There’s yet another “test” taking place that “promises” to help in the fight against AIDS.

A new type of treatment that trains immune system cells to better recognize the AIDS virus may help control the deadly and incurable infection, Australian researchers reported on Friday.

Tests on monkeys infected with a similar virus shows the treatment controlled the infection, although it does not cure it, and tests are already planned in people.

While this treatment does not “cure” AIDS, it does (so far) control it.

The treatment is called OPAL, for Overlapping Peptide-pulsed Autologous Cells, and would be categorized as an immunotherapy technique, or a so-called therapeutic vaccine, Stephen Kent of the University of Melbourne and colleagues said.

Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens, they said the treatment involves mixing a patient’s own blood cells with tiny bits of protein from the virus.

These cells are then re-infused into the patient.

“Levels of virus in vaccinated monkeys were 10-fold lower than in controls, and this was durable for over one year after the initial vaccinations,” they wrote.

When I read stories like this I try to remain hopeful that “this could be the one”, but it gets more and more difficult with time.

I don’t know how many times I have read an article on a research study that showed promising signs only to fail miserably when it came to human trials.

On the other hand, I do know that the cure will come. Even though this one doesn’t sound like the cure, it’s another step in the right direction.

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Lynne Harvey, wife of longtime broadcaster Paul Harvey, has died.

A release from the “Paul Harvey News” office says Lynne Harvey died early Saturday at their home in suburban River Forest after a yearlong battle with leukemia. Her age was not immediately available.

The Harveys met in Lynne’s hometown of St. Louis, where they both worked at radio station KXOK. They married in 1940 and later moved to Chicago.

Lynne Harvey is credited with developing some of Paul Harvey’s best known broadcast features, including “The Rest of the Story.”

She was the first producer to enter the Radio Hall of Fame and was inducted in 1997.

She is survived by her husband Paul Harvey and their son, Paul Harvey Jr.

Rest In Peace, Lynne.

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Jim Hager, one of the Hager Twins who satirized country life with cornball one-liners on TV’s “Hee Haw,” died in Nashville, the show’s producer said Friday. He was 66.

Hager was at a coffee shop when he collapsed Thursday, Sam Lovullo said. He said he had been told that by Jon Hager, the surviving twin. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he had been taken, gave no details on the cause of death.

The twins, who were also guitarists and drummers, rose to national fame as original cast members of the TV show in 1969. With its mixture of music and country-flavored humor, the show was a huge hit

…

The twins were born in the Chicago area. They said in 1988 that they had been together all their lives except for 3 1/2 years when Jon left Los Angeles and moved to Nashville. Jim remained on the West Coast, but finally followed.

“He and Jon were a dynamic and extremely talented duo,” Roman said. “I pray for his family.”.

Rest In Peace, Jim.

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The average fan of “Hannah Montana” is 8 to 12. The average fan of “Hannah Montana” hasn’t even seen the Vanity Fair cover featuring a “topless” Miley Cyrus. The average fan of “Hannah Montana” is expecting to see her this weekend at Disney World.

Miley Cyrus went to Disney World, but won’t be sticking around long enough for the media to show up.

Cyrus no longer plans to attend a red carpet event at the resort Friday, Disney said Thursday. It would have been her first scheduled public event since Vanity Fair published photos this week that have thrown her status as a role model for young girls into question.

For weeks she’d been scheduled to appear at the media party, along with dozens of other Disney Channel stars in town to film the “Disney Channel Games,” a charity competition. Disney did not elaborate on why Cyrus is no longer expected.

This is another huge mistake on Disney’s part. Seeing that Miley showed up to do autographs and such, I figure Disney has asked her to be conveniently absent from the weekend festivities.

The average fan of “Hannah Montana” is going to be asking their parents a lot of questions and that’s going to hurt the brand even more. Another good one guys. Keep up the great work. You’ll have the brand destroyed completely by Monday.

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The steady stream of products coming from China, that are tainted with lead, continues. It appears to be slowing down a little bit, but that might just be an anomoly, only time will tell.

Here are the lead product recalls in the past week or so from the CPSC:

Nintendo Recalls Lapel Pins Due to Risk of Lead Exposure

Children’s Storage Bins Sold at Lowe’s Stores Recalled Due to Violation of Lead Paint Standard

You can find all sorts of good recall information on the CPSC website. Be careful though, you could find yourself spending hours on their site, and then spending hours going through the stuff you have at home to toss the recalled items.

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On April 28th, Former President Jimmy Carter wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times. I found a few items within the article quite interesting and I would like to point them out to you.

Mr. Carter says,

Although I knew that official United States policy was to boycott the government of Syria and leaders of Hamas, I did not receive any negative or cautionary messages about the trip, except that it might be dangerous to visit Gaza.

Not only does he admit that he knew the current U.S. policy and knowingly defied it for all the world to see, but he lies about the fact that he was not contacted by the State Department. On April 22nd, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said,

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion, the United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help”

Mr. Carter does not stop there. He flat out lies again just a few paragraphs down.

Hamas will accept any agreement negotiated by Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel provided it is approved either in a Palestinian referendum or by an elected government. Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, has reconfirmed this, although some subordinates have denied it to the press.

Remember, this op-ed was published on April 28th. Now, let’s look back to April 21st, when Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said, and I quote,

We accept a Palestinian state within the June 4 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital — a sovereign state without settlements — as well as the right of Palestinian refugees to return, but without recognition of Israel

Meshaal said that himself. There was no subordinate, there was no mistake in the message he was delivering. Yet, Mr. Carter is yet again trying to re-write history and whitewash another failed attempt at diplomacy.

At the end of his op-ed he has the audacity to say that more meetings are needed with the “outlawed” leaders in order to expedite the stalemated peace talks. That’s a load of crap and he knows it.

Everyone knows he accomplished nothing in his talks with Hamas, well, other than posing as a propaganda tool for a group of terrorists, that is.

I’m not the only one who thinks he accomplished nothing. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki, who said,

President Carter came to the region thinking he could achieve something. Unfortunately president Carter left without anything concrete. The only thing he achieved was permission on the part of Khaled Meshaal of Hamas to deliver a letter from a detained Israeli soldier to his family. Nothing else. Hamas offered nothing to president Carter. They reiterated the same positions. There was no change on the part of Hamas.

I find it quite ironic that Mr. Carter titled his op-ed, “Pariah Diplomacy”. Mr. Carter knowingly met with terrorists, against current U.S. policy, then he went on in this op-ed to try and mislead the American people about the results of those meetings. In fact, it appears the only person involved in the meetings who felt the need to lie about their results, was Mr. Carter. How sad is it when you can believe the words coming out the of the mouths of terrorists before you can believe the words coming from a former U.S. President? When it comes to diplomacy and being labeled a pariah, Mr. Carter seems to be in good company.

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I can’t believe it’s May already. I thought March went by fast. Where the heck did April go? What a whirlwind month. Our water heater was going out, or so we thought, but a simple check of our warranty, and a call to the repair center, and I had the part in my hand to fix it myself. Total cost? $0. Things are looking up!

Let’s take a look at the stats for April.

The top 10 referring sites for April were:

Musing Minds
Wild Heart
The Soda Stand
Insignificant Thoughts
Right TV
Sister Toldjah
Flopping Aces
All Sewn Up
GM’s Corner
Electric Venom

The top 10 search terms that brought people here in April were:

hamachi service (highly recommended)
jack cafferty (way to piss off China, Jack!)
shasta and dylan groene (wow, we’re really going back)
danny federici (may he rest in peace)
warren savage (anchor turned junkie)
my wife naked (yeah, I knew that would draw people)
max helton (may he rest in peace)
cedella booker (may she rest in peace)
jimmy carter (what an oaf)
fudc (there’s another old one)

The top three search engines sending traffic my way were Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live.

The busiest day of the week was Monday. The busiest time of day was 9:00pm EDT, and the busiest day of the month was the 2nd.

Internet Explorer usage dropped to 54.4% from 56.5%. The record low was 48.9% (set in December of 2007). I still recommend Firefox over Internet Explorer.

The top ten countries (after .com, .net, and .edu domains) for April were:

European Union (.eu)
Canada (.ca)
Australia (.au)
Norway (.no)
Great Britain (.gb)
China (.cn) *Still not banned I guess
Germany (.de)
Brazil (.br)
Netherlands (.nl)
Hong Kong (.hk)

The top ten individual pages people came to see (excluding the main index and rss feeds) were:

Running Hamachi As A Service
Akismet Anti-Spam Module for Drupal and phpBB
Jack Cafferty Insulted China. Good For Him*
My Wife Loves Getting Naked
You 2008 Presidential Candidates At A Glance
Danny Federici Dies*
What Is Jimmy Carter’s True Motivation?*
Cedella Booker Dies*
Miley Cyrus Knew What She Was Doing*
A Blogger In Need*

* Six of these posts were written during April. The record for the most posts in the top 10 from the most recent month was 8, set in January of 2008.

The top ten category pages were:

Obituaries
Personalized
Hebetude
Randomized
Boycotts
FYI
Vituperate
Bloggage
Mumbo Jumbo
National News

And now for the numbers.

I had 9,231 unique visitors, over 334,213 page views, over 510,473 hits, the average stay on the site was 2-5 minutes, and you helped me burn 13.80 GB of bandwidth.

Thanks for stopping by!

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All week long all I have heard about is Miley Cyrus and her Vanity Fair photoshoot. From everything I have heard, Disney is not happy at all about her posing for that one particular pose. They have made it very clear that the star of “Hannah Montana” did something terribly wrong. Just about every pundit in the industry has barked about her parents, or “handlers”, or Annie Leibovitz, and Miley Cyrus has begun backpedaling because of Disney’s disapproval.

I miss Walt Disney. Not the company. The man. I bet he is turning somersaults in his grave knowing what the company is up to these days. The Walt Disney Company and the executives who run it are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites with no respect for the youth of the world. In fact, in my opinion they aren’t much better than child pornographers.

Why would I think such a thing? How could I compare them to child pornographers? It’s pretty simple when you look at the photos that accompany this article on TMZ.

Apparently Disney uses underaged models clad only in lacy, sexy lingerie to market their products in China. So why is it okay for them to support such racy ad campaigns but act completely “shocked” and “surprised” by the photo of Miley Cyrus?

The answer is simple. It’s easy to exploit cute, attractive, underage models that no one knows. It’s not so nice to see your major cash cow doing the same thing is it? Especially when you know parents nationwide will be phoning, faxing, and emailing in complaints the moment they see Miley in the satin bed sheet.

Disney makes a boatload of money from the Hannah Montana brand, and that is the only reason they have feigned shock at the actions of Miley Cyrus, her parents, her handlers, and Annie Leibovitz.

Shame on you Disney.

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I received an email from Gizmo today. Gizmo5 is a wanna be replacement for Skype that, to be honest, doesn’t work nearly as reliably as Skype. I still receive email from them because I signed up to use their service many months ago when Vinny and I were having trouble with Skype during our podcasts. We ended up sticking with Skype, and I haven’t really given much more thought to Gizmo. To be honest, I didn’t like their service before I received this email. Every call I placed with their service had low quality, and it took several attempts to place the calls in the first place.

Click the image to view it full size.

According to their email, if I install Gizmo5 on my phone or my computer, I can vote 25 times for my favorite American Idol contestant with just one call through Gizmo. Is it me, or are they admitting to gaming the American Idol voting system? If you or I use our phones to call, we register just one vote. How does Gizmo get 25 votes in to the system with just one call? That sounds a little bit fishy to me.

More importantly, however, is the fact that they are actively recruiting international calls, which are prohibited by American Idol. They are actively endorsing cheating while promoting their product.

Do you live outside the United States? Now you can vote too. The show blocks international calls, but by using Gizmo5 your calls will go through and your votes will be counted!

Not only are they gaming the voting system on American Idol, but they are trying to engage international viewers to use Gizmo5 to place their votes and bypass the fact that such calls are prohibited by American Idol. I wonder how the producers of American Idol will view this? I think it’s pretty sad when the only way you can promote your product is to encourage people to use it in an unethical way.

While I find it very natural for any company to try and attach themselves to the American Idol popularity train, I also find it disgusting that they are trying to do so by breaking the rules and encouraging people to cheat while doing so.

It’s clear they are trying to appeal to the international market by giving international users a reason to try their service. It’s also clear where they stand on ethics as a company, and I’m certainly not going to lose any sleep while boycotting Gizmo.

[Crossposted at The Alligator Pit]

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