Big Boy and Big Girl in Trouble??

It seems that the goofs who bought the old Big Boy Restaurants (renaimed Julie's Cafes) that I used to work at in Green Bay, have gotten themselves into a bit of trouble...... What Fricking idiots!!!

.........I remember a close call while managing a restaurant up in Mineapolis in the 90s where the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) descended upon the hotel that was next to the restaurant and arrested 3/4 of the housekeeping staff and took them all away for being in country illigaly...

Story (links) on the Green Bay Bad Boy and his wife follows:

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_20813210.shtml

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_20825514.shtml

Check for Green Cards when hiring....and dont make your own folks!!

Where I spend MOST of my time...read on 

A Little background on where I spend MOST of my time

So I am sitting here relaxing on the sofa with the laptop on my lap (thats why they call it a laptop??), listening to some pretty cool 70's music(I know Doug!!) on my Home Theater System (cable music and that Home Theater system sure do make a nifty pair) with Scrappy laying next to me (I dont know how she can sleep so much).... and I thought I would take a look at some of the sites that mention the hotel I work for......

As I was browsing our corporate website, refreshing myself on the various different properties that the company I work for owns and or manages, I was suprised to learn how many different brands are in the company's portfolio....(Marriott/Hilton/ Westin/ Hampton) and more.....

I guess I knew about most of them, but it has been a while since I have looked at the corporate site, or any of our local sites for that matter. The section "About Us" and the "Portfolio" tabs tell a pretty neat story though of a company that I am proud to be a part of for the last six years.

A few links for anyone interested in learning a little bit more of the great company I work for:

http://www.newcastlehotels.com/index.cfm
(corporate website)

http://www.newcastlehotels.com/portfolio_marriott_racine.cfm
(our property link on the corporate site)

http://www.newcastlehotels.com/news_magazines.cfm?year=2004
(Some cool and interesting magazine articles about the company)

http://marriott.com/property/propertypage/MKERW
(our property link on the Marriott.Com website)

http://www.racinemarriott.com/
(my favorite property link)

I also dug around on the net for other mentions of the company and there are quite a few links. It seems that David and Gerry(The two big guys ) have made a name for themselves in the hotel industry. A very competitive industry to say the least...one I am happy to be a part of.

Happy Saturday

The Horror of a Poor kid's last moments

So this dude who is flying an airplane over Lake Michigan and it runs out of fuel and he lands it in the water.
He happens to have a cell phone on him so he calls 911 to let them know of his desperate situation.
How aweful it must have been to be talking to someone like that and then....well listen for yourself..

Jonathan Leiber's 911 call which I have linked to below:

http://www.jsonline.com/multimedia/multiplayer.asp?packageid=774&id=8803

And the story from the Milwaukee Journal Online:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/apr05/321506.asp

Warm Regards for a good Friday....

HO-JO's (see post below) 

Another Blast from my Past

The following story tells of the demise of the last "Howard Johnson's Restaurant" in New York City.
The story brought me back a few years as it was a "Howard Johnson's Hotel and Restaurant" where I got MY first taste of the "Hotel Business" back in 1985. I was living in Green Bay Wis. and for two years worked at a Howard Johnson's in DePere Wis.

Remembering the Deep Fried Clams and busy Friday nights, the counter where hotel guests and locals could get 30 different flavors of icecream, people coming in to take cans of "HOJO's Clam Chowder" to take home with them (and all made from the huge commisary in New York that the article below talks about) and so many other memoires.

The hotel itself was "old and dated" by anyone looking at it, but at that time, it was the best hotel in the world to me. My parents infact, stayed at that hotel one holiday while visiting me in Green Bay.
That hotel is long gone, replaced by god knows what...but I can still remember every detail as if it was just yesterday.

Happy Thursday to all.

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Howard Johnson's, Adieu
By JACQUES PÉPIN
adison, Conn.

WHEN word spread that the last Howard Johnson's restaurant in New York City, in Times Square, would probably close, there was something of an uproar. Though plans are uncertain, brokers say it is likely that a big retail chain will replace it. The idea that this icon of American dining will disappear from the city landscape made me particularly sad, since it was at Howard Johnson's that I completed my most valuable apprenticeship.

I had been in America only eight months when I started working at Howard Johnson's. I moved there from Le Pavillon, a temple of French haute cuisine, where I had been working since my arrival in the United States in 1959. Howard Johnson, who often ate at Le Pavillon, hired me and my fellow chef, Pierre Franey.
It was Mr. Johnson's contention that I should learn about the Howard Johnson Company from the ground up. I worked a few months as a line cook at one of the largest and busiest Howard Johnson's restaurants at the time, on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park. I flipped burgers, cooked hot dogs and learned about the specialties of the house, among them tender fried clams made from the tongues of enormous sea clams whose bodies were used as the base for the restaurants' famous clam chowder. Other specialties I became familiar with included macaroni and cheese, hash browns, ice cream sundaes, banana splits, and, certainly, apple pies.

Howard Johnson's was my American apprenticeship, and it was a long one, nearly 10 years, mostly spent in the company's Queens Village commissary. Mr. Johnson gave me and Pierre carte blanche, and we experimented with different types of stews, like beef burgundy, and dishes like scallops in mushroom sauce. I became comfortable using 1,000-gallon pots and operating enormous machines. Mr. Johnson would often visit us at the test kitchen to taste, ask questions and make suggestions. He might tell us that the last time the sauce was thinner or ask why we were using frozen button mushrooms in the beef stew or why we had changed the size of the clam croquettes.

After working on a standard Howard Johnson's recipe in the test kitchen, Pierre and I would prepare it in progressively larger quantities, improving its taste by cutting down on margarine and replacing it with butter, using fresh onion instead of dehydrated onion, real potatoes instead of frozen ones. We made fresh stock in a quantity requiring 3,000 pounds of veal bones for each batch, and we daily boned 1,000 turkeys and made 10 tons of frankfurters.

Albert Kumin, the famous Swiss pastry chef, soon joined us, working to set up a pastry department that produced 10 tons of Danish pastries a day for the hundreds of restaurants in the chain and thousands and thousands of apple, cherry, blueberry and pumpkin pies each day. This was my first exposure to mass production. I developed products for the Red Coach Grill, which was the Cadillac of the Howard Johnson chain, as well as the Ground Round, and the grocery division of the company, which supplied supermarkets, schools and other institutions.

Pierre and I would occasionally visit the restaurants on the New Jersey Turnpike or the New England Thruway to see how our commissary inventions were faring with the customers. But I loved the restaurant in Times Square especially, and often went there, incognito with my friend Jean-Claude. We enjoyed fried clams, and with them we always drank what was the best Manhattan cocktail in town - it came with a full pitcher for refills alongside the initial filled glass.

Unfortunately, the orange roof with the Simple Simon logo has all but disappeared. Few of the restaurants left - among them the one in Times Square - are still called Howard Johnson's (the apostrophe indicates one of the early restaurants). For me, Howard Johnson's reliable, modestly priced food embodies the straightforwardness of the American spirit.

It saddens me that New Yorkers looking for this kind of gentleness and simplicity will soon have to find it elsewhere. It won't be easy.

Jacques Pépin is the author, most recently, of "Fast Food My Way."
_________________________________________________________________________

See post below..... 

A New Study on Sleep

Fruit Flys and Humans?
What you say?
Well that is the animal (insect) that is being used to conduct a new study on what genes make us sleep and how some people seem to need those 7 to 10 hours a night of sleep, while others tend to get by and do fine on 3 or 4 hours a night. (I am in the latter...but I do enjoy a longer snooze cycle on my days off usually).

Kind of interesting.
Link to the story follows.....

http://www.jsonline.com/alive/news/apr05/322013.asp?format=print

One more day off and then it is back to work on Friday. Toying with the thought of taking a drive up
to Green Bay on thursday afternoon. A short road trip to clear out the cobwebs in the head.
Happy Thursday.......

A Prophecy of the Popes??

Another interesting story to ponder.......
__________________________________________________________________________
Prophecy of St. Malachy Again Fulfilled
25-Apr-2005
In the year 1139, St. Malachy, an Irish bishop with a noted gift of prophecy, visited Rome and, as the result of a vision, wrote a single line of description for 112 future popes.

The list has been strikingly accurate, and the new pope has also fulfilled the prophecy about him. Pope 111 (the second to the last) is described as "Gloria Olivae," the Glory of the Olive. The olive is associated with St. Benedict's order of Bendictines, who are also called the Olivetans. Cardinal Ratzinger chose the name Benedict in honor of St. Benedict, who was one of the original and most powerful evangelizers of Europe. He has dedicated his pontificate to the re-evangelization of Europe.

The manuscript was discovered in the Vatican library in 1590, and its authenticity has been questioned. However, its accuracy into modern times has been amazing.In some cases, it could be that popes have intentionally identified their papacies with the prophecies.
For example, Paul VI, the 108th pope, was called "Flors Florum," or Flower of Flowers. His coat of arms, based around that of the Montini family, contained three fleur de lys.
However, John Paul I, Pope 109, was prophesied as "De Medietate Lunae," Of the Half Moon.
John Paul I became pope on August 26, 1978, when the moon was precisely half full. The date of his elevation could not have been chosen in advance, because the date of the death of his predecessor could not have been known.
Even more convincingly, John Paul II, "De Labore Solis," from the Work of the Sun, was born on May 8, 1920, during a solar eclipse. In St. Malachy's time, a solar eclipse was called a "labore solis," or sun-work, as the reason for eclipses was not then understood.

The 112th and last prophecy states that the pope will be "Petrus Romanus," or Peter the Roman, and he will reign during a time of terrific persecution. His reign will end with the destruction of Rome and the coming of the "terrible judge" of mankind.

Should the prophecy of St. Malachy be taken seriously? It has been, to a lesser or greater degree, accurate about all of the papacies it has described since Clement III in 1143.
This, in itself, is an amazing feat.
________________________________________________________________________
Let us hope that Pope Benny (as I fondly call him) reigns for a while. I really want to see Rome before it is destroyed and I dont think I will be able to afford my trip to Europe for a few years at least.

Thats it for today.....time to go to work
Warm Regards

A Reason not to be too Skinny!!....Yee Ha!

From the New York Times Online Edition....the story speaks for itself:

________________________________________________________________________



April 23, 2005
Fat and Happy
By JOHN TIERNEY

Porkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your diets!
But don't start wearing spandex just yet.

For those of us lacking six-pack abs, this week's report that the overweight live longer is the greatest medical news in history. The authors of this study deserve a Nobel, not just for medicine, but for peace, too.

They have taken away the favorite cudgel of the scolds who used the "obesity epidemic" as an excuse to attack the flabby. The supposedly deadly consequences of fat provided the scientific rationale for the last politically correct form of prejudice.

The fatophobes are fighting on, disputing the new study and arguing that it still shows the fatal dangers of being seriously obese. But they have lost the scientific high ground. Not only do people of "normal" weight die younger than the moderately overweight, the study shows, but thin people die even younger than those of normal weight.

After decades of listening to emaciated ascetics lecture us about diet and exercise, it's tempting to return the favor. We could turn into activists ourselves and stand in picket lines outside gyms with signs proclaiming, "StairMaster = Death."

We could denounce the dangerous role models provided by the zero-body-fat actresses on "Desperate Housewives," or go to Vogue's offices for an intervention with its social X-ray of an editor, Anna Wintour.
"Anna, we want you to put Kirstie Alley on the cover, but that's not why we're here. We're here because we love you and we don't want to lose you. Now, please, for our sake, try this crème brûlée."
But we need to be realistic. One study will not change people's minds, because the crusade against fat was never just about science.

The activists fighting the evil junk-food industry always had a streak of neo-puritanism in them. They cited scientific research to justify their battle against fatty foods, but then campaigned hysterically against Olestra, the calorie-free fat substitute.

Despite the research showing Olestra to be generally safe, the prospect of Americans enjoying fat-free junk food was just too sinful to allow. So was the prospect of calorie-free colas. When soft-drink companies replaced sugar with aspartame, the food police again ignored the research and kept imagining dangers.
It never made scientific sense to terrify women about having flabby hips or thighs, because it was recognized long before this week's study that lower-body fat was medically benign by comparison with the fat at the waist - the kind in the beer guts of men at risk for heart attacks.

In four-fifths of the societies studied by anthropologists, people have sensibly considered a plump pear-shaped body to be the female ideal. Subcutaneous fat was traditionally a sign of fertility and health, a status indicator showing that a woman was not too poor to afford food.
But as food became cheaper and more available, the ideal changed. Avoiding temptation in the midst of plenty became a virtue and a status symbol of the rich. Thinness became a form of conspicuous consumption, what might be called conspicuous conservation.

George Armelagos, an anthropologist at Emory University, calls this shift the King Henry VIII and Oprah Winfrey Effect. In Tudor England, it took hundreds of gardeners, farmers, hunters and butchers to keep Henry VIII fat. In America today, anyone can bulk up without help, but it takes a new set of vassals - personal trainer, nutritionist, private chef - to keep Oprah from looking like Henry VIII.
As long as it's more expensive to be thin, fat will not be fashionable, no matter what scientists find. The survival-of-the-flabbiest theory will not make jiggly hips hip or love handles lovable, so spandex and tube tops are still out of the question.

But the new study does give us ammunition for the beach this summer. The trick is to be subtle when confronted with glistening hardbodies. Don't insult them. Gaze admiringly, and bemoan your own paunch.

Then sigh and talk about the future responsibilities you have - children to raise, the mortgage to pay off, the relatives to support.

When the hardbody looks confused, stop and gaze admiringly again before continuing: "God, I wish I had your body - and your courage. Good for you! Don't listen to those medical nerds. Go for it! Live lean, die young, leave a beautiful corpse."
_______________________________________________________________________
So now I dont have to feel bad when I go to those "Buffet type" restaurants instead of settling for a skimpy plate of pasta at the local "Olive Garden".....Happy Monday

A few posts about my latest book that I am reading.....

"The Earth Chronicles" that I talk about in the following posts (and have mentioned in previous posts) keep me constantly finding more and more things......both in his books, and more recently cooberated by recent astronomical and scientific discoveries......to convince me that there is a different ancient history than the one we have been tought for so long and....

..........A Prediction:
I know that a day will come when the academic world will acknowledge Zecharia Sitchin's genius, and every schoolbook on history and science will begin with a study of Nibiru and our very ancient beginnings brought about by another race of beings from another part of our cosmos.

My Current Reading Material as of April 20th, 2005 

Front Cover of the 2nd book I just finished 

The Earth Chronicles-Book Three and a Vatican Connection

Most of my friends will probably know that I have always been interested in the "Wider Angle of things" and trying to find as much information as possible on subjects I find interesting.

As I wrote previously, I have been reading a series of books by an author named Zecharia Sitchin, called "The Earth Chronicals" that try to explain our (Human Beings) ancient beginings ,via ancient texts and archeoligical evidence being uncovered in the Far East, Egypt and India (including...yes.... the Bible... as one of the many reference points)........ and I have just started book #3 called "The Wars of God and Men".
(I have included cover photos of this book and the one I just finished above this post...click on pictures for a better and bigger view)

Tonight I came across an article that Mr. Sitchen wrote that tells about an interaction he had with the "Holy See" back in 2000.

I found it so interesting that I included the entire text of the article below for everyone's reading pleasure.

__________________________________________________________________________
EXTRATERRESTRIALS? THE VATICAN SAID 'YES'

The death of Pope John Paul II has occasioned widespread discussions about his own stand and the Vatican's position regarding a variety of subjects, from purely theological to social issues. Completely lacking has been any reference to an issue of concern to many, and especially to those interested in the subjects of UFO's, Life on other planets, and Extraterrestrials in general, and in Zecharia Sitchin's writings in particular.

As it happened, it was exactly five years ago, in April 2000, that Zecharia engaged in a public discussion of those very issues with a leading theologian of the Vatican, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, during an international conference held in Bellaria (Bimini) in Italy. The historic dialogue was reported at the time on this official website of Zecharia Sitchin; hereunder is the full text of that report which speaks for itself.

Dialogue in Bellaria
"SITCHIN AND VATICAN THEOLOGIAN DISCUSS UFO's,EXTRATERRESTRIALS, ANGELS, CREATION OF MAN"
Report by Zecharia Sitchin
In what must be a historic first, a high official of the Vatican and a Hebrew scholar discussed the issue of Extraterrestrials and the Creation of Man, and though different from each other in upbringing, background, religion and methodology, nevertheless arrived at common conclusions:
* Yes, Extraterrestrials can and do exist on other planets
* Yes, they can be more advanced than us
* Yes, materially, Man could have been fashioned from a pre-existing sentient being.
The Participants:

The high Vatican official was Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a Catholic theologian with impressive credentials: A member of the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church, a Prelate of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and the Propagation of the Faith, leading exorcist of the Archdiocese of Rome, a member of the Vatican's Beatification Committee, an expert on Demonology and the author of several books. Appointed in the Vatican to deal with the issue of UFO's and Extraterrestrials, he has made in recent years pronouncements indicating a tolerance of the subjects; but he has never before met and had a dialogue with a Hebrew scholar, and gone beyond prescribed formulations to include the touchy issue of the Creation of Man.

The Hebrew scholar was me -- Zecharia Sitchin: A researcher of ancient civilizations, a biblical archaeologist, a descendant of Abraham…The Monsignor and I almost met for such a dialogue last December, but it did not come about. This time we were scheduled to meet in Bellaria, Italy, at a conference whose theme was “The Mystery of Human Existence.” I arrived there with my wife and a score of fans from the USA, on March 31st, scheduled to address the audience of over a thousand the next day. The Monsignor was nowhere in sight; but he was there the next morning to hear my presentation. “I drove the whole night from Rome to hear you,” he said.
-------------------------------------------------------
Sitchin’s Presentation:
My talk, ably translated by my Italian editor Tuvia Fogel, included a slide presentation that added a pictorial dimension to the evidence from ancient times in support of Sumerian texts, on which my eight books based the following conclusions:
We are not alone -- not just in the vast universe, but in our own solar system;
There is one more planet in our solar system, orbiting beyond Pluto but nearing Earth periodically; Advanced "Extraterrestrials” -- the Sumerians called them Anunnaki, the Bible Nefilim -- started to visit our planet some 450,000 years ago;
And, some 300,000 years ago, they engaged in genetic engineering to upgrade Earth's hominids and fashion Homo sapiens, the Adam.
In that, they acted as Emissaries for the Universal Creator -- God.
-------------------------------------------------------
The Dialogue
"We have much to talk about,” Msgr. Balducci said to me as he came forward to congratulate me on my presentation; "I have great esteem for your scholarship," he said.

We returned to the hotel for lunch. Our table was surrounded in a semi-circle by my American fans, intent on not missing a word of the forthcoming dialogue. In the hours-long session, Msgr. Balducci outlined the positions he was going to state, from a prepared text, in his talk the next day. While my approach was based on physical evidence, his was a purely Roman Catholic theological-philosophical one, seeking the spiritual aspects. Yet, our conclusions converged.

Msgr. Balducci's Positions:

ON UFO's. "There must be something in it." The hundreds and thousands of eyewitness reports leave no room for denying that there is a measure of truth in them, even allowing for optical illusions, atmospheric phenomena and so on. As a Catholic theologian such witnessing cannot be dismissed. "Witnessing is one way of transmitting truth, and in the case of the Christian religion, we are talking about a Divine Revelation in which witnessing is crucial to the credibility of our faith.”

ON LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS: “That life may exist on other planets is certainly possible... The Bible does not rule out that possibility. On the basis of scripture and on the basis of our knowledge of God's omnipotence, His wisdom being limitless, we must affirm that life on other planets is possible." Moreover, this is not only possible, but also credible and even probable. '"Cardinal Nicolo Cusano (1401-1464) wrote that there is not a single star in the sky about which we can rule out the existence of life, even if different from ours.”

ON INTELLIGENT EXTRATERRESTRIALS: "When I talk about Extraterrestrials, we must think of beings who are like us -- more probably, beings more advanced than us, in that their nature is an association of a material part and a spiritual part, a body and a soul, although in different proportions than human beings on Earth." Angels are beings who are purely spiritual, devoid of bodies, while we are made up of spirit and matter but still at a low level. "It is entirely credible that in the enormous distance between Angels and humans, there could be found some middle stage, that is beings with a body like ours but more elevated spiritually. If such intelligent beings really exist on other planets, only science will be able to prove; but in spite of what some people think, we would be in a position to reconcile their existence with the Redemption that Christ has brought us.”

"The Anunnaki and the Creation of Man"
Well then, I asked Msgr. Balducci, does it mean that my presentation was no great revelation to you? We appear to agree, I said, that more advanced extraterrestrials can exist, and I use science to evidence their coming to Earth ...I then quote the Sumerian texts that say that the Anunnaki (“Those who from heaven to Earth came”) genetically improved an existing being on Earth to create the being that the Bible calls Adam.

My conclusion regarding your presentation, Msgr. Balducci answered, is that more than anything else your whole approach is based on physical evidence, it concerns itself with matter, not with spirit. This is an important distinction, "because if this distinction is made, I can bring up the view of the great theologian, Professor Father Marakoff, who is still alive and is greatly respected by the Church.
He formulated the hypothesis that when God created Man and put the soul into him, perhaps what is meant is not that Man was created from mud or lime, but from something pre-existing, even from a sentient being capable of feeling and perception. So the idea of taking a pre-man or hominid and creating someone who is aware of himself is something that Christianity is coming around to…The key is the distinction between the material body and the soul granted by God."

"From Anunnaki to God"
Yes, I responded to the Vatican theologian, in my writings I deal with the physical evidence; but already in my first book (The 12th Planet), the very last sentence of the last paragraph raises the question: If the Extraterrestrials "created" us, who created them on their planet?

From this my own thinking and the contents of my subsequent books evolved toward the spiritual or "divine" aspects. The Anunnaki, I have explained, were just emissaries (and that is what the Hebrew word Malachim, translated Angels, means).
"They thought that it was their decision to come here for selfish reasons and to fashion us because they needed workers; but in truth they only carried out the Almighty God's wishes and plans."

If such Extraterrestrials were so involved, Msgr. Balducci said, even by your own interpretation they had to do with Man's physics, body and rationality: but God alone had to do with the Soul!

My second book, that deals with Man's aspiration to ascend the heavens, is titled The Stairway to Heaven, I told Msgr, Balducci, "it seems to me that we are ascending the same stairway to heaven, though from different steps," I said.

We ended the dialogue as friends, determined to stay in touch and continue.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reproduction is permitted if accompanied by the statement
© Z. Sitchin 2005 Reproduced by permission.

________________________________________________________________________

By the way, I just finished "The Stairway to Heaven" and found it to be a very thought provoking read. If anyone wants to borrow it(photo of cover above or below)....feel free to email me and I will get it to you...just make sure I get it back... jrepinski@wi.rr.com


Happy Saturday....

Another Marriott Plus

As most of the people who read my blog know, I work for the Marriott Hotel in Racine.
I have always felt that "our" hiring practices are among the fairest and most diverse in the industry.
And a recent survery shows this to be true....

From an online source:
____________________________________________________________________

For the second consecutive year, DiversityInc magazine named Marriott International one of the Top 50 Companies for Diversity. Marriott, the only lodging company on the list, placed 12th overall, up from 25th last year. A total of 203 companies competed in the survey.
____________________________________________________________________

Happy Wed to all......

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... AKA Pope Bennedict XVI..the 265th leader of the Catholic Church 

The New Pope

There is a new pope in town...

The cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church maintained continuity with the late Pope John Paul II's papacy by electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany as the church's 265th pontiff.
Go to Story

An update on Dia and the Tragic Loss of Her Daughter...one of my employees at work

Imagine my suprise when I opened up the online edition of the "Milwaukee Journal" to catch up on the daily news and saw an article relating to one of my friends and coworkers.....

It seems the Milwaukee Journal has brought fourth some more information on the sad and tragic death of Dia's daughter. Dia works for us partime at the Racine Marriott and I wrote a while back about the tragic death of her young daughter.

Only time can heal her (Dia's wounds), and my thoughts are with her as she goes through what must be a heartwrenching ordeal......

Read on for the full article which is posted in its entirety...along with the link to the article in the paper.

Web Link: http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/apr05/318889.asp

____________________________________________________________________________

ON WISCONSIN : JS ONLINE.COM


Ecstasy caused woman's death

Racine student was drug's first victim in southeastern Wisconsin
By MEGAN TWOHEYmtwohey@journalsentinel.com
Posted: April 15, 2005

Ecstasy has claimed its first life in southeastern Wisconsin, a state in which up to 10% of high school students have admitted trying it or a similar "club" drug.

Donya Wilson, a 28-year-old college student from Racine, died in January when Ecstasy caused her heart to fail and her brain to short circuit, Kenosha County Medical Examiner Mary Mainland said this week.
Mainland said Ecstasy was the sole cause. Wilson had no pre-existing health problems. No other drugs, except a slight trace of alcohol, were found in her system. Friends told police it was the first time Wilson had ever tried Ecstasy.
"People say, 'I'll only try it once,' " Dia Wilson, Donya's mother, said Friday. "But look what can happen."

Mainland has never seen such a case before. Nor have the medical examiners in Racine, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties.
In 2000, a teenager died in Madison after taking Ecstasy.
"It's rare," Mainland said of the death. "But it can happen. There are a whole host of ill-effects from Ecstasy."Manufactured in labs and taken as a pill, Ecstasy, or MDMA, an acronym for methylenedioxymethamphetamine, works as a stimulant.

Its use skyrocketed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Wisconsin and across the country, suburban white youths got hooked on "rolling," a slang term used to describe the sense of release and euphoria that Ecstasy provides.
The drug became a staple of giant dance parties known as raves, even as the federal government produced studies showing that using Ecstasy can cause severe depression and brain damage.
In 2002, the government began asking about the use of club drugs, including Ecstasy, in its annual health survey of high school students. That year, 10% of Wisconsin students admitted to trying a club drug. In 2003, 8% did.

National surveys conducted by the federal government in 2002 and 2003 showed that between 4% and 5% of the population age 12 and older - more than 10 million people - had tried Ecstasy.
Recent studies show that the drug is spreading into minority communities and that people are taking it in more subdued social settings.

Donya, an African-American, fit that picture. Donya had her life together, said her mother and others who knew her. She worked as a nurse's assistant and as a counselor to troubled teens. She was scheduled to graduate from Gateway Technical College in May with a degree in human services.

"She would drink alcohol and occasionally smoke marijuana. But whenever harder drugs were shown on TV, she would question why anyone would do them", Dia said.

On the night of Jan. 1, Donya was at her mother's house for a party, where she chatted with family and friends. Her mother said Donya didn't drink any alcohol and was sober when she headed home at 9 p.m.
A friend told police that he picked Donya up at her apartment around 10:30 p.m. and took her to a hotel in Pleasant Prairie. Along the way, they drank some cognac, he said. It's unclear when Donya took Ecstasy, but by 1 a.m., she was sick, the friend said. The two went to sleep. When the friend woke up later that morning, Donya was dead.

"The brain short-circuited and she suffered cardiac arrest," Mainland said.
The reason, she said: the 0.99 micrograms of Ecstasy per milliliter of blood found in Donya's system. People have died from greater and lesser amounts of the drug, Mainland said.Ecstasy deaths have been documented elsewhere in the United States, but most happened when the drug caused the person to overheat and suffer organ failure.
Proponents of the drug have maintained that the drug is safe if the person stays hydrated and takes it in the right setting.

"There have been some deaths associated with MDMA," a group called DanceSafe says on http://www.dancesafe.org/, a well-visited Web site that offers information about the drug and instructions on how to test its purity. "Usually these have been a result of heatstroke from dancing for long periods of time in hot clubs without replenishing lost body fluids."
Samantha Stefka, 17, of Racine has never tried the drug, but she knows a lot of teenagers who have.
"They don't think it's dangerous," Stefka said.
That the drug could cause a perfectly healthy young woman to have a heart attack contradicts those perceptions.
"It should be a cautionary tale," said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a leading Ecstasy researcher who favors use of the drug for therapy. "Even if most people can tolerate it, every now and then you can get people who have a catastrophic reaction like she did."
John Kidd, a counselor with the Racine Council on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse, agreed.
"Young people have been thinking that Ecstasy is just another thing to do, that it's safe," Kidd said. "But it's not. Someone died from it."

From the April 16, 2005, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Dia and daughter Danya

My friend and employee Dia and her late daughter..photo courtesy of JSOnline.com

Read on.......... 

A Warning of Things to Come?

I am sure by now almost everyone has seen the movie "The Day After Tommorow" which gives a very scary picture of what MAY happen if our world climate keeps moving in the direction that alot of scientists think it is. The movie, of course, contains alot of "Fluff" and enhanced scenarioes of "What if" but this latest little tidbit from the newswires is something that is straight out of that movie.
Read on (From an online news source)
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Horrific Hailstorm Part of Global Warming

In a scenario right out of the film "The Day After Tomorrow," Hailstones "as big as eggs" have killed 18 people and injured 25 in China. In one area, over 25,000 houses were destroyed, along with local crops.
Di Fang writes in the China Daily that some of the hailstones were five inches wide. They caused over 17 million dollars in damage. The storms also brought torrential rain and high winds. They happened on April 12, 2005.

Read the book that started it all—now at a special low price in hardcover!
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Hmmmm........

Unleashing the Bad Boys??

So here we go. Some ideot decides to send a "lethal" virus around the world.
Read on....from an online news source:
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Lethal Flu Virus Sent Around the World
13-Apr-2005

In what was either an accident or a bioterrorism attack, potentially lethal samples of the Asian flu were sent to laboratories around the world by a U.S. testing organization. This flu strain appeared between 1957 and 1968 and killed four million people worldwide. Was this an accident—or an act of terrorism?

Testing kits containing the virus were sent to more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 different countries, from Brazil to Lebanon, in an act that is reminiscent of the anthrax that was sent to the news media and government officials a few years ago. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that ecause the virus hasn't been in circulation since 1968, people born after that date do not have antibodies against it, and current flu vaccines don't protect against it. If it infected just one person, it would spread rapidly.

The virus went to Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the US, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Hong Kong and Japan say the flu strain they were sent has been destroyed.

The flu was sent in contaminated testing kits by the College of American Pathologists between October 2004 and February 2005. In April, US government officials asked the CAP to contact the labs to which samples had been sent, asking them to destroy them. Due to concerns about bioterrorism, this has been kept secret until now. The College of American Pathologists did not violate the law by sending out the kits, but the law obviously needs to be revised.

The H2N2 flu virus that was sent out was classified at Biological Safety Level 2, meaning not particularly dangerous. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is responsible for classifying viruses, says it was in the process of deciding whether to change the flu strain's classification--and then found out that it had sent out all over the world. Was this an accident or, as in the case of the anthrax mailings, is there a rouge terrorist at the CDC?

The WHO says there is no guarantee that every sample of the virus can be destroyed because some of the laboratories may have sent it on to other places. So far, no one has become ill from handling the virus.
But why send out kits like this at all? The same question was asked when it was discovered that anthrax is routinely sent from one lab to another. It turns out the kits are used to see whether labs can correctly identify a particular virus strain, but normally, current flu strains are the ones sent out. The only reason this is safer is that current flu shots will protect many people, plus people who have already gotten the flu will have an immunity against that strain.
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I hope the powers that be can get this one under control...
I feel a sniffle coming on...better go pop some Vitamin C!!
Happy Friday

Some Photos of the High Dessert

A guy who lives out in Rachel Nevada (which is the little town just outside of the Area 51 military installation) , the area I plan on visiting in May while on my vacation sent me the following photos of the area where people will be able to camp during the celebration out there. Now I have seen some very awe inspiring scenery in my life (particuarly last year on my last road trip out west)...and if these photos are any indication of what it will look like out there....I want to go...NOW!!

Note the one photo by the lake...I think I will try to find that exact piece of land and set my tent up right by the tree.....

Happy Thursday....

Four of five (see last photo for explanation) 

Two of five (see last photo for explanation) 

Three of five (see last photo for explanation) 

one of 5 (see last photo for explanation) 

Imagine waking up to these sights....These are some of the photos a guy who lives out in Nevada sent me...these are actual photos of the immidiete area where I will be traveling to in May. He wanted to give me some ideas of where I might be able to camp. The last photo is of the Road that the campout and BBQ will be on......I cant wait 

The State of Wisconsin wants to Kill Cats!!! Ikkes!!

So the latest porkfat coming out of the state of Wisconsin??

Read on:
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(From JSOnline.com)
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/apr05/317585.asp
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Suffice it to say that if this bull (bill) had been passed as recently as a year and a half ago, I and a few others would NOT have our little darling kitties that were so graciously given to us by the "cat woman"...aka...my dear friend Doris.
So as Elmer Fudd says "I tout I taw a puddy cat"??? I wonder what the hunters would wear...white jackets with big black spots on them to make them look like dalmations??

Hmmmm........

This is what this rouge email looks like....Do Not even click on any of it's links!!!! 

FYI: Another Serious Computer Threat out there

A fake Microsoft email urges users to install the latest Windows update, and even links and takes them to a site which sure seems to be a real Microsoft website.....
But it isn’t. And the email actually leads to the installation of a trojan horse file. The payload file is named “Wupdate-20050401.exe", and it will turn your Windows PC into a dedicated spamming machine, at the remote beck and call of the spammer who stands ready and waiting for you to make the click which will install the Wupdate-20050401.exe file on your machine.

And reports indicate that the processes associated with Wupdate-20050401.exe are capable of taking control of 100% of your system’s processes, leaving you and your machine dead in the water.

In addition to the email looking like it comes from Microsoft, (see pic below)and offering a link to a site which looks like a Microsoft site, the timing of this email couldn’t be more perfect, as Microsoft has just announced that they in fact about to release several new patches for Windows. The new legitimate Microsoft Windows patches are due out next Tuesday.
Perhaps worst of all, the email is unlikely to be caught by spam filters, further giving it an appearance of legitimacy. “The e-mail won’t be picked up through anti-spyware software because the .exe file does not contain spyware signatures that would be used to identify it as potentially harmful,” said Martino Corbelli from SurfControl.
So what can the Windows user do to protect themselves, especially knowing that there is a legitimate update coming out in a few days? According to Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Internet security firm Sophos, “Microsoft does not issue security warnings this way. They don’t send updates in an HTML format, so don’t follow the links in an e-mail.
If you want to see if an update is real, you need to go to the real Microsoft Web site and check there.”
And just so you have it handy, the URL for that real Microsoft website is at http://www.microsoft.com/security/.

What if?? Read On.......

I want one!!!

See story that follows....... 

Should We Even Go There???

Ok...so the following article is a bit scary in some of it's implications.
It sure does open up a "can of worms" so to speak. I think science has come
to the point that one day soon, we wont have to even wonder if there is alien life
elsewhere in the universe.... because it will be in our own back yard!

Article follows.....a long read to say the least...but some interesting points pondered.

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The Other Stem-Cell Debate
By JAMIE SHREEVE
Except for the three million human brain cells injected into his cranium, XO47 is just an average green vervet monkey. He weighs about 12 pounds and measures 34 inches from the tip of his tail to the sutured incision on the top of his head. His fur is a melange of black, yellow and olive, with white underparts and a coal-black face. Until his operation, two days before I met him, he was skittering about an open-air enclosure on the grounds of a biomedical facility on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Afterward, he was caged in a hut shared with half a dozen other experimental monkeys, all of whom bore identical incisions in their scalps. Judging from the results of previous experiments, the human neural stem cells inserted into their brains would soon take hold and begin to grow, their fibers reaching out to shake hands with their monkey counterparts. The green vervets' behavior was, and will remain, all monkey. To a vervet, eye contact signals aggression, and when I peered into X047's cage, he took umbrage, vigorously bobbing his head in a stereotypical threat display. Still, it was hard not to stare.
By virtue of the human material added to his brain, XO47 is a chimera -- that is, an organism assembled out of living parts taken from more than one biological species. The word comes from the monstrous creature of Greek mythology -- part lion, part serpent and part goat -- that is slain by the hero Bellerophon. Less fearsome chimeras occur naturally -- lichen, for instance, is a mix of fungus and algae. Most, however, are created in the laboratory by scientists like Dr. Eugene Redmond of Yale University, the soft-spoken, 65-year-old psychiatrist and neurosurgeon who operated on XO47. He set up the St. Kitts Biomedical Foundation on this island because that is where the monkeys are -- an overabundant feral population of them, ideally suited for research. Redmond has transplanted immature human brain cells into a region of XO47's brain that produces dopamine, a neurochemical that is depleted in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease. If the human cells can take hold and differentiate and bolster the monkey's own dopamine-producing machinery, a similar operation on a Parkinson's patient, the reasoning goes, should have an even greater chance of success.

Redmond is of the opinion that the insertion of a few human cells into a monkey brain is no big deal, and most biologists would agree. But many bioethicists and policy makers are alarmed by recent research developments that have made chimeric experiments more common and increasingly capable of producing human-animal amalgamations that are more ambitious, more ''unnatural'' -- and thus more troubling -- than Redmond's vervets.
Driving the surge in chimeric experimentation is the enormous but still untested promise of human stem cells. In theory, stem cells isolated from an early human embryo can transform themselves into virtually any kind of cell in the body, kindling hope that one day they may be transplanted into human patients to provide new tissue wherever it is needed -- heart muscle for cardiac patients, insulin-producing cells for diabetics, nerve cells to repair crushed spinal cords and so on. But there are serious hurdles to overcome before this dream can be realized, including figuring out what controls the differentiation of stem cells and combating their tendency to form tumors. Clearly it is unethical to study the unknown actions of stem cells in human subjects. One obvious solution is to insert the cells into animals and watch how they develop. Depending on what kind of stem cells are used and where they are put in the animal, it may also be possible to pluck some particular human biological feature or disease trait out of its natural context and recreate it in an animal model, where it can be examined and manipulated at will.

While the objections to stem-cell research have largely revolved around the ethics of using human embryos, there is another debate bubbling to the surface: how ''human'' are chimeric creatures made from human stem cells? Fueling the anxiety has been the lack of coherent regulations in the United States governing the creation of chimeras. The President's Council on Bioethics has twice taken up the issue in recent weeks, and Senator Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican and outspoken social conservative, has introduced legislation to restrict chimeric experiments. Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences is expected to issue guidelines later this month as part of a widely anticipated report on the proper use of human stem cells. While the academy's recommendations will carry considerable clout, compliance will be voluntary.

Few people argue that all experiments mixing human and animal material should be banned outright. But where should the lines be drawn? ''Some scientists are completely upset with even a single human cell in a monkey brain,'' says Evan Snyder, a neurobiologist who has conducted chimeric experiments with Redmond. ''I don't have problems with putting in a large percentage of cells -10 or 20 percent -- if I felt it could help a patient. It comes down to what percentage of human cells starts making you squirm.''

Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a co-author of Canada's stem-cell guidelines, squirms not at a percentage of human cells but at the place where awareness begins. ''We have to be sure we are not creating beings with consciousness,'' she says. The very existence of biologically ambiguous creatures could lead to ''inexorable moral confusion'' in a society with two ancient and irreconcilable codes of conduct governing the treatment of humans and animals. That said, all modern genetic research, including the sequencing of the human genome itself, underscores how trivial the biological difference really is between a human being and the rest of life. Ninety-nine percent of our genome is shared with chimpanzees. Thirty-one percent of our genes are interchangeable with those of yeast. Does the nearness of our kinship with the rest of nature make the prospect of a quasi-human chimera among us less of a threat to our collective psyche or more of one?

Chimeras have been with us for some time. In 1988, Dr. Irving Weissman and his colleagues at Stanford University created a lab model for AIDS by endowing a mouse with an entirely human immune system. Since then, scientists have tailored mice and other animals with human kidneys, blood, skin, muscles and various other components. Baboon and chimp hearts have been transplanted into human chest cavities, pig cells into the brains of Parkinson's disease patients and, more routinely, pig heart valves into people with heart disease, including Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator.
For most of us, a senator with a partly porcine heart or a mouse with a human immune system is not sufficient to provoke the kind of instinctive queasiness known among ethicists as ''the yuck factor.'' The man most identified with that term, Dr. Leon Kass, the bioethicist and current chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, is of the opinion that widespread feelings of repugnance may be an alarm that something is morally wrong, even if you are not able to articulate precisely why. The mouse and the senator may not trigger a yuck because they look just like a rodent and a person. But what about a normal-looking mouse with a headful of human brain cells or a human-animal embryo that is only briefly alive and never seen?

If you want to get a peek at a real live chimera, drive about five miles east from downtown Reno, Nev., until you come to a farm that looks pretty much like any other farm. The gate will be locked, but from the road you can see some pens holding sheep that look pretty much like any other sheep. Pound for pound, however, these may be the most thoroughly humanized animals on the planet. They are the work of Esmail Zanjani, a hematologist in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources at the University of Nevada at Reno. Several years ago, Zanjani and his colleagues began injecting fetal lambs with human stem cells, mostly ones derived from human bone marrow. He said he hoped that the cells would transform into blood cells so that he could use the sheep to study the human blood system. According to Zanjani, when he examined the sheep he discovered that the human cells had traveled with their lymphatic system throughout the sheep's body, developing into blood, bone, liver, heart and assorted other cells, including some in the brain. While some scientists are skeptical of his findings, Zanjani told me that some have livers that are as much as 40 percent humanized, with distinct human structural units pumping out uniquely human proteins.

While the idea of partly humanized sheep might make some people a little uncomfortable, it isn't easy to see where they trespass across some unambiguous ethical line. But according to Dr. William Hurlbut, a physician and consulting professor in human biology at Stanford, who serves with Kass on the President's Council for Bioethics, the seeing is exactly the point. What if, instead of internal human organs, Zanjani's sheep sported recognizably human parts on the outside -- human limbs or genitals, for instance, ready for transplant should the need arise? Hurlbut maintains that this is scientifically plausible. But it would be wrong. Every living thing has a natural trajectory through its life beginning at conception, and in Hurlbut's view, a visible chimera would veer dangerously off course.
''It has to do with the relationship between signs and their meaning,'' he told me. ''Human appearance is something we should reserve for humans. Anything else that looks human debases the coinage of truth.''

Understanding the world as divided into distinct categories is a fundamental organizing principle of civilization. We conceive of the living aspect of that world as separated into species, with boundaries around them that should not be purposively muddled. The underlying validity of our categorical constructs is not as important as how we use them to make sense of the world. Our minds have evolved to be hypersensitive to the borders between species, just as we see a rainbow as composed of six or seven distinct colors when it is really a continuum of wavelengths of light. ''When we start to blend the edges of things, we're uneasy,'' Hurlbut says. ''That's why chimeric creatures are monsters in mythology in the first place.''

It is easy to marshal rational arguments to counter this thinking. The limitations of a typological concept of species, which goes back to Aristotle, are well known. Some species interbreed with closely related ones on the borders of their habitats. Evolutionary biologists cannot agree on how to define what a species really is in the first place, so it is hard to see how the boundaries between them can be absolute. Even if species boundaries do have a natural integrity, how alarming is it to find that those walls can be perforated by artificial means? We have been engaging in unnatural acts upon nature for centuries, grafting plants onto one another or breeding dogs in visible shapes and sizes that diverge wildly from their natural state -- let alone performing heart transplants and in vitro fertilizations. I'm not sure I would undergo a crisis of truth at the sight of a sheep with a human arm, especially if it were the best means available for replacing a lost one. But everyone has a squirm threshold. What would you make of a sheep with a human face?
he reason Zanjani's chimeras look like perfectly ordinary sheep is that he injected them with stem cells in a late stage of their fetal development, when their body plans were already laid down. The reason he was allowed to conduct the experiment at all is that he works in the United States, as opposed to Canada or Great Britain where such chimeric research is restricted. Older fetuses are not as impressionable as younger ones, and embryos are the most vulnerable of all. And the younger the human stem cell you insert, the more powerful an influence it can have on the body and brain of the host animal. The way to produce the most homogenous blend of human and animal would thus be to inject fully potent human embryonic stem cells into the very early embryo of, say, a mouse. This is the experiment that policies in those countries are most keen to prevent.

It is also the one that Ali Brivanlou is poised to begin. For several years, Brivanlou, a 45-year-old developmental biologist at Rockefeller University in New York, has been arguing that one of the best ways to understand the usefulness of stem cells for regenerative medicine is to first insert them in an animal embryo and see how they divide and differentiate in a living system. The experiment is explicitly prohibited by the institutions that supply the stem-cell lines approved by the Bush administration, so he is using private funds to develop his own lines. He plans to insert them into 3-to-5-day-old mouse embryos, which he will then implant in the wombs of female mice. Brivanlou is anxiously awaiting the publication of the National Academy of Sciences guidelines before proceeding, but he says he doubts that they will prove an impediment. In his view, showing the potency of stem cells only in a petri dish is like testing the power of a new car by revving its engine in the garage. He wants to take the car out on the track and see how it might perform some day on the open road.
''This experiment must be done,'' he says. ''We can't go directly from culture to a patient. That would be extremely dangerous.''
But his experiment is one that most are very reluctant to undertake, even in the private sector. When I inquired at Geron Corporation, a biotechnology company in California, whether scientists there were considering such work, I received a terse e-mail reply that ''the company is not, has not and will not pursue inter-species stem-cell chimeras.''
Robert Lanza, vice president for medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., says much the same thing. ''I personally don't want to engage in those kinds of experiments, and I won't have any of my scientists do that work,'' he says. ''Sure, we could reach our endpoints quicker that way. But it takes you into very murky water.''

Why all the shuddering? For starters, there is the gonad quandary. If the experiment really works, the human cells should differentiate into all of the embryo's cell lineages, including the one that eventually forms the animal's reproductive cells. If the mouse were male, some of its sperm might thus be human, and if it were female, some of its eggs might be human eggs. If two such creatures were to mate, there would be a chance that a human embryo could be conceived and begin to grow in a mouse uterus -- a sort of Stuart Little scenario, but in reverse and not so cute.
''Literally nobody wants to see an experiment where two mice that have eggs and sperm of human origin have the opportunity to mate and produce human offspring,'' says Dr. Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and director of the bioethics program at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing stem-cell research policies. ''That's beyond anybody's wildest nightmare.''
Is the concern over the reproductive issue overblown? It is, of course, biologically impossible for a human fetus to be delivered from a rodent uterus.
Moreover, for a human embryo to be conceived, the chimeras would have to be born first in order to mate, and Brivanlou says he has no intention of allowing them to come to term. He plans to terminate them and examine the fate of the human cells after a week. Still, there remains the question of what kind of being would be present during those seven days. Nobody knows. Does even the fleeting, prenatal existence of a chimera of unknown aspect cross a moral line -- not because of what it might look like or become but simply for what it is?

Brivanlou is not troubled by that question. He sees the other methods of testing the stem cells' power -- in vitro or in the body of an older fetus or of a fully developed animal -- as inadequate, and he says he wants the science to be allowed to follow its natural course. ''One thing that is important to remember -- we've been here before,'' he says. ''In the 70's, there was a huge debate around whether recombinant DNA should be allowed. Now they do it in high-school labs. For any new technology that emerges, the first reaction is fear. Time will take care of that. When people take the time to think, it becomes routine.''
uring my visit to St. Kitts, I watched as Gene Redmond, dressed in blue surgical scrubs in the operating room, drilled into the skull of a vervet monkey. Once he penetrated the skull, Redmond positioned a four-inch hypodermic needle on a mount over the hole and ever so slowly lowered it into the monkey's cerebral cortex, down through structures associated with emotion and on until it reached its target in the basal ganglia at the base of the brain. He let the brain settle around the needle for a while and then injected a solution of donor cells into the target.
If he were performing this operation on a human patient, the procedure would be more or less the same. But he would need a much longer needle. If it is not some categorical essentialism that draws a bright line between us and the rest of the animals, surely it is the size and power of our brains. They are the physical address of everything we think of as uniquely human -- our rational thinking, intelligence, language, complex emotions and unparalleled ability to imagine a future and remember the past. Not surprisingly, chimeric experiments that seed the brain of an animal with a little neural matter of our own are uniquely suspect, especially those that meddle with the sites of higher function in the cortex.
''If you create stem-cell lines that might produce dopamine and want to put them in an animal first to see if they retained their stability, that's not problematic,'' Norman Fost maintains. ''But what if you want to study brain cortex? You'd want to create a stem-cell line that looks and acts like cortex and put this in an animal. In the toughest case, you'd want to put it in a very early stage of development. This is extremely hypothetical, but suppose these cells completely took over the brain of the animal? A goat or a pig with a purely human brain. Unlikely, but imaginable. That would certainly raise questions about what experiences that animal was having. Is it a very smart pig? Or something having human experiences? These are interesting questions that no one has thought about before because they haven't had to.''

The scientist most responsible for making people think about those questions -- and squirm and fume -- is Irving Weissman. Several years ago, Weissman and his colleagues at Stanford and at StemCells Inc., a private company he helped to found, transplanted human neural stem cells into the brains of newborn mice. The human cells spread throughout the mouse brain, piggybacking on the host's developmental pathways to eventually make up as much as 1 percent of some parts of the host's neural tissue. Once again, the ultimate purpose of the chimera was to create a research model for human brain function and disease. While somewhat successful in this regard, Weissman said he felt his model was hampered by the 99 percent of it that was still mouse. So he came up with an ingenious idea: why not make a mouse with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? In theory, at least, this could be achieved by transplanting human neural stem cells into the fetal brain of a strain of mouse whose own neurons happen to die off just before birth. If the human stem cells took up the slack and differentiated along the same lines as in the earlier experiment, you might just end up with a living newborn mouse controlled by a functioning brain that just happened to be composed of human cells.
Before proceeding with this experiment, Weissman said he thought it might be a good idea to solicit some ethical input. He contacted Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford's law school, who put together a committee to review the benefits and risks involved. The members agreed that the human neuronal mouse could be an extremely beneficial tool to study the effects of pathogens and disease in the human brain and the action of new drugs. They identified several areas of risk. The most difficult one to articulate, as Greely told the National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the use of human stem cells, was the ''nontrivial chance of conferring significant aspects of humanness on the nonhuman organism.''
''Though exceedingly remote, we thought this possibility was reason for caution and concern,'' Greely told me recently. His committee, which has yet to publish its report, did not find that risk alone was sufficient grounds for canceling the experiment. Instead, the members suggested that Weissman incorporate into the experimental protocol a series of ''stopping points.'' Some of the fetal mice should be terminated and examined before birth, and if there should appear any ''disquieting or disturbing results,'' the experiment should be suspended pending further ethical review. Results deemed troubling would include any evidence that the transplant was shaping the architecture of the mouse's neural edifice, as opposed to just contributing the bricks. Mice have sensory structures in their brains called ''whisker barrels,'' for instance, which we lack, while we have a far more complicated visual cortex. Shrunken whisker barrels or swollen visual cortex in the fetal mice brains would be a red flag. If everything appeared normal, the remaining animals could be brought to term and monitored for the appearance of any odd, and especially humanlike, behavior, which would again warrant stopping the experiment and seeking additional input from the ethical community.

Weissman is still months or even years away from actually trying his human neuron mouse experiment, and it has already drawn ''This shall not stand'' rhetoric from Jeremy Rifkin, the anti-biotech activist, Bill O'Reilly and numerous religious commentators and bloggers.
The real problem with Weissman's proposed mouse, however, may turn out to be not that it is too human but that it is not human enough. The basic structure of our nerve cells is not all that different from those of any other mammal, including a mouse's. But because our brains are so much bigger, the cells that compose them reach across greater distances, and the timing of their development is much longer. How likely is it that human nerve cells will develop into a whole functioning brain in the tiny arena of a fetal mouse's skull? Weissman concedes that his proposed chimeric experiment may not succeed. But, hypothetically speaking, what if you could conduct the analogous experiment in an animal with a brain more like our own, like a monkey or a chimpanzee? Strictly from a biomedical perspective, a human-ape chimera could be the ultimate research model for human biology and disease -- one that is completely human in everything but its humanity.
''If someone were to try Irv's mouse experiment with a great ape or even a monkey, I'd get real worried,'' Greely says. ''I'd want to make sure people thought long and hard about that.''

The danger, of course, is in how difficult it would be to know when you've slipped over the edge. While Greely's committee has been brooding over Weissman's mouse and the National Academy has been pondering its recommendations for the use of embryonic stem cells, another ethics group has been meeting at the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University to grapple with the especially dicey issue of human/primate chimeras. Could the introduction of human cells into nonhuman primate brains cause changes that would make them more humanlike? How would one tell? Would it be morally problematic to create a chimera with a significant degree of humanlike consciousness, cognition or emotion? Should such experimentation be banned? If such chimeras were to be created, what legal rights and protections should they have, distinct from other animals?

The report of the Working Group on Interspecific Chimeric Brains is expected to be published later this spring in a scientific journal. While the group's recommendations remain confidential until then, a rough idea of the boundary they might draw between allowable and prohibited research is suggested by two experiments that have already been conducted. One was carried out in 2001 by Evan Snyder, then at Harvard University and now director of the stem-cell program at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Snyder and his colleagues implanted human neural stem cells into the brains of 12-week-old fetal bonnet monkeys, aborted them four weeks later and found that the human cells had migrated and differentiated into both cerebral hemispheres, including into regions of the developing monkey cortex. Like Redmond, Snyder discounts any possibility that had the monkeys been brought to term the relatively small number of human cells in their brain would have had any effect on their normal cognition and behavior.
''Even if I were to make a monkey with a hippocampus composed entirely of human cells, it's not going to stand up and quote Shakespeare,'' Snyder says. ''Those sophisticated in human functioning know that it's more than the cellular components that make a human brain. It's the connections, the blood vessels that feed them; it's the various surfaces on which they migrate, the timing by which various synaptic molecules are released and impact other things, like molecules from the bloodstream and from the bone.''
It's quite likely that the members of the Johns Hopkins committee (it includes distinguished philosophers, bioethicists, neuroscientists, primatologists and stem-cell researchers) will conclude that an experiment like Snyder's is ethically safe. A relatively small scattering of human cells could be introduced into a primate brain, late in its development when there would be no chance the human cells could influence its fundamental architecture. But a result of another experiment, performed in the late 1980's by Evan Balaban, who is now at McGill University in Montreal, might give the group pause about mixing human and primate tissue in a very early fetus. Balaban removed a section from the midbrain of a chick embryo, grafting in its place the corresponding piece of proto-brain from an embryonic quail. While many of the embryos failed to develop, a few matured and eventually hatched. The newborn chicks were normal in most respects -- except they crowed like quails.
''One could imagine that if you took a human embryonic midbrain and spliced it into a developing chimpanzee, you could get a chimp with many of our automatic vocalizations,'' says Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Johns Hopkins committee. ''It wouldn't be able to talk. But it might laugh or sob, instead of pant-hoot.''
Of course, Deacon adds quickly, such an experiment would be highly unethical. The notion of a chimpanzee normal except for its human sobbing would probably exceed the squirm threshold of the other members of the Johns Hopkins group. Perhaps it is not what a human-animal chimera would be that violates some fundamental categorical construct in our minds, or what it would look like, as William Hurlbut maintains, as much as what it could do -- whether it would have a brain that makes it act in a way that is uncomfortably familiar. ''Humanness'' surely resides in the emergent layers building the vastly complex architecture of the human brain.

But is there a clear biological distinction between us and the rest of creation, one that should never be confounded by the scuffling of strange new feet in laboratory basements? Deacon has devoted a great deal of thought and research to such questions. While his is hardly the only view, after a career spent comparing the brains of living primates and the skulls of fossilized hominids, he says that there is little evidence for the sudden appearance of some new thing -- a uniquely human gene, a completely novel brain structure in the hominid lineage -- that sets us distinctly apart. Obviously, there has been an overall increase in brain size. But the telling difference is in more subtle shifts in proportion and connections between regions of the brain, ''a gerrymandering of the system'' that corresponds to a growing reliance on the use of language and other symbolic behavior as a means of survival. This shift, which Deacon believes began as long as two and a half million years ago, is reflected most prominently in the swollen human prefrontal cortex.
''We humans have been shaped by the use of symbols,'' he says. ''We are embedded in a world of human creation, where demands for success and reproduction are all powerfully dependent on how well we swim through our symbolic niche.''

This raises some fascinating questions, not just about the chimeras we might create with our scalpels and stem cells but also about the ones we may already have fashioned by coaxing humanlike behaviors from animals who have the latent capacity to express them. In the wild, chimpanzees and other apes do not engage in any symbolic behavior remotely comparable to what humans have evolved. But in the laboratory they can learn to communicate with sign language and other means on a par with the skills of a toddler. The difference is that the toddler's symbolic behavior becomes increasingly enriched, while the chimpanzee hits a wall.
How much further could a bioengineered chimera go?
Could it swim in our symbolic niche well enough to communicate what is going on inside its hybrid mind?
What could it teach us about animals?
What could it teach us about us?
And what is the price of the knowing?

Jamie Shreeve is the author of ''The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save The World.''
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And as they say...Welcome to the "Planet of the Apes....

Happy Tuesday......

Life As We know It...Another Interesting Viewpoint

So....I am always thinking that it is so amazing that with the universe being so big, how can We (humans) be the only possible lifeforms in the universe, much less the only intelligent sentient forms of life here on earth??

A story I read just a minute ago put fourth an interesting concept. Hmmm....
I have copied the story here (in it's entirety) for everyone's viewing pleasure....

Happy Tuesday
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Goodbye Mars, Hello Earth
By PAUL DAVIES
Sydney
WHEN I was a student in the 1960's, anyone who believed that there might be life on other planets was considered a crackpot. Now all that has changed. To claim that life is widespread in the universe is not only respectable, it also underpins NASA's ambitious astrobiology program. Find another Earth-like planet, astrobiologists say, and life should have happened there too.

NASA is spending billions of dollars to search for life on Mars, the most Earth-like of our sister planets. But we may not need to go all the way to Mars to find another sample of life. It could be lurking under our very noses. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life started here once, it could actually have started many times over.
Geologists believe life established itself on Earth about four billion years ago. Australian rocks dated at 3.5 billion years contain fossilized traces suggesting that microbes were already well ensconced by then. But the ancient Earth was no Garden of Eden. Huge asteroids and comets mercilessly pounded the planet, creating conditions more reminiscent of hell. The biggest impacts would have swathed our globe in incandescent rock vapor, boiling the oceans dry and sterilizing the surface worldwide.

How did life emerge amid this mayhem? Quite probably it was a stop-and-go affair, with life first forming during a lull in the bombardment, only to be annihilated by the next big impact. Then the process was repeated, over and over. As the bombardment began to abate and the impacts diminished in severity, so isolated colonies of primitive microbes sheltering deep underground managed to cling on. One of these colonies was destined to become life as we know it.

What about the preceding life forms? Were they all completely destroyed? It's possible that pockets of microbes could have survived in obscure niches until the next genesis, opening up the tantalizing prospect of two or more different forms of life co-existing on the same planet. Although they would compete for resources, one type of life is not necessarily bound to eliminate the rest. After all, within the microbial realm of "life as we know it," many different species make a living side by side.

Thus, microbes from another genesis - alien bugs, if you will - could conceivably have survived on Earth until today. The chances are that we wouldn't have noticed. Under a microscope, many microbes appear similar even if they are as genetically distinct as humans are from starfish. So you probably couldn't tell just by looking whether a micro-organism is "our" life or alien life. Genetic sequencing is used to position unknown microbes on the tree of life, but this technique employs known biochemistry. It wouldn't work for organisms on a different tree using different biochemical machinery. If such organisms exist, they would be eliminated from the analysis and ignored. Our planet could be seething with alien bugs without anyone suspecting it.

How could we go about identifying "life as we don't know it"? One idea is to look in exotic environments. The range of conditions in which life can thrive has been enormously extended in recent years, with the discovery of microbes dwelling near scalding volcanic vents, in radioactive pools and in pitch darkness far underground. Yet there will be limits beyond which our form of life cannot survive; for example, temperatures above about 270 degrees Fahrenheit. If anything is found living in even harsher environments, we could scrutinize its innards to see whether what makes it tick is so novel that it cannot have evolved from known life.

Identifying alien organisms in more equable settings would be a much harder challenge, especially if they use the same basic molecules as familiar life - nucleic acids and proteins. But there is one sure-fire giveaway. The building blocks of proteins, called amino acids, are all lopsided in the same distinctive way. Viewed in a mirror, these "left-handed" amino acids would appear right-handed. Such mirror-image molecules exist, but the life forms we are familiar with don't use them. Most biochemists think it is just an accident that "life as we know it" selected the left-handed version. If this supposition is correct, then there is a 50-50 chance that alien life would have picked the opposite handedness. Such "anti-life" would eat "anti-food": right-handed amino acids and other mirror molecules. This offers a simple way to filter out known life from anything alien. Prepare a culture medium of anti-food and see if anything flourishes. Of course it's a long shot, but it is easy to try, and scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center are now testing the response of microbes from various extreme environments to a bowl of anti-soup.

Even if alien life has not endured to the present day, it may still have left its mark. Geochemists have identified organic detritus from ancient microbes in rocks as old as 2.7 billion years. Alien organisms might have left remnants containing peculiar suites of molecules or produced distinctive geochemical alterations like unusual mineral deposits.
These remnants would still give us a genuine second sample, a form of biology that is unrelated to familiar life. By comparing the way evolution works in both cases, we could identify which features of life follow from general principles and which are just accidents of history.

But there is a more profound dimension to this research. Nobody knows how life began. Somehow a mixture of lifeless chemicals assembled itself into a primitive organism, presumably through a long and complex sequence of chemical reactions. Our ignorance of this process is so great that scientists can't even agree on whether it was a gigantic, one-time fluke, or the expected and frequent outcome of intrinsically bio-friendly natural laws, as the astrobiologists hope. Jacques Monod, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, was adamant that life is a bizarre accident confined to Earth. On the other hand Christian de Duve, another Nobel laureate, declares life to be "a cosmic imperative," bound to occur wherever Earth-like conditions prevail.

The discovery of a second sample of life on Earth would confirm that bio-genesis was not a unique event and bolster the belief that life is written into the laws of the cosmos. It is hard to imagine a more significant scientific discovery. Our view of the universe and our place within it would be forever transformed, and we would at last have the answer to the biggest of the big questions of existence: Are we alone?

Paul Davies, a professor at the Australian Center for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, is the author of "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life."

A Blast from my Past

I called Green Bay Wisconsin "Home" for many years, on and off, and still have a few good friends there ...and so when I saw the following story while browsing around, even before reading it....I knew what it was about.

Link:http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/apr05/315197.asp

I worked at a restaurant (Marc's Big Boy on Military Ave) on the west side of town and when we went through a remodel and rebranding of the concept to change it to "Marc's Cafe", we couldnt include the Microbrew Beers and Wines that all the other locations had....because of the law which the above linked story tells about.

I for one think its about time that the West side of Green Bay finally moves out of the "Dark Ages". I really do miss that restaurant though. And I miss Green Bay also. But mostly I miss my friends who still live there.

A Very Intersting News Week

So much going on in the world right now. It sure is an exciting time to be alive...at least I think so. A few links from my favorite online Newspaper "The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online".....

Hope everyone has a good weekend.

NATIONAL AND WORLD NEWS
Latest Updates
• Calls for Sainthood As Pope Laid to Rest
• Thousands Protest on Baghdad Anniversary
• Prince Charles Set to Wed Longtime Love
• Eric Rudolph to Plead to Atlanta Bombing
• Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees
• Bush Indifferent Over Falling Poll Numbers
• Eclipse Proves Elusive to Fla. Skywatchers
• Woman Claiming Finger in Chili Sues Often
• Ex-Employee Says Jackson Touched Culkin
• Augusta Rain Becoming a Masters Tradition
More news wire coverage...
• Business
• Sports
• Entertainment

• Technology
• Nation World

• Politics
• Wisconsin

Video Photos

Scrappy thought this may have been the Pope's Cat...or maybe it is the "Kitty Pope"???? 

The Vatican has an "Internet TV station"!

I was browsing the web and saw a site that mentioned the "Pope's Funeral" being televised over the Web...pretty cool (If you have broadband).

Link for the Vatican Web TV site:
http://www.vatican.va/news_services/television/index_it.htm

The head of the Catholic Chruch finally in Peace. Rumor has it that millions of people throughout the world are making a pilgrimmage to pay their respects to him. Wow.