The Poe Toaster tradition continues, but if random assholes have their way it won't for much longer:

BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- Continuing a decades-old tradition, a mystery man paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his January 19 birthday.

Some of the 25 spectators drawn to a tiny, locked graveyard in downtown Baltimore for the ceremony climbed over the walls of the site and were "running all over the place trying to find out how the guy gets in," according to Jeff Jerome, the most faithful viewer of the event.

Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, said early Thursday he had to chase people out of the graveyard, fearing they would interfere with the mystery visitor's ceremony.

What is wrong with these people? What kind of worthless mouthbreathing Morlock is willing to spoil, for all time and for everyone, something unique, odd, touching and wonderful -- merely to satisfy an overstimulated monkey-mind that will move on to the next shiny soundbite in less than a minute? It's not even real curiosity, it's something grubby, selfish and hyperactive, an infant's "meeeeeeeeee!" high on MTV, a sick conviction that a personal Right to Be Entertained trumps everything.

Fuck.

Hat-tip: Ivy; news stories abound here, mostly rehashes of the same release. Once again, AP writer Brian Witte has good coverage

Oh, and I never did manage to get permission to publish the photo of the Toaster, but someone else either did, or didn't care. I don't suppose it matters much, so here.

Note the new category. Via Waxy's links: fucking Nintendo (who make worthless games) has threatened to sue researchers at Sloan-Kettering (who are trying to cure cancer) to get them not to nickname a gene "pokemon":

Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have changed the name of a gene found to cause cancer, due to legal pressure from Nintendo's Pokémon USA. The gene, which has the formal name of POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic gene, was previously abbreviated as POKEMON, leading to media reports that compared the game with aspects of the disease, albeit in a lighthearted fashion.

Scientific journal Nature reported that Pokémon USA, the subsidiary company of Nintendo established to control the Pokémon brand in America, threatened to sue the cancer research center on the understandable [senn: wtf?] grounds that equating Pokémon with cancer was doing harm to the brand's image. Sloan-Kettering acquiesced to the company's demands and changed the gene's name to the more unobtrusive Zbtb7.

(Actually, the gene was initially called FBI-1, which would make the protein name FBI-1; the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee entry is here. In rodents, the gene was initally called LRF/OCZF. HUGO doesn't list nomenclature history (or I am missing it), but the rat and mouse genome databases show that the gene has been officially called Zbtb7 since 2004 (rat in September, mouse in January). There are papers as late as 2004 calling the human gene FBI-1 and LRF, which doesn't tell you what the "official" HUGO symbol was at that time -- which in turn tells you that gene nomenclature is a bit of a mess. ANYway.)

The abstract for the paper calling the protein POKEMON is here; it's a member of the POK family of DNA-binding transcriptional repressors, and it directly downregulates p19/ARF, a key protein in the tumor suppressive p53 pathway. If that's all blah and no Ginger, take my word for it: this is an important gene in cancer biology. It's going to be much studied and much discussed, and I hope that it's continually referred to as "ZBTB7A, known as POKEMON until those greedy whiny assholes at Nintendo sued because they have no sense of humour and an unhealthy fondness for their precious "brand", which they claimed was being somehow harmed".

I mean, sheeeeit, Sega has no problem with the gene called sonic hedgehog (the mutant causes spiky denticles in Drosophila; the first two hedgehog genes, indian hedgehog and desert hedgehog, were named after real animals; the third to be discovered, in 1993, was named after the video game character).