Merry Christmas to me:

http://www.half-million.com

Oh, and merry christmas to you all, too!

I know we are closing in on Christmas. I love Christmas.. I don't so much this year, I mean so much of this year was finding myself again and establishing my base of operations. I just didn't make the Christmas leap this year. I couldn't find the money for the season of giving...

I know that's not what it's all about. My 10 neices and nephews don't know that though.

Anyway. New Years is what this is about. I have been floundering this year through depression and bummed-outted-ness. Some of it due to **bux. Most of it due to finances. I might not be able to fix ALL of that this year, although I can hope... but I CAN try and motivate myself.

I've bought a new domain name. I'm installing a blog on it. It all is going to have a very definite purpose and a very definite idea behind it. I want to figure out ALL the logistics first, but if it works, at the very least - I will be one active and creative sonuvabich. That's important to me. To stop hitting STUMBLE or playing FLASH GAMES all the time. If I am drawing close on a deadline, my focus becomes laserlined. It's the reason that IHL has lasted as long as it has, good or bad.

At the least, I'll be creative and writing. Forcing myself with these little imposed deadlines. At the most, come the end of 2010, maybe I'll have something bigger to give to the world. Maybe I'll have many somethings. We'll see.

I'll be talking and posting more about it - especially after the domain and wordpress are all installed.

It's my new years resolution - and I fucking HATE those.

I'm hit or miss with Radiohead. Just not my cup really, but I do like a couple of their songs.. including Creep. Yeah, I'm aware just liking 'Creep' is like being a "Dead fan" who only likes 'Touch of Grey' but the song is powerful.

Anyway, Opie and Anthony had on a homeless guy, who they came to find out was a former out of work actor and musician. Looking for hilarity in a drunk homeless guy singing... they gave him a guitar. They got this.

It might be my favorite cover of the song to date - and for as much as I love music and the right song moves me.. it's rare something almost brings me to sniffle let alone tears.

Well this is really good news. Researchers have sequenced the genomes of melanoma and lung cancer. This will vastly enhance the quality of treatments for these cancers and the speeds at which those treatments are developed.

Considering the amount of damage I've done to myself from sun exposure and smoking, this is a relief. According to the article, it takes from 10 to 15 years for the genetic profile of a smoker to return to normal after quitting. I haven't had a cigarette in 3.5 years. I should be out of the woods by the time I'm 42. And if not, perhaps treatment will be advanced enough at that point that I don't have to go through what my grandfather went through.

Another interesting statistic from the article:

The researchers now plan to sequence at least 50 cancers, with tissue samples from 500 patients for each tumor type. The process, as part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium established in 2007, will take five to 10 years and identify the most common cancer causing mutations, Campbell said.

The process is getting faster and cheaper every day, Stratton said. While it took $100,000 and months to sequence the lung cancer and melanoma samples in the studies, in the next 18 months researchers should be able to complete the process in 10 days at a cost of less than $20,000, he said.

This is pretty wild when you think about it. In 1990 it cost about $10 to sequence a base pair; by 2000 it cost less than a cent. In 1990 we could sequence less than a hundred genes per year; by the end of the decade we could do tens of thousands. The change was so drastic that we mapped most of the human genome in the last few years of the project. Ten years ago we could map only about 10 genomes a year. Now we're going to decode 50 more cancers in under a decade. We're in the middle of a drastic paradigm shift in medicine that will leave almost no one unaffected. This is probably just another reason life expectancy across the U.S. is on the rise. I've seen figures reflecting the same for even the shittiest parts of the world.

I just sent out query letters to prospective publishers about finding IHL a publishing house or an agent.

...I don't know whether this is an attempt in futility or I should be excited to get my first rejection letters...

We'll see!

Hanneman, King and Araya tend to have different lyrical influences. Hanneman's lyrics deal with Nazis and similar topics. King's lyrics are generally just very anti-religious. Araya's lyrics usually deal with less controversial topics than Hanneman and King such as serial killers and warfare.

That's a good division of labor they have there. I bet Henry Ford would be proud.

Don't know if everyone saw this and I'm just catching up. Language might make it NSFW