subject like codon bias and make one of your professors think of something they never realized before.

Or when a girl in class is waiting for a moth to hatch from her pupa and gets an ichneumonid wasp instead, and you turn dissapointment into wonder by explaining what exactly just happened (from oviposition to eclosion, no less).

Or when you become the life of a party by explaining malaria’s role in maintaining sickle-cell anemia through the heterozygote advantage after drinking half a bottle of Jager.

Then, you realize exactly how incredible everything is all over again.

This semester’s been a lot of fun, but it’s been a lot of work. I’ve been religiously observing no-sleep Tuesdays and Three-Hour Nap Wednesdays. I have absolutely no idea how I’ve kept going, but I have…and it’s been working (kind of).

After this week, I have three weeks of school. Then I start my last semester at Iowa State. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate yet…I’m either going to graduate school or applying for vector biology jobs in Florida.

We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, check out this post about Wolbachia at The Butterfly Diaries! It links back to one of my older posts at my old blogspot blog. Probably not my best science writing, as it was mainly a practice blog…but that’s not necessarily for me to decide. Read it, see what you think.

Oh…and something I never explained in the post they link to: The Toll proteins.

The Toll proteins are proteins which float around in the cytoplasm of a cell bound to each other. When they hit something like bacterial lipopolysaccharide, they separate and move to the nucleus and act as transcription factors for genes involved in various immune system pathways. Insects actually have very similar systems and this part of the immune system is very highly conserved.

Anyways, there’s your weekly smattering of my brainpan onto the interwebs. Enjoy!

Oh…and for the record, I am actually working on something awesome.

This has been a big year for me. I had two books published, travelled to Lisbon, to Italy, Germany, the UK and the US, gave a slew of talks and talked to a slew of folk. And today I was recorded for a nation-wide show, Ockham’s Razor (probably to be broadcast next year) on species.

Oh, and the contract came for a job. As of soon, I will be an Associate Professor at Bond University on the Gold Coast of Queensland (think Miami Beach without the cyclones). This is 2/3rds teaching and 1/3rd research, so I can keep my hand in and write my various next books. But it means that I have to:

1. Arrange to move

2. Find a place to live (in Brisbane; the GC is only an hour’s drive due south)

3. Write two courses straight away

4. Buy a car (for the hour’s drive).

5. Revise and resubmit three papers.

6. Write three book reviews.

All before Christmas. The nervous breakdown is scheduled for December 26 to 2 January.

Now I’m not complaining, and fame and fortune have arrived at last in a modest but satisfying manner, but I may be a little light on the blogging for a while. On the other hand, every time I’ve said that in the past, the Bloggods have sent me material that I have just had to write about. Hang about and see…