Tiny boxes can't thwart box-loving cat

No box is too small or oddly shaped for Maru, the box loving cat.

Weird almost-lucid dream last night in which I was aware of the strangeness of random shifts in people's identities and locations (I'm on an ocean liner; wait, now it's a spaceship; no, now it's a boarding school and someone is driving a red convertible from the garage to the highway outside). Didn't quite make the leap to actually realizing it was a dream though, just boggled at the WTF-ery of everything as it happened. And Robert Downey Jr. being in most segments of it tells me that Due Date trailer is getting way too much airtime and can go the hell away any day now.

US Map Showing The TV Series Best Representing Each State

Another Caturday-eve video....

Simon’s Cat in Lunch Break

US Map Showing The TV Series Best Representing Each State

DC gets "The Pretender" Not that I didn't love that show, but there are a variety of better shows. Like, say Bones.

Okay. I am making progress today. After working until midnight last night with the last victorious keystroke only to discover that my corrections put my number off by even more than I was wrong in the first place. Woes.

Today I decided I needed a clear head and to put the Big Task aside and try to work on all the little tasks that Must Get Done before I leave. And whaddya know, those mostly didn't take that much time. So now lunch, and then tackling the Big Task again.

DC gets "The Pretender"

Actually, that's Delaware.

Happy Birthday Jessica!

US Map Showing The TV Series Best Representing Each State

Those are pretty funny.

Apple bran muffin. I still feel cheated, though this is quite tasty. Too sweet, though.

The Insanity Virus

Is schizophrenia caused by genetics or environment? The answer may be both, but in a way you’d never imagine. The culprit may be a virus! The good news is that you don’t have to worry about catching this virus. The bad news is that we all carry it in every cell of our bodies.

Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”

But such genetic intrusions stick around a very long time, so humans are chockablock full of these embedded, or endogenous, retroviruses. Our DNA carries dozens of copies of Perron’s virus, now called human endogenous retrovirus W, or HERV-W, at specific addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7.

This virus was long thought to be “junk DNA”, which makes up a fair amount of our genetic material, but doesn’t affect us. The new line of research says that this virus, if it is activated at a certain age under the right conditions, may cause changes to human immune systems that lead to the development of not only schizophrenia, but multiple sclerosis and possibly other diseases.