I subscribe to Google Alerts — a service, from Google, that sends me a weekly email with new or updated search results for the search term that I have selected. The only alert that I have set up is “Schellack” (please forgive the obvious egocentric-ness here).

It’s always interesting to see where a Schellack shows up — especially when it’s not in German, since I can’t read German.

Here’s the most recent example: IC31, a novel adjuvant signaling via TLR9, induces potent cellular …

How cool is that? Someone named Carola Schellack was the lead in an Austrian study of a vaccine in mice (IC31), the “combination of a novel immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotide containing deoxy-Inosine/deoxy-Cytosine (ODN1a) and the antimicrobial peptide KLKL(5)KLK.”

Don’t worry; I didn’t really understand that either (it’s something that stimulates the immune system — maybe a cure for HIV/AIDS!), but you must admit that other Schellacks are doing great work out there!

South Louisiana has, rightfully, been called one of the wettest parts of the United States. Yesterday, in just a couple of hours, cars started floating away.
Check out this video from local news station WBRZ to see some of the water-logged vehicles in Baton Rouge: 2theadvocate.com | Storms tear through Baton Rouge area

Apparently one unlucky Toyota Camry was floating underneath Interstate-10 near downtown BTR when a truck rolled by and damaged the Camry.

Given the choice, I’d rather be the person in the truck.

Sites like www.nineplanets.org are now obsolete. Textbooks have to be rewriten. Astronomers have decided today that Pluto is no longer a planet!

from BBC NEWS: Pluto loses status as a planet

Now if they just take Neptune out of the list, Uranus will be at the back-end of the planets.

With the Braves 5.5 games out of the wildcard race in the National League and light-years behind the Mets in the NL East, this may be the first season in over a decade that Atlanta has not made the division championship series.

Hopefully we won’t have to go back to a 1990-like year, when the Braves were dead-last, to get to a 1991-like year, when the Braves almost won the World Series (they played amazingly and the championship was essentially stolen from them, if you consider the gaffe in Game 2, when the Twins’ Kent Hrbek lifted Ron Gant off of first base to tag him, and the ump actually called Gant out!). Even though Atlanta lost, that may have been the tightest, most exciting World Series ever.

In 1990, the Braves finished with a Win-Loss percentage of .401, the worst in baseball that season. Today they aren’t too close to .401; at .476 they would have to lose 23 games in a row to get there. It is possible, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen. My prayer is that something else will happen, besides lots of losing or another General Sherman, to light a fire under Atlanta.