So I’ve been occasionally bugging a lab mate about his progress on making a particular construct to generate a mutant in our bacteria. Because if he doesn’t make it, then I have to. And I’d rather not if I can avoid it ~_^
Today I walked over to my lab bench, and saw a present for me:
What could it be? I unwrap it and lo and behold:
He made them! Awesomest bday present ever! d(^_^)
I haven’t read too many comics in my day. I never really got into them while I was growing up. I read a few Daredevil and Darkhawk books, and some of my brother’s Spawn collection, but that was pretty much it. However, over the past year or so, a couple of series have caught my attention.
At the recommendation of a few people, I started reading The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman. The setting is your typical zombie apocalypse. The main character, Rick Grimes, awakens from a coma to a world that’s already overrun. Thankfully this series doesn’t use those popular new-age zombies that can run and jump and climb and such. These are the classic groaning, bumbling zombies, that overwhelm with numbers. The series focuses on how Rick and co. cope with their new world. I’ve read through the first ten trade paper back volumes so far and I’m itching for the next one.
Y: The Last Man is apocalypse series I just started reading. In this one, Yorick Brown is literally the last man on earth. He and his monkey are the last male animals. I’m reading this one at the recommendation of a few people too. I’m only two books in, but so far it’s pretty good, even though I find Yorick pretty annoying. This series has already wrapped up so I could potentially just buy the rest of the books, but I think I’ll try borrowing them from someone first, and buy if I like it.
So I’ve been thinking about the topic of trends. An email ad just landed in my inbox from Blue Nile, an online jewelry e-tailer. And their ad featured a silver key necklace. Over the past year, I’ve been seeing these key necklaces popping up in all manner of places: first Tiffany unveiled them as a new collection, then individuals on DIY sites such as Etsy started making them to order at lower cost , and finally large retailers such as Blue Nile, Nordstroms and Macy’s now carry them at various price points. The trickle down effect is obvious. And people who buy one of the key necklaces that are infiltrating the market because they think they are pretty, may have no idea where the trend originally started. They probably would not be wearing the necklace they are wearing today without X Big Brand to propagate the trend at some point so that the style was readily available. I’m not denying that people made keys into necklaces prior to this point, but it certainly would not be as prevalent without brand help. Just something to think about. How long does it take for something to become mainstream? I wonder how many people choose to wear something less often because it has become a trend?
I immediately thought of a scene from the movie The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, a powerful fashion magazine editor, and Anne Hathaway plays Andy, a non-fashion oriented journalist trying to move up in the world:
Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.
Miranda Priestly: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
Courtesy of Tiffany & Co. Keys splashpage.
