Welcome to the study.
I was reading this article in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago by Carl Elliot about semi-professional medical guinea pigs. People who eke out a living entering themselves in pharmaceutical studies to be poked, prodded, starved, given chemicals with unknown effects on humans, and observed the whole while in the name of advancing health care. Ideally, everybody involved -from the pharmaceutical companies, to the doctors administering the studies, to the test subjects- would be doing their part for purely altruistic reasons, albeit the article seems to show that this is frequently not the case and as with most things in life, the grease of financial reward is dripping out of the machine and causing some people to slip and fall.
I don't know why I bring this up other than the fact that this open thread is a kind of test without any of that lucrative grease. With aspects of social networking fittingly creeping into these blogs -you might have noticed we have developed a Purple Row community here- it seems obvious that some of our friends here would want to share aspects of their lives that don't involve the Rockies and that many of us that would be happy to know this stuff, but equally obvious that others might not care for it at all. So here you have it. If you want to mingle OT with your Row buds, go ahead and click through to the comments, should there be any. If you're only here for Rockies info, I'll have another post or three up in a little bit. If this catches on and we don't see any brawls develop, they might become more regular features.