By Noah Baumbach, in The New Yorker, January 19, 2009

Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs. The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. . . . [In a related study] scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day.—The Times.

August 24, 2008

I uncork a 2003 Haut-Médoc, which has a delightfully oaky nose, and pour a glass for myself and a bowl for my subject, Louis, the gray-and-white mouse I’ve selected for this study. I’ve chosen him for his serious and restrained demeanor—among the other rodents, he keeps to himself. Cautious by nature, he sniffs the wine apprehensively, but after a sip or two he laps it up eagerly.

The Château La Croix opens up in the glass, developing a full body and a luscious texture, and really hits its stride by the sixteenth bottle. Once we get a good head on, Louis is able to do the treadmill for twice his normal length of time and I do a pretty solid forward roll.

August 25th

Late start today. I don’t wake until after ten. (And that’s only because the phone clangs like an air-raid siren. Debra wondering where I was last night.) Louis moans in his cage until eleven-thirty. A 1998 Saint-Émilion helps ease the crippling sensation of blood poisoning. A little hair of the dog. Try to jot some observations from last night, but, really, after I started dialling ex-girlfriends it’s all a black hole.

Louis again shows an abundance of energy, however; he must’ve taken the wrong turn in the maze about eight times in a row before he realized the cheese was to the left. Once he gets it, he collapses in a pool of laughter and urine. And then I collapse in a pool of laughter and urine.

September 3rd

Louis is characteristically reserved and a bit testy before we get going, but after eight or nine glasses he’s back to his jocular self. He even makes some astute comments about the 2005 Pomerol’s peppery herbaceous finish. This is a terrible thing to say, but I like Louis better when he drinks.

After eleven bottles, Louis shows unbelievable muscular progress. He can lift my left foot and, according to the rabbit, he arm-wrestled the monkey to a draw. (I must have been dialling ex-girlfriends around this time.) I do what might generously be called a cartwheel but really is just me losing my balance. I fall and smash into a cabinet of borosilicate glasses.

The mice in the control group get the usual bowl of water and are asleep by nine-thirty. Louis and I don’t crash until four, following a spirited argument about free will and half of “Norbit” on Starz.

Read the rest of the story at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/mouse-au-vin

Regular visitors to Pixels may wonder why a story from The New Yorker is being published here today. It’s fairly simple: I love the story. It made me smile and allowed me a brief respite from the horror show in which we have been embedded for the foreseeable future.

Over the past ten+ years, I have often posted articles related to photography and art, poetry, along with documentary and, of course, music videos. Due to the pandemic, I have been posting a lot more music and other videos of late. Traffic on the site has climbed dramatically, which I rather like.

I stumbled on the this short story and thought, “I’d like to share this on Pixels.” Pondered it for a minute and here we are. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my favorite website besides Pixels is biblioklept, so I think I’ll be taking it as an example and expanding the scope of this site to make it more magazine like. For a while, anyway. Pixels has been an improvisation every single day since November 29, 2009, so we’ll see how this works and if people like it.

Iphonic art is Pixels’ raison d’être, its heart and soul. That will never ever change, but I feel like celebrating more of what life has to offer. I need it. Do you?

Thoughts and comments welcome, as always.

—Knox

I don’t know if you know the Brain Pickings website. It’s pretty wonderful, right up there with Biblioklept, in my estimation. And Pixels, of course! Thank you to Barbara duBois for sending me a link to this article, which is a part a series on Brain Pickings, “The Greatest Commencement Speeches Of All Time.”

Here is an excerpt from her article:

Like Chuck Close (“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”), Isabel Allende (“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”), E. B. White (“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”), and Tchaikovsky (“A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”), Watterson speaks to the importance of work ethic and grit — but, like Freud, he places playfulness at the epicenter of creativity:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

[…]

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

[…]

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

You can read the whole article here. I love how she includes so many links to other articles, whole synergistic systems of exploration and thought.

You can read Bill Watterson’s whole commencement speech here.

Here are a couple of quotes I particularly liked:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.

This comic strip struck home, as well. Reminded me of my dad.

And one more … I couldn’t resist … as a metaphor, this one struck close to home, too. :)