Friday, May 20, 2005
Because it’s Friday.
| What military aircraft are you? B-52 Stratofortress You’re a B-52. You are old and wise, and you absolutely love destruction. You believe in the principle of “peace through deterrence” and aren’t afraid to throw your weight around.
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| Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests. |
Via Caltechgirl, who seems to have become our source for these things.
The weather should visit ER and get itself healed.
So this morning Pete says:
...Oh, and don’t look at the 7 day if you want warmth, sun and summery weather....
You know, I like rain. What I freaking can’t stand is a week of clouds that nets a shower or two. I’m pretty sensitive to lack of sunlight and I’m getting close to the end of my rope here. I’ll have to go sit out on the basketball court this afternoon and soak up the little bit of sun that’s breaking though.
Supposed to have a high of 56 tomorrow. 56!
Every time I think I might be getting used to living in this wacky place, the weather reminds me I’m in hell.
Watched the last Carter episode of ER last night and I told Jay that I was so disappointed that Carter was leaving...but that I can sympathize with moving to a foreign land for love!
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
It’s Friday already? Sheesh! I was planning to enter Carnival of the Recipes this week, possibly with my own creation. Alas, it’s up already, so you’ll just have to enjoy all the offerings that aren’t mine.
Your Daily Sadie
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Being Vewwy Vewwy Quiet
Sorry for the lack of posts. I have a lot to do and have had no ideas to speak of. No doubt if I see The Movie this weekend I will opine on it then, but even that I have nothing to say on at this point.
Except for one little thing I noticed the other day. I saw someone mention people waiting in line for the first showing of the original Star Wars.
Huh? Is this revisionism or was I just completely out of it? Who in the world knew about that movie enough ahead of time to be rabid? Remember, nobody was even sure it would do well.
I think my experience was not that unusual. I became aware that the movie existed, on some level, after it was released, but had no special reason or compulsion to see it. My best friend saw it, raved up and down, and all but dragged me to it after it had already been in the theaters several weeks. The word of mouth build plus the unusual repeat viewings kept it in the theaters long enough so stragglers had no problem seeing it.
This past week is the first time I ever heard anything about lines to see it when it was first released.
Your Daily Sadie
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Si
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Si… Silicon You scored 52 Mass, 38 Electronegativity, 44 Metal, and 70 Radioactivity! |
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Interesting. Take a bunch of really common person-elements and throw them together to get something truely exceptional… that’s you. You are probably someone that gave up on trying to understand society at large a long time ago. You don’t fear it, but you don’t try to be one with it either. You are more or less unperturbed by things… if a problem comes up you might deal with it, or you might avoid it… whatever. You don’t take kindly to people pushing you around, and you don’t really push anyone else around. You’re probably the only one that can tame oxygen simply because you don’t understand it’s raging neediness, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll really enjoy having a tame oxygen hanging around all that much either. You can probably get along with people like yourself really well, but you aren’t your own soulmate… if only they could make entire colonies of people like you you’d be stoked. Just like you don’t understand society, society doesn’t understand you… and yes that is my excuse for not knowing how to describe you better. |
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Which Chemical Element Am I Test written by effataigus on OkCupid Free Online Dating |
P
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P… Phosphorous You scored 49 Mass, 41 Electronegativity, 39 Metal, and 0 Radioactivity! |
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You’re high energy… really high. Unfortunately, you don’t always put your energy to calm constructive use and sometimes let it all out in intense bursts. If your energy can be harnessed however, you will produce truly great things. I suggest you take up a job that runs you ragged… like opening and closing a Sodium-Potassium pump. Socially you ought to hang with a crowd that is even more social than you. If you don’t, well… all those people who spontaneously combusted throughout history… you guessed it, phosphorous people who didn’t have enough to occupy themselves. When picking friends make sure most of them rated high on the electronegativity scale… Chlorines, Oxygens and whatnot. |
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Which Chemical Element Am I Test written by effataigus on Ok Cupid |
Via Caltechgirl
Redneck Jedi?
I should probably be ashamed of laughing at this, but I’m not.
Dude.
Wow. Three sets? I. Am. So. Jealous!
Hey, Dad, remember when you broke the Jabba the Hut one when you were fixing the dishwasher?
We never forget anything around here. Especially if we can pick on you for it.
If you’re needing a carnival fix…
Tangled Bank #28 is up over at Chronicles of a Medical Madhouse.
Your Daily Sadie
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
More on health insurance and smokers…
From Steve Verdon at OTB, who recognizes that these things are more complicated than they look.
Truncated Sadie
Yesterday we trimmed Sadie’s hair for the first time, saving for posterity what we cut off in a generic zip-style plastic bag. Don’t worry, she’s still cute! Only now the hair isn’t constantly in her eyes and a few of the straggler long hairs are in line elsewhere.
I didn’t expect to have to cut it so soon, but she was becoming bothered by it.
No pictures yet, but no doubt some of the ones that appear soon will feature the decidely unprofessionally trimmed look.
For Caltechgirl
Your doctor in the computer
I find it extremely odd that such a high percentage of people in this study didn’t want to pay for e-mail access to their doc. I would love, love, love something like this and I can’t imagine that a doc would choose to charge more than I’d be willing to pay. For the chance to have a question answered without ever stepping foot in the office, or to be able to go knowing that the doctor thinks you should be there and wants to see you, and all without playing phone tag or dealing with difficult office staff...it’d be like a miracle. It’d save so much time and hassle for me.
What’s not to happily pay for?
Grand Rounds Is Up
Galen’s Log has the latest Grand Rounds, a weekly roundup of medical blogging posts.
May The Quiz Be With You
I always seem to come out as Han Solo on things like this, appropriately enough.
Via Caltechgirl, Yoda who is.
Your Daily Sadie
Monday, May 16, 2005
Health cult theory, further explained.
I don’t think I said it all that well down here, or maybe I just didn’t make clear what the point of all of that random philosophizing was, but the thing that’s got me ready to scream is the way that people think that it is 100% possible to ward off ill health through diet and exercise, and that therefore anyone who does suffer a malady of a certain sort is blame for it. The utter conviction that other people are sick because they’re bad people and since you’re obviously not a bad person no such harm can befall you seems to be behind a lot of the obesity hysteria. We’ve turned things upside down, drawn an inference there that is unwarranted. That it may be possible to reduce one’s risk for a disease does not translate into one is to blame for one’s disease. Nothing is 100% here in the real world, and you can’t live forever if you just eat enough tofu.
It occurred to me that this might be some sort of attempt to fill a spiritual void.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because it hits very close to home for me. I’ve been desperately trying to do something about the baby weight. My doctor is quite perturbed with me for not losing it already. Hell, after four months he told me that normally he tells a nursing mother to eat what she wants and enjoy herself, but...(yeah, I know I should fire him for that, but hang with me here). The thing is that I have high blood pressure, and the presumption is that if I lost the weight, we could cut back on or eliminate the medication I take.
So I was looking through my medical records from my time in the Navy because I ran across them and I’ve been curious about this for a while. And yes, my blood pressure problems were showing up even at the tender age of 25. The majority of the readings are higher than any reading my doctor has ever gotten, even way back before he put me on meds in the first place.
The problem with this is that those higher readings came when I was exercising a minimum of 2 hours a day, 6 days a week (under the expert supervision of the United States Marine Corps) and weighed a full fifty pounds less than I currently do.
So forgive me if I don’t think diet and exercise are going to miraculously solve my problem. In fact, forgive me if I decide to get general and think that maybe I’m not the only one that applies to. It’s fantastic if diet and exercise help you control your blood pressure. Hell, I hold out hope that maybe someday it’ll work for me. But I am so fucking tired of being treated like an idiot. I eat healthy. I’m in better shape now than I was at my last desk job.
I’m not doing anything wrong.
And yet I saw it suggested recently that it is immoral for people like me to take blood pressure pills. It is wrong, goes the argument, because fat people are obviously doing something wrong, and if they’d just eat right and exercise, then we wouldn’t have hypertension and we’d quit ruining the health care system for people who actually take care of themselves.
This wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t such a common opinion. And this sort of thing is what I’m talking about when I call the health thing a fetish or a superstition. If I just do everything right, the thinking goes, the boogeyman can’t get me.
This has gotten so severe that when Cojo was on Oprah, she asked if he would share how high his blood pressure got that it alarmed his doctors and said it was ok if he didn’t want to, because it’s like weight, we’re ashamed of it (I’m paraphrasing, obviously, but that’s pretty close). And the man had Polycystic Kidney Disease, for crying out loud. How in the hell can you be ashamed of that?
In any case, this is why I worry about what they’re doing to the smokers, because what they’re doing to them today they do to us fat people tomorrow. As far as I can tell, there’s no fix for the thing, short of freeing the healthcare market, which isn’t going to happen. But that’s not going to stop me from screaming about it. After all, I am a blogger. That’s what I do.
I love it when this happens.
So Jesse and Al are having their stopped watch moment right now, and I have to say that I’m enjoying it immensely, not least because it’s coming at the expense of Vicente Fox.
A part of the Jedi’s theory about our sick fascination with weight and health.
The problem with embracing the culture of victimization is that we have also embraced a culture of blame. After all, you can’t sue fate. Somebody has to be responsible for anything bad that happens, right?
But I only can blame (sorry, couldn’t resist) a little of the current state of this game on that mindset. I think there’s a bigger issue, and it’s one I don’t even want to point out, since I’m not the fan of religion in its organized form that I often appear to be as I defend it. I may not be a churchgoer, but I think there’s something very healthy about a strong faith in a force that’s beyond human control.
I think this is the sickness that we’re suffering from, and it becomes worse and worse as we take our faith away from God or fate or whatever you want to call that power and transfer it to humanity: we believe that we can control everything. And I think this is what leads to the viciousness of the current moralizing, which continues to get more and more overwrought the more secular our society becomes.
And oddly enough, this belief has taken on the character of a sort of superstition, and now instead of praying that we’ll be blessed with a long life, or making an offering to a goddess or a saint, we diet and run and lift weights and count on that to protect us. Sadly, there is something in the human animal that wants to demand that others must share the same belief system or forever be other, open to demonization. And thus we blame people for their own disease processes in the misguided belief that if we just do something differently from what they do, we will be protected from the scourge that they have suffered.
Hatred of fat is simply fear of death.
We repackage it so that it looks rational. This is especially convenient because we mostly claim to worship rationality anymore. There’s nothing wrong with believing in science. Science is a good thing, a very good thing, an absolutely amazing thing. But it just stands there with the facts. We’re the ones who twist those facts into our strange new morality where having a less-than-perfect body is something that causes deep shame.
We don’t control nearly as much as we think we do.
Carnival of the Capitalists
The May 16 Carnival of the Capitalists is up at AnyLetter, in a nice, straightforward format, and early too. If you’re interested in law blogging too, the latest Blawg Review is up as well.
Next week it will be at Ideologic L.L.C.. Send your entries to cotcmail -at- gmail.com, or better yet, use one of the handy submission forms, at Gongol.com or Conservative Cat.
There are hosts lined up all the way through January 26, 2006, and you can see who they are at the Carnival of the Capitalists hosts and info page, which really needs to be redone Real Soon Now.
Can we flush his career now, please?
Isikoff? Isikoff?
Aw, jeez. I should have known.
Saw somebody this morning saying that Isikoff is a well-known Bush hater (sorry no link, too lazy to find it again). Only thing is that isn’t this the same joker who had the Lewinsky thing originally? Seems the guy is less a partisan that a self-styled Woodward-and-Bernstein all rolled into one. He’s just dying to be famous and important like them.
Famous he got, anyway.
This is the price we’re still paying for letting them take Nixon down. Finished off American journalism, as far as I can tell.
Makes you wonder about the whole Clinton thing, too, doesn’t it?
Hmm.
Still not awake enough this morning to comment with any real thought or thoroughness, but the thing that always makes me pause when this sort of thing comes up is that it has a tendency to spread. If we’re going to start getting into charging people based on who we think statistically will use more healthcare things are probably going to get weird really fast. Of course, that might just be my fear that the fifteen “quit-smoking” pounds I gained will price me totally out of the insurance market…
(And no, I don’t really have a better idea. I’ll have to think about it.)
Your Daily Sadie
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Before and After: A Hair Razing Experience
Deb had the idea of taking before and after pictures of me when I was going to get my hair cut a couple days ago. Seemed like a good idea to me, especially since I was finding my hair especially hard to control, even though I have had it longer many times.
Apparently I did too good a job of brushing it into place for the picture, because it doesn’t look that bad.
By the same token, the barber didn’t cut it as short as I really wanted, which was “regular men’s haircut, very short, but still combable; not quite a crew cut,” so in the “after” picture it looks like there is little difference. Believe me, it’s a lot shorter and easier to control. I just don’t like the job the barber did, beyond that it’s an improvement over how it had been before the cut.
Next time I’ll try to go back to my usual barber, rather than a more convenient one the next town over. It’s just that it’s an extra 2 - 3 hours of my time to do that, between the drive and the long wait.
Looking at the pictures again, I think it’s also a matter of perspective. The after shot is more of a closeup.
Anyway, here you are, rare pictures of me, rather than Deb or Sadie. At my messy desk no less. Click the pictures for larger versions.
Before
After
My Sadie Knows No, She Got Her a Shake and She Knows How to Use It
As the lyrically paraphrased title implies, Sadie has learned that shaking her head means “no” and is not merely an amusing thing to do. I was quite impressed.
Well I Never Been To England, But I Kind Of Like The Beatles…
Via Steven Taylor, who got it from Althouse, here’s a fun meme, citing ten “nevers” from your life. Now to see if I can come up with ten of my own.
I’ve never…
1. Been outside of North America
2. Seen The Lion King
3. Been to Disney World or Land
4. Been hunting
5. Attended a football game
6. Owned a gun
7. Eaten caviar
8. Read all of The Hobbit
9. Taken chemistry
10. Been to a Star Trek convention
As they say, feel free to join in via comments and/or link up to this post on your own blogs.