In high school I was on the swim team. Though generally it’s least male exponent, I remained an active participant for the last three years of school as swimming seemed to bolster my health over the winter months. There are alot of random aspects of the experience I recall here and there:

• Friends and aquaintences of interesting character, now gone their separate ways.
• The various away pools: one with salty water, one with disinfectant troughs you had to walk through when entering the locker-room, and a third that was so sauna-like it sapped your strength.
• Painting a ceiling tile in the guy’s locker-room with the words to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”.
• The day I swam several hundred extra yards until everyone else had left, in order to avoid getting my hair shaved in solidarity with the rest of the team.

But the one thing that really stands out in my mind is the moss pit.

Continue reading The Moss Pit – A Memory →

Recently at my place of employment, our shredder broke, and I had to purchase a new one. My criteria going into the purchase were to find a shredder that did a fine cut and was around $50-60. I ended up buying the Ativa DQ81M*.

The Ativa DQ81M was in the price range, did 8-sheets a go in a diamond cut and also came with one feature I hadn’t expected. To see the mystery-shredder-feature watch this movie of my use of the shredder.

Did you notice anything odd? It is okay if you didn’t. Behold, I have a second movie for you to watch, of Bob and I shredding in the dark.

What did you see? You saw a light, not from my Mini Mag-Lite, but from on the shredder itself.

Think about that.

I have my own conclusions as to why a shredder would come equipped with a light, but rather than expound on them, I wanted to pose the question to the wider Protozoic forum. So:

1. Why would a shredder need a light?
2. Are there any further-reaching, perhaps darker, implications of shredders with lights on them?

• Though the Ativa DQ8M1 gets only okay reviews online, at least it isn’t the DQ6M1, the 6-sheet unit, a model people hate with an almost sublime passion.

There are a lot of great crab recipes on the web and I thought I would add to the mix by providing a recipe for a little known Maryland crab dish. While it goes without saying that Maryland is for crabs, I have a funny feeling that all you Shoreheads out there are going to particularly love this one.

Blue Crab Stuffed with Squirrel Meat

Ingredients:

Blue Crab Squirrel Old Bay Seasoning Butter Cream Salt

Instructions

1. Choke* the crab (discard the dead man but keep crab meat see step 6).
2. Clean, gut and de-bone squirrel (keep the giblets and skin but discard the gizzard – see steps 4 and 6).
3. Mince squirrel meat and season liberally with Old Bay brand seasoning mix.
4. Stuff crab shell with squirrel meat and wrap the shell in the squirrel skin.*
5. Heat oven to 450°C and cook crab stuffed with squirrel meat for 15-20 minutes or until done.
6. Mince giblets and crab meat. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 5 teapoons of butter (vegans may substitute extra virgin olive oil or EVOO if desired with no decrease in flavor).
7. Bring 1/2 cup of water or 1/2 cup of cream to a boil and add giblets-crab mince. Boil for approximately 15-20 minutes until a
   thick creamy sauce clots on the surface. Add ice water as necessary to help the sauce congeal and skim from the surface.
8. Remove crab from oven. Dispose of squirrel skin. Pour the gibblet-crab sauce you’ve skimmed over crab shell and serve with lager or cola.

• Choke – Old Eastern Shore dialect for picking a crab.
• Don’t eat the skin! The skin is only used to cover the crab shell and seal in flavors.

Note: Dragon helped me transcribe this recipe.

These days I’ve been doing some testing that involves gel electrophoresis. This is a process often used to separate out different chemicals in a mixture (for example a mixture of DNA fragments with assorted lengths), typically in aqueous solution, on the basis of the individual component’s size and charge.

To accomplish this you basically make half inch thick slab out of gelatin (well “agarose” technically) and cover the “gel” with a sufficient quantity of buffer solution (say a 1x concentration of Tris/Acetate/EDTA solution). Then you insert some of the mixture to be separated into little holes in one end of this gel.

Continue reading Current Employment →

Finally I make a Proto-post about my Asian excursion. I was thinking since a lot of travel blogs end up with a couple posts in the first month and then one every 3 months after that, I would try to hold myself to one post every month. So, now that I’m 5 months late, let’s get right to it.

Continue reading China O’Brian →