Update: I will try to blog the interesting parts tonight when I’m feeling a little more human. Jittery as a colt and frankly, as advertised, hurt. Taking meds to get on top of the pain cycle now. More later. Thanks for all your kind wishes and thoughts.
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Today (Tuesday) I go in for a Radio-Frequency Ablation treatment. They are going to find the nerves in my neck that were given the what-for back in the auto accident of ’07, stick a wire in ’em, and burn the little effin’ things until they die. You heard that right – they basically microwave the nerve to death.
Yes, I know. This is reported by several acquaintances as being pretty damned painful, especially for the ten days, maybe 14 days, and surely no longer than 6 weeks, that it takes for the rest of the nerve to actually die… die… die… So until that time I guess life won’t be a bed of roses. Not that it is right now, anyway. Was at an 8.5 on the scale of 1-10 for pain today because I refused to take any painkillers until past any reasonable time. I just hate being fuzzy.
But, if it is a light at the end of this tunnel so I can get a drug-free active life back… sign me up. They only do one side of the neck at a time, so this will be a four-month endeavor.
Wish me luck. Please.
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Ok, it’s just 2-1/2 hours away and I’m blogging. Nervousness, fear, loathing, trepidation, and hope. All blended together like a chinese blood bank.
A great article points out that anti-Obama parafe… paraphnal… perapher… stuff is selling quite well. HTOVWOFY, people?
In that article… one paragraph says this:
A poll of likely voters by Rasmussen Reports, released Thursday, found that 32 percent “strongly approve” of the way the president is doing his job, while 38 percent “strongly disapprove.” Overall, 49 percent at least ?somewhat approve? of his performance, and 51 percent at least somewhat disapprove.
Uh… that adds up to 170%, right? Damn new age maths. I mean yeah, sure, I can do differential equations and vector mathematics but can’t add numbers or balance a checkbook to save my life, but even I can see that the way they wrote that paragraph suckeths mightily.
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A Washington Times article titled “Angry Rich Liberals” was especially fun to read. You know why? Because I’m tired of being told by everyone else that I’m the problem. I’m apparently a co-conspirator in global warming, the oppression of blacks, domestic abuse, home-grown terrorism, ad pseudo-infinitum, ad nauseum. It starts with Algore, chattering like a squirrel, demonizing everyone else but himself and his fellow fart-sniffers.
The rest of us would find these environmental scolds more convincing if they chose to live modestly in average tract homes. That way, they could limit their energy consumption and provide living proof to us of how smaller is better for an endangered planet Earth.
Critics in the business of racial grievance offer the same contradictions.
Recently, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. got into a spat with a white policeman who arrested him in his own home for disorderly conduct. Mr. Gates immediately cried racism. He argued that his plight was emblematic of the burdens the black underclass endures daily from a racist white America.
However, Mr. Gates is one of the highest-paid humanities professors in the United States. And Mr. Gates – not the middle-class Cambridge, Mass., white cop — engaged in shouting and brought up race.
[snip]
Yet this well-connected, well-paid man apparently wants us to believe in melodramatic fashion that he is living in something like the United States of decades ago.
[snip]
We have more of the rich on the barricades railing about the economic inequality of America. Former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina preached about “two Americas,” one poor and abandoned, one wealthy and connected. Mr. Edwards should know because he built himself a gargantuan multimillion-dollar mansion in which he might better contemplate the underprivileged outside his compound.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, sermonizes about corporate greed and credit card companies’ near-extortion. Nonetheless, Mr. Dodd managed to squeeze out of the corporate world a low-interest loan, a sweetheart deal for a vacation home in Ireland, and thousands in campaign donations.
Former senator and Cabinet nominee Tom Daschle of South Dakota was a big proponent of raising taxes to nationalize our health care system. The problem was that the populist Mr. Daschle both hated paying taxes and loved limousines — and so avoided the former but welcomed the latter.
[snip]
Now the most vehement critics of America’s purported sins are among the upper classes. These critics’ parlor game has confused Americans about why they are being called polluters, racists and exploiters by those who have fared best in America.
Do the wealthy and the powerful lecture us about our wrongs because they know their own insider status ensures that they are exempt from the harsh medicine they advocate for others?
[snip]
Here’s a little advice for all of America’s wealthy critics: a little less hypocrisy, a little more appreciation of your good lives — and then maybe the rest of us will listen to you a little more.
Lemur King's Folly 