A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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Good Day with a Rough Start

This morning started off with a good deal of confusion over where to deposit my samples on a sequencer plate, but it all worked out in the end. I should be getting sequence reads back tomorrow that will tell me something about the identity of the two Sarcodon specimens I collected. I won't get to work on them until Thursday, though, as tomorrow is my day for field work.

I received the approved permits for the research sites in North Florida at which I and my colleague will be working on our upcoming Florida expedition. We've got everything set now — field sites, flights, a place to stay and a lab to work in. The only thing left to do is put together a schedule for when we'll be at specific sites, as the terms of the permit requires that we notify the state biologist two weeks in advance so that any necessary arrangements can be made.

I also received 25g of 2-sulfobenzaldehyde sodium salt when I came back from lunch. I've been waiting for that to show up. One of the compounds used in identifying fungi particularly russula, is sulfovanillin. It's a pain to work with as it can't be stored for long periods of time and mixing up a batch of the stuff requires messing about with sulfuric acid. SBA is a good substitute that stains gloeocystidia and can be stored and doesn't involve acid and fume hoods. I can't wait to try it out (yes, I know how geeky that sounds). Perhaps I'll have the chance when I get back to the lab tomorrow.

Finally, today is my kid sister's birthday. She turns 37, so I guess "kid" isn't really applicable. I did get her a present that replaces something of hers that I melted into little blue puddles when she was about 7, though. I hope she gets a chuckle out of it.

Not a bad day, all in all. I've got potential PCR product from four Diaperis maculatus on the thermocycler as I write this. It should be ready for electrophoresis at about 2:45 PM, so all (five of) you "gel of the day" fans might be in for a good one today. 32 samples comprised of large and small rDNA and two different cox1 segments may be ready before the day's out.

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Natural Curiosity: An Inordinate Fondness for Fungi

My sister and her family are visiting this weekend. She and and my brother-in-law are both psychologists and my niece, Alex, is a rambunctious and extremely bright four year old with tremendous curiosity about nature. I don't know whether that's nature or nurture at work. They live in a rural area in the Hudson River Valley. Their home is the kind of place where deer wandering across the lawn is a daily occurrence and it's not too unusual to have a bear raid the garbage every so often. Nonetheless, as I've mentioned before, Alex seems to have been born with a particular interest in fungi. It's not something that anyone taught her about, though it's certainly been encouraged. I can't think of why...

We met up at Elm Park yesterday to let Alex blow off some steam at the playground. The plan was that the adults could check out Art in the Park at the same time, but there wasn't much art to see despite the banner proclaiming that the event runs through October. Practically the first thing that happened is that I was handed the note you see to the left. It was important that I see this right away!

When we started getting hungry, we left for Binh Duong, which still ranks as LL and my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Worcester. I asked Alex if she'd like to see the lab where I work on the way and she was very interested in doing so.

It being Saturday night, nobody else was around. We did a quick tour of the clean lab; it's very hard to explain to a four year old what we do in there. She did want to wear the cool purple nitrile gloves, though. Alex was much more interested in the dirty lab. She wanted to see the mushrooms, of course, and she got to check out a whole preserved Bondarzewia berkeleyi and giant specimens of Ganoderma applanatum as well. She also went through some of the Russula specimens I've collected and she thought the big green ones were pretty impressive. I noticed that she was eying the microscopes, so I asked her if she wanted to look at a beetle and that was a cool idea. I dug out a big staphylinid from my bug box and set it up under a dissecting scope for her. Woah! Giant beetles... the kid was psyched.

I asked Alex if she'd like to look even closer and see what a beetle's foot looks like. Big surprise; let's do that! I dissected off a tarsus and described what I was doing. At each step, Alex replied with a "yeah" and implicit, "and then what," the pitch of her voice increasing a little each time. I showed her how to make a wet mount and each step brought a higher-pitched "yeah" dripping with curiosity. When I had the slide set up on the microscope, Alex climbed into my lap to look at the foot at 100X magnification and her eyes were bugging out enough that she could probably have seen it from a foot away. By the time she'd had her fill of those tarsomeres and tarsal claws, she was ready to do it again. "Let's do another one!"

It was time for dinner, though, so I let Alex use a pair of watchmaker's forceps to put the beetle back in its vial. I didn't tell her how to do it, and it struck me that she knew enough to be very delicate about the task. She started off trying to barely exert any pressure at all, dropping the insect a couple of times before she squeezed just hard enough to get the thing from the hack to the vial without crushing it in the slightest. The kid is a natural!

Our plan for today was to go up to Wachusett so that she could see the giant green mushrooms and whatever other kinds might be out. Alex wants to find beetles, too, so I let her pack a few vials of EtOH in my kit last night for use today. Unfortunately, we're having a wicked electrical storm at the moment and the forecast is calling for rain throughout the day, so I'm not sure whether we'll be able to follow through on the plans. We may need to come up with some kind of indoor alternative. I think I'd be as disappointed as Alex would about that. Most, if not all, kids are born with a curiosity about nature, I suppose. If the four year old keeps that same level of curiosity past adolescence, they become science geeks. When they keep it past the age of forty they become... well... me, I suppose. Doesn't every kid need a weird scientist uncle?

I hope the rain stops so I can go find mushrooms and bugs today! Am I a four year old dreaming that I'm a graduate student, or am I a graduate student in the company of a four year old?

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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Preparing for Tryptophan Overdose and Giving a Few Thanks

LL and I were originally planning to leave town for Thanksgiving weekend today, but plans were changed and we're headed out tomorrow morning instead. We're off to visit my sister and brother-in-law's family for Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York. The following day, we're all headed down to a campground in Pennsylvania owned by my sister-in-law. We won't exactly be roughing it, though; we'll be staying in a heated cabin with a nice bed and a hot tub available. We're looking forward to a fun weekend and I'm particularly looking forward to seeing my niece. I'll have my camera, of course, so be prepared for numerous photos come Sunday, when we'll be returning home.

Tycho has been taken to a babysitter (lizard-sitter?) while we're away. LL has put together a care sheet for him that I wish I could post here. It includes such statements as "give him a piece of satin and he'll be your best friend" and "if you have some mac-n-cheese, put it on a plate for him." Note that the crooked veterinarian had prophesied that he'd be dead by now. Instead, he's going strong and apparently about to have another shed, which means that he's still growing. One of the things we're thankful for this year is that we still have Tycho in our lives.

Generally, today has been an unusually lazy day. I didn't have much to do, so I didn't do much and I've enjoyed the heck out of it. That's not to say that I didn't accomplish anything at all today, however. I managed to get an Intelligent Design Creationist to admit that he really didn't know what he was talking about on a forum discussing Florida's new science standards and the opposition of the Polk County School Board to them (they want to teach intelligent design nonsense, of course). Who knows... perhaps this person will make an effort to actually educate himself rather than uncritically accepting Michael Behe's junk as valid science. I can dream, can't I?

I don't know that I'll have net access from tomorrow through Sunday. If not, I'd like to take the opportunity to wish American readers an enjoyable Thanksgiving. The rest will have to settle for my hoping you have a nice day. Wherever and whomever you are, it's not a bad idea to thank people every so often.

So, thanks to LL for moving to our third state together this year so that I can take a shot at fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Thanks to the folks I work with at my new university for taking time out of your busy schedules to bring me up to speed on oh-so-much that I need to learn. You guys have been terrific, every one of you.

Thanks to the people online who educate me, who point out my errors so that I can learn from them and who do so in a good-humored way.

Thanks to all the people out there who expend so much energy in defending reason from the darkness that will always threaten it, people like Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers and Wes Elsberry (whose name I may never spell correctly!) and Nick Matzke.

Thanks for reading, one and all.

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Happy Birthday

Today is LL's birthday. She says that she "still feels 16," but I disagree. Then again, it's been a few years since I've felt one. I don't particularly care to.

We're heading into Boston to celebrate today, as well as to entertain my niece who is in town. We're going to check out the Boston Children's Museum and probably the New England Aquarium again. Once my niece winds down a bit (she's four, so her energy is tremendous), we'll go out for a nice dinner. I suspect that my sister and her family will retire earlier than LL and I, so we'll likely stay in Boston after they've headed back to their hotel for the night and perhaps have a few drinks, too. My university is on Fall Break, so I don't have to be anywhere tomorrow. I may well head into the lab during the afternoon, though. I've got an unidentified resupinate fungus and a couple of beetles from which I need to extract DNA. I think I'll do the entire ribosomal region, if not tomorrow then on Tuesday.

As for now, I think I'll go check again to see if LL feels like she's 16. Readers wishing to leave her a Happy Birthday message are encouraged to do so!

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An Unlikely Photo

This photograph is incredibly unlikely and has a lot of history behind it. It doesn't look like anything unusual, I know, but it is. I just received it by email from my sister .



This is a photograph of my sister and I taken when I visited her for her 36^th birthday about a week ago. The unlikely part is not that the woman in this photo is 36 years old and doesn't look like it, although she certainly doesn't. My sister got the family anti-aging genes and seems to have stopped aging at age 21. Lucky her. But there's much more to this.

My sister and I are both survivors of extreme physical abuse as children. Well, that's not entirely true. I was abused from a very young age, perhaps from close to birth. I can say with certainty that I recall being physically abused with beatings as far back as I have any memories at all. I'm not talking about spankings and the like. I have scars from it. I had sprains and, on at least one occasion and possibly more, broken bones that went untreated. When I was 15 years old, the state of New York attempted to remove me from my parents' home after a series of particularly bad incidents that I don't care to detail but that finally resulted in me landing in a hospital. The effort didn't succeed; my father, a fairly high-ranking police officer, knew people in protective services and, long story short, the case wound up being thrown out and the records sealed. I thus went back to the abuse which continued until I moved away to college. In 1988, I had to leave school, in part because I was unable to do mathematics of any kind due to an organic disorder (I can do math well now, thanks to that diagnosis and subsequent therapy) and at about the same time informed my parents that I didn't believe in their religion. As a result, they disowned me. We've had no contact for 20 years and I'm absolutely fine with that.

My parents told my sister at that time that the reason I had vanished was that I had been arrested on charges of dealing heroin and was in prison for a long stretch, an utter lie. Up until I had left for school, my sister was simply neglected while I was being abused. With me now entirely out of the picture, however, neglect turned into the same kind of physical abuse visited upon my sister that I had suffered until then. My sister is five years younger than I, and so she was mercifully only two years away from leaving for school herself, which she did. Unlike me, she did stay in touch with my parents. Then she met her husband-to-be, who is one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and who bears a striking resemblance to a young Robert DeNiro. He was ambitious and responsible and made my sister very happy.

That wasn't good enough, of course, because he's Catholic (or, should I say, was raised in a Catholic home. Neither he nor my sister are at all religious). My father now became abusive toward my sister's fiancee and his family — not physically, but verbally and emotionally. There were a couple of years of threats and insults. He and my mother made it clear that if they married, my sister would be disowned. Moreover, my mother told my sister that any children — her own grandchildren — would be evil (yes, evil) because they weren't Jewish. My mother believed, and this is as near a quote as I can get to one, that she would have to "defend herself" from such children, that they were a "threat to Jewish people."

All of this is utterly deranged, but perhaps this explains why my sister and I were both independently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Again, both of us received therapy for it and have learned to live with the symptoms.

In any case, my parents did cut off all contact with my sister when she and her fiancée set their wedding date. As luck would have it, I had been trying to find her by this time. Because she was the immediate relative of a police officer, all of her public records were held in confidence. I finally hired a private detective who tracked her down. Just a few weeks before her wedding, my sister and I made contact for the first time in over a decade. The first time I phoned her, she was living in New York and I in California. She didn't even believe it was me at first, and once I'd convinced her that it was, I had to also convince her that I hadn't been in prison and hadn't been a heroin dealer, and in fact had no criminal record of any kind. After a few conversations, she invited me to her wedding.

It was a good thing she did; I was the only person from my entire family who attended. In fact, I gave her away, the role normally performed by the bride's father.

Because of the distance between us and lack of money, my sister and I kept in touch by phone and email but only managed to get together in person once more after the wedding. She and her husband came to visit LL and I in San Francisco in 1999. Thus, the photo above documents the first time we'd seen each other in about 8 years and only the third time since the 1980's that she and I were in the same room together.

All of that is in this photograph. I don't suppose any of it is visible. It just looks like a typical family snapshot. It isn't.

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Photos from Our Trip

Just a few photos from the visit with my sister's family.

	My niece exploring the wonders of slime mold fruiting bodies.
	The result of eating ice cream cake. She mostly wanted to eat only the blue icing...
	Girl meets lizard. Tycho quickly came to enjoy Alex's company. She was very good with him and won his scaly heart by feeding him fresh-picked basil leaves until he couldn't eat anymore. As they say, the way to a dragon's heart is through his stomach.
	Another trait that runs in the family; love of very old cemeteries. Here's my sister checking out some old tombstones in the Huguenot cemetery in New Paltz.
	Here's a very flattering picture of LL peeking into somebody's window. If you never see another update from me, rest assured that it's because I posted this image!

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Back from Wallkill

LL and I had a wonderful weekend. We spent it with my sister and her family in Wallkill, NY. It was the first time I've seen them in eight years, and my niece is only four years old... so you get the picture. I'd forgotten what a handful a toddler can be, and my niece is at the high end of that range. I can't imagine where all that energy comes from. There are some amazing family traits showing up there; I'm convinced that the kid is a budding biologist. She's fascinated by mushrooms, and so she and I walked around the property and found a few. She now knows that deer mushrooms have pink gills that don't attach to the stipe and can identify the spore bodies of slime molds which she spent a great deal of time flicking with her fingers to make "smoke." She already knows not to eat anything she finds. According to my sister, my niece has spontaneously come to the idea that walking around with a bucket gathering mushrooms is fun; she likes them better than flowers.

Sound at all familiar?

We celebrated my sister's 36^th birthday at her mother-in-law's house (what is the term that describes my sister's mother-in-law's relationship to me, anyhow? Aunt-in-law?) with a huge Italian-style dinner. Steak, sausage and peppers, chicken... and Tums for dessert, because I'm not at all used to eating that way!

There's more, but I'm not recovered from the drive and from my futile attempt to keep up with my niece yet. I have pictures, too. That will have to wait for tomorrow, though, because I think I need to lapse into an eight-hour coma right now.

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It Lives!

Here it is... my first update from Worcester, MA. We arrived here on July 4 and have been furiously unpacking and such since then. My internet and cable service got turned on less than an hour ago. Everything appears to be working.

I have been tremendously out of touch with the world of late. I've had my MP3 player, which receives FM radio, as my only electronic media connection. FM radio in Worcester is largely classic and oldies rock formats; there's one talk station from Boston that I can pick up, but it's fairly right-wing and most of the shows are, frankly, far too stupid to listen to, and I mean that in the most factual sense of the descriptor.

The day after our arrival here, three of my new lab-mates were nice enough to take time out of their day to help us unload the truck. Good guys, the lot of them. After we'd finished, we met at a restaurant where I bought lunch and a couple of pitchers of beer. One local brew, Green Monster Ale, was tremendously hoppy. It started strong but finished pretty weakly, much like the team that calls the stadium in which its namesake stands home. I must be very careful about making such comments here. Worcester so far seems like a town that loves its baseball, and the home team is, of course, the Red Sox. My landlord, in fact, has a Red Sox flag — a full-sized one — hanging from a flagpole in the front lawn. I haven't mentioned what team I prefer lest I find myself evicted! Suffice to say that my Yankees caps are all hidden in the back of my closet until further notice.

There is good ethnic food here. Vietnamese restaurants are especially prevalent, and we've also "discovered" an excellent, family-run pizza place just a block from our apartment. I had the best calzone I've had in years last night... spinach and feta, no less. It's probably a good thing that I've started walking a lot more lately. I can see gaining any number of extra pounds around here. There's a seafood place, again within walking distance, that sells lobsters for $6.99/lb and steamer clams for $3.99. The closest supermarket has entire aisles of ethnic foods from Italy, Brazil, Poland, India, you name it. It's huge and we can get anything from ghee to gefilte fish anytime we want. It's been a long time since I've seen a supermarket like that. It's been a long time since I've seen a city like this, too. The cultural diversity here is amazing. I even got to practice a little Portuguese with the guys who installed our cable today (both Brasileiros).

LL and I did take a little time out of unpacking to visit the Worcester Art Museum a couple of days ago. Great place, and just barely small enough to be completely toured in a single afternoon. They have a very respectable collection, particularly when it comes to Dutch and Flemish paintings, particular favorites of mine. They've also got a very nice collection of Roman era antiquities unearthed during an excavation at Antioch. Once I get my Clark ID, I get free admission to the museum whenever I like. I could see it being an excellent place to get some reading done, particularly in their library.

All in all, I'm happy to be back in the northeast. It feels like I've come home; I don't think I'm having any problem at all getting adjusted here. Everything seems familiar and comfortable so far. I need to get the knack of the roads, but driving here is almost exactly like driving in Brooklyn. Even the accent is close to that with which I grew up. It feels right, and to make it all seem even more homey, I'm going to take a three hour drive and spend my sister's thirty-sixth birthday with her during the first week of August. It will mark the first time I've seen her in eight years, the first time I'll be meeting my niece, and the first time that my sister and I have lived within a 500 miles of one another in 20 years.

I think this is all going to work out well. For now, though, I think I'll go watch TV for the first time in more than a week and maybe play a mindless online game for a couple of hours. We've finally arrived fully, I think.

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