Sam's Town/Nobel Awards

I bought Sam's Town. I've heard the album twice and it sounds good. I need another week of listening before I can give a real opinion. Music has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm feeling the jazz/blues/soul music much more these days. Craving listening to Norah Jones, Diana Krall, and D'Angelo. Oh D'Angelo. I curse the people that stole all my CDs from my car five years ago. Let the Fates plan some savage stroke against them. May "red pustules appear upon the skin...open and ooze their purulent filth, Burning, rushing fever swelling the body. Black blood bursting through the mouth and nose. The eyes no longer seeing" (I've been reading ancient Greek literature). ANYWAY, they got an amazing collection that I haven't had the cash to replace including some CDs appropriate to this post: my D'Angelo, Faith Evans, Brian McKnight, Isley Brothers...I guess they're more classic R&B than anything else. If it's not obvious yet, I'm not too good with the categorizing. I should've re-cataloged my collection when I had no conscience about downloading and Napster was KING. Now, I feel the necessity to financially support the artists I like (I think) even if I've purchased their CD once before. So I will be without the sexy stylistics of D'Angelo for a little longer. I guess Dave Matthews will have to do for now.

In other news: the Nobel awards. Three wins for Americans: Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. Two wins for Molecular Biology. Both the Medicine and Chemistry awards were given to work in biology. Both dealing with discoveries with RNA. It's great that the Nobel committee chose to honor work in RNA and bring the "RNA World" into the spotlight. This field has been abuzz for biologists for the past few years. I think everyone expected the Medicine winners, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, to win at some point or another. Their work was seminal and their discovery led to a technique with profound clinical applications. I think it's a little interesting that Viktor Ambros and David Bartel weren't recognized though for their initial discovery of microRNAs in worm, but I do understand that Mello and Fire actually showed that this natural silencing system found in the worm (and now shown to be conserved in most plants and animals) could be used in other tissues and for general gene silencing hence its clinical/medical applications. It was huge. It's used so often in the lab today that I didn't even realize the creators hadn't yet received the Nobel, and it is definitely a discovery akin to PCR (the Polymerase Chain Reaction), a technique which revolutionized Molecular Biology. Robert Kornberg won the Chemistry prize for elucidating transcription in yeast at an atomic resolution. I'm not as familiar with his work and like his father, the great biochemist and previous Nobel winner Arthur Kornberg, I agree that the details of his work are beyond me, "but I certainly admire it from a distance". Tis a good week for my science.