• I am very late to this link, but if you haven’t seen this comic explaining why Obama won a Nobel Prize, you should!
• I’m also late to tell the story of the first (and only) rain the San Francisco area has had this season: basically, it was a piddling mid-size shower, and yet it shut down major roads and cut power to thousands of homes
• In other San Francisco news, the foggy city’s mayor dropped his bid to run for California governor next year. Gavin Newsom has made plenty of people unhappy already (city residents complain about things like crime and homelessness, for instance) — but even after losing his Mr Sheen status, he still stood out amongst a fairly lacklustre field. There seems depressingly little hope for a leader who can drive home the changes California needs to, y’know, function properly.
• Speaking of the governor — the current one, that is — there’s been plenty of chatter online about the hilarious letter he wrote to exercise his veto on a recent bill.
• And speaking of San Francisco, allow me to put small worries like an ill-planned triathlon in Perth into context. Until yesterday, the main bridge into the city was closed for almost a week — dumping n00b riders on an already-busy subway system, and throwing egg on the face of the state agency responsible for its (still-delayed) reconstruction. Nobody’s happy that it took so long to fix a crack that was already supposed to be fixed, at least until it got windy …
• And finally, I’m saddened that it took an (admittedly spectacular!) fire to draw attention to the great big oil spill off the West Australian coast. It’s clearly screwed up the ocean environment (hopefully temporarily, if the oil is cleaned up), so I assume there’ll be consequences for the company involved? So far all they’ve had is part of the bill and some bad PR, and I don’t see strong signs there’s anything more to come.

Thanks to all who made it to my party last weekend and a thousand rabid monkeys to those who failed to come. (Actual rabid monkeys are optional, but only because of budget cuts, not any sort of kindness on my part.)

Some of the hilarity that occurred is captured in these photographs taken by Cara, Daniel, and Korin, which you might like to peruse … well maybe.

In other exciting news today, the dude who lectured me in Molecular Biology yesterday just won himself a Nobel Prize! This is the first Nobel to go to a UWA person (no longer can the unis of Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne claim exclusivity!) and indeed the first to go to West Australians, which I think says more about northern-hemisphere bias than anything else

Sadly (but not surprisingly, considering past Aussie Nobel winners) all the major news sites ? even Aunty ? have dropped the story from their front pages already. Apparently bombs killing two dozen people are a bigger story.

Better yet, Yahoo! News is listing this in their Oddly Enough section just cause they hadn’t heard the story that’s circulated round Perth for ages, that Barry Marshall ate some Helicobacter pylori when no one believed him that they caused stomach ulcers. Meh.