I like New Yorkers/so you wanna be Super Mario, eh? A double feature.

I have to say that I really do like New Yorkers. They shoot straight from the hip, they're brutally honest, they aren't (usually) arrogant assholes, and they are funny! Jamin has become my New Yorker benchmark since he's from Manhattan and he embodies all of the aforementioned qualities. And he's one of my favorite people to boot. So far at Wayne State, I have encountered two professors who are from New York. The one I've had for the last couple of days in molecular biology is Dr. N. He looks like your standard middle-aged professor, with a slightly larger than average (for the profs I've encountered, anyway) paunch. Yesterday, he got to class early and had to come out into the hallway to say that resistance was futile and that we might as well come into the room. This was almost 10 minutes before lecture was scheduled to start. I know that words on a page (or email or text message, etc.) can't really convey the tone of the dialogue or the spirit in which it was intended, but immediately I could tell that 1) he wasn't trying to be a jerk, and 2) he had a New York accent. Yesss! This should be a fun lecture! And it was. Today was even better. Again, he was there early - waiting for students to show up and kind of pacing at the front of the room. I was the third student to walk in and I asked where everyone was. He wondered the same thing aloud and said that he was instituting a new rule just then: he would lecture 5 minutes for every student who was present when lecture was scheduled to begin. Class is supposed to start at 9:30 and I came in at 9:25. There are about 27 students in the class, so I wondered how exactly this was going to play out. Everyone finally showed up right at 9:30, so it turned out to be okay. I sit in the front row, which makes me an easy target for professors. I really don't like being an easy mark for anyone, but I'm getting old and can't see or hear so good anymore, so it is whatever it is. I may as well have painted a bright red bullseye on my forehead this morning because I have an iPad that I use in class to see the PowerPoint slides, rather than printing out hundreds of pages of them per week. I convert ppt files to pdfs and I have an app that lets me mark them up. I explained this in one of my early posts. Dr. N didn't miss a beat - as soon as I pulled the thing out of my bag, he was asking all kinds of questions about it. What kind of reader is it? What do you use it for? What app lets you take notes on the pdfs? Again, he wasn't being jerky at all - he just couldn't conceal his curiosity about it. I'm weird - I really love people who are my relative opposites. It's funny. If you're outgoing, have no internal filter, and have a good sense of humor, I'm in love. I do have what I think is a good sense of humor - maybe a bit twisted, but still good - but I am certainly not outgoing or filter-less in normal situations. The exact combination of qualities varies from person to person, but those things seem to be a common thread most of the time. Anyhow, lecture gets started and today we're talking about DNA manipulation techniques. PCR, restriction enzymes, cloning, sequencing - that kind of stuff. Amazingly, I seemed to be the only student who knew that EcoRI doesn't cut E. coli DNA because E. coli DNA is methylated (thanks, Jim!!). A cancer biology student, thinking eukaryotically of course, hypothesized that the enzyme or the DNA assumed a different conformation, so no cleavage occurred. Nope! We aren't talking about G-protein coupled receptors! Try again! Ha ha! For a split second, I felt knowledgeable like I did when I taught micro. Then some other student said something about the DNA being "different" and that was a good enough answer, I guess. So the funny part of class was when we were talking about PCR. Referring to Kary Mullis (who won a Nobel Prize for PCR, even though it wasn't really his invention), he said that Mullis was a jerk before dropping acid and coming up with Taq polymerase for PCR and he's still a jerk. He also said that Kary Mullis just goes to show that you can have the brain of a rodent and still win a Nobel Prize. It doesn't sound nearly as funny in print now as it did when he said it - I guess you really had to have been there. It was hilarious!

Enough school crap and on to Halloween costume crap. Elliot decided that he wants to be Super Mario (as in Nintendo video game Super Mario) for Halloween. Mary said that she could give me a Mario costume that her son had, and I told Elliot this, but he said he wanted me to make one because it would be more special. This kid is freaking smart and he knows exactly which buttons to push to get what he wants. Dammit! Mario wears blue overalls with big yellow buttons, a red long-sleeved T-shirt, a red newsboy-type cap, white gloves, and a big bushy mustache. Apparently, the American sewing pattern companies only make like 5 patterns for boy shit, and none of them happen to be patterns for overalls. American sewing pattern companies (McCall's, Butterick, Simplicity, and Vogue) suck balls. Since I'm weird, I like the German pattern company, Burda. Even the paper they print their patterns on is better quality. Burda was the only company that had more than a couple of patterns for little boys. The problem was that their pattern for overalls looked to be too complex for what I wanted - pockets all over the damn place, decorative seams everywhere - just too technically difficult for me to work with in a short time frame. I did, however, almost (almost!) buy the pattern they had for lederhosen. Could you imagine Elliot's reaction if I told him I decided that he would be a brown German for Halloween instead of Super Mario? He actually IS a brown German, but that's beside the point. Every time I tell Chris that I'm black Irish he just laughs at me until I tell him that my mitochondrial DNA comes directly from County Cork, Ireland. Then I must start sounding like the mom from Charlie Brown, because he totally tunes out everything I say after that. Alright, so the point of this part of the post was to say that I think I succeeded in drafting most of a pattern this afternoon:

Super Mario pattern pieces I drafted today. Ignore the attention-whore Siamese. He goes wherever I go and I can't stop him.

I kind of half ripped apart last winter's bib overall snow pants and drew these pattern pieces according to how they were constructed. I think I'll try to slap together a muslin prototype to make sure the pieces work as they should and so I can fit them to Elliot directly before cutting into the fleece I bought for the project. This should be an interesting process. I'm waiting to draft a pattern for the straps until I can figure out how long they need to be, since they won't be adjustable. Is it wrong that the part I'm most excited about is finding a fake mustache? (Sigh) It probably is.