Mutating Genres Meme

Here's the dealio, yo. Pharyngula started this meme to see how it mutates over time.

First, the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is: Children of Men
The best sexy song in pop music is: Real Love by Mary J. Blige
The best cult novel in American 20th century fiction is: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The best high-carb food in Italian cooking is: cheese lasagne!

My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My parent is Thus Spake Zuska.

I'm tagging the Pooflinger, Ethyl Benzene, Ennui Herself, Transcript, Jane, and everyone else on the blogroll. Go!

Hello again

Sorry for the prolonged absence. It's been a busy few weeks at lab and doing things. Things and stuff.

You know what's nice? I did a DNA maxiprep the other day, eluted with 1 mL of water, and got DNA concentrations of only .11 and 0.08 ug/uL. I like to have at least 0.5 ug/uL for doing transfections into cells, so I put the tubes of DNA into the SpeedVac, which spins them around in a warm, dry chamber to evaporate the water. I reduced the volume from 1 mL to 0.1 mL (100 uL) and then measure the DNA concentrations: 1.4 and 0.7 ug/uL respectively!

I know, why am I so pleased? That's what you would expect if you reduced the volume 10-fold.

Exactly. I love it when stuff actually works like it's supposed to, with numbers and volumes and things.

Hey, I'm a cell biologist. This doesn't happen all the time for me! It's the little things in life. Like bands on a gel that actually add up correctly ... it's like beautiful magic. Ahhhh. Everything else I do is so much more fiddly.

Anyway. I've been playing on YouTube far too much the last couple of days and found this video of the Solid Gold Dancers counting down the top ten songs in the mid-80s (sorry, can't embed it), which is especially awesome because the #1 song of the week was one of my absolute favorite songs when I was a kid: Part-time Lover by Stevie Wonder. Also featured are Never by Heart, We Built This City by Starship, and Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears - three other childhood favorites.

I wanted desperately to be the dancer with the long, long, long hair (Darcel; she's from Pittsburgh, aw yeah). I used to dance around in this gold bikini, handed down from a cousin, and imagine my long, long hair whipping around as I kicked and spun through the Number Ones.

That, and I wanted to be an astronaut. A solid-gold astronaut. (Like David Bowie?)

I don't think I've really changed much since I was little, actually. If I could hook that up I would totally still be a solid gold dancing astronaut.

Karaoke star biologist is, I guess, the next best thing.

In retrospect, though, why was a six-year-old even watching Solid Gold? It's pretty smutty.

You got here from where?

Google Search: he absolutely LOVED her and was so springy and joyful!

Torturing The Cat

This post about war as a thing that gives a jolt of meaning in the midst of complacency really struck me today. I've been falling asleep to The War on PBS lately, and I had a conversation the other day with someone who admitted to feeling a pang of envy for that sense of terrible purpose. (What, you want to go die in a war? I sniped.) I remember feeling wistful, in the halcyon 90's, for someone to hate as much as my mom hated Nixon. (Thanks, George!) I remember the sunny day I rode my bike to lab thinking, I wish something would happen so I didn't have to work today. I remember thinking, Cool, I don't have to work today. The powerful urgency of just getting through on the telephone to ... anyone ... to someone I hadn't talked to in a while. A perfect reason, putting into perspective what really matters, etc. Remember those dreams about the Holocaust, where Lisa got in the truck with her parents because I couldn't hide them all in my basement? I'd have been a spy. I'd have gotten out of there. I'd have ... I'm thinking of my Coulter-reading relative switching off FOX "News" not because it is shite but because she "can't be an activist every day." Yeah, I sneer; but what activism do I pursue getting righteously indignant over at Pharyngula's or Twisty's and then wandering off down the street for an iced coffee and a long hard think about my dissertation? You know what I mean. Anyway, it's a good post, much better written than I could have done.