Lately all it seems to be is alternating between fluff and doom & gloom.

Economy crashes. Corporate greed. Torture allegations. Swine flu.

Fuck it all.

You want to know about swine flu from an insider?

The stress that the story is generating will likely reduce more life than the virus itself. I feel sympathy for the people who have suffered from an actual infection of the virus, but what the mass media is doing is worse.

There isn’t much that modern medicine can do against a newly evolved strain of virus. It takes time to generate potential medicines and therapies.

That being said, there is a lot that you can do now to prevent spread/infection by viral beasties.

1) Wash your hands. With regular soap. Don’t pay extra for ‘antibiotic soap’. All soap is antibiotic.

2) Sneeze into the crook of your elbow rather than onto your hands if you can manage it. Sure your shirt sleeve may get a little snotty sometimes, but most virus are spread via the things we handle. How often do you use the crook of your elbow to handle things?

3) Stay healthy. Eat right. Get enough sleep. In other words – keep your immune system charged!

4) Enjoy life.

And for me (4) means that I’m switching off Morning Edition. I hope they can bring it back around, but it is unlikely I’ll be there for them in the future.

Been busy with work – on the one hand, it is nice to have someone recognize my talents, but on the other I have no shortage of work. I’ve been handed a few high profile projects, so much of my energy has been focused towards my career of finding new cures. Cancer doesn’t sleep, so why should we?

My remaining energy has been directed towards:

-seeing my first Red Sox game of the year (Baltimore with Josh Beckett picking up the win)

-refinancing my mortage. Yay for our crashed economy!

-taxes. In a word? Ugh. Last year I had 3 different official positions, a stock buy out, I ran my own consulting business and helped to manage my wife’s business. I pity the IRS agent going through my return, but not too much…

-PTO work. I used my mad web skillz to create an on-line auction site for my son’s school. We’ve already raised $2K and there is still 2 weeks of online bidding and an evening live auction. Last year they raised just over $1K, so I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

-Spring/summer sports I’m coaching my son’s T-ball and attending my son’s soccer games.

-Beer brewing – I finally fired up my new all-grain brewing rig and made 10 gallons of an English Pale Ale starting with just 15 lbs of malted grain, 3 oz of hops and a small test tube of yeast. If it tastes as good as it smells during fermentation I’m thinking that my brewing has just stepped into medal territory.

-put a new roof on the porch of my house. Or rather I hired a guy who subsequently hired some Brazilians. Still counts as work, right?

- entertained my Mom for Easter weekend. She’s into Soduko (sp?) now so the weekend went pretty easy…

-reworked my finances so that a savings plan is in place for my son’s education

I’m sure there is some other stuff I’ve forgotten in that long list.

Maybe sleeping?

That’s where I’m off to now.

The NewScientist is a fairly respectable publication, but not completely above April Fool’s Day jokes..  It is half-way between professional journal and public-consumption science.

I was more than mildly amused by an article touting the benefits of masturbation for the relief of spring allergy symptoms.

The theory is that congestion is a result of inflamed & swollen (getting dirty already) blood vessels in the nose.  Ejaculation results in a system-wide constriction of blood vessels, thereby bringing relief to your stuffy nose.  The scientist behind the theory claims that this has benefits over using typical allergy medication.  He points out that it might be difficult to put into practice while you are suffering symptoms in a public place, such as at work (isn’t that what executive bathrooms are for?).

The author states that sex with a partner can also accomplish the same task, but apparently the decongestive relief is for men only.  So if she is sneezing in bed and you are not, tell her to blame science.

Check out this picture included with the article – I am not sure whether the guy is sneezing or masturbating.   Sweaty hair, pained look on face, wadful of kleenex in hand…

I’m in a temporary spot at work working with someone I really don’t like.

I’ve got a 6-pack of Harpoon’s Irish Red.

Fuck it – I’m playing the HORSE tourney tonight in the Blogger Skillz game. Should I make it to the final table, make sure you raise my blinds. I’m pretty much guaranteed to be passed out on my keyboard.

I always forget to sign up for the tournies I want to play. I missed the big game last Sunday and tonight I missed Columbo’s HA.

Next week I’m there for sure. I’m stepping in my time machine now…

Tournament: Brit Blogger Game
When: Sunday’s at 16:00ET
Game: NLHE
Buyin: $5+.50
Password: donkament

Tournament: PPI / Riverchasers Tournament
When: Monday’s at 22:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: $24+2 or token
Password: riverchasers

Tournament: Blogger Skillz Game
When: Tuesday’s at 21:30ET
Game: rotation of non-NLHE games
Buyin: $10+1
Password: skillz

Tournament: The Mookie
When: Wednesday’s at 22:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: $10+1
Password: vegas1

Go to drunkenhippy.blogspot for more information.

*****

Given that most of these games start kind of late and finish way to late I’m probably just going to file this news under b.e.d. (that would be Big Effin’ Deal). It might be fun to back somebody and follow their progress. I bought a share of Absinthe and gained tremendous pleasure by following his table-side tweets. I wish I could have gained tremendous pleasure by rolling around in a pile of cash that he won, but what are you going to do. You gotta watch the cards that your horse is dealt.

****

In other news, one of the first poker bloggers that I read, LuckBox, is back. I’m guessing since the republican voice has been reduced to a cowering wimper he feels a need to return to the mix. Maybe he can write about how they spent the last 8 years fucking up the economy and will spend the next 4 years whining about not being able to do anything about it while the democrats fix it. Over simplification? Sure. But I can’t help myself. Suck it republicans.

*****

In other news, I’m writing about poker! Go figure. I haven’t played in well over a month – I’m having too much fun learning about beer. Also – my day job, curing cancer, is going exceedingly well. We are a few good results away from a tremendous step forward in breast cancer therapeutics. We are also potentially a few steps away from the whole thing folding up. Such is the nature of the beast. Have no fear, breast lovers – no idea ever goes away completely – the good scientist just takes the results and learns how to do it better next time. Unfortunately, the shitty economy makes it tough to look more than a few years into the future for any biotech company. I’m feeling good about all of this anyway. To anyone who said to me when I was squeezed out of my last postion that I would find something better – you were 100% correct. If I was living my life backward I would have left that last position even sooner.

In a paper titled “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network“, a professor of political science from UCSD and Sociology from Hahvad are reporting that happiness is contagious within social networks, but only to the 3rd degree. Which is to say if you hear of a friend of a friend coming into some good fortune, that good fortune is yours as well in the way of a little emotional pick-me-up.

Now neither political science or sociology should ever be construed as real science. Disciplines? Ok. I’m sure they even follow systematic rules that make internal sense. Unfortunately they publish papers with graphs that have error bars so large you could pretty much prove any point you decide is in vogue at the moment.

They do publish some slick plots like this one showing ‘happiness connections’:

And lest you all think me overly cynical, I do believed that the esteemed professors I mock are onto something that very likely taps into the way our brains are wired. Think evolution – we are not so removed from our knuckle dragging ancestors that our neural make-up is indistinguishable from what drove them. It would have been advantageous for our ancestors to have grouped together for both protection and sharing of resources. One could reason that the success of any within the group would be a boon to the entire group. Happy people are more productive. Happy people are more reproductive. Combine those two facts (with some other stuff, I’m sure) and you have a conduit for a certain type of mind to move forward in the species.

And this is all apropos in our hyper connected society. I write here and you read or skim these words. You may know me simply through my words or perhaps we’ve partied in Vegas. Through the hyper-hyper connectivity of Twitter and your network within 3 degrees becomes greater and greater. I can honestly say that I feel happy when one of the people I know through these types of connections has some success. It’s cool to see someone go deep in a big tourney or land an awesome new job or see some similar bit of fortune. Likewise it sucks when someone runs into a bit of trouble – but for the most part that doesn’t push me down as much as success buoys me up.

Had dinner with some family friends last night at a brewpub in Harvard square – good company and the brewpub brought their A game last night.  Their poivre-burger kicked ass and went perfectly with a single-hopped IPA (Amarillo).  I took sips from the flight my wife had picked up.  Helle’s pale ale, chainmail red ale, provision ale, and a kick-ass stout.  The only thing missing was their imperial stout which they’d run out of that evening, but I’d had it a couple weeks previously.  I took a pint of the chainmail red ale – I don’t think I’ve had a better red in recent memory.

This is where I will be over the next few days – New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  We are staying at an inn that has a brewery on premise.  $3.50 drafts every afternoon happy hour so likely I’ll be spending a decent amount of time inside as well…

I just bought this:

For those who don’t brew – this is known in homebrewing circles as a ‘brewing sculpture’. 

It is more than just eye-candy. 

This thing is meant for all-grain brewing and can produce 10 gallons of beer at a go.  Cost for 10 gallons of beer?  About 5 hours of work and roughly $30 in supplies.  The guy I bought it from is an engineer and previously professional brewer.  He used this rig to do pilot brews for some of the local micro-breweries that didn’t have sufficient small-scale capacity.  I also bought a 15 gallon fermentor to take the output from this beastie – I’d been using 6 gallon plastic pails – I knew immediately that they really wouldn’t cut it anymore. 

I’m counting on Absinthe for a big finish in the LA poker classic to help offset the cost of this purchase….