Taste of the Future.

Today I came home to find Girlhead was feeling much better than last night.  And the house did not smell like dead animals for which I take as proof-positive that God exists and miracles do happen.

The sitter had tried to take her to a weekly after-school function and they turned her away because it had only been 21 hours since her sickness and not 24.  She was bummed but then suggested we start back up where we left off reading “Cosmos” together.

Cosmos, as in Carl Sagan.  Not Cosmo as in Cosmopolitan.

So she and I were sitting there reading about Eratosthenes and his measurements of the pillars in both Alexandria and Syene, and deducing the shape of the Earth.

Suddenly Franken-Boy came running into the family room.  He stood there until we hit a break point and I said “Yeah, what is it, buddy?”

He looked at me (as much as an autistic kid can) and says “Lemur-Dad, what is our password?”

He had just been on Cruel Wife’s computer looking up stuff for Skylander™, the video game.  He hit this one part where he got stuck on a challenge.  Since Cruel Wife hadn’t gotten home yet, it should have occurred to me that him even being on Bing and searching for Skylander stuff might be… peculiar?… out of the norm? … noteworthy?

I knew he was already surfing and CW doesn’t really have a password set up on her system, so I said “Don’t need one, Slug-butt.”  Yes, Slug-butt is our special name that only I can call him.  He loves it.  Slugs are funny.  Butts are funny.  It’s a perfect name.

“Okay.” and he ran off.

A while later he ran back into the room and waited for us to hit the end of a paragraph.

“What is it, buddy?”

“What is our e…?  Uh… hang on…” and he runs off again.

He came back a moment later and said “What is our e:mail address?”

To myself I thought, “Alarm bells going off now, big red flag… okay, this is not right.”

“Buddy, I don’t know what is going on but you need to show me.”

So we went into the office where on Cruel Wife’s computer he had started to set up an account with some site affiliated with Skylander™.

There was an open window to generate a user account based on your info:

Name: N-i-c-e B-o-y  (I added spaces here to avoid sick-perv searches)

Password: **************  (presumably the asterisks cover up the words “Don’t need one”)

e:mail:

Telephone:

I stared at the open window in slowly dawning horror.  I thought about it for five seconds and shut the window down and turned off the computer.  “Okay, that’s enough for today.  No more computer time.  By the way kids, we never ever EVER set up accounts on-line unless Mom or I am here and watching you do it.  So DON’T DO IT.”

What can I say?  It was a teachable moment of sorts, and I punctuated it with the sinister/nebulous implied-threat tone to my voice that fathers everywhere learn in order to survive child-rearing.  You fathers out there know the drill and you know the way one pitches one’s voice for that special effect.  It requires physical equipment that women just don’t have.  We can’t give birth, they can’t make that particular kind of ominous noise.

The kid is SIX.  He:  (1) managed to figure out that he wanted an account, (2) figured how to navigate to where to set one up, and (3) was working his way through the information to set it up.

Cruel Wife was pleased that he thought so kindly of himself and it demonstrates that he really doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.

It is WAY too easy at times to think of him being less-than-bright when in actuality he’s a lot smarter than the average bear.  The searching for words, won’t look at you, the literal-ness of interpretation of the world around him – if you are slacking off you mentally write it off as “he’s clueless here” and short him in the validation department.  I admit it, I’m guilty of it.

I think we got a taste of the future today.  Going to have to watch him a lot more closely and stop being lazy with the computer.  Used to be a time when he clicked on NickJr and that was as far as it ever went – he just played games.  Today Skylander™, tomorrow a credit-card account – using my card – at “Big Un’s”, no download limits.

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In the Eye of Newt.

“So I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Newt Gingrich said at a townhall event in Plymouth, N.H. today.

Thank heavens he’s not going to pull off a presidential run.  It’s stuff like this that is really scary – it doesn’t sound stupid until one thinks about it, and then it becomes really scary stuff.  At first you think “Yeah!  Why shouldn’t they prefer paychecks over welfare?”

And then it hits you – why are you thinking about that when you should be asking what in the hell right does anyone in America have to DEMAND any damn thing at all?  Demand?  Seriously?

This is America where life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are good things – unalienable rights.  Nowhere has anyone been awarded the right to stipulate what they feel is required for the pursuit of their happiness, such as arguing that a requisite for any of those three is a job that one must be granted once demands for a suitable one are made.

And then we have the Bill of Rights, which is something you should demand.

Ol’ Newt sure must think a lot of himself to think that the NAACP is going to bail on Obama so’s they can pick out some old cracker who is arguing that working for money is somehow smarter than not-working for money.  Sheesh, given that kind of choice, who isn’t going to take the no-work option?

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Nope, in a million bazillion years I could not have made this up.  A 100 year old still-practicing prostitute?

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More later…

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Tear Along Perforations.

In the mailbag:

Dear Dr. Lemur -

My cousin has asked me to become their friend on FaceBook.  I think she is a soul-less heartless monster for the way she has screwed one of her brother’s kids out of his inheritance and feel towards her exactly the way this quote puts it:

If I’d known my niece was going to turn out as she has, I would have gotten my sister a dingo for a baby shower present.  – leeann (a blogger)

Except I feel that someone should have sent the dingo to my aunt, instead – maybe even two dingoes just to be sure the job had been done.

What should I do?

Signed,

Wary Kitty in Kalamazoo

Dr. Lemur:  Well, Kitty, a little constructive criticism would do wonders, so if I may offer some that could provide you with needed assistance…?  Kitty, listen carefully because this is important, get a grip on your shoulders and pull your head out of your ass.  Just because this radioactive hose-beast is “family” by no means obligates you to have anything to do with her.

Take two Midol, grow a spine, and tell the creature to take a hike.

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I’ll say this:  I don’t know why I chose the title I did.  Don’t try to make sense of it.

I can tell you that there is great news and that is that I had a consulting surgeon, probably one of ten in the country, who said that he loves surgery but doesn’t want to cut me open because he doesn’t think it will help.

“Sure, if you go see more surgeons one will cut you open, but I wouldn’t do it,” he said.

“Well, thank you, doc,” said I, and Cruel Wife sighed a sigh of relief along with me.

But, he says, the type of injury is most likely soft-tissue injury that’s just not healed and it’s referred pain.

I don’t know, perhaps that is code for “No idea what’s doing it,” but when I asked him “So you’re telling me that this is not in my head?” he said “Oh, no, it’s real.”

So, in some ways it is great news but in other ways we’re back to square one, with no real solution.  Regardless, I am going to see a longer-term pain management and I’m going to insist that we do something, anything, to manage this without the opiate-based painkillers which are just (a) not good for long-term pain control, and (b) a real pain in the ass for an engineer.  There are other solutions that are being used in Europe and I’ll bring that up with him but my first choice is what can we do to change the referred stuff.  For whatever reason, ligaments in my neck have impersonated my left arm and hand, and are doing a Jean-Claude Van Damme crappy job of the whole affair.

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Hey, if you haven’t seen it, check out the movie “Aaah! Zombies!!” (Wasting Away).   How can you not like a movie where the story is from the zombie’s perspective and the “agent of change” is green goo in a barrel labeled “Baby Formula” that is then mixed into soft-serve ice-cream that uses cheap beer as an ingredient?  You can’t, I say.

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How much longer to we have to put up with Team Obama, again?

I’m experiencing failure to achieve liftoff in my guesses as to how they could alienate struggling and out-of-work families even more than they already have.  Then there are the fortunates like my family that still chafe at having to pay a lot of money to support everyone else (we are comfortable but we are not rich, nor do we feel secure in this economy).  And then there are the affluent who are probably getting tired of being Obama’s financial whipping-boy – whenever he gets blamed for something he talks about how evil the rich are and how raising their taxes even more is really just them paying their fair share.

This is enough to make one ill, especially when you think what, for example, $1000 means to you personally.  Now think about how many people who pay thousands of dollars (at a minimum) in taxes while these classless clowns could get their African Vacation.  A lot of people haven’t had a proper vacation in years because of the economy, or even had a job… Sure being President is a hard job and the family of the President does have stress, but you can’t tell me they are more stressed than the family that is getting foreclosed on and hasn’t yet figured out where they can go.

Although ignored by most of America’s liberal-dominated media, several online US news sites are reporting that Michelle Obama’s grand tour of southern Africa earlier this year cost American taxpayers nearly half a million dollars – and that’s just for the flights. This follows in the wake of claims this August from sources inside the White House itself that the First Lady may have spent “$10 million of taxpayers’ money on vacations alone in the past year.”  - Nile Gardiner

Live it up, douchebags.  Your first-term presidency time is running out and the election is growing nearer every day.  I doubt a second term is in the stars.

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The idea of mountain coasters (mini rollercoasters on mountainsides) makes me think of Action Park (aka Traction Park).

It sounds like a GREAT idea!  What could go wrong?

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Wax on, wax off.

Update:  Hmmm.  So UARS didn’t come down yet.  Ha!  Ha, Mitchell!  Just goes to show you that when you start taking about physics it’s never “as easy as all that”.

I continue to be less than concerned.

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Been a hell of a week in LemurHouse.

All the same reasons with a few really scary new ones but hey, it’s only another 8 days until I see the surgeon, right?

Short post – this whole article made me immediately think of Brazilian waxing, for some reason.  Piranhas attacking beachgoers in Brazil.  I think the ol’ brain thought of getting bitten in the privates and the reported pain involved in waxing… down there.

Neither one sounds very appealing.

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I Do So Swear…

That my testes traveled to my shoulderblades in record time (mere microseconds), beat only by the puckering of my butt so tightly that a singularity was formed.  (Run guys, run with that joke… RUN)

Seriously… I can’t watch it.  I can watch autopsies, watch surgeries, compounded bones, gooshed limbs, ok.  But this, because of my neck sends me screaming out of the room like an 8 year old girl.

Next week I’ll show the video where he gets beat out by the man who can turn his head 181 degrees.

More later if I have the energy.  Hard day.  Check back and I’ll probably have something.

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Note:  Fair warning, I am/was in House mode – I’m trying to get the house ready for the out-laws (in-laws) and damaging myself to do it.  Cruel Wife deserves to be able to show her folks a back room that isn’t a pile of shiat and has all the frames around the windows, doors, and closets put up.  As you can guess, I get… intense, when I hurt badly.

Here we have a woman bitching that when her mother died she was more in touch with her cat more than her.   Had she written to this column It’s All About Me, Dr. Lemur, why my response below would have been quite different.

Q. Dealing With My Mother’s Death: My mother died in February after a long battle with cancer. She and I live in different countries but always tried to see each other a few times a year. I also have a sister who lives about two hours from my parents’ house. My mother knew for some time that the end was near. My sister and I asked time and time again to see her, but we were told by her and my father that she didn’t want to see us and that she wanted us to remember her as she was. While I was upset about this, I wasn’t going to argue or upset her. The day after she died, my father called me to tell me she had died. He mentioned several times that she died peacefully while looking at photos of their cat and that her last words were to the effect that my father should look after the cat. Now, I know my parents love this cat, but I am hurt and upset that she had nothing to say about either my sister or me or any of our children (her grandkids). Fast forward to her obituary, which did not mention any of her grandchildren by name but had several sentences about the cat. This was an obituary that my mother wrote herself about six months before she died. I am struggling now, as I feel angry, and then guilty that I am angry. I feel like actual human family members are more important than feline ones. I want to get past this and have positive memories of my mother, but I am hurt by being cut out of her final moments and her favoritism of a cat, which sounds ridiculous, I know!

A. Dr. Lemur: Cut the lady some slack you little ingrate.  The woman took care of you for eighteen years – fed, cleaned you, tended your boo-boos, listened to your inanest utterances, and sought reasons daily to NOT kill you as a teenager. You moved to a different country and I’d guess that you and your little snowflakes visited when it was convenient.   But by the time was growing near she felt she looked hideous and didn’t want to spoil your memory of her.  Yes, ultimately it is a vanity thing.  She doesn’t love you any less (although she might be tempted by your lack of empathy)  The woman was dying.  Her cats never cared in the least what she looked like – it is easy unconditional love and they were with her all the time, they were her children in the here and now.  What you won’t see until you choose to stop being so self-centered is that your mother was doing what she thought was the kindest thing possible by not letting you see her dying.   As for an obit, it’s hers to write.  If your family all loved her they would know that the obituary is for the acquaintances and describes her life – there’s nothing that says she has to account for each and every offspring.   If you all loved her, remember her for the reasons you loved her and celebrate her life and get off your self-importance merry-go-round.   Life was slowly being taken away from her – her friends, her hobbies, her loves, her health, her mobility, and lastly it took away her sense of self-worth and then her life.  Let her have her cats.  They weren’t taken from her and she was doing the best she could do at the time in that situation.  Go pop your angry balloon, have a beer, get laid, and if you’re still whiny, punch yourself in the face five or six times – hard.  If the problem still persists, you’re just a bitch and there’s really no help for that.

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Ok, see the x-ray through the side of a semi-truck which shows lots of illegal aliens?  There’s a certain amount of radiation that is required to peer through the truck sides… how many BED’s‡ did those people get?  Is it considered cruel and inhumane to subject these people (who were whisked away from their homes to work here illegally) to high exposures of x-rays?  Should we stop using this awful method of enforcing borders when we should be giving everyone amnesty and instant green cards?

‡  Banana Equivalent Dose.  The amount of radiation exposure you get from eating a banana.  For me, I always read BED and think back to PATEOTS units as proposed by Neal Stephenson, which illustrates some Highly Toxic Substance X that can do Scary Thing Y with a quantity that fits on a “Period At The End Of This Sentence”.

Note:  If you can’t recognize my humane/amnesty/green-card statements as sarcasm, you need to go someplace else.

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Rug F***ers is the perfect name of a carpet cleaning company, in my honest opinion.

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Oh, boo hoo.  If you hate it here so much that you spit on people who aren’t doing anything to you then you need to quit school and find a good university “back home”.

I especially love how she takes the blame away from herself:

Al-Doaifi told officers she was spitting on “white people” because of the way her people are treated and that a “higher authority” made her do it, an officer wrote.

Huh.  I wonder if her “higher authority” is going to pay her fines and court costs.

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The suspect, whose identity was not disclosed, has a history of mental illness.

Seriously, you think so?  Sheesh, you eat one person’s liver and you’re marked for life.  I mean, talk about being labeled.  It’s not likely that once he killed and dismembered his friend would need that liver anymore.

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Michigan man wins $2M and is still on food stamps.

A man who won $2 million [has admitted] that he still uses food stamps.

Leroy Fick [snip] admitted he still swipes the electronic card at stores, nearly a year after winning a jackpot [snip] that more than half the prize went to taxes.

Fick says the Department of Human Services told him he could continue to use the card, which is paid with tax dollars. He told WNEM: “If you’re going to … try to make me feel bad, you aren’t going to do it.”

This is how you recognize a broken entitlement system.  One that allow people to feel entitled long after there is any need for them to take government money.   He should be fined for every penny retroactively that he used on food stamps since the day he collected his prize plus another 20% just for being an a$$hole.

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I am a law-abiding citizen.

I am.  I’m a law-abiding Michigander.  But I’ll tell you this:

If the Michigan police think that if I am stopped that they can download data off my cellphone they are going to have to arrest me.  AFTER I take my SIM card and destroy it.  There is no F*CKING WAY they get to intrude on my privacy like this.  No way.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

I will endure arrest on principle.  I will be respectful to the officer, as much as I can and still refuse to comply with his “orders”, but I will NOT hand over my personal information to anyone under duress.

A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

“Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags,” a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device’s capabilities. “The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps.”

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

“With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity,” Fancher wrote. “A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched.”

Many thanks to The Butcher of Lansing for this link.

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Now, do NOT think that this next graphic (not mine) and the previous section above are related in any way.  They aren’t.  But Llamas with Hats make me laugh and damnit, I could use a laugh.  Family health issues with my sister have made this kind of a dark week.

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Oh the Humanity!

(YOU MUST READ the updates down at the bottom)

Why, oh WHY could I not have found a boob belt instead?

You put the sour milk back in the fridge… it ain’t gonna be better tomorrow, and she is way way way past her shelf date.

This is like The Ring… you view this and within 24 hours you’ll be dead.  Or wish it.

I was looking for a pic of Michelle Obama in a boob belt so I could ‘shop it onto the pic with the Barbie Dolls – white and black – and their racially different prices.  Imagine, making the white kids pay more for their Barbie Dolls.

(now if that doesn’t bait a troll, I am at a complete loss as to what will)

My vision is starting to get a bit less blurry so I’m going to go find a boob belt picture that doesn’t involve graphic porn or horror.

Ok, thanks to McGoo – who is more man on his bad day than I’ll ever be on my best – he sent me some boob-beltage, straight from Mibo herself.

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Woman crashes her car while shaving her privates.

As Laconic Pup said, “I am beyond words…”   and “There’s like forty-seven things wrong with this.”

Here’s where it gets really weird…

Ex Husband Allegedly Held the Wheel While She Shaved, Neither One Noticed SUV in Front of Them

Really?

According to the arrest affidavit, the trooper asked her afterward why she didn’t hit the brakes when she saw the SUV. She answered bluntly, “I told you, I was shaving.”

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I hear more and more people like this.  Allergic to radio waves?

Far more likely that he has a psychological issue where when he sees something he recognizes as being electronical he goes and has an episode.

I dare him to show his affliction in a scientifically organized double-blind test.

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China… What the Hell is Wrong with You?

For the life of me, I cannot figure China out.  Baby formula, dog food, lead toys, building lead ore smelting plants next to towns, and poor blood practices giving an entire town HIV.

What do they all have in common?  The same thing that the bird flu situation in China stems from.

Somehow, China always seems to have excuses for why they can’t live by a set of rules.

At a conference a flu expert from China gave a report.

“Some local healthcare authorities are reluctant, unwilling to test patients with severe pneumonia because there’s some latent rule which says the more H1N1 deaths, the less effective the control and prevention work in your area,” Zhong said.

Nice.

Zhong told the Chinese media last week that China may have had more H1N1 flu deaths than it has reported, with some local governments possibly concealing suspect cases.

The doctor is known for his candor and work in fighting Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003, when nationwide panic and international alarm erupted after it emerged that officials hid or underplayed the spreading epidemic.

Couple that with China’s inability to police themselves, allowing great open-air markets where wild birds are allowed to come in contact with poultry meant for purchase and consumption.

Time to drag third world countries kicking and screaming into civilization.  You argue that China isn’t third-world because they’ve launched things into space?  They are trying to cover up deficiencies by “proving themselves to the world” – until they achieve the harder task of becoming a society with a conscience that can uniformly adhere to sound practices, they haven’t proved a thing.

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Important Safety Tip for Today.

Do it for the Squirrels…!

Tequila Squirrel returns in another installment.

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Once the brain goes into “art mode” it doesn’t turn off easily.  It actually won’t, barring death, dismemberment, fire,  job loss, or doing Google searches using the wrong words (see below).

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US AG Holder defends choice to try terrorists in US Courts as “a tough call“

The prospect of these dirtbags getting free on technicalities when they are not US citizens but terrorists who have attacked the US on it’s own soil does not make for a tough call.  Trying to figure out how to spin it so your liberal whacked out thought processes are internally consistent, not that is a tough call.

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Obama didn’t have a very tall pole tox leap in order to give “his sternest warning yet” on deficit spending.  Crap, the idiot has been piling fuel on top of the fire since the first day.  He’s been spraying diesel on it and dumping magnesium powder on the flames.

I’d venture to say that it is his first “stern warning” and if not, it’s not far behind.

President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip recession.

This sounds too much to me like he knows a double-dip recession is already looming (which many of us already knew) and he’s trying to “groom the witness” (himself).

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If you are looking for wheel bearing grease…

For the love of all that is good and holy and innocent, do not… and I repeat – DO NOT use in Google the search term “Lube”.

JUST DON’T DO IT.

As soon as I hit enter, I knew I had made a fatal error.  I’m pretty sure with that one keystroke a thousand kittens died.

Even with a long hot shower and a steel bristle brush, you will never feel clean again.

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Sweet and Savory.

Yeah, maybe but I think I’d barf before I could eat it.

A bacon cheeseburger with a bun made out of a glazed Krispy Kreme donut.

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Reminds me of the joke – what is the last thing to go through a mosquito’s mind when he hits a car windshield?  His ass.

This guy was lucky he didn’t do it when he bungee corded.

A British daredevil’s vacation bungee jump went horribly wrong when his cord came loose and he hit the water at 80 miles an hour — but miraculously, he survived.

Rishi Baveja, 21, told “FOX & Friends” Wednesday that he didn’t even know the rope around his ankles had slipped off during his videotaped 165-foot leap in Thailand until the very end.  – source:  Fox News

He’s lucky he isn’t dead or paralyzed.

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Radiation Burns, Man.

I feared a great many things while living near Hanford years ago, but this was never one of them.

Nasty in all ways imaginable.

Six to twelve inches of topsoil in a 6 acre area are being dug up.   And where are they going to put this soil?  We’re talking 1614 cubic yards of “fairly highly contaminated” soil here folks.

I know!  You bury it.

Radioactive wasp nests at Hanford reservation

RICHLAND — Workers cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation are going after radioactive wasp nests.

The Tri-City Herald reports 6 to 12 inches of top soil are being dug up this month from 6 acres near the H Reactor. And, workers will dig up more individual mud dauber wasp nests over about 75 acres of the nuclear reservation in southeast Washington.

The contractor handling the clean-up, Washington Closure, says the nests were all built in 2003 when water was used to dampen dust during demolition of an H Reactor basin. That attracted the wasps that used the mud to make tube-shaped nests for eggs.

Spokesman Todd Nelson says the nests are “fairly highly contaminated.”

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The fact that I laughed hard enough to spew this morning’s coffee out my nose probably means I’m a sick bastard.

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So this co-worker has been giving me a hard time lately.  As we walk down the hallway I stop long enough to see her in the window of an office as she walks by.  I say “Holy cow, I was just checking, but you really do cast a reflection.”

So she comes back and hangs a seminar folder on my door.

What was her point?

She says it must have been intended for me and came to her by mistake.

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The US Postal Circus must die.  It’s for the planet.  It’s for the children.

How Global Temperatures are Driven by Postal Charges.

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If you gotta break some odds and go get hit by a 30,000 mph meteorite, you should follow this kid’s example and avoid getting hit in the head or someplace really precious.

1 in 100,000,000.  Go buy a lottery ticket.  Lucky dog.

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Dr. Feelgood, I presume?

Yesterday’s post had a disclaimer that I did not feel well.  Had it been planned, one could have accused me of employing a literary device known as foreshadowing.

Here’s another instance of foreshadowing… this is the rack I could have gotten if I’d chosen to upgrade to for extra money.

Had a hell of a time tonight.  On the way home, as I was riding with The Butcher of Lansing, all of the sudden I couldn’t take a breath.  I mean, I could not take a breath, and it was NOT asthma.  I leaned forward and forced a breath in through a huge effort, and was able to continue breathing. We went further down the freeway and I decided to speak up.  “Butcher, pull off at Jackson Road and pretend that we’re going to the hospital.  Humor me and just do it,” I said.

So we looked for the UofM hospital, overshot it despite the fact that they put up two whole signs to point the way, and headed towards the other local hospital.  I swear, our attempts to find the UofM hospital read like part of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“:

“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display …”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

By that point I was noticing dry mouth, screaming fast pulse, felt like shite, numbness in my hands was more pronounced than normal as was the pain in my arms and neck, and clammy.   No chest pains but skipping beats every so often.  Related to the epidural?  We wondered.

Funny thing, that release I signed Monday morning prior to the epidural.  It was a form that roughly said:

I understand that this is not a risk-free procedure and that potential side effects could include:  Trench foot, acid reflux, gingivitis, tinnitus, bursitis, myelitis, conjunctivitis, peritonitis, inflamed uterus, headache, phantom limb pain, eczema, fallen arches, ringworm, paralysis, and death.

Seriously, those last two were on that form.  Plus things like loss of bladder control, bowel irregularities, and… yes… difficulty breathing.  The proper response for those events was listed as “GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM IMMEDIATELY.”

You can imagine what thoughts were going through my head.

We got there, they whisked me into triage ahead of a compound fracture, two impalements with garden implements, and a sucking head wound.  This might seem odd but remember, with a sucking head wound you can still breathe.  They immediately hooked me up to an EKG and took me in the blood-soaked back of the ER – screams echoed off the walls and vague thudding noises could be heard at irregular intervals.  Hints of brimstone and iodine teased the nose in the drafty cell I was taken to.

Someone asked a question about any recent travel on a plane, train, or bus for an extended period (answer:  No) and then muttered something about “pulmonary embolism” and wandered out of the room without further discussion.  Now, couching the scary stuff in medicalese does not really work with me because I know damn well that pulmonary refers to the big toe and embolism is a fancy-schmancy way of saying “cramp”.  I was plenty worried because I couldn’t figure out how toe cramps equated to breathing difficulties.

They put me on a gurney made of bones, concrete shards, and chicken wire, and then took blood tests for enzyme levels.  I was put on a heart monitor with cables made from barbed wire and later there were  x-rays taken by running through a shuttered area with a poorly shielded cobalt source… I was there for six hours.   Cruel Wife came down and brought GirlHead and Hellboy.  And wasn’t that fun!? No, not really.

It was really touching for the first ten seconds – got a tender kiss on my arm from GirlHead.   It wasn’t twenty seconds until GirlHead got into the bio-waste garbage can and Hellboy started playing jump-rope with my IV.  The heart monitor started going BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP in this rapidly increasing and shrill way.  Through clenched teeth I told CW to either put a rein on them or get out because it was helping nothing. Cruel Wife finally got ahold of the sitter on the phone and took them there, vowing to come back later.

When I asked early on in my visit, the Doc said that I could take my [narcotic of choice] and it wouldn’t hurt anything, and by then I was truly in need, eight hours since the last pill – the pain scale goes 0 to 10 and I was at 4 and creeping higher at an alarming rate.  Later he told me that from my blood sample they did enzyme and thyroid tests and he also had a drug panel run on it.  I said “Oh geez, let me guess, you found narcotics.  Gosh, gee willikers, how about that, Patch?”   He looked at me and said “No, not Patch… I’m more like Hawkeye.”   I told him that I wasn’t taking meth, coke, speed, or anything like that.  I only do heroin and huff paint thinner on Tuesdays – us engineers, we have standards.

There was some truth to what he said about being more like Hawkeye Pierce because early on we’d gotten onto the topic of how much caffeine I drink in a given day.  “Well, LOTS,” I said.  He said “Hmmm” in that way that doctors train for years to perfect, and then asked me how I was doing otherwise.  I said “Other things aside, I’m really thirsty… could I get a Coke?”  He left saying that he was going to send the nurse by with a thingy to stick up my thingy for a urine sample.  I told him that was fine as long as we avoided catheters.

Long and short of it, today was a perfect storm.   I woke up feeling terrible – shaky, tired, weak – and probably was dehydrated right off the bat.  Add a Red Bull and a whole bunch of coffee throughout the day because I was struggling continually just to keep moving.  Then add the fact that as an insomniac I don’t sleep for shite to begin with.  Caffeine poisoning.   No wonder my pulse was funky and up around 140 at rest, huh?

X-rays were clear.  Enzymes were clear.  Thyroid was lit but not too lit.  After six hours my pulse was back down around 108 and still dropping.  Had a bitchin’ headache/neckache from lying on the concrete-and-chicken-wire thingy.

Yah-frakkin’ hoo.  Shoulda stayed home like I’d originally planned.   Tomorrow, however, I’m working from home.  Tough shite.  I was going to meet with Le Savant Fou (a fantastic scientist I work with)  in the morning but I’m sure she’ll understand.

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Quick!  While all the rich greedy corporate guys are weak and bleeding, finish them off with energy-conscious mileage requirements!  This is really going to stimulate the economy into a tailspin.  I’m going to come right out and say it:  Obama, you’re an asshole.

****

More evidence that Obama is just the kind of president that Iran has been hoping for these last 20-something years… a spineless kumbaya-singing hand-wringing jellyfish.

Why else suddenly crow about the looming ability to nuke US interests and Israel in the middle east?

****

Nothing says love quite the same way.  Swiss-made spike strips to block off your driveway.

www-deutscheoptik-com_catalog_product_info-php_hnh31jee

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Doesn’t get much more self-serving, insincere, and worthless than this.  I call BS on this.  This is just another “apology that isn’t an apology” that politicians and liberals are so very famous for.  Never once did he say “I’m sorry I behaved like an asshole and ‘teabagging’ was rude and obnoxious of me.”

Calling it a “stupid, silly, one-line aside,” he touched on the attention it received. “I think it’s an incorrect statement to say I was, in any way, trying to disparage legitimate protests,” said Cooper. “I don’t think it’s my job to disparage, or encourage, which oddly other networks seemed to be doing. Protest is the great right of all Americans, and it’s not my job in any way to make fun of people or disparage what they’re doing.

“Cooper said he regretted making the comment. “If people took offense to that and felt that I was disparaging their legitimate right to protest, and what they were doing, then that is something I truly regret, because I don’t believe in doing that,” he said. “Having this discussion just takes away from the real story.”  – Anderson Cooper making a disingenuous speech at a UCLA Weasel-fest

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Jumping to Conclusions

Why?  Why must they look for the most sinister of explanations?  Should they rule out suicide immediately?

An X-ray shows multiple nails embedded in the skull of 27-year-old Chen Liu. (Source: Reuters)

Detective Inspector Mark Newham said yesterday that post-mortem examination results had showed Liu was shot repeatedly in the head up to 30 times with a high-powered nail gun.

Look everybody, it’s “Gallows Humor Friday”.  It is actually a pretty horrific thing to happen.  Whoever did this needs… help.

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Not so fast… Nice smoke and mirrors, Obama.  Nationalization by any other name is just as scary.

…when the Administration leaked out word over the weekend of a plan to convert TARP loans into common stock in the banks, it did so with rhetoric that this was a way to rescue banks without asking for any more taxpayer bailouts. That drew attention away from the fact that this was an effective nationalization, with new outright government ownership in banks.

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