Month: February 2018

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What I Don't Understand…

…is how and why so many people of my generation—who were children in the free-love 60s, teenagers in the anti-war 70s, and came of age in the "Do What You Wanna Do" 80s—have turned into such ridiculous, conservative right-wing christian douchebags in adulthood.

That's the reason I haven't been to a single High School Reunion. With only two exceptions, (one a liberal gay I met in first grade and the other a slightly conservative-to-middle-of-the-road straight Jew who was one of my best friends in high school) I haven't kept in touch with anyone I went to school with. What little I have gleaned from cursory social media searches over the years has told me all I need to know and confirmed that I want nothing to do with any of those people.

 

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Roto-Rooter, That's The Name…

I'm getting a colonoscopy and upper GI endoscopy today. This was prompted in part by anemia and some slightly-off norm blood tests last fall that had my doctor (who errs on the side of caution, bless her) sufficiently concerned to send me to a hematologist. The hematologist, in turn, referred me to a gastroenterologist, as even though I've had no indication of a GI bleed, this is the first thing they check when this sort of thing occurs.

It's been ten years since the last one, so I was due for a colonoscopy this year anyway. The endoscopy was something my GI at the time of the first colonoscopy wanted to do in response to my decade-long history of recurring GERD. I never followed through with it because the GERD was controlled by Prilosec and quite frankly, I hated her guts. She had the bedside manner of a pit viper.

I'm not worried about results from the colonoscopy; the endoscopy has me more concerned. I'm fulling expecting a hiatal hernia diagnosis at the least.

Excuse me now while I run to the toilet—again—in response to the final prep solution I had to drink this morning.

UPDATE: I worried unnecessarily, both about the procedure itself and the outcome. I was literally asleep two seconds after they inserted the bite guard and don't remember a thing (other than it was the most restful sleep I've had in ages) until I woke up in the recovery room. Esophagus and Colon were unremarkable. The doc removed 7 benign polyps from my stomach lining, all of which were bleeding to some degree. Source of the blood loss located and taken care of! As I told Ben afterward, "You're stuck with me. No cashing out my life insurance just yet!"

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Did They Even Read The Book?

After a delay of over a year from its original scheduled release, the third and final installment of the Maze Runner trilogy finally hit the theaters last week. I saw it today and all I can say is…well…that was $7.50 and a little more than two hours of my life I'll never get back.

Okay, I will admit it's been a few years since I read the book, and I'm a little hazy on the small details. But c'mon. This was one of those films "based on" a book that the script writer obviously never actually read; the "based on" part being the title of the book, a few of the characters, and precious little else. I suppose I should have expected it; the previous film was just as off-script as this one,

It's kind of sad because the first film was faithful to the source material and it was a genuinely interesting story. I guess subsequent marketing surveys convinced the filmmakers that there just wasn't enough blowing shit up in the two subsequent books to attract their desired demographic. and changes needed to be made.

And oh…was there ever a lot of blowing shit up in this last film.

As I read in a review,"By the time the villainous scientist played by Aidan Gillen sighs in the middle of a fight scene, 'Okay, that's enough,' you'll have long since come to share his weariness."

That about sums it up.

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Back When the World Was Sane




The desert radio tower in Pahrump, Nevada that beamed Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell across the continent for a generation.

I miss the golden days of the face on Mars, Open Lines, whatever looney outer space conspiracy Richard C Hoagland was cooking up, Linda Moulton Howe and the UFO nonsense, and of course the C Crane radio because Y2K.

That was when late night conspiracy radio was at its finest, before it descended into paranoid racism.