Charlie Brown's Christmas

Tonight, Charlie Brown's Christmas will be shown on TV in our area at 7 PM. NPR had a nice little piece about how this was put together 35 years ago. Next to the genius of cartoonist Charles Shultz, is the magic of the music.

Enjoy. :)Mom

Another riddle

The other day at work I was thinking about the various ramifications of the time-dependent inhibition of enzymes. In brief, the potency and safety of some drugs (including the block-buster drug Celebrex--yes, if taken as directed, Celebrex is still safe) is due to the time-dependent nature of the inhibition. Celebrex, for example, starts out with very weak potency against it's enzyme target, but over just a few minutes, the interaction with the enzyme gets tighter and tighter, and the drug gets more and more potent relative to any other side effects it might be having.

Anyway, this brought to mind Gollum's riddle in The Hobbit:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Thinking it was a great commentary on the time-dependent nature some kinds of enzyme inhibition, I printed out the riddle and stuck it on the wall near my cubicle. The next day I saw that someone had written their own answer at the bottom:

"George Bush?"

Riddle

We heard this riddle last week and wanted to share it with you:

I am your constant companion. I will push you forward to success or I will drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. 80% of what you do, you might as well hand over to me and I will do it promptly and I will do it correctly. I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me. Show me what you’d like to have done, and after a couple of lessons, I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great people. Alas, I am the servant of all failures as well. All who are great, I have made great. All who are failures, I have made failures. I am not a machine; but I do work with the precision of a machine and the intellect of a human. Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I’ll lay the world at your feet. Be easy with me, and I will destroy you!

Who am I?

You can get the answer here. We thought the comments included with the answer were also interesting.