Busy Week - Grub, Cingular, Igs

This weekend begins the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and fortunately for us, we're spending the first two days with Nomi's parents. I say "fortunately" because we have had almost no time this week to prepare for the holiday ourselves. If we had had to build a sukkah, we'd have gone nuts.

Actually, we have no place to build a sukkah of our own; as always, we will be relying on the kindness of friends, families, and synagogues to take meals in a sukkah this year. But this post isn't about Sukkot; it's about the last three evenings that kept us occupied and up late.

Tuesday night, after work, I had an instructors summit at Grub Street, Boston's independent creative writing center. Although I'm not actually teaching a class or a workshop this semester, I still attended. Grub Street has been doing a lot of good work recently for the city of Boston, such as the Memoir Project (memoir writing workshops for senior citizens) and YAWP (a monthly teen writing workshop for Boston-area high school students). I wanted to find out more about them, as well as meet with my fellow instructors. But that meant not getting home until very late Tuesday night.

On Wednesday evening, Nomi and I met up after work and went to the Cingular Wireless store in Coolidge Corner, Brookline. We've had the same older-style cell phones for about four or five years, and I had been feeling the bug for a newer model. Cingular obliged, with a letter informing us that the new network would soon no longer support our old phones, but hey, here's a rebate deal for some new ones. So we went to the store and bought these spiffy new Nokia models and an updated contract. We can now take photos and access the Internet with our phones! Here's a picture of Nomi I took with my camera phone:







Now I just have to hope I run into Superman lifting a car, and I'm all set.

The only problem, though, was that the sales associate (a very nice guy) couldn't get the system to accept our upgrade properly. He had to call Cingular customer service, and they kept him on hold as much as they do the rest of us. So once more, we had a late night. In the end, though, we got the service we wanted, and we've been having fun text messaging each other.

Last night, of course, was the Sixteenth First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Although we did not manage to get together a delegation from the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet, we did attend the ceremony. This was our third time attending an Igs, and I saw fewer familiar faces in the crowd than I have in previous years. The ceremony, as usual, was very funny, even if they attempted to put the kibosh on paper airplane throwing. The 2006 Ig Nobel winners list has been posted at the official site. The winning "research" included investigations into why woodpeckers don't get headaches; the finickiness of dung beetles; the invention of a high-pitch tone to repel teenagers; a calculation of the number of photographs you need to take of a group of people to ensure at least one photograph where no one has their eyes closed; the report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly"; reports on how to terminate hiccups through "digital rectal massage"; an explanation of why spaghetti breaks into more than two pieces when bent; a report on ultrasonic velocity in cheddar cheese; and the discovery that the female malaria mosquito is attracted equally to the smells of Limberger cheese and human feet.

(If you're interested in learning more about the Prizes, this Saturday as usual you can attend the The Ig Informal Lectures at MIT. Nomi and I won't be there, of course, but we hear they're always good.)

Anyway, because it was our third late night in a row, we didn't stick around, but we headed home to do what packing we could for the weekend. (I'm still not done.)

So that's been the week. To top it all off, I had some Library Trustee business I needed to deal with by email, an interview of a horror writer to arrange, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped.

Plans for the weekend include sleeping.

Copyright © Michael Burstein; photo copyright © Michael Burstein

Personal Reminiscence: Coliseum Books

I just discovered today that one of my favorite New York City bookstores, Coliseum Books, will very likely close its doors before the end of the year. A letter in today's New York Times referred me back to the article Coliseum Books to Close Permanently by Year's End, from October 3, 2006. The article quotes the founder and co-owner, George S. Leibson, saying that he thinks the store will simply disappear.

If this is true, I'm saddened by the news. When I was a teenager growing up in New York City, Coliseum Books was one of the few stores that kept a large collection of esoteric books. In particular, they had huge sections devoted to science, mathematics, puzzles, and games. I always managed to find books there that I knew I would not find in either the Waldenbooks or Barnes & Noble in my home neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens. A lot of my mathematical recreational reading, such as books by Martin Gardner, came from that store. I also picked up history books, plays, even science fiction novels. I remember browsing their large, unfinished wooden shelves, always eager to see what surprise would turn up next. (This link will take you to a picture of the store's interior, which still has those same shelves. I would have copied the picture here, but I presume it's under copyright and I wish to respect that.)

Coliseum Books used to stand in Columbus Circle, a short walk from the Coliseum, which is where I presume they got the name. According to the article, they opened the place at 57th Street and Broadway in 1974, where they stood until 2002. Their location was extremely out of the way for me, but I made a point of visiting whenever I could. (Their location was near Cami Hall, where the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society meets, which gave me a good excuse.) Once I left New York City for Boston, I generally didn't make it back there for obvious reasons.

I remember being concerned when they closed in 2002 due to rent issues, but I was delighted when they reopened in June of 2003, at 11 West 42nd Street. Ever since then, when Nomi and I took a trip to New York, we made a point of visiting the new Coliseum Books and buying some books there. I remember buying a whole stack of hardcovers about New York City history, and having them shipped home to Brookline. That was shortly after they reopened, and we had a nice conversation with a gentleman working behind the counter, who seemed to be more of an owner than just a sales associate. I'm now wondering if it was Mr. Leibson himself. I told him all about my love of the store, and even back in 2003 this fellow expressed the same concern that Mr. Leibson noted in the Times article. Loyal customers from the Upper West Side simply don't bother going to the store anymore. It's too much of a shlep for them, they say.

To me, this is absurd, as Coliseum Books was always a "destination location" for me, like The Strand Book Store on 12th Street and Broadway, or the Forbidden Planet science fiction and fantasy specialty store that once thrived on 59th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. But things change, and I guess a store like Coliseum Books may simply not work for today's market.

The writers, scientists, and poets of the future will have to go to some other bookstore for their dreams. I wish them luck.

Copyright © Michael Burstein

Hypoallergenic Cats

I was fascinated by an article I read this morning in the New York Times, Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties. Apparently, a biotech company in San Diego named Allerca has begun to sell hypoallergenic cats, or cats whose glands "do not produce the protein responsible for most human cat allergies."

Now, its no secret that genetic engineering has made some great strides in the past few years. We all know about Dolly the cloned sheep and Cc the cloned cat. But what fascinated and amused me about these hypoallergenic cats is that they weren't genetically engineered. They were engineered the old-fashioned way, by breeding.

Allow me to quote from the article:

Most human cat allergies are caused by Fel d 1, a molecule that has been sequenced and its gene mapped in the last decade. At first, Allerca scientists sought a method to delete or disable the gene.

But in testing to see whether the gene had been effectively silenced, they made a fortuitous discovery: A very small number of cats carry a mutant gene that produces a modified protein, far less likely to induce allergies.

At that point, the research shifted course. Allerca screened thousands of cats to identify a population with the modified gene and then set those cats to breeding. Because the mutant gene is dominant, the breeding cats could be mated with normal cats to produce hypoallergenic kittens. And no special licensing or government approvals were necessary.

So, for the past few months, Allerca’s small pool of hypoallergenic cats have been busy reproducing. Their breeding facility cannot be visited and “is at a secret undisclosed location,” said Ms. Young, Allerca’s chief executive.

Amazing, isn't it? Here we are, with all our advanced technology and modern techniques for manipulating the genome...and Allerca decides to create their cats by using a method of "genetic engineering" (phenotype engineering?) that has been around since the dawn of civilization. Even had they not been able to identify the mutant gene, this sort of breeding could still have been done. All you would need to do is find a population of cats that didn't induce allergies, breed them true, and hope for the best.

I'm also intrigued by what Allerca is trying to do to keep a monopoly on their cats. Since the mutant gene is dominant, if one of their cats got into the general population, it could start to sire or give birth to more hypoallergenic cats. Or some entrepreneurs could buy one of the cats, breed it with others, and undercut the company's prices with their own hypoallergenic kittens. So according to the article, Allerca neuters every kitten before delivery. They say this is to prevent feline overpopulation, but the Times and I know better.

We iive in a fascinating world, an age of scientific marvels and wonders, and sometimes it's far too easy to become blase about it all. Last night, I told Nomi about the reported experiment that had teleported a chunk of matter (as opposed to simply individual atoms) a distance of half a meter, and her response was a calm statement of, "Cool."

Copyright © Michael Burstein