Wednesday at its best

Ahoy champs,

It's about time I start feeling a little better. This friggin cold is peein me off. After a long day, 8am-8pm mostly involving schoolwork. So now I sit down to relax for a few minutes before i start studying for my funtastic exam on saturday. Organic chemistry seems to be the life and death of me. I need to know it for my soon to be career in medicinal chemistry yet it's got to be one of the most complicated things to ever been discovered. Although the complexity is basically beyond my mental capacity, I did show a spark of brilliance in the discussion group. They tell us that these so called "Diels-Alder" reactions can be done by basically mixing one with the other and heating it up. For those not up on the jargon of "Diels-Alder", it basically means electrons moving in a circular fashion to produce a "conjugated" ring out of local electrons. So, one of the questions on our assignment was supposed to show the, here's a big one to bring out at cocktail parties, "electrocyclic" reaction. BUT, my knowledge from reading the textbook, I figured i paid $130 for it so I should read at most a few pages. So basically i asked why it goes a different way from the way the teaching assistants say. To make a long story short, there was dead silence for a few moments and the answer was inconclusive. I, BUCKMASTERFLEX, ACTUALLY STUMPED SOMEONE SMARTER THAN ME! That made my day.

Anyway, on the real situation at hand. I just finished some half boiled, half fried hotdogs smothered in ketchup. I'm washing it down with a stiff rum and gingerale. Canada Dry, not the crappy schwepps or whatever other kinds there are. I hate laundry. I really wish my mom was here to do my laundry. And how bout this VIOXX stuff going on? Here's my deal with the whole pharmaceutical stuff going on right now. For those who don't care to research the subject, i'll summarize very briefly. The drug was not in clinical trials long enough to actually find out that it gives heart problems. So, the question is now, how long do we have to test something before we can use it to "help" people. I personally think that the whole 10-15 yr testing period is long enough. Of course we are not going to be able to identify ALL of the side effects because everyone is configured a little differently. So, my opinion of the whole dealy is if you're going to take drugs, which first of all I don't agree with totally, you should know the risk that bad things may happen later, or even WAY down the road. If drugs were to be tested for as long as they should be to see total side effects, ie until someone who takes it when they are 20 dies, then we wouldn't have a variety of drugs to help us. The whole variety of drugs comes from different companies patenting different molecules and such which differe in an atom or two. So, the whole get rich quick schemes that a whole lot of law firms are making off the VIOXX side effects should be stopped, period. I'm truly sorry that many people are in great pain and for those who have already died because of it. We take a risk everytime we put something in our mouths, so why should it be different if what we put in there is a drug? Who do we blame, Doctors? I'll leave that one till next post. Have fun kiddos, I'm goin to bed.

Buckmastaflexdog