When I started this blog, I decided to make it about life extension, and all the possibilities and news of SENS and natural/organic ways to live longer, if not indefinitely. I quickly veered into childhood memories, which of course I find more interesting than anyone reading, and the blog changed topic.

But I'd like to jump back to life extension for a post here, simply because it's been popping up in news and on the web. In fact, any place you can find vitamins online, you're almost sure to find some life extension news as well.

I recently saw a man on the Colbert Report named Aubrey DeGray. Aubrey DeGray PHD to be exact. Doesn't that sound like the name of a barrister right out of a Sherlock Holmes novel? Anyway, Aubrey had the longest beard I've seen on television since Martin Short played Moses on Saturday Night Live. Aubrey was only the show for a couple of minutes, just enough for him to mention his new book, something about ending the aging process. But, he was enough of a character for me to do some research...

Apparently, Mr. DeGray has founded the "Methuselah Institue" dedicated to finding a cure for "death." There are six full time employees of the institute, and they are recruiting the help of collegiate research across the world.

I saw Aubrey give a half hour lecture at a convention recently where he better divulged his postulates. First, I must say, he is a passionate man. A radical, though possibly rational idealist, and very "bull headed" as he puts it himself. Aubrey goes over the seven factors that lead to death, and some ideas on how to eventually slow down or stop those factors.

So, the point here, is Google Aubrey DeGray, and tell me if he's a wacko or a prophet. And while you're at it, google orac value as well and keep on taking your vitamins!

Memories can be a hard thing to hold onto. Certain moments pop. The first kiss, the first time someone close passes away (in my case, my dog Oliver), the moment I found out I was going to an Ivy league school. And the first time I was fired...

My first job was as a performer. I was picked to play the lead role of Barry Manilow in Barry Manilow's dinner theater production of the Copa Cabana. The theater was on the outskirts of Washington D.C. so I stayed with a friend for the summer while a drove back and forth an hour every day to rehearse and perform for the elderly in between the buffet and the desert.

And then I was fired.

Apparently, the only reason I was hired in the first place was because the guy who usually plays the lead in the musicals had decided to jet off to New York to make a name for himself. Apparently making a name was harder than intended and he came crawling back to Maryland halfway through production. Then, during one of the rehearsals, I sprained my ankle doing the splits. I recovered quickly, but that was all the ammo the production needed to fire me. It was short and quick, and I left the building and the state before anyone knew what happened, I think people were still cleaning up after the customers.

At the time, I was pretty unravelled, but I realize, every experience, even the bad ones are worth remembering. Now it works as a line in my resume
1st Job = Playing Barry Manilow at a Dinner Theater in Maryland. I was fired.

Onward and upward, they say. Get some life extension, read a health blog, and keep on footin' it. And keep your eyes open for the best antioxidant. I hear no one has found it yet.

I wasn't much of a prankster as a young child. I brought fireworks to school a couple times. And I pinned a lascivious drawing of a comic book heroine to the map of Kansas in the library, but most of my imaginative juices were spent beating up my friends in elaborate manors at a nearby creek, or likewise taking an elaborate beating. We'd build projectiled, homemade slingshots, and jousting poles we could attach to our bicycles. I'd broken my arm three times before I turned eight.

My sister didn't care so much for giving or taking beatings, so I had to come up with clever subtle ways to undermine her existence.

My mom made my sister and I take vitamins since we were six. And not the flinstone kind. We had to gulp down the marble sizes rock hard calcium supplements reserved for the brittle old.

The original plan was to swap my sister's vitamins out with something nasty, like real rocks, or pieces of horse radish. My father got wind of the plan and offered up a much more clever use of the daily vitamins.

Apparently, if vitamins are left in the pockets of clothes for a period of time, they leave a permanent sour odor. A baggie of busted vitamins in a suitcase could ruin a whole vacation. I asked my Dad how he knew this and he told me mom had played the trick on him years ago.

So, I grabbed a handful of vitamins and stuffed them in my sister's dresser.

Sure enough, a week later, our whole house began to smell like vitamins.\

"You smell like vitamins!" I yelled at my sister, with as much pointing and laughing as possible.

"No, you do!" She yelled back, laughing and pointing even harder.

Apparently my dad had told her about the trick as well.

All this talk of vitamins reminds me to link you a couple websites. The best antioxidant is a pretty good blog for basic info. Then check out this hub page on the vitamin shop. It's not so much a store as information, but good information.

Uncle Joe wasn't really an Uncle. He was a my dad's second cousin, or first cousin twice removed or something. But he was Uncle Joe. Mom hated Uncle Joe, but it was many years later that I found out why and I don't blame her.

Uncle Joe made full use of our back yard. He would play games of tag with my sister and I and our cousins. He was always it, even after he tagged us, so the game was basically, "run from Uncle Joe."

Joe tagged hard, he'd pick you up and toss you across the yard. He throw you into the pool, or the pond. I was the best tree climber and Joe would pluck me out of a tree. He'd just pull me leg until I couldn't hold on and I'd fall to the ground.

Uncle Joe would get in contests with my dad. Dad wasn't very physical. He had more than a pot belly, but he had a good amount of energy and a no-quit attitude. Joe would get dad into a jumping race, or--literally-- a spitting contest, or they'd fake wrestle "for our amusement" Joe might say. We always laughed at the fake wrestling, but it wasn't really fake. Joe would do some silly moves on dad, and dad would take some dramatic falls. Then Joe would imitate something he'd seen from the three stooges, usually it involved slaps or noogies, or bopping dad on the head or the nose. My sister and I were six or seven years old, but even then we could tell there was something else going on. Aggression toward another person is hard to mask. Eventually Joe would go to far and throw dad to the ground. Dad would, "call it quits," and everyone would go back to drowning snails in beer. Never once did my dad land a blow against Joe, he just wouldn't fight back, fake or otherwise.

Mom was popular and pretty. She wasn't the queen bee of her high school, but she certainly wasn't without a clean cut boy on a friday night. Dad was smart and crazy and not dashing, but charming enough to get in trouble with a fare share of girls' parents at a young age. Mom and Dad met in college, rebelled, became hippies, eventually became doctors, moved to the suburbs and had us.

Joe was my dad's best friend growing up. Joe got married out of highschool. He got divorced, got a woman pregnant, married her, then divorced her as well. Joe went through women like an alcoholic, and every time he left one, he swore them all off and decided he was just better off with his buddies. Then his buddy, my dad, went and got married. Dad, didn't have as much time for Joe because of mom, and though dad would probably never say so, he knew Joe resented mom because of it. The stinger to the whole situation, something I probably knew when I was six, but certainly know now, is mom was better and Joe knew it. Mom was better than Joe's women. She was better than dad deserved, and she was even a better buddy to dad than Joe was. Dad knew it too, and I think this is why dad never fought back, because he'd already won.

Okay, enough about the parents, here's you're monthly health links: The best multivitamin and damage control master formula are very helpful for general health blogging and good fun.

When I was young, there was a soy bean facitility near my house. The place was massive, dozens of silos were capped by a series of ladders, walkways, and conveyor belts. The cops patrolled the facility, though I couldn't imagine what crooks would hang out there. My friends and I would sneak down to the silos at night to climb around and create mischief.

Getting up the first ladder of the lowest silo was the hardest part. There were locks and cages and all sorts of mechanisms to stop people from climbing the thing. There was no greater challenge at age 12, so Jeff, Nole, and I learned how to squeeze through a bent section of bar and climb up the underside of a staircase wrapping around the silo to get to the top. Once up high, all the bridges and conveyor belts were ours. A dangerous new playground.

But tag and spy games can only go so far. One day we decided to drop stuff off the top. Our first experiment was watermelons. Carrying a water melon up a staircase is hard enough, but carrying a watermelon while hanging from under a staircase forty feet above the ground....that's just wrong. Nevertheless we made it to the top with a watermelon each. It was near midnight. It had never occurred to us that our cloak of darkness prevented us from seeing the ground, thus no view of watermelon exploding fun.

Jeff shrugged and heaved his melon over the edge of the silo. A second or two passed before we heard a loud splat. Then another second passed and we heard a hundred little smaller splats.

"Cool!" said Nole, "Watermelon shrapnel!" Indeed, the chunks of watermelon had blast apart ricocheting of the walls of the silos. This was almost as exciting as actually seeing what was going on. Jeff heaved his over the side. SPLAT. splatsplatsplatsplat. Then I heaved mine. SPLAT. CRASH!!!!! A piece of shrapnel had actually busted out a window.

We were high enough to see most of the city, and Jeff almost immediately spotted a cop car about a mile away do a Uturn.

We scrambled down the ladders and staircases.

"Can you imagine if that was your head instead of a watermelon?!" shouted Nole as we climbed under the cage and back through the bars.

Suddenly I could imagine, very well. If we had fallen from that silo, it wouldn't be a sprained ankle, it would be splattered head shrapnel. The cops weren't patrolling for crooks, they were patrolling for us. The cages, locks, and bars, wasn't to protect from theft, it was to protect kids from climbing up hundreds of feet and then splatting themselves like watermelons.

A good visual reminder goes a long way to keeping someone safe, but when you can't see, just hearing will sometimes do the trick.

And finally, it's health week as usual, and what better way to celebrate health week than with omega 3 benefits. If omega 3's aren't your cup of tea, you can always try from many one a day multivitamins to get your health on.

And that's it for this week's childhood memory. Sorry for shifting the focus of my blog from living in the future to living in the past, but more recently I've begun to feel like the past is just as important.

I love a good conference. A well oiled convention. My first was as comic book convention. I was eight, and I went with two of my nerdy friends. My life savings up to that point was $120 dollars, which I figured was probably enough to by a house, so certainly I could by all the comic books I'd ever need.

My favorite comic book was X-Men (mind you, this was long before the movie, when you still had to have either pimples, weird facial hair, or be very young, to know who the X-Men were). The first thing I bought was someone's home made Kitty Pride action figure. She's the girl that walks through walls. Basically, someone had taken a $3 Jean Grey action figure, cut it in half, and glued each half to either side of a foam brick wall--because she can walk through walls! Ha! The action figure cost me $25 and it fell apart two weeks later.

$95 dollars left. My friend, Alex, and I went browsing the boxes of vintage comics while my other friend, Aaron, went crazy with grab bag collections. A grab bag collections is about a dozen comics you buy for a couple bucks that someone has stapled inside a brown bag. It sounds like a great deal until you open it up and get "The story of Isiah and other Biblical Adventures: The Comic!" None of the comics are in color, and often the are part 3 or part 6 of a 12 part series, like getting just one out of order chapter in a book. One grab bag had 12 copies of "El Cid" and nothing else.

I bought a couple vintage comics and a couple grab bags and I was down to $75.

Then I saw it. X-Men #4. Tucked into the back of the box. The comic was frazzled and faded, but it was there, with a $60 price tag. I flipped through my pricing guide, just to make sure the deal was good.... Sure enough. X-Men #4 was worth $850 dollars! I bought it immediately. I had just won at life.

With $15 dollars left I went up to a booth filled with airbrushed T-shirts. A sign said "Pick a shirt: $15" Perfect. In the back of the booth was a muscular man talking with a bearded fat man. The muscular man was airbrushing a shirt while talking. I watched him for a moment, ready to pick out a shirt.

"Hey there buddy. Look what this guy's doing for me," chirped the fat man, "that's customization at it's best." I looked over at the shirt. The muscular man was airbrushing a picture of wolverine with a cheesy grin and a woman under each arm. The women were Arial from Little Mermaid and Belle from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

I was shocked. "You can't do that!" I shouted, "Those characters aren't even in the same universe!"

"This guy will airbrush you anything, kid!" the fat man was mighty pleased. My comic book elitist obstinance waned as I thought of the possibilities for what could be on my shirt...

"Can you paint Dead Pool burning down my elementary school?" I asked.

"That's my specialty," said the muscular man. Dead Pool was the coolest comic book assassin, and I'd be the coolest kid in school if I had a shirt with him setting the place on fire.

The muscular man finished up with lascivious wolverine, and began on my shirt. He only had one size, X-Large, so the shirt went all the way to my knees once it was finished, but I was as happy as an assassin at a mobster's reunion.

"That'll be $75 dollars," said the Mr. Muscles.

"But the sign says $15!"

"That's for those other shirts. Custom jobs cost $75"

"But I don't have $75. I've only got $15."

The man frowned and demanded to see my mother. My mother wasn't around. She was at the mall, fawning over bed spread patterns. She'd be fawning for another 4 hours. The man was not pleased to hear this. He eyed my bag full of purchases.

"What have you got in the bag?"

"Just some comics and stuff. I don't know." But I did know. And, oh, I didn't want him to.

"Let me see." he said. And by said I mean growled. Step back for a moment and realize I was eight and he was maybe 35 and did I mention muscular. He took the bag and thumbed through it and almost immediately came across the X-Men #4 with the $60 price tag still on it. "Well, look a this. A $60 comic plus the money you've got just equals enough for this shirt."

I was too scared to make any sort of argument, so I handed over the comic and my money, and got my airbrushed Dead Pool shirt. It was the most expensive shirt I ever purchased, but I'd be the coolest kid in school, right?

I wore the shirt the next day, was promptly sent to the principles office for wearing something portraying violent images, and was made to wear the shirt inside out; which, of course, made everyone ridicule me.

I'm 25 now. I sold off all my best comic books years ago, but I still have the shirt. I guess it was worth the price.

P.S. - Sorry this post had nothing to do with everlasting life or health, but I've decided to make this blog a little more life personal. Anyway, to make up for it, here's a couple links to health blogs. They are master formula and omega 3 benefits.

There has been much discussion of the the mythical one a day pill. For life eternalists, this is the pill meant to be the cure all. It prevents cancers, gets rid of basically any disease and any mutation. It corrects errors in genes. It provides all the daily vitamins and nutrients the body needs to survive. It stops telomere degeneration, and it revitalizes the cells, keeping skin young, hair growing, and brain cells strong and healthy. Essentially, it's everything for the human body except water and calories.

I'm not entirely convinced this one a day pill is possible, considering viruses and bacteria are trying as hard as we are to survive, constantly mutating and change to overcome the best medicines we can throw at them.

But IF this one a day pill becomes a reality, the maker of this pill has a locked return profit on every customer using the pill FOR ALL ETERNITY. Think about how far cell phone companies will go to get a customer they can keep for a couple years. Can you imagine the lengths companies would go to get you locked into their one a day pill? This is the type of scientific progress that, while miraculous, is also the stuff that causes wars.

But who knows if we'll ever see such a pill.

Can NanoRobots help us live forever? They certainly may be able to fix many diseases, and very possibly extend the cell life of most of our bodies organs and tissues. But actual life extension may be a whole different matter. Apparently tampering with telomeres is serious business, and even our near future predictions of what nanobots will have the capabilities of achieving does not include telomere reconstruction.

I have been reading some studies on the best multivitamin options for life extension, and I've found a few that claim to support regeneration of telomeres, but these tests are highly scrutable. These are the sort of vitamins and meds sold at back alley pharmacies in Tijuana with no labels by shady doctors who look more comfortable in nylon sweats than white coats. But hey, wherever the revolution is occuring, I will follow.