Happy Birthday, Bob!

Bob Dylan is 68 years old today.

The Bob Dylan Show (2009)

The Bob Dylan Show

Along with fellow troubadour Willie Nelson, this summer The Bob Dylan Show will also feature John Mellencamp, marking just the second time in the past 24 years that these three performers have shared the concert stage.

bobdylan.com is happy to offer pre-sale tickets for all ballpark shows to its visitors. At each venue, the gates will open 30 minutes early for holders of tickets purchased during the bobdylan.com pre-sale.

Visit this page for pre-sale passwords, which will be posted in the table below before each pre-sale begins. You do not need to be registered or logged-in to see the passwords.

All concert tickets are priced at $67.50 and most shows are general admission, allowing fans to grab a seat in the stands or find a place to watch from the field. Children 14 and under get in free with each adult ticket holder at ballpark shows.

Showtime is 5:30pm and gates open at 5:00. Gates will open at 4:30 for holders of bobdylan.com pre-sale tickets for ballpark shows.

Please check your local listings for on-sale dates and information. More shows will be announced.
Please visit this page regularly for updates.

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After making our reservations for our trip to Seattle August 6-10, I realized that I was going to be gone when Bob Dylan was playing in Grand Prairie, TX on Friday, August 7.

:(

But...since he'll be in Round Rock, TX, on Tuesday, August 4, which is less than 3 hours south of where I work, I can leave work at noon and drive to the concert!

So I got my ticket today! Hurray! (As long as it doesn't rain!)


(identifying/authenticating information blocked out in photo of ticket)

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From John Mellencamp's site:

The Bob Dylan Show Summer 2009 Tour Frequently Asked Questions

WHAT IS THE TICKET PRICE?
The base ticket price is expected to be $67.50 for most shows, plus any required venue and ticket fees. Tickets for shows at venues other than ballparks may vary in price.

WILL THERE BE A PRESALE?
There will be a Mellencamp.com presale for most shows during the week tickets go on sale to the public. Watch the TOUR page for details. Some of these presale tickets may allow early access to the venue. This will allow those ticket holders first choice of their location to enjoy the concert. Because the shows are general admission, Club Cherry Bomb will NOT be doing our own private presale. There are no VIP ticket packages on this tour. Presale tickets for non-ballpark venues will most likely NOT include early access to the general admission areas.

WHEN WILL THE PRESALE START?
We have been advised that the presale will begin the Monday of the week tickets will go on sale to the public. However, at this time, we have not been provided exact times for the presale to start. Please refer to Mellencamp.com and Ticketmaster starting Sunday evening to see when the presale(s) will start.

IS THERE A CLUB CHERRY BOMB PRESALE?
No. Because John is not the headliner on the Bob Dylan Show tour we are unable to offer a Mellencamp Fan Club exclusive presale. Please use the general presale password and links we will post on the TOUR page of Mellencamp.com for early ticket access.

WHAT TIME DOES THE SHOW START?
Gates will open around 5 PM. Music should start around 5:30 PM. Holders of tickets from the presale will gain access at many venues at 4:30 PM.

WILL THERE BE MORE DATES?
There there will be more dates announced for the tour. The initial announcement will be augmented by more show announcements in the coming weeks. The tour will total about 30 dates once all are announced, and will run from early July through mid-August 2009.

IS EVERY SHOW AT A BALLPARK?
No, not every show on the tour will be at a ballpark. Select shows will be at other venue types.

WHAT IS THE PERFORMANCE ORDER?
The expected performance order will be any opening/additional acts playing first, then Willie Nelson & Family, followed by John Mellencamp and his band with Bob Dylan and his band closing the show.

ARE TICKETS GENERAL ADMISSION OR RESERVED SEATING?
Most shows will be general admission seating throughout the entire venue/ballpark. The stage will be located on the field and will point towards the seats, allowing fans their choice of sitting on the field or in the seats of the venue to enjoy the concert. Shows in Dayton, Syracuse, and Sevierville will have reserved seating. Other shows/venues may have assigned seating, check with the venue. Also check with local venue for what items are allowed to be carried in (blankets etc.).

IS JOHN PLAYING AT BOB DYLAN'S OTHER SUMMER SHOWS?
John is not performing on Bob Dylan's other Summer dates at Milwaukee Summerfest or the Rothbury Festival.

Radiant Barriers

(Read the Comments, too)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/031009dnmetradiant.3d76bd0.html

Go, Speed Racer, Go!

I just finished watching this movie on Blu-Ray disc.

Wow!

The story is fun, it's kid-friendly (but with a few PG words) without being too childish for adults, and the visuals are spectacular. My only regret is that I didn't see this in the local all-digital-projection theater when it was released.

It is a visual knockout, with colors so bright and saturated and unreal and over-the-top that you'll just stare at the movie in giddy delight the whole time.

It Was Forty-Five Years Ago Today

Yeah, Yeah, Yes
How the Beatles led a six-year-old boy to contemplate art and life.

By Mark Goldblatt

Forty-five years ago this week—February 9, 1964—the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was six years old and don’t remember much about it, but my mother never tired of telling the story of what happened that night in the Goldblatt household.

We owned one television, a black-and-white Motorola monster built into a battleship of walnut cabinetry that also housed a record player, a radio tuner, and stereo speakers. My five-year-old sister and I functioned as remote controls for my father, who, when he was home, would lie on the couch and exercise absolute dominion over programming. The arrangement was more onerous than it sounds; wherever we were in the house, whatever we were doing, if my dad wanted to change channels, one of us had to run into the living room and do it.

The payoff for our labors came on Sunday night at eight o’clock, when we’d gather around the TV—my mom and dad on the couch, my sister and me on the pine-green carpet at their feet—for Ed Sullivan. It was the only program we watched together, a coincidence of agendas: My dad liked the show enough to watch it straight through, my mom liked the idea of having the family together at the end of the weekend, and my sister and I liked staying up past our usual 7:30 bedtime. On a typical Sunday night, according to my mom, my sister lasted until 8:15; I’d start to doze off 15 minutes later. By 8:45, we’d both be conked out on the carpet, ready to be toted to the bedroom we shared as soon as Sullivan signed off at 9:00.

But February 9, 1964, was different. My mom said you could sense it from the start of the show. There was a buzz in the studio audience that came through the speakers and seemed to take hold of me and my sister. We were suddenly up on our haunches—as skittish, she said, in her Louisiana twang, as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs. She had just enough time to notice the difference before Sullivan introduced the Beatles, and the crowd broke into a torrent of screams . . . at which point, my sister and I rushed the TV. The two of us sat mesmerized, perhaps a foot from the screen, as Paul McCartney began to sing “All My Loving.” We did not move the entire hour, not even during the commercials. Afterwards, when my mother tried to tuck us into our beds, we kept kicking the covers loose. She got us settled down after half an hour, but around midnight, she was awakened by several loud thuds. She ran into our room and found us jumping up and down on our beds, literally bouncing off the walls, making nonsensical noises that sounded vaguely like Beatles songs.

It’s difficult for baby boomers to convey to their children, and now to their grandchildren, the otherness of the Beatles. There was, of course, the sheer size of the phenomenon. Beatlemania was a kind of collective derangement, an abrupt skewing of popular perception. By April, the group held down the top five positions on the Billboard magazine chart and had seven other songs in the top 100. That meant that if you turned on a radio in the spring of 1964, you heard a Beatles song. I remember thinking that the Motorola tuner was a Beatles music player; once I turned it on and heard Louis Armstrong singing “Hello Dolly,” and thought the thing was broken.

But Beatlemania went beyond radio. The girls in my first-grade class would sing Beatles songs as they lined up in the schoolyard, then break into spontaneous screams until the teachers shushed them. I remember a boy named Andrew crying in the back of the classroom because his mother made him cut his hair, which he’d wanted to grow out like the Beatles. My best friend, Eddy, who was a year older than I was, persuaded his parents to buy him a Beatles single—I’m almost sure it was “A Hard Day’s Night.” I remember going over to his house and staring at it. Not playing it; that was too risky. Just staring at it, the paper sleeve and record together . . . and then, holy of holies, the vinyl itself. Eddy set it down on the pillow of his bed, and the two of us stepped back and venerated it.

Even in 1964, though, no one could have predicted that by the end of that decade the Beatles would bear the same relationship to popular music that Shakespeare bore to the English drama of his time: clearly within it, yet curiously beyond it. Just as there is no explicable way to get from Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so too there is no way to get from Leiber and Stoller’s “Jailhouse Rock” or Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” to John Lennon’s “Revolution” or Paul McCartney’s “Helter Skelter.” Given the landscape of musical influences available to the Beatles, what’s the logical precedent for “Eleanor Rigby” or “I Am the Walrus” or “Golden Slumbers” or “Nowhere Man” or “Penny Lane” or “Across the Universe” or the entire Sgt. Pepper album? The question that jumps to mind with each of these recordings is: Where the hell did that come from?

For each generation’s most popular musicians, from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Temptations to (I suppose) Eminem, Mariah Carey, and Beyoncé, there’s a traceable progression to their musical development, a discernible link with what came before. What set the Beatles apart was that they seemed to conjure their greatest work out of the ether—or maybe out of the breath of a muse.

Consider the first verse of “For No One”: “Your day breaks, your mind aches / You find that all her words of kindness linger on / When she no longer needs you.” The subject matter couldn’t be more familiar—in essence, breaking up is hard to do. But the mood is Thomas Hardy. The compactness is William Carlos Williams. The rhythms and internal rhymes are Emily Dickinson, with hints of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. There’s nothing remotely like it in popular music. Now consider that the words were written by McCartney, who was 23 at the time, who set out to write a pop song, not a work of literature, and who, by his own admission, never put as much effort into his lyrics as Lennon did.

When asked once whether he himself was a genius, Lennon replied, “Yes, if there is such a thing as one, I am one.” Whether Lennon was correct is debatable. He was no intellectual giant—“Imagine” is melodic and moving, especially given what we know of his fate, yet it’s as trite and grandiose as a mass-produced sympathy card. His inability to see through Yoko Ono’s bluff art is forgivable, perhaps, as the indulgence of a spouse, but not otherwise. On the other hand, Lennon did have flashes of exquisite clarity throughout his life, even towards the very end, as in the justly celebrated line from “Beautiful Boy”: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” He also had a largeness of sensibility that both reflected and shaped the times in which he lived. Does that amount to genius?

The question of genius becomes less debatable when asked collectively of the Beatles. If there is such a thing, they had it—in spades. Indeed, the strongest evidence of their collective genius is found in the unimpressive post-Beatles careers of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr. Lennon, who had once appeared to some an amalgam of Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Buddy Holly, and Howlin’ Wolf, devolved into Lenny Bruce with a guitar and a howling Oedipus complex. McCartney, who as a Beatle seemed to channel George Gershwin as often as Chuck Berry, became just another Brill Building–caliber singer-songwriter, a harder-edged Neil Diamond. Harrison, who had developed into a great songwriter through osmosis, released one magnificent triple-LP solo album, All Things Must Pass, consisting primarily of a backlog of Beatles-era material, and then a string of ever-more-unlistenable records before hooking up with a group of fellow has-beens, including Dylan and Roy Orbison, to form the intermittently palatable Traveling Wilburys. Starr, after the success of his solo album Ringo, went on to become a nostalgia act, even now peppering his stage performances and interviews with two-fingered peace signs straight out of 1970.

Clearly, in the case of the Beatles, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. But isn’t that a hopeful sign for the human condition? There’s potential in each of us, perhaps, for greatness—a potential that cannot be gauged or accounted for, a potential that cannot be tapped by social engineering, because the formula for its realization is mysterious. (What would a happy childhood, a structured adolescence, and a formal musical education have done to John Lennon?) Of course, the overwhelming majority of us will never be truly great at anything. But the potential for greatness, even if it’s rarely realized, is the first and final counterargument to the grim sterility of materialism. We’re more, the Beatles remind us, than the cells of our bodies, more than the atoms of our cells, more than our drives and appetites, more than our economic relation to the state and to one another.

Under just the right circumstances, we can transcend the deterministic logic of what we are and come to the truth of why we are. Being the Beatles was the why of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr’s lives. It was their raison d’être, their teleology, their lasting contribution.

And it was what had me bouncing off the walls 45 years ago this week.

Texas: Where Innocence Is No Excuse

From http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6243255.html

Commentary: Verdict is still out on innocence as defense
By LISA FALKENBERG
Feb. 2, 2009, 11:31PM

Does innocence matter?

When I posed that question in a column last week on death row inmate Larry Swearingen's innocence claim in federal court, I was unaware of the state of Texas' long-held official answer.

The next day, attorney Gerry Birnberg sent me the link to the transcript of the 1992 oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Herrera v. Collins.

I was appalled by what I read.

The State of Texas argued before the nation's highest court that it was OK to execute an innocent person, as long as he got a fair trial.

The most chilling exchange came when a justice asked the assistant attorney general arguing for Texas, Margaret Griffey, whether the state would maintain that same position if video evidence conclusively proved the person didn't commit the crime. The justice wanted to know: Is there a violation of that person's constitutional rights if he were executed anyway because no court would hear the video evidence?

"No, Your Honor, there is not," Griffey replied.

The justices continued to probe, as if needing clarification of what they were hearing.

If everyone agrees that the evidence establishes innocence, another justice inquired, but the jury just made a mistake, "is there a constitutional right under the Eighth Amendment (which bars cruel and unusual punishment) not to be executed when you're innocent? That's the issue. And you're saying no, there's no such right."

"That is what I'm saying, Your Honor," said Griffey.

Several criminal defense attorneys told me this is still Texas' official stance. But I decided to ask Attorney General Greg Abbott's office.

AG spokesman Jerry Strickland provided an unexpected response. Texas, it seems, has changed its mind.

"No," he wrote in an e-mail. "It would not be permissible for the state to execute a person whom the state knew to be innocent." In a later e-mail, he said such an execution "would constitute a miscarriage of justice."

I asked what led to the change of position, and he wouldn't elaborate. But he pointed out that even under the old thinking, AG's attorneys had worked to clear inmates they felt were wrongfully convicted.

The new philosophy was news to the criminal defense bar.

"It's a breath of fresh air coming from the AG's office, a fabulous development," said James Rytting, who represents Swearingen. "To take the position that you can kill people who are innocent is morally repugnant to anyone's system of justice."

Rytting said the AG's new stance could help his client, who got a stay of execution from a federal appeals court last week based on newfound forensic evidence. The evidence suggests Swearingen was in jail on an unrelated charge in 1998 when the body of 19-year-old victim Melissa Trotter was dumped in the woods.

But several other criminal defense attorneys expressed skepticism that the AG's lawyers, who represent the state in late criminal appeals in federal court, will practice what their office is now preaching.

The AG's office, defense attorneys say, still throw up every roadblock at their disposal, such as procedural errors and strict adherence to deadlines, to derail even credible claims of innocence.

"It's a refreshing attitude," said attorney Patrick McCann, but, "until they start actually waiving appeal and confessing error ... they're just blowing smoke."

"It's a significant change in position," said attorney Dick Burr. "We in the capital defense bar hope they will likewise have a more open-minded approach to the facts showing innocence."

"They're charged to defend the state's convictions," said attorney Stan Schneider. "I don't see them changing. They're going to continue fighting cases."

Still more roadblocks

The question remained: was Strickland articulating a true shift in Texas' approach to innocence claims, that actual innocence actually matters, or just feeding a line to a newspaper columnist?

The proof, I guess, is in the pleadings.

As recently as last month, the AG's lawyers answered Swearingen's compelling claim of actual innocence with the same procedural roadblocks it's employed for years.

Among the reasons the AG's office argued that the 5th Circuit shouldn't consider the merits of Swearingen's claim: It was past deadline.

And, this late in the game, in federal court, being truly innocent isn't a good enough reason to ask not to be executed.

Go, Wen, Go!

From http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/drc/localnews/stories/DRC_tams_0130.18507e59.html

TAMS student advances in contest

08:30 AM CST on Friday, January 30, 2009
By Britney Tabor / Staff Writer

(see my earlier post here)

ALSO ONLINE Scholarship awarded to Chyan

Intel Corp. this week chose Wen Chyan, a student at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas, as one of 40 finalists nationwide for its Science Talent Search.

Wen Chyan Competing for the top prize — a $100,000 college scholarship — the second-year student is the lone finalist from Texas invited to Washington, D.C., in March to present a project he’s re­searched that may help hospital patients avoid bacterial infections resulting from treatment.

Annually, infections af­fect more than 2 million hospital patients and kill about 100,000, officials say. Chyan, 17, said he’s developed a polymer coat­ing for medical de­vices that he believes could help prevent those infections.

The 40 national finalists hail from 17 states and 35 schools. Intel reports that within the last 67 years, seven Science Talent Search finalists have gone on to win prestigious awards such as the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science and the MacArthur Foun­dation Fellowship.

In December, Chyan’s project earned him the grand prize and a $100,000 scholarship in the country’s premier high school research contest, the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Tech­nology.

The Sign of the Cross (1932)

This 1932 film by Cecil B. DeMille, which you've probably never heard of (let alone seen), may be one of the most entertaining Christian movies to come out of Hollywood, even though it includes some things that might raise some Christian eyebrows (e.g., barely-hidden nudity, gratuitous violence and gruesome scenes, etc.). From the synopsis at The Internet Movie Database:

After burning Rome, Emperor Nero decides to blame the Christians, and issues the edict that they are all to be caught and sent to the arena. Two old Christians are caught, and about to be hauled off, when Marcus, the highest military official in Rome, comes upon them. When he sees their stepdaughter Mercia, he instantly falls in love with her and frees them. Marcus pursues Mercia, which gets him into trouble with Emperor (for being easy on Christians) and with the Empress, who loves him and is jealous.

Look for a young John Carradine at 1:53:34 as one of the Christians being led into the arena to be devoured by lions.

It's been nicely restored on DVD by Universal Studios to its original length, including all the "sinful" and gruesome scenes that were cut by the Hays Code. It's available through Netflix.

The ABSOLUTE Worst Movie I've Seen This Year

Earlier this month I wrote about The Worst Movie I've Seen This Year.

Well, just before this year ended, I watched an even worse movie, which now holds the title of The Worst Movie I've Seen This Year:

The Transporter, starring Jason Statham.


It was truly awful.

And to think that they've made not one, but TWO sequels, Transporter 2 and Transporter 3.

I'm sure that there have been even worse movies made, but of the movies I saw this year, The Transporter was a truly time-wasting way to spend 1-1/2 hours of the last evening of 2008.

Rock Band 2

A week ago, Rock Band meant nothing more to me than the fact that our older granddaughter was getting it as a Christmas present from our son for her Nintendo Wii. I'd heard it was "fun," but that and a humor piece I'd read at Salon.com entitled "How Rock Band saved my marriage" was the extent of my knowledge.

I was in Wal-Mart on Wednesday night, Christmas Eve, shortly before they closed for the holiday, and saw that they were selling Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 (my platform; primarily for Blu-Ray movies, though, not games) for $109, a significant savings from their regular $189.99 price (apparently to price-match Toys "R" Us). I thought, "Well, why not? If I don't like what I see in my granddaughter's game after she opens it, I can always return it unopened." I had my son check Amazon.com for user reviews, and it seemed that Rock Band 2 was rated better than Guitar Hero World Tour, so even though I could have bought both and returned one, I went with Rock Band 2. A later at-home search on the Internet seemed to confirm that Rock Band 2 was the better choice for us - plus, if I liked it, it would be the same game our grandkids were getting, so they could play it at their house and ours with no relearning needed.

Well.... Curiosity or anticipation got the better of us that night (that, plus the glowing reviews I'd read), and we opened it up, assembled the guitar and drum set (a very minor procedure), plugged in their wireless dongles, inserted the disc, started up the game, and...

Wow!

We had a blast that night playing... and playing... and playing the game. In fact, after finding out that the Wii version of Rock Band 2 had just been released on December 18, we convinced our granddaughter the next day to hold off on opening her game until I could find and exchange it for Rock Band 2 (which was said by everyone to be an improvement, both in minor and major ways, from Rock Band). After a bit of a hassle, I was able to accomplish that mission on Friday, December 26.

The kids and family were at the house all day on Christmas, and the hit of the day was Rock Band 2. Our youngest granddaughter, age 5, was doing her part on drums and vocals, and surprisingly well for someone who had never played the game, nor seen it before. The grandkids were over again the next day, and... you guessed it, more Rock Band 2!

I can see why it's such a popular party game. Unlike a lot of video games, you are not simply absorbed in and by the game, but are also interacting and visiting with your band members as well as the others in the room, especially if you trade off instruments among yourselves. It's a great social activity.

It's of course mostly, if not entirely, rock 'n' roll, and the lyrics of some of the songs are on occasion not what I like hearing or saying, or having young kids hear or say, so there are some things that some parents might or should be concerned about. But I think those are very minor compared to the sheer fun of the game.

I'd read or heard that Rock Band 2 was one of the hottest-selling games for Christmas this year. Now I understand why.

Rock on, dude!

- - -

FYI, here are the "cheat codes" for Rock Band 2:

PS3 http://www.cheatcc.com/ps3/rockband2cheatscodes.html

Xbox 360 http://www.cheatcc.com/xbox360/rockband2cheatscodes.html

Nintendo Wii http://www.cheatcc.com/wii/rockband2cheatscodes.html

Also:

Rock Band Feature: Harmonix's Top Tips For Drummers

Equipping Your First Fake Plastic Rock Band

Five Accessories to Improve Your Rock Band Experience

Ugo Nation

With all the talk about the U.S. Government taking over the automobile industry (or at least 2 of the Big 3, if not all 3), may I suggest that if this comes to pass, they ought to call the resulting car that rolls off the assembly line the Ugo: The "U" stands for the "United States," of course, and as for the rest of it - well, the name will quickly bring to mind what kind of car the government is likely to produce:

Way To Go, Wen!

From http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/drc/localnews/stories/DRC_Chyan-Award_1208.424de143.html

TAMS student wins national award


11:50 AM CST on Monday, December 8, 2008
By Britney Tabor / Staff Writer

(Wen and his younger brother Yieu were students in the New Testament Greek classes I taught at Denton Bible Church several years ago.)

Wen Chyan, a second year student at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas was named national champion and the recipient of a $100,000 scholarship Monday in the country's premier high school research contest.

Announced about 9 a.m. Central time Monday in New York City, Chyan was named individual winner at the 2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

The 17-year-old beat out five other high school students for the coveted title with his project "Versatile Antimicrobial Coatings from Plasma Deposited Hydrogels and Hydrogel Composites," work that could possibly help hospital patients avoid bacterial infections resulting from treatment.

In his project, Chyan developed a polymer coating for medical devices that could prevent infections caused by bacterial biofilms. Such infections affect more than 2 million hospital patients annually and kill about 100,000.

The polymer, which was created by Chyan, is adhesive and embedded with silver ions that can be used on medical devices such as catheters and breathing equipment, which require a tube to be inserted into a patient.

Broadcasted live via a press conference on the Siemens Web site, Chyan gave brief remarks shortly after the announcement in which he thanked his parents, Jin-Jian Chen and Oliver Chyan, and his mentor, the University of Texas at Arlington chemistry and biochemistry professor Richard Timmons for their support while creating such a project.

"I feel very honored to be [presented] with this Siemens award," he said.

Timmons said he was delighted with the news that Chyan earned top honors at the contest.

“It’s just a great feeling to know him,” he said of Chyan. “Sometimes teaching you get jaded with students who aren’t highly motivated, but when you come across a Wen Chyan, it makes the experience more important.”

Dr. Richard Sinclair, dean at TAMS was overwhelmed with surprise at Chyan’s accomplishment. He said Chyan is the first student from the school to go on and win the contest at the individual level. In 2002, student Charles Halford was named champion at the competition in the team category, he said.

Sinclair said having Chyan be named the 2008 Siemens champion shows what TAMS is about, the students they produce and the kind of research they conduct.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Wen,” he said. “All of us just can’t believe it. It’s just fabulous news.”

BRITNEY TABOR can be reached at 940-566-6876. Her e-mail address is btabor@dentonrc.com

-- UPDATED/REVISED STORY --

TAMS student wins an education

$100,000 scholarship awarded for Wen Chyan’s infection-fighting project


11:57 PM CST on Monday, December 8, 2008
By Britney Tabor / Staff Writer

A Denton student at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science won a $100,000 scholarship Monday for a chemistry research project that could prevent hospital-related bacterial infections.

Announced Monday at New York University, Wen Chyan, 17, was named the top individual finisher in the 2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, the country’s premier high school research contest.

Wen Chyan “[I’m] definitely very excited about the turn of events,” Chyan said shortly before boarding a plane back to Texas on Monday.

Chyan is a second-year student in TAMS at the University of North Texas. Students in the program complete their first two years of college while earning a high school diploma.

In brief remarks made shortly after the announcement, Chyan said he was honored to earn the award and was grateful to his parents and mentors who’ve contributed to his success.

Chyan beat out five other students in the individual category for the coveted title. For his project, he developed an adhesive polymer coating for medical devices that is imbedded with silver ions, which could prevent infections caused by bacterial biofilms. Such infections affect more than 2 million hospital patients annually and kill about 100,000.

The coating could be used on medical devices such as catheters and breathing equipment, which require a tube to be inserted into a patient.

Siemens competition judge W. Mark Saltzman, a chemical and biomedical engineering professor at Yale University, said in a statement that Chyan’s project was a creative idea that required “a proactive approach where cross-disciplinary initiatives” such as electrochemistry, materials science and biology were explored.

“With further testing, these findings have the potential to improve a wide range of medical devices from intravascular devices at hospitals or catheters used in insulin pumps,” he said.

Dr. Richard Sinclair, TAMS dean, was overwhelmed with surprise at Chyan’s accomplishment. He said Chyan is the first student from the school to advance and win the contest at the individual level. In 2002, TAMS had a student named champion at the competition in the team category, he said.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Wen,” he said. “All of us just can’t believe it. It’s just fabulous news.”

Among other privileges, Chyan also will ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange in February with the winners of the Siemens team award, Sajith M. Wickramasekara and Andrew Y. Guo. The pair, both seniors at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, presented genetic research of chemotherapy.

Launched in 1998, the Siemens competition recognizes America’s top math and science students. This year, 1,893 students entered the contest with 1,205 projects. Eighteen students — 12 of whom competed on teams — advanced to the national finals after being named top finalists at one of six regional competitions.

“These remarkable students have achieved the most coveted and competitive high school science recognition,” Thomas McCausland, chairman of the Siemens Foundation, said in a statement. “There is no doubt that these scholars will change the world, starting right now, with their passion for math and science.”

BRITNEY TABOR can be reached at 940-566-6876. Her e-mail address is btabor@dentonrc.com.

ON THE WEB

To view the press conference naming Wen Chyan as the winner of the 2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, visit http://mapdigital.com/events/siemens/sc08.

The Worst Movie I've Seen This Year

I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Blu-Ray disc (via Netflix) Friday night, December 5, 2008. I had skipped seeing it at the theater (even though my wife went) because of the less-than-enthusiastic reviews, and also because the trailer I had seen had horrible-looking green-screen effects (though the film looked better than my memory of the trailer).

I started feeling embarrassed for Spielberg, Lucas, Ford and Blanchett almost from the beginning. Labeouf was about as lifeless as a mannequin.

What a sorry way to end a series.

I don't know which was worse: the story, the dialogue, or the acting. The movie was a "perfect storm" of the worst of each of those elements all coming together and generating this turkey. Watching the featurette on Disc 1, “The Return of the Legend,” about how they came to make the film made me wonder if Spielberg and Lucas have just been extremely lucky that they've made not just one but several good films, because if Crystal Skull is an example of the way they think and what excites them, they are seriously messed up.

It was the Hudson Hawk of Indiana Jones films, except it makes Hudson Hawk look brilliant in comparison.

As far as I'm concerned, there are only three Indiana Jones movies. Crystal Skull is merely a parody - no, a travesty.

Bob Dylan - No. 7 Greatest Singer Of All Time (Rolling Stone Magazine)

Photo: Wilmer/Redferns/Retna
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/24161972/page/7

7 Bob Dylan
by Bono

Born May 24th, 1941
Key Tracks "Like a Rolling Stone," "Lay Lady Lay," "Visions of Johanna"
Influenced John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Conor Oberst

Bob Dylan did what very, very few singers ever do. He changed popular singing. And we have been living in a world shaped by Dylan's singing ever since. Almost no one sings like Elvis Presley anymore. Hundreds try to sing like Dylan. When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.

To understand Bob Dylan's impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in "Howl" to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell's murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It's like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. What's interesting is that later, as he gets older, the fist opens up, to a vulnerability. I have heard him sing versions of "Idiot Wind" where he was definitely the idiot.

I first heard Bob Dylan's voice in the dark, when I was 13 years old, on my friend's record player. It was his greatest-hits album, the first one. The voice was at once modern, in all the things it was railing against, and very ancient. It felt strangely familiar to an Irishman. We thought America was full of superheroes, but it was a much humbler people in these songs — farmers, people who have had great injustices done to them. The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the Voice of a Generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground — these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes — that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.

Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, indignant, jeering, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it's full of wonder and worship. There is a voice for every Dylan you can meet, and the reason I'm never bored of Bob Dylan is because there are so many of them, all centered on the idea of pilgrimage. People forget that Bob Dylan had to warm up for Dr. King before he made his great "I have a dream" speech — the preacher preceded by the pilgrim. Dylan has tried out so many personas in his singing because it is the way he inhabits his subject matter. His closet won't close for all the shoes of the characters that walk through his stories.

I love that album Shot of Love. There's no production. You're in a room hearing him sing. And I like a lot of the songs that he worked on with Daniel Lanois — "Series of Dreams," "Most of the Time," "Dignity." That is the period where he moves me most. The voice becomes the words. There is no performing, just life — as Yeats says, when the dancer becomes the dance.

Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience's face and said, "I dare you to think I'm kidding."

Scratch Out!

I was in Wal-Mart yesterday, and on a whim/chance, I bought a product called "Scratch Out!" barcode 6-89076-62379-7 from viaMarket CP, LLC http://www.scratch-out.com/. I figured it's only $5.98, and if it doesn't work as promised, I can return it as "defective" and get a refund.

FAQs on how it works: http://www.scratch-out.com/so_faqs.php)

So I took it home and gave it the "acid test" (which was the reason I bought it):

My DVD of A Thief In The Night - a decently-acted kind of cheesy '70s Christian movie about "The Rapture" (part 1 of a 4-part/4-movie series) from Russ Doughten films of Des Moines, IA (formerly Mark IV Pictures) - http://www.rdfilms.com/ - had become unplayably scratched. I had tried every method I had of cleaning and "buffing" it from DVD/CD scratch remover/polisher to toothpaste. No luck. It would freeze up about 2/3 of the way through in both my old DVD player and my computer DVD drive. This was the only DVD I hadn't been able to repair to playability using these methods. (I had loaned it out, and when I got it back it was loose in the case and had bounced all around and back and forth and who knows what else it had been subjected to.)

Well ... Scratch Out! fixed it.

I tested it by FFWd'ing it in my PC DVD drive, with no problems. I then did the same thing in my recently-bought PS3 at 120x. No problems. Then I watched it in the PS3 and it played all the way through with no problems.

I'm impressed with "Scratch Out!" (It comes with a microfiber polishing cloth as well.)

(It also seems to have restored a hopelessly-scratched "Barney Sing-Along Fun!" DVD.)

PostSecrets

PostSecret (November 2005)
My Secret (October 2006)
The Secret Lives of Men and Women (January 2007)
A Lifetime of Secrets (October 2007)

The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary.

"You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative."

It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously.

The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional.

As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity.

Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.

About the Author

Frank Warren is a small business owner who started PostSecret.com as a community art project. Since November 2004 Warren has received more than 150,000 anonymous postcards. The website won two Webby Awards in 2006 and this year was named Weblog of the Year at the Seventh Annual Weblog Awards. The PostSecret project also received a special award from the National Mental Health Association for raising awareness and funds for suicide prevention. Warren lives in Germantown, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.

---

I have all four of these books, and find them fascinating. Reading them is like therapy. It makes you realize that most of the people you see and work with and talk to every day are showing you only part of themselves. It also makes you realize that you are not alone with your fears, problems, and secrets, but that others have theirs, too - many of which are just as awful or guilt-inducing or traumatizing as your own, and likely worse.

You'll find yourself saying a prayer for some of these anonymous persons, too.

See examples of the postcards/secrets that are in the books by viewing the sample pages for the books at Amazon.com or by visiting these Websites (warning: some of the secrets deal with mature or adult subject matter, as is to be expected):

The PostSecret Website/Blog

The PostSecret Community

A Google Images search for "postsecret" yields lots of results and examples like these:

Happy Halloween!

My wife and I on our 3,000th wedding anniversary
Someone was offended that a friend posted the above picture on their "Christian" blog, and in defense of my friend, I replied:

Don’t you recognize us? We’re two of the four horses of the Apocalypse! If you look up the original Greek, you’ll see that the word translated as “pale” (as in, "behold, a pale horse" - Revelation 6:8) is χλωρος (chlôros), which means "green" (e.g., "chlorophyll" = "green leaf/blade"). That would be my wife. The first horse is a white horse (Revelation 6:2), and that would be me. We look like death because the four horses bring death and destruction.

And ... My wife’s black hair and my red/orange fiery hair represent the other two horses. See Revelation 6:4 (Greek = πυρρος (pyrros) = fiery-colored - e.g., "funeral pyre") and 6:5. We’re THOROUGHLY and TOTALLY Biblical, and in the best of Reformed/Wesleyan/Lutheran/Catholic/Orthodox theological tradition, too. :^D

Yeah, I was a bit snarky. Sorry.

100,000 Miles, No More Warranty

This isn't our car, but one just like it
This morning our 2000 Hyundai Elantra lost its 10-year/100,000-mile warranty. As I was driving to work on the service road parallel to I-35E South just past the new Hwy 121 and coming to the Frankford Road 270-degree crossover, the odometer turned from 99999 to 100000.

I hope I don't need any major repair work anytime soon!

What Happens When We Die?

Thursday, Sep. 18, 2008
What Happens When We Die?
By M.J. Stephey

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain.

What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?

When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases —as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.

How does this project relate to society's perception of death?

People commonly perceive death as being a moment — you're either dead or you're alive. And that's a social definition we have. But the clinical definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light into someone's pupil, it's to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem, and that's the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn't work, then that means that the brain itself isn't working. At that point, I'll call a nurse into the room so I can certify that this patient is dead. Fifty years ago, people couldn't survive after that.

How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?

Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now — who knows if they'll ever make it to the market — that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine you fast-forward to 10 years down the line; and you've given a patient, whose heart has just stopped, this amazing drug; and actually what it does is, it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

But what is happening to the individual at that time? What's really going on? Because there is a lack of blood flow, the cells go into a kind of a frenzy to keep themselves alive. And within about 5 min. or so they start to damage or change. After an hour or so the damage is so great that even if we restart the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable, because the cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it's not a moment; it's a process that actually begins when the heart stops and culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What's going on to a person's mind? What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death? Does that cease immediately as soon as the heart stops? Does it cease activity within the first 2 sec., the first 2 min.? Because we know that cells are continuously changing at that time. Does it stop after 10 min., after half an hour, after an hour? And at this point we don't know.

What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?

Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than 10 years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened, and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.

Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours?

Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that, well, when you die, you die; that's it. Death is a moment — you know you're either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically valid, but they're social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of motion, and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was out there in the universe. When we look at the world around us, Newtonian physics is perfectly sufficient. It explains most things that we deal with. But then it was discovered that actually when you look at motion at really small levels — beyond the level of the atoms — Newton's laws no longer apply. A new physics was needed, hence, we eventually ended up with quantum physics. It caused a lot of controversy — even Einstein himself didn't believe in it.

Now, if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in 99% of circumstances we can't separate the mind and brain; they work at the exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the Big Bang, the very beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us. Does something continue?

From:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html

I Saw Bob Dylan

Friday, August 28, 7:30 p.m., Uptown Theater, Kansas City, Missouri.

Cameras were not allowed (though some people sneaked theirs in; at times it pays to have a slim pocket digital camera!), otherwise I'd post some pictures.

Here is a review: http://backtorockville.typepad.com/back_to_rockville/2008/08/review-bob-dyla.html and some comments by people who attended: http://www.bobdylan.com/#/tour/2008-08-28-uptown-theater

What Michael Phelps Eats

PHELPS' PIG SECRET: HE'S BOY GORGE
By CLEMENTE LISI with Post Wire Services

August 13, 2008 --

Swimming sensation Michael Phelps has an Olympic recipe for success - and it involves eating a staggering 12,000 calories a day.

"Eat, sleep and swim. That's all I can do," Phelps, who won two more gold medals today, told NBC when asked what he needs to win medals. "Get some calories into my system and try to recover the best I can."

By comparison, the average man of the same age needs to ingest about 2,000 calories a day.

Phelps, 23, will swim 17 times over nine days of competition at the Beijing Games - meaning that he will need all the calories he can shovel in his mouth in order to keep his energy levels high.

Phelps' diet - which involves ingesting 4,000 calories every time he sits down for a meal - resembles that of a reckless overeater rather than an Olympian.

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase "Breakfast of Champions" by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.

He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.

He washes all that down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

Phelps remains on course to at least equal Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals won at the 1972 Munich Games.

At these Summer Games, a typical day for Phelps starts with a 5 a.m. wake-up call. Most of his races have taken place between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET when in China - 12 hours ahead of East Coast time.