Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

The Creeping Crud

A week ago I paid a visit to my doctor for a routine checkup. By that afternoon my throat was scratchy and I was starting to feel decidedly under the weather. When I went to bed that night I was running a 101 degree fever and I’ve been feeling like crap since.

I was supposed to return to the doctor’s office the next day for a followup test, but I called and rescheduled. I wasn’t going anywhere.

The fever disappeared that night, so the following day—feeling much better— I decided to get out and run errands. Big mistake. That evening the fever returned with a vengeance. It broke later that night and I woke up drenched.

Thankfully there’s been no more fever, but as has been typical for these things, it’s progressed from a sore throat into my sinuses and down in my chest. Thank the baby Jeebus for Mucinex, although I’m now blowing/hacking up what I affectionately refer to as creamed corn. A little over a week has gone by since this started. If the past is any indication, I’ve got another week and a half to go before I’m feeling back to normal.

AND WE ARE NOT AMUSED.

2 comments

Posted on

Current Mood

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. ‘Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.’ And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’

Plastic… asshole.” ~ George Carlin

0 comments

Posted on

20 Non-Sexual Sensations That Feel Amazing

Found somewhere on the interwebs and copied verbatim. Not necessarily my own choices, but I found the list interesting enough to pass on:

1. The feeling when you first wake up but don’t have to get out of bed yet.

2. It might not be sexual, but having your hair played with.

3. Taking a big poop with only a little resistance. Combined with a dry wipe and you’re winning at life.

4. Getting goose bumps from music.

5. When you’re congested and then suddenly your nostrils open up.

6. When you finally get rid of that thing stuck in your teeth.

7. Dipping your hand into a deep bag of uncooked rice.

8. Sitting down after being on your feet all day.

9. That moment right before your favorite part in the song then that motion you do afterwards.

10. Pee-shivers.

11. Burying yourself in hot laundry fresh from the dryer.

12. Dangling a cool metal chain over your hand and slowly lowering it down so it collects in your palm.

13. Lying in the pool and smacking your arms down in the water to create a rush of tiny bubbles underneath you that envelope your entire body for a few seconds.

14. Putting on a brand new pair of socks.

15. A shower beer. I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried it.

16. Turning your pillow to the cold side.

17. Getting into my bed after I’ve washed my sheets and made it.

18. Opening a book to the correct page on the first try.

19. Twirling a q-tip in your ear right after a shower.

20. Pulling the protective plastic covers off new electronics.

1 comments

Posted on

Quote of the Day

How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion—mandatory 48-hour waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, and an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.

It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with woman and healthcare. I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”

0 comments

Posted on

Visiting an Old Friend

Ben and I were itching to get out of town, so yesterday we drove to Tucson where we met up with Bernie and Damon for lunch at a place we’ve been going to since I was in college.

The place hasn’t changed at all. Bernie said, “You almost have to look through the ghosts.”

And why is this so special?

Hamburger patty tacos. Yeah, I know it sounds bizarre, but they’re a South Tucson staple. They tasted a bit different from what I remember; the seasoning in the meat had changed, but otherwise they were still delicious.

1 comments

Posted on

What. The. Fuck.

From RawStory:

An enraged Waffle House customer shot and killed a waitress early Friday who asked him not to smoke.

Police said Johnny Mount was eating about 1 a.m. at the restaurant in Biloxi, Mississippi, when he lit a cigarette, reported WLOX-TV.

A waitress asked the 45-year-old Mount to put out the cigarette or smoke outside, and he began arguing with her.

Police said Mount then pulled out a 9 mm handgun he had concealed under his shirt and shot the 52-year-old waitress in the head.

She was taken to a nearby hospital but died from her wounds.

Mount was arrested as he tried to leave the restaurant and has been charged with first-degree murder.

He remains held on $2 million bond.

0 comments

Posted on

Quote of the Day

The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist—like tomorrow—remember this: I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families of this country who produce the wealth of this country deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down.

I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.

I believe that most Americans can pay lower taxes if hedge fund managers who make billions manipulating the marketplace finally start paying the taxes that they should.

I don’t believe in special treatment for the top 1 percent, but I do believe in equal treatment for African Americans who are right to proclaim the moral principle that Black Lives Matter.

I despise appeals to nativism and prejudice of which we have been hearing a lot in recent months, and I do believe in immigration reform that gives Hispanics and others a pathway to citizenship and a better life. I don’t believe in some foreign “ism”, but I believe deeply in American idealism.

I’m not running for president because it’s my turn, but because it’s the turn of all of us to live in a nation of hope and opportunity not for some, not for the few, but for all.” ~ Bernie Sanders

1 comments

Posted on

‘Murika!

While I don’t feel this is a completely accurate depiction of politics in these United States, I think it is a good rendering of its overall Zeitgeist. Yes, I agree that the Democrats by and large do much, much more for the 99% than the Republicans would even consider, and by and large (there are exceptions, of course) they are —at least for now—foregoing the current fear-mongering being spewed by the Right Reich, but when it comes down to the interests of the 1% who ultimately control both parties, I think this is pretty much spot on.

1 comments

Posted on

Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly is No Way to Go Through Life, Son

From John Scalzi:

So, this week.

The last few days are a reminder that a large number of Americans are in fact shrieking, bigoted cowards, and that’s a sad thing, indeed.

Seriously, I don’t think the bedwetting about Muslims has been this bad in a very long time, which is saying something, and the panic on Syrian refugees is particularly ridiculous. Here’s a nice, juicy quote from a just released essay on the subject:

Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States and none was successfully carried out.  That is one terrorism-planning conviction for a refugee for every 286,543 of them who have been admitted.  To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.  The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough…

The security threat posed by refugees in the United States is insignificant.  Halting America’s processing of refugees due to a terrorist attack in another country that may have had one asylum-seeker as a co-plotter would be an extremely expensive overreaction to very minor threat.

What horrifyingly liberal commie soviet came up with this load of codswallop? The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, i.e., the fellow who with his brother is currently trying to buy the entire right side of the political spectrum for his own personal ends. When the Cato Institute is telling you to maybe take down the pearl-clutching over the Syrian refugees a notch or two, it’s an indication that you’ve lost all perspective.

It’s been particularly embarrassing how the mostly-but-not-exclusively (and thankfully not all-encompassing) GOP/conservative politician freakout about the Syrian refugees points out that, why, hello, bigotry really is a thing, still. From small-town mayors declaring that FDR had it right when he put all those US citizens of Japanese descent into camps to presidential candidates alluding that might not actually be a bad idea to make special IDs exclusively for Muslims here in the US, to the House of Representatives passing a bill to piss on the Syrian refugees, it’s been a banner week for bigotry here in the US, enough so that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement of concern with reference to the Syrian refugees. And as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales.

But as this asshole politician said this week, “Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do.” Well, no, they don’t. Leaving aside that the perpetrators on the attacks in Paris all appeared to live in Europe to begin with, the actual process for placing refugees in new countries is so long and arduous and so selective, with just 1% of applicants being placed, that (as the Cato Institute astutely notes) there’s a vanishingly small chance that someone with ill intent will make it through the process at all — and an even smaller chance that they would be assigned to the US when all the vetting is done. To worry about terrorists in the refugee pool is, flatly, stupid — no terrorist organization is going to pour resources into an avenue with such a small chance of success, especially when it’s easier to apply for a friggin’ visa and get on a plane (they can buy their guns when they get here, don’t you know). The reasons why so many people are voiding their bowels about it are simple: Ignorance, racism, xenophobia and bigotry.

“But people are scared!” Okay, and? Being scared may be the excuse for abandoning all sense and reason in the moment one is actively under attack; it’s not even close to a reasonable excuse for, thousands of miles away from an attack and with no immediate threat on the horizon, vilifying innocent co-religionists of the attackers and plotting to slam the door on refugees running from the very people who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. Taking the Paris attacks out on Syrian refugees is security theater — it doesn’t make us safer, it’ll just make the most ignorant among us feel safer. It’s the TSA of solutions to the Daesh/ISIS problem.

This has been a bad week for the United States, folks. France was directly attacked by terrorists and its response was to promise to house 30,000 Syrian refugees; we weren’t and one branch of our government fell over itself to put the brakes on accepting a third of that number. France is defying the very organization that attacked it while we, on the other hand, are doing exactly what that organization hoped we would do. We’re being the cowardly bigots they hoped we would be, and as loudly as possible.

So congratulations, America. We’ve successfully wrested the title of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” from France. Enjoy it.

1 comments