Chemistry

1
I was flipping through the November issue of Wired! magazine and came across an article about Leo McCloskey’s work on wine. Leo has figured out the chemical components of a whole slew of wines, and through his tinkerings in the lab, he can make you that bottle of 1983 Paulliac Bordeaux from scratch. That’s right—no oak, no aging, no yeucchy tannin sharpness—a perfect bottle of designer wine just by knowing the chemical contained therein and the secrets to good wine are chemical manufacturable.

2
This sort of got me thinking about other tinkerers in the realm of chemistry, our modern–day alchemists. One was Bob Noyce the genius who figured out if you take a chip of silicon and heat it and treat it chemically, you can make it take on positive and negative charges. He invented the integrated circuit and help found Intel, which probably supplied the chips that run the machine you are reading this email from.

3
I met a real alchemist personally. I was in Palo Alto looking up a Dead Head friend of mine back in 1997. He worked at a very hush hush experimental lab that had a huge budget (a billion dollars) to play around with T cells. T cells are the ones that the body produces to combat infectious organisms in our bodies. The lab was to recreate the entire immune system of the human body from a single T cell. Quite an adventure for sure—but that is only part of the story.

My buddy introduced me to one of maybe a handful of people on the planet today that can synthesize any compound chemically. He was stirring a glass beaker filled with proteins and looked like a wigged out Dead Head—a normal enough guy you would meet stirring proteins at Stanford. He asked me if I liked LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, and I said, “yeah, sure." I ain’t no Captain Trips but hey? So he handed me two plastic, scientific-looking vials containing colorless, tasteless, and odorless liquids. He smiled and we said goodbye. Anyone that tried that stuff (and there are a few Spam Family members out there that have ;-) can attest to the sublime effects it had—very clean, very pure, very trippy!

4
Some confuse genetically modified organisms (GMO) with such chemical tinkerings. They are in no way similar, and so don’t be confused. Chemical tinkering is working at several layers above the genetic level, and in no way can alter or change living organisms. The same cannot be said for GMO tinkering—it is a much less understood, and hence dangerous enterprise in the world today.

5
I was watching TV last night. For me watching TV is creating my own TV shows by clicking through the channels picking up tidbits as I go along and not really taking time to actually watch an entire episode from start to finish. Well, I do if it’s a really good documentary or a classic movie or the Simpson’s, but I don’t go for sit coms or dramas at all. And watching the news just makes me roll my eyes in disbelief at the jingoist crap out there (fact: CNN’s rating have dropped substantially since Sept.11—credit Wolf Blitzer and that other whiner Aaron Brown for the drop in ratings—Larry King must figure in there too somehow).

6
Anyway, on this night on TV, there were three shows featuring the VAGINA. All three of them were sort of sexy too. I mean, there was some pseudo-medical premise for the shows, but when it came down to it, there were big juicy close-ups of quite an attractive, young women’s genitalia lit up real nice with bastard amber lights and everything (“bastard amber” is actually a real color—it’s the color of the lighting gels made popular by Playboy magazine photographers to make human flesh look appealing. In fact, I met a Playboy photographer in the 70s who told me there was little difference in photographing a naked model and a bowlful of strawberries—the object was to make them both look appealing). I guess it’s OK to show wide open vaginas on TV these days.

7
The vagina seems to be a much misunderstood part of the human anatomy. Seems even women are only now coming to understand some of what the vagina has to offer. I can only say this because that is what they said on TV—and we do believe TV, don’t we?

8
This misunderstanding of the vagina has made it to Broadway in a show entitled “The Vagina Monologues” . I can’t imagine what that would consist of, but perhaps it explains some of the mysteries of the nether regions of the female body—no doubt it includes what is inside the female thinking about the vagina as well.

9
Have you ever read the ingredients for Preparation H? I did. In the list of scientific-sounding chemicals, there is shark liver oil—and “flavor”.

OK, you tell me why they add flavor to Preparation H.

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