Summer is here?????

Good morning on this Tuesday:

This picture is on the "big surprise" pictures sent to by Bill in Eugene.

I am watching the Ed Sullivan special from KOPB a few nights ago. The Ed Sullivan Show was on Sunday night when I was in high school. I can recall sitting with my parents watching these singers on the Ed Sullivan show. My father did not like the music, but I sure did.

I record these shows on KOPB because they occur during pledge month on the station. I don't want to watch the 15 minutes of fund-seeking so I advance fast during pledge breaks.

I am still reading The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare. Right, now the young man is composing the forgeries that made him famous. Remember this is in 1795, 180 years after Shakespeare died. Shakespeare was as famous then as he is now. But everyone was searching for something in Shakespeare's handwriting. Remember watching Shakespeare in Love as the young William composes first Romeo & Ethel, then changes it to Romeo & Juliet. You see his love open his composition: it is a folio, folded into fours and opened up. It was in his hand but like I said earlier, paper was reused as it was so rare yet at then end of the 16th century.

If you get the chance get the DVD of Nova from 2007 Ghosts in Our Genes. This showed when I was in China so I did not see it on TV. We have the human genome now but it is only part of what we are made of. Epigenes are those chemicals that turn off and on our genes. Now it looks like what happened to our grandparents affects us. For women is what happened to their grandmother while she was still in the womb. For us men it is our grandfather when he was a youngster. These epigenes affect us with disease and good traits.

I have a friend who never gets the sensation of filling up. He can eat an entire pizza when I eat just two or three pieces. He tells me he never feels he is eating too much. He now weighs over 250 pounds, has diabeties, as well as three or four other diseases. I will ask him, the next time I see him, about his grandparents and where they lived.

It appears we not only inherit our DNA but also the epigenomes, the chemicals that have turned off and turned on certain our genes. We can also affect our own epigenomes by smoking, drinking too much, being exposed to chemials and bad air. It not only affects us but also our progeny down two or three generations.