736 lines
38 KiB
Plaintext
736 lines
38 KiB
Plaintext
File: getting_it.txt
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Cont: Pred's friendly metastasis. Reality nibbles gently. What the fuck'll
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I do now?
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I can't remember what it was which provoked this memory. In 1993 I was
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doing the practical component of the TAFE explosives course. This was
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where I held my first old, sweaty (the nitroglycerin had started to sweat
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its way out of the cartridge), stick of AN60 gelignite, which we were
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gonna condemn to death by laying it down in the quarry and torching it in
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puddle of diesel. A long way away from where we would observe it.
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It's been a long time since I've had that creeping, prickly feeling of
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fear that accompanied the realisation that the nitroglycerin was migrating
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across the skin of my fingers and I'd have a fucker of a headache later,
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since nitro' is a potent vasodilator as well as a vicious explosive. It's
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the cold grey feeling of discovering you're being infiltrated by something
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malevolent, but are powerless to prevent it. Dropping old AN60 from any
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height is a good way to become dead fast. I couldn't let it go in any
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manner other than was required by the disposal protocol. I could feel the
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explosive oil on my fingertips. Yes, I did indeed get a fucker of a
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headache later. I have never handled NG since, preferring the nitrated
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pentaerythritols and the salami-like sausages, thick as your arm, of 3151
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PowerGel.
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Whatever it was, it came to me while I was headding up to the doctor's
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office via the elevator. Maybe the hydraulic oil of the elevator and the
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NG smell the same.
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The redheaded flautist, who kindly donated me a pair of khaki pants before
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departing for the apple isle (these were the genuine ADI item, too, not
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some imitation low-durability crap from a chinese sweatshop), has me under
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a momentary vow of monogamy. I mentioned to her after saying I'd cop this
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for about a month at most, that since my time is short and I'm grabbing
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most things offered to me, that if any carnal offers came up in her
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absence I'd probably say yes. She's sounding resigned to my stance, saying
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unconvincedly that I should just do what I have to do, but I said that
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while we're in the loop, she can negotiate with me about what else we get
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up to. She told me to just do what I had to do and tell her a story when
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she came back. Wow. This is the same person who without a moment's thought
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just walked into the geek room and offered to shag me a few weeks ago. And
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we still haven't, though we've been pretty close. I think she's right -
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it's gone beyond simply fucking, we're getting to know each other so it's
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no longer the straight proteinaceous exchange one can get away with under
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the blanket of anonymity which comes from barely knowing each other.
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I figure we've got the pathogens and pregnancy aspects under control, so
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it comes down to how vulnerable her ego is to the percieved threat of
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anyone else who shags me, whom she would consider as a superior or
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competitor, or the assumption that I would, or even could, (I'll phrase
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this indelicately for maximum effect) fuck her cheaply and forget her, and
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I'm sure as hell not about to do that. But then, maybe that's why she
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offered to shag me, from her point of view - I'm disposable. Fair's fair.
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I dropped her at the airport and rode to the doctor's surgery in Kogarah.
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I noticed later her blood on the front of the khakis (and they're not
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AusCam so the blood contrasted darkly against the green drill fabric, but
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ah, there was nothing else to wear). So did the doctors. I would expect
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they'd have an eye for blood.
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I had a chat to Aslan _and_ Cozzi, the dudes who spent a few hours playing
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about in my guts back in Nov. Cozzi, who resected my cancerous chunk o'
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lymph nodality out of my retroperitoneal area, had a look at the scar,
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which has healed well. If I have to complain, it could only be because the
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scar's fucked up my ol' six pack, even though I never did any work to
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obtain either of them. I asked 'em about the homicidal maniac incubating
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itself in my neck. They're gonna pass the job to his mate at Randwick and
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he will probably opt to chop it out. I am glad I can rely on my previous
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tactical slash merchants to be of the opinion that we should slash first,
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ask questions later. Okay okay, de Sousa reckons I'm fucked anyhow and I
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mostly agree with him, but for reasons mainly related to the need to
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support the idea that I've got some sort of a chance (and that I want a
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scar I can wear in public for maximum gratuitous egotistical street cred
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without freezing my arse off in winter), I'm not going down without a
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fight. Finally, someone has the clue. So I see the professorial dude in
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Randwick on the 19th. Arrr... precious days elapse, during which time Bill
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feeds on my ichor, presumably preparing to launch cytological tentacles
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into the important adjacent infrastructure which keeps me alive... little
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things like oh, you know, my carotid fuckin' artery. I told 'em I'd been
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reading the scientific literature and that it was my opinion that the more
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I read about this creeping doom the less I liked it, and frankly the odds
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sucked. They said there wasn't much they could do about that. Looks like
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medicine is still DIY to some extent these days.
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So I'm also off to see Fluhrer on the 13th about some lipopolysaccharides
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from strep pyrogenes and oh, what was the other one.. serratia marcassens.
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If we fail to provoke massive immune response to this thing and its
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invisible buddies by stuffing a few hundred nanograms of immunogenic crap
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into it, we'll chop it out afterwards.
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It's been a good week for scavenging, but it usually is in the couple of
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weeks after Christmasturbation, since all the perfectly good old stuff
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gets tossed to make way for more perfectly good new stuff.
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I hauled an _astounding_ bit of stereo hardware out of a dumpster last
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week, while bicycling breathlessly back from the paint shop adjacent to
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where I went to school as a little kiddie in the mid-late 1970s. It's a
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serious weapon from Sony, will drive 160 watts root mean-square into eight
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ohms, per channel. It has bass enhancement, surround sound and all that
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related digital signal processing accoutrementage of which the Japanese
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are so enamoured, and which English electrical engineers such as NAD have
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correctly held in contempt from the day they built their first amp out of
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thermionic valves nearly a century ago. I still haven't figured out how
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to program the graphic equaliser, and have not figured out exactly what
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much of the rest of it even does.
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It doesn't have a damned left/right balance control on it, but at least
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the volume control is a nice, massy knob with no dead spots. It is very
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spacey to hear in operation. It drives my dumpster-dived (and re-coned)
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Technics SB1950s with the ... well, noticable effortless transparency
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which comes from an amp which is not working very hard to do what it does.
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Liquid sound, man! Excellent, and I don't give a fuck what the snotty
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audiophile set sez about it. Skinny Puppy's messianic `Warlock' poignantly
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flares my nostrils and... I can't quite explain it ... makes the glands at
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the back of my jaw ache (listen to everything after four minutes, ten
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seconds into the fifth track on the Rabies album, at as much volume as you
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can tolerate). I almost have to weep when listening to the rolling,
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oceanic, bass tectonics which underpin the Pet Shop Boys' track Jealousy.
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The savage dog twitches to it while she sleeps on the carpet. I haven't
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wired the surround drivers into it yet. Ahh. Thank you, oh bountiful gods
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of Dumpster.
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Along with this audio bounty came a toolbox with lots of good tools and
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hardware in it. The tools came up pretty well with a little work involving
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some oil and steel wool. Man, I must have found or scavenged just about
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every tool in the shed by now... everything from fuel pumps to cathode ray
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oscilloscopes. But it's getting crowded. I've started throwing out stuff
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that I have accumulated there which had a low probability of my using it
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in the next two years. I'm glad of the space.
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I mention the paint shop because adjacent to it is the primary school
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where I spent the first seven years of forced incarceration in the
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pedagogic monster which has consumed most of my life. In the corner of the
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playground where the carpark of the paint shop abutts, is a large gum
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tree. I planted it in 1977, at the age of six, on a day pouring rain, with
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the then state environment minister, Paul Landa. He died of cancer (are
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you bored yet?) a few years later. It was but a fragile sapling when I
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packed the wet earth around its roots with my clean, small, childish
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hands. It's a BIG tree, now, twenty five years later. The only honest
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state politician I have ever met, Paul said it would grow to be so, but I
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guess he knew he could be sure in his opinion. It makes me smile to see
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kids eat lunch under it.
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I am cycling more, and the lungs are obviously awaking from a long
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slumber. Geez, there's so much more traffic these days, and more
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noticable when I'm not keeping up with it on the pushie. I got on the
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scales at the veterinarians and they said I am captain to 64.65kg of mass.
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But my memory's odd. I went to use my TheftPOS card and I remembered the
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PIN from three years ago, which it duly rejected.
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I went down to the bicycle shop where I got components for my first
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bicycle in the 1980s. It's run now by the son of Ron, who used to run it,
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who was claimed by mesothelioma some years ago. I'm on the hunt for a
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suspension seat post now I'm back on the road.
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I've also started stability testing of my next bit of computing machinery.
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It's a mongrel with a tale worth telling. I dragged the chassis (where oh
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where do the side panels always go?) in from the roadside last year. The
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power supply was a cat.org.au item but was broken since someone dropped it
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so hard its circuit board broke on the mounting lugs - I fixed this, and
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also soldered in a nice IEC-III noise suppression socket... maybe I'll put
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in some MOVs later for spike quenching. I found the cdrom drive on the
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roadside too, a couple of years ago. The RAM is cat.org.au's and I'm
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testing that too. The Pentium-III CPU came from a mobo felled by errant
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onboard electrolytic power capacitor explosion (irremediable, sadly, since
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the resulting short blew some of the adjacent regs) and scavenged from
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NDARC by Jude Hungerford, who was *sure* it would be useful for something
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(yep - a CPU is a Good Thing).
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I had to fling the broken GX-150 mobo; the actual motherboard is one from
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XML, who said it `had problems', and I figured them out : it was doing
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segmentation faults mainly 'cos the jumpering and BIOS settings were
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changing the core/bus ratio to something faster than the processor could
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handle (and it helped to put a heatsink on the south bridge too) so it'd
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just seg-fault itself to death a few minutes after boot. So it's in the
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other room, doing memory tests, running lots of concurrent maps of its own
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process table entries, running a GUI and factoring huge prime numbers.
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It's doing about 733MHz, which is a bit sluggard by modern glitzo
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standards but is twice as quick as my not-very current Celeron/366
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Robo-608. If it's gonna shit itself I'll know by morning. If not, I'll be
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happy. I am glad when I live on a planet where usable recyclable computing
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hardware, for which free software is also available, adorns the roadsides
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and junk on the living room tables of friends.
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The motherboard came my way at Smokering's, the day after I slept in XML's
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bed (and we didn't shag tho we did listen to a lot of Yello which I hadn't
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heard for 15 years and I remembered almost all of it, too). Which was
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before I spent a couple of afternoon hours in the graveyard behind King
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St, Newtown under the huge spreadding fig trees as the sun descended,
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holding Wolfie in my mosquitophilic arms and failing to escape the feeling
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that I was surrounded by a historical example of my next big change in
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domicile - holes in the ground with slabs on top.
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---
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I spent some of today in the back shed with my shirt off, doing the case
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metalwork for this Pentium-III machine I'm putting together, which I'm
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happy to say spent all night testing itself (a knoppix 2.4.20-xfs kernel,
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several instances of top -d0, memtest, a gui, and about thirty
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factorisations of large prime numbers - a considerable load average) and
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didn't skip a beat. I think, ladeez-an-ginnulmen, we have a winner. The
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PCI bus works too, which i can't say was ever the case for the '608.
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I love metalwork. I would have elected to do it as a full subject in
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highschool but I was considered too bright for that, which strikes me as a
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decision diagnostic of shameful disdain for the great engineering arts of
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metallurgical cuttin'n'weldin'n'drillin'n'foldin, and I've sure as hell
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done more useful things with my limited metalwork skills than I have with
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anything I ever learned in, say, higher school certificate Modern History.
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It's summer and the back shed (where all the real work happens) is hot and
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poorly ventilated even with the exhaust fan on and the door open.
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I did the sheet steel work with aviation cutters and a hacksaw (this was
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an old ATX tower cover, so pretty easy to retrofit onto a smaller box).
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The other case plate came from the aluminium chassis of an obsoleted
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19-inch rackmount Digital DECserver MX-200 hub from 1992. I hate wasting
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aluminium sheet so I carved it up with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool, and now
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it's the side casing of my next machine. Also scored some mains
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noise-suppressors out of the ol' DEC item. Cool.
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Cuttin' metal requires manual effort. Sweat poured off me, I stank of
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burnt cutting lubricant (stuff you put on the blades to make 'em glide
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through the cut metal edges more easily) and that rusty tang from the
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reaction between sweat and freshly cut iron filings. The aluminium job was
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too big for the bench vise so I cradled it in my lap with my left arm and
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used my right hand to guide the jigsaw, which has a customised blade in it
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which I tooled down with a grinder a year ago for precisely these sorts of
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jobs.
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It was fast work, and hot alloy shavings rained off the smoking, snarlin'
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blade onto my belly and thighs but aluminium cools fast (low specific
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heat) and I knew I wouldn't be burned. Fuck this new belly button of mine,
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though. My previous belly button, protruding slightly as it did, didn't
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catch metal shavings with anything like the amazing efficiency of this new
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one, and the shavings are sharp, hard to get, and being aluminium won't be
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persuaded out with a magnet. I tried to get 'em with the long-nose pliers;
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that didn't work, and I eventually used a hose. Bugger. If I sound to you
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like the sort of person who will find anything to complain about, it's
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obviously 'cos you've never had alloy shavings stuck in your natal scar -
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they're a fuck of a lot more of a nuisance than generic bellybutton fluff.
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Normal mundanity - the thing I continue to live for - is biting again. I'm
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gonna go back tomorrow and paint the place I was gonna paint in November
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but didn't 'cos I got sick. I'm not looking forward to it since my
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destestable sister has made the kitchen messy and smelly again. Fuck I
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hate, hate, hate cigarettes and the arseholes who smoke them near me. Even
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her vacuum cleaner's exhaust stinks of fag ash.
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------
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Some dudes I meet are telling me about things I consider to be possibly
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dodgy cures. The present one about which I've been zealously enthused to
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is laetrile, also known as amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside from almonds,
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which is supposed to destroy cancers. Some people call this stuff vitamin
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B17, which is just silly since it sure as hell isn't a vitamin, (tho if
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you were going to call it a vitamin, it'd be right at home in the motley
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molecular crew which comprises the B's, nomenclaturally speaking) as far
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as I can tell, it's not even an enzymatic cofactor anywhere in mammalian
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biochemistry.
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Laetrile's not any good as an antineoplastic according to my Dictionary of
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Plant Toxins (but that's a book about plant poisons, not about oncology),
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nor is it any good for this according to my Merck Index. These two tomes
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haven't jerked me around before, but the Merck's description struck me as
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rather unusually ambivalent in its phrasing - I've never heard of The
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Merck putting in an entry for a "putative synthesis". Why anyone'd bother
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anyway eludes me - plants *always* get the chirality right.
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According to the Merck, the last paper to seriously take the piss out of
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laetrile was written in 1982 before whoever wrote it could have had a clue
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about what we know now about enzymes in human metabolism. According to
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quackwatch there's been a lot of hostile commentry on the material in the
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last 20 years. Dudes have gone to gaol for selling it.
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I'm thinking maybe what I am up against here is anecdotal evidence
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unquantified, and amplified, through the meme-propagating power of the
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internet, and exposed to people who are desperate for something to believe
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in since they believe (correctly) they're gonna die without some or other
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cure... natch, the med industry has its own agendas: if cancers were all
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easily cured, nobody'd make any bucks out of oncology, chemotherapy or all
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the other fun things we people in Club Metastasis live to enjoy for a
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while.
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"Don'tcha get a fuckin' chokko when you
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watch one of those docos about
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those diseases which mean you're born with flippers?
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You're feeling sorta well and, next thing you know
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it's the Peter McCallum,
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for the haircut they give you without clippers."
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TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing, Do Not Manufacture
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I'm never one to dismiss the observations of thousands of ordinary people.
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Time to crank up that ancient part of my head into which I hammered
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organic chemistry into years ago, and make a judgement for myself.
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"Worf, shields up, activate bullshit filters!"
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-something Picard never said.
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Never done chemistry? Here goes. Don't be afraid, most of organic
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chemistry is just a bunch of exercises in electron-pushing and accounting
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for it by equivalent amounts of proton theft. They expand this paradigm
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into a whole degree at university but it more or less boils down to this:
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electrons are the negative things which get pushed around wires
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(electron-ics) and are also the material out of which chemical bonds are
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made between atoms. A proton is a hydrogen atom without an electron,
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protons are positive. Other atoms have more protons in them and need more
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electrons to keep 'em electrically balanced (atoms like it when
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electrons=protons). Protons repel each other and will rip electrons off
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other things to form chemical bonds to them.
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Electrons repel each other and like to go where protons are not already
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shrouded with too many electrons... so you can shove electrons in one
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place in a molecule (molecule=group of atoms glued together with
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electrons) and the electrons'll rearrange to accommodate this, which has
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consequences for the end structure of the molecule, which will either bond
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to something new, throw something away, or rearrange itself to stash the
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electron someplace within (frequently this creates a negative ion). You
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can shove protons in and much the same, but opposite sorts of things will
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happen. So much for lay terminology, let's chow down.
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Laetrile is two hexose sugar molecules glyco-bonded to each other, in this
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case, one of them is bonded via one of its oxygen atoms to a carbon atom;
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this last carbon atom is also bonded to a benzene ring (the -Ph below), a
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proton (the H atom) and a nitrile group (which people who haven't done any
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chem tend to call a cyanide group, but really, it is a nitrile group -
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cyanide's an ion, the nitrile group ain't - big behavioural difference).
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glucose
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mannose-O C%N <-- nitrile
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\ /
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C
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/ \
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H Ph <--- benzene ring
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The chemically astute will, if they ignore the nitrile (CN thing) in the
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top right for a while, see in the ugly ASCII-art above the residue of a
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benzaldehyde precursor (Ph-CHO) in the ether bond to the mannose.
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Benzaldehyde is the stuff they sell as bitter almond essence in
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supermarkets and you'll see a picture of it in a sec when we pull this
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stuff apart. Maybe we'd be better off rotating our heads 90 degrees
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anticlockwise and calling this thing the glucose-mannose ether of
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phenylacetonitrile, but maybe not. Fuck it. Who cares? IUPAC does but
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chemical nomenclature's enough of a shit already. One name'll do.
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The exact nature of the sugar molecules don't matter especially, they're
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the metabolically profitable `bait' that the cell is attracted to... the
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cell enzymatically drags larger sugar molecules into itself for processing
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because they're energetically worth it. Now, if tumors preferentially
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metabolise sugars like glucose (but there's a LOT of different sugars in
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biochemistry... mannose, lactose, fructose, maltose, erythrose, threose,
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trehalose, ribose, rhamnose, just to name a few from memory) 'cos their
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protein and lipid metabolism is somewhat broken, then it makes sense that
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this stuff gets processed preferentially by tumor cells, IF laetrile is in
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fact metabolised by tumor cells at all - the enzymes which cleave sugars
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tend to be fairly picky about what they choose to cleave.
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Now we have to think about what happens when a cell tries to eat it.
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First it'd rip off the glucose and use that for the usual glycolysis
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pathway into the Krebs cycle, leaving the mannose stuck by an ether bond
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(R-O-R') to the phenylacetonitrile, probably floatin' around in the
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cytosol someplace.
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Now my chem's a bit rusty, but if, enzymatically (which is more or less
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organic-chemist-speak for magic, which is what biochemists know enzymes do
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everywhere, all the time), a cell tries to rip off and metabolise that
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remaining sugar by pushin' an electron into that ether bond (tricky -
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ethers are pretty inert) I'd expect it'd leave a phenylacetonitrile
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radical like so:
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O.
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Ph-C-C%N
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H
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|
|
the electron (represented by the lone . ) either has to attract something
|
|
electrophilic to bond to, or the electron has to go someplace locally.
|
|
|
|
The benzo (Ph-) is already stuffed to the gills with these things in its
|
|
aromatic bond structure and is just gonna electrostatically tell the
|
|
electron to go away; the single bond to the proton can't accept any more
|
|
either, and the nitrile's fairly dripping with electrons already. The
|
|
radical is unstable but it happens that the oxygen wants to keep that lone
|
|
electron to itself, to get the sort of double bond it needs to fill its
|
|
outer octet... and oxygen being oxygen (the electronegativity rant can
|
|
come another day), it's gonna be pretty forceful about getting it.
|
|
|
|
So that electron stays right there on the oxy and forces its probability
|
|
distribution cloud onto the nearest other thing electrophilic it can bond
|
|
to, which is the central tetrahedral carbon. The single bond between the
|
|
central carbon and the singly-bonded oxy atom is joined by another single
|
|
bond, and (twang!) we get a nice C=O double bond.
|
|
|
|
[A probability distribution cloud is the best way to think of an electron;
|
|
because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't really say
|
|
exactly where an electron is, but you can describe the space of where it
|
|
is most likely to be in a given slice of time. Some of these clouds have
|
|
some funny shapes... go look up electron orbitals if you're bored.]
|
|
|
|
This'll push an electron off the central carbon, onto whatever can soak it
|
|
up (whatever's the most electrophilic now that the carbon's stuffed with
|
|
one more electron than it can usually take) so the radical will degrade to
|
|
benzaldehyde and a cyanide radical (a nitrile group with a lone electron
|
|
on its carbon atom, which happens to make the whole nitrile electrically
|
|
negative, at which point we can refer to it as a cyanide ion):
|
|
|
|
|
|
--->
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
H
|
|
|
|
|
Ph-C -C%N
|
|
"O
|
|
|
|
benzaldehyde cyanide
|
|
molecule ion
|
|
|
|
Benzaldehyde tends to get oxidised to benzoic acid fairly quickly in air,
|
|
and I guess the same'd happen in oxygenated cells, too, though I can't see
|
|
how it could chew up very much of the cell's available oxygen. It would be
|
|
bad news for any marginal cell which tried to metabolise this stuff,
|
|
especially anything not well oxygenated due to poor vasculature (as tumors
|
|
tend to be), since not only has it had much of its oxygen chewed up by
|
|
this sudden appearance of something which likes to be oxidised
|
|
(consequently the cell momentarilty can't run its respiratory reactions by
|
|
shovin' electrons onto the normally available oxygen, which would in the
|
|
usual circumstances subsequently steal a couple of protons to form water).
|
|
But you'd still need to eat a LOT of benzaldehyde or its dietary
|
|
precursors to have this effect.
|
|
|
|
The real headshot for the cell is that the immediately available cyanide
|
|
ion has an innate ability to irreversibly bind to components of, and thus
|
|
shut down, the cellular electron transport chain. A cell trying to
|
|
metabolise this stuff is gonna have a hard, very short life if it can't
|
|
accommodate these two problems somehow. Hmmm. I dunno what benzoic acid's
|
|
gonna do for the cell's pH either.. probably not much, it's a very weak
|
|
acid.
|
|
|
|
Ok, so chewing laetrile as a plausible generalised cytotoxic agent passes
|
|
my chemical mechanism sanity check. But. But! It immediately occurs to me
|
|
that eating this stuff is just gonna protonate the nitrile group in the
|
|
low pH environment of my gut (contains HCl, so, uh, about pH=3, about
|
|
10000 times more acidic, that is, more prone to donate protons to anything
|
|
nearby, than is water, with pH=7) and give me low-grade cyanide poisoning,
|
|
which is probably why the almond plant makes the stuff: eat enough of its
|
|
seeds and you'll die and be no further threat to its species. At this pH
|
|
disaccharides tend to hydrolyse in the gut anyway, leaving me with
|
|
phenylacetonitrile derivatives floating around in my gut too, even if the
|
|
nitrile doesn't come off and form cyanide.
|
|
|
|
Also - why my other cells wouldn't also try and metabolise the stuff, and
|
|
die trying too, eludes me.... maybe they do but can deal with the damage
|
|
and tumors lack some of the enzymes which normal cells use to cope with
|
|
damage to their electron transport chain. I don't really know. Someone
|
|
mentioned something about mitochondrial rhodanese sulfurtransferase
|
|
failure in tumor cells so they can't turn the CN into thiocyanide and
|
|
excrete it, so they die. I've never heard of rhodanese and it's not in my
|
|
copy of Lehninger, nor my old copy of Stryer, but it's known about at
|
|
EMBL.
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Cancer cells, tax accountancy - the ways we all are failing."
|
|
|
|
-TISM "This Morning I Had Work To Do" - from the Best Off compilation
|
|
|
|
|
|
Time to start chewin' bitter almonds, then? Oh, fuck it, I should face it,
|
|
I've already turned into a pill-poppin' freak. Se, B-vitamins, garlic
|
|
(well, that's not a pill but it's not something I'm eating because I like
|
|
eating it, it's for allyl compounds), A, E. I can't say `it cant hurt' to
|
|
take these things, 'cos cyanogenic glycosides *can* hurt. But then so does
|
|
Se, and so does retinoic acid, if you eat enough of them, and they're
|
|
normal parts of your metabolism.
|
|
|
|
So now I've gotta go back to the people who swear the stuff'll cure me,
|
|
and they're gonna ask me if I've investigated their amazing wonder cure,
|
|
and I will tell them yes, I have - but not with the same conclusions as
|
|
they have. It's plausible but I can't say I'm convinced yet. But whaddo I
|
|
know. It's on the internet so it must be true, right? 8-)
|
|
|
|
Maybe they'll say, oh, ok, go ahead and ignore our advice, see if we care
|
|
if you die. It's only half as insane as shooting up yer metastasis with
|
|
dead microbial coats. Which is what I'm investigating day after tomorrow.
|
|
But I'm doing a lot of things... I'm altering my biochemistry in a lot of
|
|
ways. I am a statistical sample size of one. If I don't die of this stuff
|
|
my survival's not going to be attributable to a single thing.
|
|
|
|
Whatever laetrile does, it's not gonna provoke a long term immunological
|
|
reaction anyway, which is why I'm going for the lipopolysaccharides. Can I
|
|
think of a way a population of tumor cells could adapt to low dosages of
|
|
cyanide? Yes. One or more of them will somehow exhibit a tolerance (why
|
|
*should* a tumor not make rhodanese?) and will then go on to be the
|
|
progenitor cells which make future tumors. The same way any tumor deals
|
|
with any chemotherapeutic agent, synthetic or not.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jan 12
|
|
|
|
I was listening to Regurgitator's Unit album today, on this thumpin' amp I
|
|
pulled out of the dumpster last week, and it has a great, great track on
|
|
it. Thank fuck there's musicians somewhere with their heads screwed on
|
|
properly.
|
|
|
|
|
|
All that I am and all I'll ever be
|
|
is a brain in a body.
|
|
And all that I know and all I'll ever see
|
|
is the real things around me.
|
|
|
|
All I've heard, and it's true -
|
|
there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
|
|
I don't see a point to this place.
|
|
But I'm happy to be floating in space.
|
|
|
|
I won't mind if you're holding my hand
|
|
and life seems sublime when you don't understand
|
|
that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
|
|
if we all die away and we never come back again.
|
|
|
|
All that I am and all I'll ever be
|
|
is a brain in a body
|
|
I live till I die, then rot away
|
|
it's a beautiful story.
|
|
|
|
All I've heard, and it's true -
|
|
there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
|
|
I don't see a point to this place.
|
|
I'm happy to be floating in outer space.
|
|
|
|
I won't mind if you're holding my hand
|
|
and life seems sublime when you don't understand
|
|
that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
|
|
if we all die away and we never come back again.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jan13
|
|
|
|
Manly Beach, South Steyne. I went out and chatted biochem with Joachim
|
|
Fluhrer, who is unusual for a doctor in that he seems to actually know in
|
|
some detail the sort of cellular biochemistry which one needs to know
|
|
about for tumor processes. It's great to crap on with someone who has a
|
|
clue and isn't afraid to articulate it.
|
|
|
|
Despite all the stuff I just raved on about above (trust me - this dude
|
|
earned every cent of the $200 he got paid to talk onco-biochem with me for
|
|
an hour) he's not experientially convinced laetrile's especially useful
|
|
either, and he's of the opinion that we should chop Bill out rather than
|
|
inject dead bacterial things into it if someone can remove Bill cleanly
|
|
(which given the CT scans we probably can). He suggested some doses of
|
|
retinoic acid which struck me as outright toxic. Also folate, but that
|
|
makes sense. Bunch of immunomodulatory dietary things. I've bored you with
|
|
enough of this stuff already.
|
|
|
|
----------
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jan 16.
|
|
|
|
Not that I want you to think I go feeling myself up all the time but I've
|
|
noticed Bill The Neck Lump has shrunk. I'm not kidding myself, it's really
|
|
happened. Now, while this is much better than its previous agenda of
|
|
expanding to devour my whole head, I'm not getting hopeful about it. For
|
|
all I know, next week I'll wake up and there'll be lots of other lumpy
|
|
Bill-equivalents elsewhere. I think maybe what it means is that there's
|
|
tumor cells there (which means there could be others elsewhere), but now
|
|
my major scar is mostly healed up (I notice the scar tissue has started to
|
|
grow its own superfical microvasculature now) and my serum levels of
|
|
growth hormones such as one secretes when one's flesh is traumatised by
|
|
the surgeon's blade have returned to normal, they're not growing under
|
|
their own instructions. Good. I hope they all fuck off and die, even if
|
|
Bill's a pretty convenient sort of lump... I can feel it and gague the
|
|
mood of the tumor, to some extent. For easy-access diagnostic purposes it
|
|
sure beats having one in, say, your prostate gland. Or your brain.
|
|
|
|
I spent the day debugging my new machine (can't boot off the slave drive,
|
|
so I've swapped it; can't boot knoppix but I think that's the weirdo scsi
|
|
device jamming the autoconfig, so I swapped that too; can't get red colour
|
|
pixels in quake which I think is a bug in the card, not the driver, so I
|
|
took out the Alliance Semiconductor item and slapped in a Tseng ET6000; I
|
|
couldn't get the other sound card recognised, slapped in my old one and it
|
|
worked fine; otherwise it's great) installing another bit of a LAN, moving
|
|
some furniture, and being periodically deafened by the bloody panic alarm
|
|
to which some of the furniture was attached by screws.
|
|
|
|
Feb's coming around quickly. Back to work. I'm sort of looking forward to
|
|
it. Graham sent me an email asking if I was up for it and I think I am,
|
|
given the way I feel at the moment, which aside from some random gut pain
|
|
is actually pretty good.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jan 17th
|
|
|
|
Dad dragged home the copy of what my oncologist wrote to my kidney
|
|
chopper-outerer on the 23rd of Dec.
|
|
|
|
Status:
|
|
-Post nephrectomy, high-risk renal cancer.
|
|
-?Adjuvant therapy
|
|
|
|
It was his opinion that the lump in my neck was probaby due to
|
|
lymphadenopathy. Which is rather like saying the lump in my neck was due
|
|
to lymph-node lumpiness. Off I go to Goldstein on the 16th, which is the
|
|
day after tomorrow.
|
|
|
|
Ok. So. Now what? I've got cancer and I've had a few weeks to accommodate
|
|
myself properly to this fact. What am I gonna do now?
|
|
|
|
Is it better to proceed on the assumption that I will survive this? Maybe
|
|
it is, even if I won't. Among the consequences of that decision would be
|
|
that I could return to my original mundane life and stop documenting it as
|
|
if it mattered to anyone else who would care to read about it. I could get
|
|
on and write about stuff like the things I did last night, which wasn't
|
|
get laid for a change (monogamy to an absent person really is a drag) - it
|
|
was scarier and in some ways, better ...
|
|
|
|
0) Ate a cheeseburger at the McDollars at Heathcote, while waiting for the
|
|
rest of the Clan to assemble to do the journey down to Port Kembla. This
|
|
was possibly the riskiest thing I did all night. I haven't eaten any of
|
|
their stuff for oh, seven years. It tastes exactly the same as I remember
|
|
it, which means we've probably both degraded equivalently. I sort of don't
|
|
give a fuck now. A friend spent ages searching for a power point to charge
|
|
his phone, found one in the ceiling tiles, and was then accosted by a
|
|
McDroid for charging his fone off it.
|
|
|
|
1) motorcycle 100km through extreme fog and light drizzle at 120km/h to
|
|
the huge industrial precinct at Port Kembla. I didn't know the way there
|
|
so I was following other Clan vehicles and sped to keep up, but it turns
|
|
out, you can't miss the Port, yellow-white and blue gouts of flame sear
|
|
into the night sky, huge clouds of steam well up from the clanking dark
|
|
shapes dotted with the yellow pinpoints of a thousand sodium lamps,
|
|
scattered like so many miniature suns. When I arrived and unzipped my
|
|
weathersuit I noticed the _stench_of_fear_ wafting out of the pockets of
|
|
warm air held against me for the journey.
|
|
|
|
2) with about 20 other people, explore the vast, recently mothballed Port
|
|
Kembla Copper Smelter. The fence is a shit, as is the barbed wire. After
|
|
that... not a guard anywhere (and there's a million places to hide).
|
|
Everything's still lit up. Evidently nobody watches the security cameras.
|
|
The huuuuge vent stack, at least 80m tall, sez something about the nasty
|
|
outlet of the plant process - whatever it is they want to waft it over to
|
|
New Zealand. The sulfur-dioxide detectors still work, which is good, since
|
|
that's the hellish toxic gas which comes off copper sulfide when you smelt
|
|
it down to metallic copper... near Port Pirie in South Australia this
|
|
same gas changed the pH of the surrounding soil so much that it killed
|
|
every tree for miles adjacent to the copper smelter and not a thing grew
|
|
back for 20 years. At 10 parts per million it'll kill you if you breathe
|
|
it. They add the gas to water and sell it as corrosive fuming sulfuric
|
|
acid (hence, lots of stainless steel pipes to guide it around), but there
|
|
wasn't likely to be any here, the plant's been shut for months. We wore
|
|
gloves to stop us from touching anything corrosive, but I suspected if we
|
|
did touch anything corrosive it'd just momentarily pause to eat the gloves
|
|
before getting into the meat below. It's that sort of place. Everything,
|
|
and I mean everything, is covered with warning signs. Funniest danger sign
|
|
of the night:
|
|
|
|
Entry Prohibited Without Permission From The Acid Technician
|
|
|
|
Pass the LSD, maaan.
|
|
|
|
I didn't know what half of it did, it was like being in one HUGE, vastly
|
|
scaled up pair of interoperating enzymes, each designed to do one reaction
|
|
at kilotonne scales:
|
|
|
|
CuS + O2 -> Cu + SO2
|
|
SO2 + H2O -> H2SO4
|
|
|
|
Huge crucibles, cranes, hoppers, silos, tanks, motors, analysis and sample
|
|
control laboratories, radioactive materials handling arms, floor after
|
|
floor of steel mesh and I-beams, miles and miles of pipes and conveyors
|
|
and cabling and chain... it just goes on as far as the eye can see. Huge
|
|
rotating kilns (I could fit my hand crossways in the gap between the drive
|
|
gear teeth of these) sit frozen in position with dark slaggy copper
|
|
stalactites hanging off their outlets at 45 degrees to gravity. Below it
|
|
all is a train engine, and tracks, part of the railway via which
|
|
presumably came the ore. I don't know where it gets made into sheet and
|
|
wire and pipe but I guess it'd need to be electrolytically purified first,
|
|
judging by the stalactites, it looks like shit when it comes out of the
|
|
kiln.
|
|
|
|
It's untouched by graf artists. It must cost 'em a thousand bucks an hour
|
|
just to keep the place lit like this. The whole place looks like you could
|
|
just turn it all on again in a day or two. I pissed off when we spotted a
|
|
lone forklift driver doing the rounds. Experience has taught me not to
|
|
hang around to get busted.
|
|
|
|
I rode back slower, and slept very well, to be awoken by the sound of a
|
|
chainsaw. I was convinced there was nothing left to cut down in this
|
|
suburb but I am evidently not correct, the people two doors down are
|
|
taking out the ancient paperbark trees in their back yard.
|
|
|
|
I estimate from being 7.5cm long when it was CT scanned, Bill is not more
|
|
than an inch (2.5cm) in its longest dimension. Hmmm. Pass the
|
|
cheeseburgers.
|
|
|
|
18 Jan
|
|
|
|
|
|
I wonder at times why the Flautist has offered me something she is
|
|
evidently not prepared to give. What good is her provoking a hardon if she
|
|
won't use it? Arr, I'm not one to impose, but it's frustrating. She's been
|
|
accepted to go to Brissie, and I am happy for her. Rural Tassie is,
|
|
according to her report on her time down there, crawling with crazies.
|
|
Maybe I shouldn't go there.
|
|
|
|
Bill The Lump is smaller again. I have to go to some effort to find the
|
|
fuckin' thing now. By the time the interleukin pusher gets to biopsy it
|
|
(will somebody, ANYBODY kindly suck some guts out of this adenopathic
|
|
lump, please?) it'll probably be in hiding, lurking to pop out again
|
|
later. Hmmm. It's 1am, Jan 19th. That's today. They'd better move fast.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Next load of screen-searing bilge will be at
|
|
|
|
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<predator>
|
|
|