Nothing Much

especially when I’m right.

After my rant yesterday I took them time to look up one of the authorities on CWD and send them an email asking if the CWD prions were present in fully formed antlers.  I got back a response this afternoon:

Ruth,
Thanks for directing you question to the CWD Alliance. According to the most recent research, infectious prion proteins are present in the antler velvet of CWD infected animals when their antlers are growing and the velvet is engorged with blood. As past research has demonstrated that prions are present in all blood of infected animals, this is not particularly surprising. Also, we know that infectious prions can be present in the marrow of skeletal bones, mainly due to the blood present in the marrow itself. To date, I am unaware of any study that has tested for CWD in hardened antler. This is likely the case because of what we know about the bone-forming process.

Like all bones, antlers are formed through a process called ossification.  During this process, osteblasts (which are mostly a matrix of specific protein synthesizing cells, prions not being one of them) extract calcium from the blood and deposit it in the forming bone matrix, which is largely cartilaginous in the early stages. When full ossification is complete, there is no blood remaining in the hardened bone. In antlers, there is no marrow in the core of the structure as there is in skeletal bones. So, it is highly unlikely that any blood-born prions remain in or on the hardened antler.  But, as stated before, when the antlers are actively growing on a CWD-infected animal, infectious prions will likely be present in the new tissue, particularly in the velvet.

It seems that no matter how well we document facts about CWD, people will still choose to believe what they wish. In your case, the issue is simpler than whether or not CWD prions are present in hardened antler. Research in 2009 (Trans-species amplification of PrP^CWD and correlation with rigid loop 170N, Virology, Volume 387, Issue 1, 25 April 2009, Pages 235-243. Timothy D. Kurt, Glenn C. Telling, Mark D. Zabel, Edward A. Hoover), showed that CWD prions do not replicate in canines (dogs, wolves coyotes, etc.). Essentially, that means that dogs are not susceptible to CWD.

Tell your friends to chew on that (pun intended).

So basically, yes, the prions are present in the velvet of forming antlers, and they are present in the not yet fully formed antlers themselves.  However, once the antlers are fully formed and hardened and the velvet has been shed there is no blood or marrow present in them for the prions to be present in.  And it doesn’t even matter because canines aren’t susceptible!

Now to go piss off someone else……

(and yes, I have permission to post this here!)

Well, ok, not everyone, but the comments are making me laugh, so I’m going to follow along:

1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?

Well lets see the first car that was “mine” in the sense that I was really the only one who drove it, was a ’90 Ford Tempo, and god did that thing suck.  My parents bought it for $1000 when I went off to college so I could come home for weekends without them having to drive me (I then proceeded to live at college for ever day the school would let me, oh well).  It was technically black, but it was so faded (at 8yrs old) that it looked blue in most lights.  Technically in “good” condition, but only technically.  Parking brake never worked, and proceeded to fall apart within weeks of having it fixed (so it would pass MA inspections), the brakes themselves sucked.  I ended up in my only accident ever in that car when flooring the brakes was unable to stop the car when it was going a less than 10mph and I rear-ended someone.  Infact the cop tried to tell me that I probably hit the gas by mistake.  I pointed out that my bumper had gone so firmly under the rear of the car I hit that when they separated us her tailpipe wouldn’t come out of my bumper.  Turned out it was embedded in some major piece of equipment (I think it was the radiator, but not going to swear to it).  Cop looked at it for a moment, and asked me again how fast I thought I was going when I hit the brakes??  I pointed out that it was stop and roll traffic, and there was no way I’d gotten over 10mph.  He ended up agreeing with me, but it was still my fault for rear-ending the girl.  We should have let the insurance total it after that, but we didn’t.  I drove it for another year till it dang near fell apart around me and we gave up on it.

The first car I actually owned was a ’91 Honda Civic hatchback in white.  My parents bought it brand new off the lot (with as few optional features as possible, car didn’t even have a cig lighter), and when I graduated from college and got my first “real” job they signed it over to me.  By that time it had a few rust spots but was in otherwise good condition.  It had the smaller of the two engine options too, not that it needed anything bigger.  That car MOVED when I put my foot down.  Manual tranny, no power steering, no power anything.  It got an average of 37mph on surface roads and over 42mph highway right up till the day it died.  Gosh I miss that car.  It took me everywhere, did everything.  Handled great in snow, rain, everything.  Then September of 2007 the timing belt broke and killed the engine leaving me stranded in the right hand left turn lane in the middle of a 6 lane road.  Repair shop said it was going to be at least $2k for parts, plus at least another grand for labor.  Which I didn’t have.  Brother of a friend of my husband (then boyfriend), bought it off me for $100.  Bought the parts and did the labor himself.  Last I saw him (about a year ago?) he was still driving it, and said that it was still getting that same insane gas mileage.  I offered to buy it back from him and he refused.

So this morning, while catching up on Pophat, he linked to the Bloggess.  Specifically this post.  And I read the post, and had to shake my head at the stupidity, and then I started reading the comments.  And then I went back tonight and read more comments.  THIS is why saying stupid things to bloggers is a bad thing, especially when you’re a VP with a PR firm…..

So I use Gmail as my primary email, I have Yahoo & Hotmail accounts too, but mostly use those as spam catchers.  In theory I have an email through my ISP, but I’ve never used it.  Yesterday, on Gmail, I was sending out an email, and forgot to attach the file I was sending along, but in the email I wrote the phrase “I have attached…”.  So I hit send, and instead of the email getting sent I get a popup asking me if I meant to attach a file cause I put the phrase “I have attached…” in my email, and do I want to continue to send or cancel send and attach file?

So of course I hit cancel and go back and attach the file.  And I’m glad that it did get caught cause this particular email was kinda important but under the circumstances I’d have never noticed (and the receiver would likely never have told me) that I’d neglected to attach the file, and that would have been a bad thing.

But really?  When did the system start reading my email well enough to know that I meant to attach a file and stop me when I didn’t?  I’m not sure I like that…..

I try to go through the spam folder on my email once a week or so, just to make sure that nothing important got put in there by accident.  Though I do have to say that Google has an awesome spam detector, I almost never get spam in my inbox, and I can’t recall the last time something important went into spam by mistake.  But I still check.

Recently I noticed a trend.  Among all the drug offers and advertisments for porn and organ enlargement, there have been ALOT of AARP offers.  Like several a day.  Now I had been ignoring them, I’m no where near old enough, but today I decided to look at them out of curiosity.

They all appear to be the same at first glance, the subject line is either FREE GIFT or MEET BETTY WHITE, and the inside appears to be a standard “come join us and get this free gift!!!” sort of solicitation that you would expect to get from AARP.  There’s just one problem, not one of the links in the email leads to an official AARP site, and the links in each email are different from the next email, as are the email address they come from, and I don’t mean one is from joe blow at AARP and one is from joe smith at AARP, I mean they’re info@RandomWebsiteName where RandomWebsiteName matches the random website that the links to go.  And none of them are (up front) valid websites, for example one is konstructionleadersteel.com (where links go to konstructionleadersteel.com/********(random letters and numbers)*****), another is sleepingbabyshop.info, or sleepingangelimages.info.  None of them are the same (I only spotted one duplicate in the 28 I’ve received in the last week).  So just for the heck of it I copied out the links (so I could go to the link without clicking from the email) and went to the “home” page of a couple.  Blank pages.  No idea if its just an attempt to get money, or spread a virus, didn’t feel like digging far enough to find out.


I gotta say its pretty slick looking, and since its aimed at a generation that isn’t always comfortable with computers I  bet it works on occasion too.  Kinda scary.