Polish Man in New World

That one blue line caused quite a havoc in the early March 2018 :) Following the moment I took a picture of the above critical pregnancy test I stopped thinking rationally. I was seeking jobs at the time when the above blue line appeared in our lives. I was invited for an informal interview towards a teaching post at Tulane University. Guess what, because of that blue line I could not understand how clock works and came terribly late = something like 40 minutes late to an interview with Tulane faculties. Not a good first impression 😊 Our cooking following the blue line day imploded as well. Christina mixed up spices that we would normally had never mixed up. I think she threw tabasco, fish sauce and soy sauce onto frying prawns and in result we had to evacuate from our little apartment due strangling smell 😄🔥🔥. Next day I oversalted the breakfast porridge. Who would have thought that Victoria will bring us to Victoria !!! = Born in Box Hill Hospital, Australia.

I simply have to diarize that Thrilling Tuesday (19 June 2018). That Tuesday didn't start anything special. Following one month or so of Christina's unflattering comments on my hairstyle I arranged a meeting with a hairdresser. Here we come - the roller coaster starts accelerating. The hairdresser turned out to be a rock/jazz band singer and I could not stop asking for more details. Is there anywhere a place on Earth, except for New Orleans, where singers recruit their fans by trimming their hair :) ? Anyway, here is one of the videos of  that rock & roll hairdresser Barbarella Blue (like all well-established Kardashian-like stars in USA Barbarella Blue has Instagram too):  A chatter with Barbarella made me come late to viewing World Cup game at the Botany Lab, Tulane University. Fan W. set up the projector and the live channel before I came. Few colleagues joined us in supporting Poland against Senegal. What a disgraceful game it was for Poland! One deflection off P...

Book about Simona finished. Story of  prof. Simona Kossak could make a good script for Hollywood movie. Simona studied animal psychology first in Krakow, then in Bialowieza and became life-long advocate for protection of the last primeval forest in Europe - Bialowieza forest in Poland . She never separated animals from humans because, well, we all share very similar behavioural traits. For example, Simona trained men as if men were tigers. In her opinion, men are no more than sperm sacks carried around on two legs. Men are programmed to inseminate as many women as possible but as with tigers they can be trained. The key skill in the process of training is to make men (tigers) believe that they are always right. Once the tigers trust their master they will obey and walk by woman's leg like cuddly savages.  As I was enjoying Simona's biography (Thanks Monia!) I also came across stories of female humans  who were less skilled in training tigers and/or they could ...

T o be successful is to be able to retain enthusiasm between the failures (Churchill probably said so).  Philosophy that explains how important failures are in one's ability to grow may apply to humans as  well as to any organisms on Earth. Last week I had a chance to help one of the graduate students Dr-to-be Stephen Formel in the field element of his PhD project. While collecting mud for his glasshouse experiment we also ventured into one of the island ecosystems of Bay Jimmy - oil contaminated part of the Gulf of Mexico .  To our surprise oil-contaminated soil did not stop mangroves from establishing but what managed to kill them was the very short period of freeze that happened last winter in Louisiana . Apparently, the xylem vessel that transport water into mangroves canopy are of weak design ( broad vessels with thin walls ), just like pipes in the whole of New Orleans - they burst open while temperature fall below 0C (32F). The mangroves do not give up t...

If you were to USA and you have not experienced passive-aggressive behaviour then you haven't been to USA. It still is a "Struggle Street" for me as I do not know how to navigate the passive-aggressive situation. Do you go back as if you hit the dead end street or move forward and attack the dead end wall? I ask myself this question on a quite a regular basis. It is not unusual that for example  a huge truck drives over my feet on a pedestrian crosswalk (green light for me) and the drivers sends a broad smile and says "Oops, I am sorry". I can respond to an aggressive person, I can respond to a nice person but I am still puzzled where I have to deal with a smiley light-weight abuser. More, American Street is loud. Expect smiley light-weight abuses daily. Shop-assistant/cashiers shout out " Hey !!!" right after I paid  and I still turn around to realize that this is how employees start conversation with another employee - standing shoulder in shou...

It's OK to flirt and make yourself look like a fool every time there is room for choice and mutual understanding. It is getting uncomfortable when sexual signals come from someone with power. It sucks completely when you are stuck in an abusive situation and can see no way out just like the wife of ex-deputy Prime Minister of Australian Barnaby Joyce . Natalie Joyce agreed to pose with two gay guys after her husband's lovechild-affair-with-staffer got out. She did it to keep her husband in power. God give her power! But in fact, #MeToo campaign has gone bee-knee too viral and one step ahead of itself. #MeToo shifted the power imbalance between the sexes and men began to feel terrorized. Suddenly, any attempt to pick someone up, look into eyes for a second longer is considered an act of sexual assault. French woman were first ones to object to that in their famous  #AntiMeToo campaign . God bless French Women! Sexually charged or not, #MeToo campaign seems to be one of the m...

When a local Teddy Bear comes off the skateboard due to icy conditions on the roads this definitely means a panic in New Orleans. State of emergency to be precise. State of Emergency. A real panic was caused by air temperatures falling below water-freezing level (30°F or 0 ° C). The schools were shut down, the classes were cancelled, the pipes were getting frozen, and all locals were advised to stay home. Mind you, we live in subtropical Louisiana where few dare a thought of insulating the water pipes. Icicles on local fern. T he only way to prevent freezing water from blowing up your pipes is to keep your water running entire night until you go mad or until the temperature goes above 0c or 30F. As in this famous torture   dripping can make you go insane.....drip, drip, drip, drip, mad, mad, mad. So... a sinking swamp city of New Orleans is not only exposed to rising sea level, hurricanes, but suffers from frostbites too. So... what would you do in the coastal...

" What the fuck is going on? " - it is a citation from super charismatic Dr Jack Gilbert - microbial ecologist who decided to ID all microbes present on Earth in an ambitious called Earth Microbiome Project . There are more microbes on Earth than stars in the entire cosmos. To be precise, estimated number of cellular microbes in the biosphere of the Earth is around 10 to 30th power (10 + 30 zeros) the number of stars is estimated to be 10 to 22nd power ( Purdom and Francis 2009 ). And we, Louisiana Phraggers Team , are a part of the research project that aims to contribute to Earth Microbiome Project by hunting microbes related to invasive success of local grass Phragmites australis .  Phragmites is mostly the dweller of wetlands ecotones zones  - zones of high disturbance level that mark border between high wave/hurricane/human activity and more intact wetland ecosystems. And of course we do have our hypotheses we want to test: H1: Increases in soil salinity w...

The attack on native gardens as described in recent West Australian (“ Verge rules crackdown upsets residents ”, Nov 11, 2017, Issue, Page 23) upset me all the way here in Uptown, New Orleans, USA. The very Ex-Minister of Environment, currently Mayor of City of Joondalup Albert Jacob supports issuing notices for residents to remove “offending native plants” and “landscaping features”. It resonates with me very much as I still have vivid memories of participating and co-organizing native garden workshop in 2015 as an active member of Murdoch Branch of Wildflower Society of WA. How on Earth it is possible that residents’ passion for native vegetation is so brutally punished by ex-Minister of Environment?   Let’s try to accept the fact that Ex-Minister for Environment does not care for the terrestrial environment ( many Australians do not care for natives either ) but genuinely is worried about pedestrians’ well-being. Pedestrians indeed may stumble over a rock, or worse, get en...

The fundraiser on Oct 28, to sustain Turtle Cove Environmental Research Centre , made me think politically. How on Earth public institutions, like Turtle Cove mentioned above,  need charismatic individuals, like Rob (guy on the phone, on the photo below, who let Christina drive the boat while discussing business matters),  to find ways to sustain their existence? My hypothesis is simple - levels of empathy differ across political scene. The less empathy for public good the less tax to do public good. Right seems to be of greed for few ( Red Republicans in US/ Blue Liberals in OZ). I noticed that right wing parties tend to be made of few alpha males and all the rest sucks up to them in a faith they will become alpha males one day as well. Everyone below the alpha male level is driven by a dream to grab everyone else by their groins that one day. This sort of wild west attitude seems to go back to medieval times where  rather democratic peasants were overpowered ...

Following a long entertaining night with a local Halloween artist and English fiction writer Jack Bell, we have not only acquired strictly American skill of carving Halloween pumpkins but also learnt a lot o f insights on American culture.  Racism . You may wonder why people, that share 99% of DNA with monkeys, still debate racist issues? Why the very people that were reduced to the population of about ∼2,700 ( Zhivotovsky et al 2003 ) individuals in our most recent evolutionary history pay so much attention to skin colour? We know that there's a great divide. The USA split into North and South. In the North people hate people but love race. In the S outh, people hate race but love people. In my previous blog post on black murderer/American writer , I pondered on source of that racism. It does feel that below race-label runs a deep wound. It looks like it 's less about black skin and more about never healing wound of slavery underneath that skin. Basically...

You start seeing things when exposed too often to media. TV news, social media, radio, text messages - even my mum in Poland is tracking Irma, The Hurricane, that is hovering above Florida as I type these words. Nonetheless, against the scream on media, we decided to drive towards Irma's eye to visit our dear friends that flew into Florida's pan handle from far corners of USA. It looked like we had a window of opportunity to do just that. Screaming media makes you see things though. We subconsciously looked around for any signs of oncoming calamities. The rental car company, for example, was testing our patience when asking us to prove we are not criminals. We were close to taking it as an evil omen (we already saw us driving into an eye of category 5 hurricane) and cancel the trip to Florida. But car rental company was humble and offered us a ~1h trip around New Orleans to help in collecting all the needed documents. We ended up driving at night and can you realiz...

Too often things are not what they seem to be. Have a look at this industrial set of iron pipes and bricks I have to pass every day I walk to work at EEBio . Do-not-enter Entry Do-not-enter Entry to what? Why are all those people breaking the "do not-enter" rule!? Would you expect a lively intellectual hub behind that wall? It is called Loyola University (named after Spanish Saint) and it truly feels like you are Alice from Wonderland who fell into rabbit hole because this how it looks like behind the do-not-enter entry: Have a great school year, Wolf Pack! #loyno pic.twitter.com/l8UbIKW1EN — Loyola New Orleans (@Loyola_NOLA) August 20, 2017 Life has a way to keep good things hidden away these rusty pipes seem to say. The fake things, on the other hand, tend to be well-manicured. How to tell apart fake from not fake in present post-truth world? Not sure. Science? Very likely. Many may say that off-putting bible is a fake too but I managed to...

Psoriasis is well-known in Portland to my surprise and drugs are promoted widely there. Psoriasis is a condition that is poorly understood though and blame is put on genes. I can not escape comparison with homosexuality here. The drugs that are on market have a lot of side-effects as they state clearly in the ads! Of course they do - as any drugs against homosexuality drugs against psoriasis will be a form of a systematic torture therapy. Art Work in Portland Gay Bar. How come that general public fears people that deviate a "bee-dick" too far from normal? How can Western Medicine treat something misunderstood? Western Medicine prescribes expensive drugs that kills symptoms not causes.  In my nearly 20 years long struggle with psoriasis I can say that psoriasis relates greatly to the stress level. Every time I take holidays I recover a little bit. In other words do not put psoriatic nor gay people in stressful situations. Just be nice, please . Coming from my ...