Ten Grand

I recently attended a Monster Concert in Nathan Phillips Square. This production was in part the fruit of Boyanna Toyich, a motivational speaker, and RCM graduate. One of my best friends found out from her fellow pianists about a group they had joined last year, which would tour around, putting on Monster Concerts.
What is a Monster Concert? Well, in my friend’s case, their slogan was “10 pianos, 20 musicians, 200 fingers.” The phenomenon began in 1860 with a piece called “Triumphal Hymn” written by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. In 1867, it was preformed by an orchestra of 650 musicians, including 80 trumpets (hopefully they didn’t blare!). Much of Gottschalk’s music had a multi-cultural aspect that was way ahead of its time. You can read more about
Gottschalk’s life and work, if you wish.
Back to the concert, here was their repertoire:
Night in the Tropics, by Gottschalk
Overture to Semiramide, Rossini
Faust (Valse), by Gounod
Symphony No 40 (1st movement), by Mozart
Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, by F. Liszt
Overture to The Barber of Seville, by Rossini
Danse Macabre, by Saint-Saens
William Tell Overture, by Rossini
My friend, that evening, was absolutely beautiful, and she played beautifully too! I was honoured to watch her concert, along with a couple other of our friends from highschool. We saw a suprising number of former classmates from highschool there, actually, and Nathan Phillips Square was completely full.

FAB

Long time ago when we was FAB is now back. I first read about it in the May 2nd issue of Business Week. FAB Labs, which is a group of personal manufacturing software and hardware, is like a 3D printer. You can program anything into it’s system, and it will produce the piece by carving cross-sections out of plastic, and fusing those pieces together to create the piece as a functional whole. Today these stations cost $20,000, but hopefully in the future they will drop to $10,000, then possibly even $1000.
Again, on 0 comments  

Movies with Dad

Well, congratulations to me, I've posted my first picture! Now I need to write a post about it! So here goes.
I have watched so many movies with my Dad over the years. The first one I remember clearly was the Langoliers, a "B" movie made from one of Stephen King's books. Another one I watched with him was Pitch Black; just this summer, and then The Chronicles of Riddick just after that. Those were my introductions to the cutie in the picture below. We are now in the middle of watching Kevin Smith movies; the best one of those was Dogma.
We've also watched many theatre movies together, like the Village. I think these movies are a big part of our time to touch base with one another just to have fun, and I really enjoy these times. Sometimes we eat and drink, sometimes we laugh together during the movies, sometimes we sit together on opposite sides of the couch, and sometimes I snuggle up to him.
It's wonderful to be able to have a good relationship with my Dad. He's going through some tough projects and times at work right now, and so I just want to let him know that I really love him, and all the time he makes for us, his family, in various ways.
Thank you Dad, and I love you.
(And what better way to celebrate than with my first posted pic, of Vin Diesel! ooops*)

Drug racism?

I just read an article, published a couple months ago, about drug research, and the fact that researchers are ignoring the differences that might come up because of race.

I find these researchers and their attitudes to make absolutely no sense. If one culture eats predominantly more of whatever vitamin in their diets than others, lets just say vitamin B, then they won’t suffer from any conditions that result from lacking that vitamin. However, if another race eats a lot of iron in their diet, if they are given a drug that also has a very high dose of iron, that could result in adverse health effects.

News flash; different cultures don’t all eat the same, we don’t all exercise the same amount, and we don’t all have the same lifestyles. Some different eating habits ARE based on culture. Some different lifestyle habits ARE based on environment, and tradition. So to ignore the fact that differences in culture are important when studying drugs is to ignore the fact that humans are different. For example, you wouldn’t NOT take into consideration the fact that some people are allergic to some drugs if they have the medic bracelet. You wouldn’t ignore their bracelet and administer the drugs to them regardless. Why then would it make sense for the drug researchers to discount the possibility that people of different cultures would be, as a group, allergic to some sort of drug on the market, or at least, it would have no effect on them – meaning not treat their disease?

For example, if one drug has no effect on Italians, then upping the dose would still have no effect in curing the disease, and soon your Italian patient would be dead because of some reason like the wine they drink combined with the ravioli they eat blocks the active ingredient in the medicine your giving them. But you as a drug researcher pretend this doesn’t exist. You’re still looking at a dead patient! The drug researchers seem to not want to broach the topic because it could be considered politically incorrect; “this can fuel social conceptions that there are meaningful genetic differences between races”, says one Jonathan D. Kahn. Well, so what if there are! And, “scientists are struggling to understand why many drugs don’t work alike in all races”. *sigh*. Please read this blog.