The Brilliant Mind of One George Grande

I think I have blogged about this before, but this one will be more in-depth. Baseball season is here again, which means our ears will once again be blessed by the eloquence of "Hi, Hello, and Welcome" George Grande (seen here wondering how he could use this piece of wood on Chris Welsh). If you are not from the Cincinnati area, or don't get Fox Sports Ohio/Cincinnati, then you may not know who this clown is. He is the play-by-play TV announcer for the Reds, and, quite simply, he is an absolute idiot and number one on my list of people I would like to punch in the face (even above Roethlisberger).

My plan for this year is to keep a journal of all the things he says that don't make sense or just flat out leave me dumbfounded and them send him the journal at the end of the year. We are only 10 games into the season and I have only watched 2 games in their entirety, so my sample size for this season is very small. Nonetheless, here are a few of his "go-to's." (Instead of logging them each time he says them I will just get these out of the way from the start.)

• He constantly chuckles at his own "jokes" (most aren't actually jokes)
• He introduces nearly every player that approaches the plate with "well, you all know his story"
  
• He calls Chris Welsh's house "The Ponderosa" at least once a game
• He says "Best Darn Sports Show" instead of "damn"
  
• And (my least favorite) he says "hit good" instead of "hit well" on every ball that is hit somewhat deep into the outfield.
  

(I know there are many more, but I that is all I can think of at the moment).

So, regarding individual, non-staple statements, here is the start of my journal of George Grande quotes:

1-"Barbara Bush is truly one of America’s treasures."

2-"In the WBC (World Baseball Classic) Joey Votto, ironically, went home to Toronto to play for team Canada."

3-"Ironically, if that ball wouldn’t have hit Harang’s glove it would have been a double play." (This one I am not 100% on, but every time he says "ironically" I just assume it is not ironic).

4-(I have to set the scene first for this one, pulled singles through the hole between 3^rd and SS, a left-hander batter then came up and sliced the ball through the same hole>) “After the first two singles “Batter X” also went the other way with a single.”

Well, that's my first installment. For more information on the worst baseball announcer ever, you can visit his myspace page.

TTT Science Beat: Who knew worms could do more for humans than help 'em catch fish, parasites, or computer viruses?

[Worms: now those are some cats with amazing phenotypes! Very elegans... Nani J. Cootsack]

Apr. 17, 2009

Emory Study Yields Clue to How Stem Cells Form

Beverly Clark

The reddish dots show DNA, and the green indicates the presence of the "erasing" enzyme in this dissected worm gonad.

An Emory University study shows some of the first direct evidence of a process required for epigenetic reprogramming between generations – a finding that could shed more light on the mechanisms of fertilization, stem-cell formation and cloning. The journal Cell published the results of the study on the nematode worm C. elegans in its April 17 issue.

"We believe that we have demonstrated one of the processes that erases the information in a fertilized egg, so that the offspring can begin life with a clean slate," says David Katz, lead author of the study. Katz is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of William Kelly, associate professor of biology at Emory and a co-author of the study, and Action Jacksons utilityman.

"One of the most fundamental mysteries in biology is how a sperm and egg create a new organism. By looking at the process at the molecular level, we're gaining understanding of this basic question of life," Katz says.

When a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell, the specialized programming of each parent cell must be erased, in order to form a zygote that can give rise to a new organism. The process by which these two differentiated cells return to a developmental ground state in the zygote – the ultimate stem cell – is little understood.

'An amazing phenotype'

The Emory researchers wanted to test the theory that removal of a particular histone protein modification involved in the packaging of DNA – dimethylation of histone H3 on lysine 4 – is involved in reprogramming the germ line.

They compared successive generations of a normal strain of C. elegans – a microscopic worm commonly used for studying cell differentiation – with a mutant strain. The mutants lacked an enzyme that test-tube experiments have previously shown appears to play an "erasing" role – demethylating histones to remove information from the packaging of DNA.

In the normal strain of the worms, the histone modification the Emory researchers had targeted was not passed on to the next generation, but in the mutant strain the modification continued through 30 generations, and each generation became progressively less fertile.

"That's an amazing phenotype," Katz says. "The organism gradually lost its ability to reproduce. We have shown that when this enzyme is missing, the worms can inherit the histone modification – not only from cell to cell, but from generation to generation."

When the researchers re-inserted the missing enzyme into the sterile generations of mutant worms, they were able to reverse the process: the worms no longer inherited the histone modification, and they regained fertility.

Showing inheritance of epigenetic event

For years, it's been accepted that histone proteins help coil six-foot strands of DNA into tight balls, compact enough to fit inside the nucleus of a cell. Histone modifications have also been known to correlate with gene expression. More recently, researchers have theorized that a chemical change in the histone packaging of DNA, known as an epigenetic event, can be passed on – just as genes themselves can be inherited.

"This study is one of the first demonstrations in a living organism that this theory may be true – that every generation can be affected by an epigenetic event," Kelly says.

"Our work provides some of the best, direct evidence that chemical modifications in the packaging of DNA can be inherited from cell to cell," Katz added. "That indicates that these chemical modifications are not just involved in packaging – they contain information."

Groundwork for stem-cell therapies

A better understanding of the role of histones, and the enzymes involved in their modification, could lead to therapies for everything from cancer to infertility. "Stem-cell therapies are an incredibly promising technology for treating any problem that has to do with defective cells," Katz says. "We're hoping that our work will help this technology to develop."

Additional authors on the Emory study were Matthew Edwards, a research specialist at Emory, and Valerie Reinke of Yale University School of Medicine.

Katz and his colleagues are now building on the results of the study, to see if a lack of the erasing enzyme shows a similar effect in mice.

###

The Results of Me Doing More Sit-Ups

see more pwn and owned pictures

The Hypocrisy of the Teabaggers

Matt Taibbi states the case:

[T]his teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.

...

We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.

Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?

Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit.

The whole Taibbi post is worth a read, especially the part where he imagines teabagging Michelle Malkin.

The white Flo Rida

anthropomorphizing bovine

phor Conway

didn't phish have a song about llamas?

For Those Seeking Spiritual Clarity

... uh maybe best to skip this piece by Matt Taibbi:

The one thing I wonder about is this notion that somehow religions are “more realistic” because they teach children that people are bad. First of all, I don’t think this is really what religions do. In my experience, religion taught something very different: that because two half-naked people with leaves over their genitals named Adam and Eve ate an apple in paradise a billion years ago, I, Matt Taibbi, was somehow a sinner and doomed to roast in the hot flames of hell for a billion years unless I accepted God’s authority. Which was not “realistic” at all, I don’t think, but completely retarded on about nineteen different levels. Moreover, you teach any normal kid the Bible and what he’s going to get from it is not a “realistic” view of the world but a disturbing series of questions to ponder. Like for instance, what does it mean when my own parents tell me, with a straight face, a story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son? You’re a little kid, listening at bedtime in your pee-jays to the story, expecting that Abraham is going to tell God to go fuck himself because he loves his children so much, and be rewarded for doing so. Instead it’s exactly the opposite, the father in the story is rewarded for being willing to carve his innocent son up with a knife, the moral of the story somehow being not that God is an insane murderous psychopath, but that God is just and wise and should be obeyed. When the story is over, Dad tucks you in to bed and says he’ll see you in the morning. Now that’s realism for you.

Happy Easter!

Happy Good Friday

Tackling the Cruelty of the Pet Shop Boys

PETA, this is why people hate you.

What do we really know? [my visit to the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky]

let's find out...

A letter from T Rex to the Galatians

T-Rex belched in my face... and it was good.

I hadn't either. Wow, this kid is no dummy.

Dad explains trilobites, Bible style.

Popularity: temporary. A concept that doesn't compute with the Nani.

"Whatever! I'll do what I want." --eric cartman

collage of all wrong with world 1

collage of all wrong with world 2

collage of all wrong with the world 1

Bitches. People of all shapes & sizes learn how the Fall of Man was woman's fault.

This video display showed a fallen member of the modern world rolling a joint and then getting on the Internet. Oh the humanity.

Am I the only one who sees a Chicago Cubs emblem in here?

After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were visited by E.T.

my wife and I shed our garb and hopped into a display

Noah, how could you save the dinosaurs and not us!?

Mennonite parents approve of this entertainment

Huh! I didn't know this. How wonderful.

Come to think of it, we may still be living with dinosaurs. The ones in this picture are finding out how Noah was able to fit all their dinosaur ancestors on the Ark. Great work, Noah!

The Celebration Got A Little Out of Control ....

His Syracuse teammates rush to give Eric Devendorf a Rusty Trombone:


If that's what he got for the shot that didn't win the game, I wonder what his teammates did after the 6-overtime victory?

what is this?

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Quote of the Day

Dick Polman:

I can’t fathom the new Republican hue and cry about how Barack Obama is supposedly trying to “Europeanize” the U.S.A.

Think about it: If they couldn’t successfully discredit his ’08 candidacy by linking him to our terrorist enemies, how can they possibly discredit his ’09 domestic agenda by linking him to our friends?

1977 Camaro stolen AGAIN

Yes, it has been stolen from me twice, my beautiful rust colored 1977 Camaro LT with a small block 305 v8 and a 3500 turbo transmission.

And this time it was stolen by my insurance company.

A Good Day for Edgeweeds

Yesterday I received this missive from Edgeweeds, who's lamented the loss of his cougar magnet for nearly three years.

CAMARO RECOVERED.

Here is a picture of my rust colored 1977 Camaro LT sitting in the impound lot. Having it towed to mechanic tomorrow. Was stolen in October 2006.

Congrats, Edgeweeds, at least until Stealing Larry takes it from you again.

Quote of the Day

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone reviewing "The Last House on the Left":

Ten minutes into this puke-slick remake of Wes Craven's infamous 1972 revenge classic on rape, torture and murder, I knew this crapathon would give Watchmen a run for its money as this weekend's top box-office bell ringer. Such is the debased state of American moviegoing barely three months into the new year, a time when profits soar and taste sinks to sewage levels.

Sheesh. Bitter much?

English Football Pep Talk

Random Chinese Secrets

My co-worker translates: "run, etcetera, sorry, woods, ball," and "run" is repeated at the bottom though was cropped out of the photo. She says that the whole restaurant is filled with nonsense; I guess you don't need to make any sense when decorating a Chinese restaurant in America.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Stewart lunges, Cramer cowers

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Intro - Brawl Street: Get Read to Buy Low! And Sell Die

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Andrew Sullivan has a GREAT recap:

I watched the Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille. It was, as Fallows notes, journalism.

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