legionnaire

OK, it's way late so this entry will probably have to be pretty short (yeah, right, like the rest of them?)

Anyway, today was relatively unproductive for me. I woke up late and rushed to the lab to get my staining done on the cultured cells that I mentioned yesterday. I was looking for expression of two different things - the intracellular domain of the Neuregulin protein, as well as the total amount of alpha-7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in my cultured cells. The neuregulin staining was a complete failure - all of my cells looked like crap. The alpha7, however, looked OK. Not fantastic, but at least OK, so I'm pretty sure that it's real and not some weird artifact of the staining process. I should have some pictures tomorrow that I can post up of cells stained for it. They're pretty - but they've undergone quite a bit of photoshopping to get there.

I'll explain what I mean by all of these procedures some other time, right now it would probably take too long and I need to get up early tomorrow morning.

After the lab I met up with some friends to play this game called "Illuminati." It's really dorky - it's this sort of card game where each card is different (meaning it has a different name, different stats and different 'alignments), and every player's goal is to either "control" eight cards (or more, depending on the number of people playing) or meet their faction's "special conditions" for winning the game. It's ridiculously complex, but suffice to say, there's dice, little money chips, lots of cards and shit talking involved. Not to mention marijuana and alcohol, which makes the whole thing that much more interesting (and hard to figure out.) I didn't win - although I did at one point control the 'Robotic Sea Monsters' (which are Communist, for some reason), Crop circles (which are Peaceful and Weird) and the CIA. And my friend Scott (who some of you may actually have met before) took great pride in destroying the UN with Ninjas. Yeah, we're dorks, but we have a good time sometimes.

Editing the politics section has been fun, but I do hope that people start submitting more articles, because it's a definite drain on my time to have to write everything. Also, my coeditor thesleepthief has been completely MIA, no one has seen or heard from him since he got the job, so right now I'm the only editor for my section. Which means I have a fair amount of work to do. But I'm still enjoying it. But whatever, I'm sure things will work out.

Anyway, it's way late, I have a bunch of shit to do tomorrow morning, so I'm off.

Take care.