The stuff we're made of, and dream of

Like America before Columbus, deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA had been around a long, long time before Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin discovered it 50 years ago yesterday (they announced it April 25, 1953, in the journal Nature). Since then, an international team of scientists has used the DNA key to unlock the secrets of the entire human genome. I met Dr. Crick in the mid-80s at a conference at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, where Dr. James McGaugh has made it his life's work to further our understanding of how we remember what we remember. Dr. McGaugh and I had a nice chat about the hipness of the hippocampus, and the madeleines that brought Marcel Proust's memories alive in A la recherche du temps perdu (in search of lost time), which Proust translated as "Remembrance of Things Past." Having long since deciphered DNA, Dr. Crick was on to more stubborn mysteries by then, trying to understand why we dream, and why we dream what we dream at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. I didn't get to talk to Dr. Crick very long; everybody there wanted to meet him, and though already a senior citizen, and a very married one at that, he was constantly surrounded by beautiful blonde groupies. He told me about his theory about dreams, which was less romantic than Proust's work: Crick believes dreams are just the brain's way of cleaning itself up and getting rid of the day's "cognitive debris." Crick taught me the term "neural net" that day, years before I heard it again on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Union made

Congratulations to my friend Jonathan Tasini on his last day as President of the National Writers Union, Local 1981 of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, more commonly known as the UAW, of which I am an active member. After serving 13 years as leader of the union for freelance writers, Jonathan is moving on to head a new nonprofit, the Creators Federation. In his new position, Jonathan will continue to advocate for the rights of writers and other independent content creators. Jonathan is best known as the victorious lead plaintiff in Tasini v. The New York Times, a lawsuit filed in 1993 by Jonathan and other freelance writers against the Times and other publishers that were reselling the writers' work through electronic databases, even though they had only paid to use it in print. In June, 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the writers.

Congratulations also to my friend Marybeth Menaker, a veteran labor activist who steps up from Vice President for External Organizing to become the new NWU President.

In a related matter, Monday, April 28 is Workers Memorial Day, sponsored by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), honoring all workers killed or injured on the job.

Lost in Cyberspace

Today The Dagley Dagley Daily sadly notes the loss of at least one of our recent posts, the one headlined "Triage" posted April 11. While we believe with all our hearts that it's always, always good to have backups, backups, and more backups of things that are important to us, we have learned from this experience that backups do no good if they are backups of things that were already gone. In backing up the entire blog during our recent technical difficulties, and backing up that backup just to be sure, we failed to note that the posts from April 12 and April 11 had been replaced with a cryptic two-word message from Blogger: "Big Body." Obviously Blogger has never met me, or they would have replaced my words with "Short Body" instead. In any case, while we did have a separate copy of the April 12 post, it appears our only surviving backup (in 3 places) of the April 11 post is the "Big Body" message. Oh well. Shikata ga nai (Japanese for "it couldn't be helped" or "unfortunate thing happened; we must go on," or as Donald Rumsfeld would put it, "Stuff happens").

Elsewhere on the disappearance front, a cartoon by Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich that was pulled from publication got circulated on the Internet anyway, though most of the publicly posted copies have now been pulled as well. For those who didn't see it, the cartoon featured a spoof of the new Georgia flag, with the proposed flag slogan "In God We Trust" replaced with another popular phrase, "I'm with Stupid," captioned: "A flag Georgians of all races could unite around."

Elsewhere in the Southeastern Conference, Felice Bryant, the surviving co-author of "Rocky Top," has died in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, at the age of 77. She and her husband Boudleaux Bryant, who died in 1987, wrote many better known and more popular songs such as "Bye Bye Love" (recorded by the Everly Brothers) and "Raining in My Heart" (recorded by Buddy Holly), but only "Rocky Top" became a sports anthem, a rallying cry for University of Tennessee sports teams, whether football or basketball, male or female. "Rocky Top" was written in 10 minutes in 1968, Mrs. Bryant told interviewers years later, and the mountain in question is fictitious (but not the "corn from a jar"). It was first popularized by a couple of Kentuckians, the Osborne Brothers, and has been played and played and played and played and played by the University of Tennessee marching band at sporting events since 1972. The Bryants wrote more than 800 songs together, recorded by more than 500 artists. "Rocky Top" works much better as a sports rallying cry than the "Tennessee" song they taught us in school, "Dear Hearts and Gentle People", made popular (if it ever was) by Tennessean Dinah Shore as well as Bing Crosby and Gordon MacRae. The version we learned in elementary school began, "There's a place I'd like to be, and it's back in Tennessee," while other versions were localized for other areas ("There's a place I'd like to go and it's Batten, Idaho"), but apparently there is no version for New Jersey or Hoboken, which is just as well. Local songs should be local, not local-ized, and while football players may have "dear hearts," they can't be "gentle people" on the field.

Thanks for your patience

Now that our technical difficulties seem to have been resolved, we've got some cleanup to do, restoring broken links, replacing images that were deleted as we tried to fix the problem, getting rid of all those "testing...testing" posts, and learning at least some of the new features of Blogger Pro.

If you get bored while waiting, you might want to pass the time by checking out one of these interesting items:

Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahhaf has disappeared along with Saddam Hussein and other officials of the deposed Iraqi administration, but ESPN columnist Jim Caple speculates on a new career for Saeed Al-Sahhaf as a YES man for George Steinbrenner.

Two weeks after the fall of the Saddam statue, there's still no running water in Iraq's two largest cities, and electricity has been restored to only a fraction of the capital, but first things first: Pizza Hut and Burger King are already operating in Basra, and even more important, apparently, oil is flowing again from the pumping station in Zubayr. "Our focus in restoring the oil is to give the biggest benefit to the Iraqi people," Brig. Gen. Robert Crear told the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the first suspected cases of cholera and typhoid, diseases that result neither from a lack of refined petroleum nor a shortage of burgers and pizza, but a lack of clean water, have been reported in Baghdad.

Blogger's note: Technical difficulties with Blogger.com interrupted publication of The Dagley Dagley Daily from April 16, 2003 to April 22, 2003.