I have to believe this is not true.

Apparently smoking and drinking coffee protects you from Parkinson's disease. How can this be?!!
I know that compared to smoking-related diseases, Parkinson's is quite rare. And it might have something to do with dopamine: the great neurotransmitter associated with food, sex, drugs, etc. People who develop Parkinson's tend to have a low-level of dopamine-creating cells in the brain, and consumption of coffee and cigarettes (that sounds so nice) stimulates dopamine production. Does that then mean that depressed people (sigh), who sometimes have an imbalance in their dopamine levels, also have a greater chance of developing Parkinson's?!

Couldn't they hide that little scientific finding? Don't give smokers any more reasons not to quit, for god's sake.

Clearly, day 46 of quitting smoking has been a hard one for me. I'm double-fisting coffee.

Read the article here.

In Memoriam

I remember reading Cat's Cradle when I was about 14, and I barely understood all the allegory and strange flights of fancy, but I have always been a science geek/groupie, so I really dug it. There was a collection of short stories too, Welcome to the Monkey House, that I loved. Mostly because there was a seriously mushy love story called "Long Walk to Forever" that I made everyone I knew read; I remember that my sappy-hearted friend E.A. cried her eyes out... I just read an article in the Post in which Vonnegut said that he wished more adults read his books. So in his honour, I just bought Slaughterhouse-Five and will read it and love it as an adult. Anyways, because he was a great writer, irreverent, and brilliant, he will seriously be missed. Hope you're hanging out with spacemen, Kurt.

Dark Victory, or a list of good things from the past 12 hours.

yes, i know this is from Now, Voyager.

I like Dark Victory because of all the cool smoking and melodrama. Just because I quit smoking doesn't mean that I don't still love it. (Pause to pop a Commit lozenge in my mouth.)

I like the candy that has a hard candy/utensil that you lick and dip into a bunch of crystalline, flavoured sugar. Lick, dip, tweak!

I opposite-of-like puns (shut up to boyfriend, Blackfoot, and Will), lamb cooked in any form (sorry, newly-risen Jesus, for eating your flock) and any perfume that is supposed to smell like the 'Orient'.

I like Nightmare on Elm Street and flan and maybe, I like the Sopranos a little bit.

I thought that my first blog after having my identity corrupted by Google's lame bid to take over the world would be hard to write, but I forgot that I just have to talk about myself.

I like talking about myself.