Present Day Conks

Theme from...Mystery!

I watched this compulsively on PBS as a small child for the Gorey credits.

The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey

Brazilian Girls - Rules Of The Game

The lead singer, Sabina, reminds me so much of Martha (la française)...


Rules Of The Game

What are you to me tonight
Other than
Something we know from the past
Is that a laugh we had

Why are we here tonight
Are you sure
Before the night is over
I'll be yours

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
What can I do
There's nothing as a lie
Nothing as a lie
More as the truth

Do you think it's right
Just to stare
Straight into a picture
Old zero and one (?)

Who am I to you tonight
Look at me
"Don't talk", he says:
"Hmm let it be"

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
What can I do
There's nothing as a lie
Nothing as a lie
More as the truth

It's the rules of the game
The rules of the game
Don't ask me why
Noone knows how to win
Or knows what is fair
We just get by

It's the rules of the game
It's the rules of the game

...Nor do I.

As I have grown older I have grown more aware of the subtle, sordid private lives of adults. With wastes of broad tracts of memory our loves slowly collapse into the whole that we are--enumerations of relationships. There always remains that inward care for the unblemished acts of lovers, whose confidences can only be kept and cleared away by glances. Reading myself there, without your love, all of the details of your life are trivial, pathetic. How is it that the uninterrupted searching for meaning cleaves us, searching. This time, I will put the fuming resentment down, and like some cities, rebuild my foundations on the extinct volcano.

Tonight, I will return to the road, which is all I can to do to keep from falling over. All I can do is run, that is, falling forward. The body regains its edge by straining and sucking in the cold air. The teeming pause before--this emotional life--is reckoned in the body...becoming flaccid. Now this, is the best mental hygiene.

Ah, so it is a new moon in Scorpio with Sun/Moon conjunct.

I will soon post my running from the camera challenge ...

Brian Eno, Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror

All Your Immunological Effects

Celine commenced his interview for The Paris Review: Savy, the biologist, said something appropriate: [i] n the beginning there was emotion, and the verb wasn't there at all[.]"

The B lymphocyte is the agent of the humoral immune response: surface immunoglobulins and secreted antibodies do not kill pathogens, but flag their surface antigens for immobilization, eventual destruction in the peripheral blood.

The hypervariable region of the antibody, the region that binds antigen, also "fits" the unique molecular structure of the antigen (the epitope) with a high degree of specificity from induced fit interactions.

Antibodies throughout the course of an immune reponse or repeated exposures to the same antigen, will acquire an increasing affinity for binding antigen in a process called affinity maturation.

Somatic hypermutation is exactly that: the antigen-binding coding sequence of immunoglobulin genes undergoes significant single base substitutions to match the ever-changing nature of foreign cell surface proteins, yet

these mutations are not transmitted in the gametes. Programmed mutations are likely to occur during crossing over in meiosis for the variation of generations, but the immunoglobulin superfamily is singular among body cell lines with gene rearrangement mechanisms in place to do this.

The second of the two interrelated processes of affinity maturation is clonal selection, whereby the overabundance of B lymphocytes, newly developed from hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow, undergo genetic rearrangement of their receptors while remaining unexposed to antigen to amp up and diversify the repetoire.

B cells maturing with the requisite cell surface receptors gain specificity after exposure to antigen, where they are stimulated to divide and divide cells of themselves with that antigen-specific receptor. B cells that do not bind the antigen remain in circulation, and are not proliferated.

On one hand, the emotions effectively scrabble or scatter the mosiac of our immune reponse. On the other hand, theories of the immune system are probabilities that are incredibly hard to describe. An elusive,everpresent force.
Given the statement "I feel like I am dying"...Yes, but how so by the degrees you are from the somatic level, the psychological level, the cognitive level?

J posts an unfinished undertaking she began in preparation for her exam (completed Thursday morning) on the subject. The class, like anything else, is contest of egos but the few bits she has parceled away in her long-term memory will serve some purpose, if only to perplex others.

J has a clear favorite among Picasso's women and "their" respective works.

J knows the right and left eyes of Horus represent dualities of the mind, the senses, etc...but she did not know they served as measures.