This is a blurb from the British Guardian that made me smile when I found it yesterday:

Five Swedish-based scientists have been inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into research articles as part of a long-running bet. After 17 years, the researchers revealed their race to quote Dylan as many times as possible before retirement. The bet began in 1997, following Nature’s publication of a paper by Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg, Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind. “We both really like Bob Dylan so when we set about writing an article concerning the measurement of nitric oxide gas in both the respiratory tracts and the intestine ... the title came up and it fitted there perfectly,” Weitzberg recently explained. That was as far as it went until several years later, when a librarian pointed out that two of the scientists’ colleagues, Jonas Frisén and Konstantinos Meletis, had used a different Dylan reference in a paper about the ability of non-neural cells to generate neurons: 2003’s Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate?. Soon the bet was struck: “The one who has written most articles with Dylan quotes, before going into retirement, wins a lunch at the [local] restaurant Jöns Jacob,” Lundberg said. Word spread quickly through Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, where all four men work, and before long there was a fifth competitor: Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research, who is also keen to win a free lunch. By the time he met the others, he already had one Dylan paper to his name – Tangled Up in Blue: Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era, published in 1998. With five competing rivals, the pace of Dylan references accelerated. Lundberg and Weitzberg’s The Biological Role of Nitrate and Nitrite: The Times They Are a-Changin’, in 2009; Eph Receptors Tangled Up in Two in 2010; Dietary Nitrate – A Slow Train Coming, in 2011. The bet is not for strict scientific papers, Weitzberg said. “We could have got in trouble for that,” he said. “[This is for] articles we have written about research by others, book introductions, editorials and things like that.” All the scientists are great fans of Dylan – he ought to win the Nobel prize for literature, suggests Weitzberg – but they are also realistic about his role in their careers. As Weitzberg told the Local: “I would much rather become famous for my scientific work than for my Bob Dylan quotes.”

Into Neverland

The first attempt by the film mogul Harvey Weinstein at producing a theatrical show, a new musical called “Finding Neverland”, will begin preview performances on Broadway in March at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and open on April 8.  Adapted from the 2004 film about J.M. Barrie and the creation of his early-20th-century play “Peter Pan,” “Finding Neverland” broke box-office and attendance records this summer at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where it finished two months of performances on Sunday. The show received mixed reviews. Mr. Weinstein has spent roughly $3 million to enhance the budget of the Cambridge production, and is expected to spend an additional $11 million to mount the show in New York – on the medium-to-high-end of budgets for new Broadway musicals.

Streisand's Ego

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good… To have ego means to believe in your own strength. And to also be open to other people's views. It is to be open, not closed. So, yes, my ego is big, but it's also very small in some areas. My ego is responsible for my doing what I do - bad or good.

Barbra Streisand

72 And Still Number One!

“Partners” (Columbia), Ms. Streisand’s 34th studio release, featuring duets with stars like Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and Josh Groban — as well as one with her son, Jason Gould — opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s new chart, with 196,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Ms. Streisand, 72, has now had a total of 10 No. 1 albums in her career, and, as Billboard notes, she is the first artist to reach the top of the chart in each of the last six decades. The first time was with the album “People” in 1964, and most recently “Love Is the Answer,” in 2009. (Her last release, “What Matters Most,” from 2011, went as high as No. 4.)

Smart Decision

Nick D'Aloisio is a British teenager who developed the app News Digest and sold it for millions of pounds to Yahoo. He was offered to join the tech department of Yahoo in California, but now has decided to go rather to university in the UK. "I am thrilled to be attending Oxford University in England where I will study computer science and philosophy," the 18-year-old told a BBC reporter. Boy, you're really smart.

Marie Antoinette Reborn

In Seoul/Korea rehearsals for a completely rewritten version of the musical Marie Antoinette have started, directed by American director Robert Johanson and starring some of the country's best musical protagonists. The show will open on November 1st, 2014 at Seoul's Charlotte Theater.

“The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” By Jeff Hobbs

"One man is Shawn, born to a sweet-talking, drug-pushing father named Skeet, who tries to keep his son from books, fearing they will make him too soft for a hard world. Instead, Skeet teaches Shawn how to fight, intimidate, know everyone on avenues where it’s lethal not to. When Skeet is imprisoned for killing two women, Shawn inherits his friends. He becomes a dealer, too, eventually sleeping in his car, wearing a Kevlar vest.
The other man is Rob, son of a feistily aspirational mother, who, while toiling in kitchens, wishes for her child the escape she never had. She borrows books from the local library to read to her small son, and later buys him the first volume of an encyclopedia, getting additional ones, letter by letter, when she can afford them. She navigates their bleak world to find institutions and people who will help him. A Benedictine school rescues Rob. A bank executive offers to pay all his college expenses. Yale accepts him. He majors in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and works in a cancer and infectious disease laboratory.
What makes this book so devastating is that these two men, Rob and Shawn, are really one: Robert DeShaun Peace, who went from a New Jersey ghetto to Yale to wherever men go after dying face down, knees bent, in a drug-related murder."

From a NYT book review of Anand Giridharadas

Paradox

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Albert Camus

The Song

Leonard Cohen At 80

I saw some people starving
There was murder, there was rape
Their villages were burning
They were trying to escape
I couldn’t meet their glances
I was staring at my shoes
It was acid, it was tragic
It was almost like the blues

I have to die a little
Between each murderous thought
And when I’m finished thinking
I have to die a lot
There’s torture and there’s killing
There’s all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing
Lord, it’s almost like the blues

I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot
My father said I’m chosen
My mother said I’m not
I listened to their story
Of the Gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn’t boring
It was almost like the blues

There is no G-d in heaven
And there is no Hell below
So says the great professor
Of all there is to know
But I’ve had the invitation
That a sinner can’t refuse
And it’s almost like salvation
It’s almost like the blues

Leonard Cohen