How my 'plain omelette' nearly cost me my Wife - Exclusive

We already know about Aliens Eating Buicks and DJ's Saving Lifes, so, what's different about a plain omelette disrupting married life? READ ON.


Last nicht, after work, McDawg met up again with James Meikle (and his wife, Fiona) from The Guardian for a few drinks at The Drum And Monkey, in Glasgow. (Follows a random snap of the interior of the pub)



Flickr source

McDawg has had regular contact with James for about 8 years now, but this was only the third time that we've met in person. The previous time was in London last August with Dr Jenny Rohn for an hour or so the day before Science Blogging 2008: London

Prior to the meet up yesterday, McDawg had a browse through some of James's recent online articles and noted a couple of key changes:-

a) He's started to include lots of handy hyperlinks, which he didn't used to
b) On a number of his articles, comments sections are included, which is new

All in all, despite not being really into social networking sites, etc., he's morphing into being a blogger !! Woot....

I found this rather interesting and threw open a discussion in this regard. I noted that certain articles had no comments, and others had differing amounts. Relatively typical in the blogosphere.



A broken egg with yolk spilling out. Photograph: Getty

One particular recent post he referred to was Sunny side up for eggs published in The Guardian's Word Of Mouth Blog.

Mrs Meikle pretty much told me the story about that post and it was rather amusing to listen to them discuss it. From the blog:-

"My wife (jokingly, I think) threatened to leave me when I promised her a special dinner on her return from a trip away and proudly produced a beautifully-cooked, but undeniably plain, omelette. With salad, I hasten to add".

James lied about adding mushrooms, allegedly - tsk, tsk!!

What came out of that post however and James was so delighted about this, were the number of recipe suggestions that followed in the comments section (67 before the comments section was closed).

Mrs Meikle said that she had considered leaving a comment, but wasn't too sure about the concept of a husband and wife team communicating online in such a manner.

McDawg responded straight away, citing the likes of Dr Gee and Mrs Gee who've relatively recently started to do this on Nature Network ! Most recent example earlier today.

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Some 'take home' issues here, and knowing The Meikle's as I now do, I most enjoyed the other night and writing this up in a blog !! Enjoy your Oban/Highlands trip guys !!!!

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This sounds rather nom nom nom, from commenter, bitwize


Here's an excellent Turkish egg dish

Menemen - for 4 persons
4 eggs
2 green peppers,
2 T. butter
2 ripe tomatoes
salt, blk. pepper
chopped parsley
garlic
chopped onion
feta cheese cubes
Peel and chop the tomatoes. Remove the top and seeds of the green pepper and cut into thin rings. Cut the larger rings into half or forths. All should be the same size. Dice the onion

Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat. Sauté the onion green pepper & garlic until soft. . Do not allow to brown. Add the tomatoes and allow to sauté a few minutes. Use a fork to crush them until it resembles a loose sauce.

Add the slightly beaten egg, salt and pepper to taste and stir gently until it begins to set. Add the feta cheese iand continue to stir until the liquid is evaporated.

Garnish with fresh chopped parsley and serve with crusty bread/baguette.

Absolutely Beautiful.

McDawg's Flickr

Over the last day or so, I've been playing around with Flickr much more than in the past. Indeed until now, I only uploaded one photo there.

I've now shifted over a much larger "n" of images over to Flickr though, and if this works (and it should do - and it does), follows my first embedded Flickr slide-show evah.

For maximum enjoyment, you will need some fine music/wine of your choosing, throw them kids away (for a bit) and dim the lights etc.



Musician/Patient Advocate.

Most of my Flickr creations thus far are "virtual covers" for my musical recordings (where I trade under the name of Steck) which have been uploaded at MacJams.

www.macjams.com/artist/steck

I'm Male and Single.

McBlawg
Galafray, Andromeda but I drop by Somerfield's every second Wednesday - allegedly.

MP3 Experiment 9.65

OK

So now, can I embed an MP3 of my own choosing?

Let's go random and see if this works.

FAIL - so over to YouTube instead for another version. Added value too in the form of video and live.

Seeing is Believing - Believing is Seeing

A few weeks ago, through Facebook (Fb), McDawg became are of the Open Access Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

Let's do a "Teaser Video", JoVE style....


Click the play button :-


(A better quality full screen version can now be found here.)

music c/o Morning Jacket and "Anytime" - cool toon.

As JoVE is Open Access, all (the) content is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

McDawg contacted the JoVE co-founders who were unaware of their Fb presence.

Last week, MacDawg spoke with JoVE CEO, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder Dr Moshe Pritsker. McDawg thinks (and now knows) Moshe found it interesting that a non scientist was interested in a site like JoVE.

I also then discovered the official JoVE blog. This blog entry is most interesting. There is also now a JoVE wiki.

Prof Peter Suber blogged about JoVE Nov 2006.

Here's a hand picked selection of JoVE Visualized Experiments - watch, learn and spread the word folks !!

McDawg - woof woof



1) This video is from a well-known Bhatia lab at MIT working on tissue-engineering:

Silicon microchips for manipulating cell-cell interaction

Elliot E Hui, Sangeeta N Bhatia

Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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2) This video is from the lab of Doug Melton, a highly respected authority in the stem cell biology field, known for his recent work on derivation of human embryonic stem cells, which also inspired a lot of political debate:


Derivation of Human Embryonic Stem Cells by Immunosurgery

Alice E. Chen, Douglas A. Melton

Dept of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University

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3) An animal cancer model from Stanford:


Orthotopic Mouse Model of Colorectal Cancer

William Tseng, Xianne Leong, Edgar Engleman

Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine

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4) Arnold Kriegstein is the director of the Institute at UCSF, a big authority in the field of neural stem cells. They cited this video in their recent article in Nature.


In Utero Intraventricular Injection and Electroporation of E16 Rat Embryos

William Walantus, Laura Elias, Arnold Kriegstein

Institute for Regeneration Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

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5) Behavioral studies in Drosophila from the Carlson lab at Yale:


Proboscis Extension Response (PER) Assay in Drosophila

Takashi Shiraiwa, John R. Carlson

Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Yale

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6) Dr Pritsker's favorite: animal model of Multiple Sclerosis – good for immunologists and neuroscientists:


Induction and Clinical Scoring of Chronic-Relapsing Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis

Christine Beeton, Adriana Garcia, K. George Chandy

Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of California, Irvine

Is it in our Nature to Network?

But of course !! We have being doing this since Adam and Eve et al.

Some entries from Wikipedia here, here and here.

Now, McDawg is interested in science, networking, social networking, scienceblogs, making contact with researchers and so on so forth.

What if we were to Get Creative and combine all of these entities.

It's happening all over the world if you know how and where to look on the internet.

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The latest resource that I am road testing (10 days in) is Nature Network (NN for short).

Can I suggest watching this short explanatory video from the folks at NN.

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McDawg for one thinks this is certainly an interesting new development.

McDawg