Alchemic Tango

So, I recently had a pretty severe inner ear infection that caused me to break a 12 year streak and seek medical attention from the 'guys with the good drugs'. That's right, the almighty, allopathic, AMA. One ear infection and I end up spending $800 for a blinding array of tests to have them tell me the things I diagnosed for myself were, in fact, the case. Oh, and here, take some pills. Never mind that the things we "just caught in the nick of time" are things I've known about and have been treating for years. Oh, and here, take some pills. Never mind that ALL I wanted to do was get some antibiotics for my ear. Oh, and here, take some pills.

The AMA was formed to combat hucksterism and the patented medicine industry. If you're drawing a blank here, think of Sweeney Todd and the Pirelli's Miracle Elixir scene. Oh, and here, take some pills. In this case, Todd would be the humble and well-intentioned AMA, and Pirelli would be the shameless huckster portrayed in the movie. Thing is, the AMA did eventually move on to the atrocities displayed in the movie by Todd: literally cutting the throats of it's competition (in some cases) to attain dominance over american medicine. Oh, and here, take some pills.

Now, I walk out of the clinic with 6 bottles of pills, multiple punctures, referrals for two specialists, and a pear tree up my partridge. These last few days have incited more stress in me than the last 10 years of running my own business. Oh, and here, take some pills. Never mind that I found some startling similarities between my 'treatment' there and typical cult indoctrinations: 15 hour fast, separation from home, change of name, group-specific terminology, and let's not forget the drugs. Oh, and here, take some pills.

And now, having googled all the various pills they gave me, I find that one of them counteracts another, two cause symptoms that counteract each other, the one pill I feared most turns out to be the most innocuous of the bunch and the ones they put me on first are the most likely to kill me. Yaaay... Oh, and here, take some pills.

Tis the Season

I think I just spoke to my father for the last time.

Years from now, I'll look back at this as a present, the likes of which I may never get again, but right now it feels like a dark pall on my Xmas day. Lemme 'splain.

First, my father has been sick. Really sick. He's over 90, so this is hardly a shock. He smoked for 40 years, worked in a factory and generally lead a sinful, meat-eating, stripper watching life. But my mother died a couple months back and apparently, that's all that was holding him together.

Though we don't talk about it much, most of the members of both my bloodlines have selected the time of their deaths. My mother's mother left a little note the night she died. My mother called and talked to everyone before she kicked. My father's father was particularly cruel by telling the boys to stand against the wall in punishment until he came back down stairs, then laid down to die. The examples go on and on.

Before my nana died, we had a Very intense talk amidst a sea of aberrant behavior for her. She hadn't been lucid for days but managed to speak her peace to me before drifting off again. Most folks made the same remark.

Well, I just had about the same conversation with my dad. He's cleaning out, speaking his peace, and looking for solace in his last days. Even if I talk to him again, I doubt I'll get my dad, but rather a rapidly deteriorating shell.

Merry Xmas to me.

*sigh*

What's Microsoft really saying?

Okay, so, this image to the left is from the amusingly wonderful folks at Photoshop Disasters. It shows two Microsoft ads, One for the US, and the other for Poland. MS is doing backflips to explain why the black man's head is [badly] replaced with a white man. Notice the hands aren't different.

But here's where it gets really good. What ELSE is this image telling us? First take a good long look at the monitor in front of the woman. It's not plugged into anything. Also, notice the white laptop in front of the edited man.... It's a Mac Book Pro with the apple logo carefully removed. So, apparently, the IT tools YOU need are to unplug your MS machine and get a Mac. :)

Oh, and if you happen to be black and heading to Poland, wear a white mask. ;P

An open letter to Coors

Thank you so much for providing your "Cold Activated Can". Long have I hoped that nature could have provided me with some sort of sensory mechanism, say, on my hand, that was just as capable of responding to temperature as my mouth. But, bereft of a naturally calibrated system like that, we have to resort to vision and your new packaging.

I know what a monumental task it must have been to develop this bleeding edge technology in this economy. Thermographic imaging has come a LONG way since the recent invention of candles and lemon juice. Even the little known technology of "mood rings" could not have advanced the industry as much as YOUR product. Clearly a Nobel prize is in your future.

Thank you so much for spending your company's profits on this immensely helpful technology. Thank you for not spending those profits in a temporary price reduction, pay increases for your workers, or re-opening plants to put more people to work in these trying times. Thank you for pushing millions of dollars into the advertising industry instead. The 3-4 people in your commercials clearly needed the money more than the people who faithfully made and consumed the one American beer that can be sometimes successfully argued not to be cold urine.

Now, I will take my leave. You see, a few of my buddies have taken our cues from your workers in the deep south. We'll be donning white (and black) apparel, covering our heads with white (facepaint) and marching on the local McDonalds. Imagine their faces when they see 100 Mimes burning a Fleur-De-Lis on their front lawn. Nothing says "stop it" like the burning symbol of France!

Heelarious

No...
I roll my eyes at "safety third", I get tiffed when someone blows up buildings in new york, I even get a little queasy when some shmuck commits genocide in the name of racial purity. But this... this... Baby's first High Heels?!?!?!?!?! BLAAAAARRRRGGH.....
I can't stop vomiting. Will somebody please crash their server?

Seriously.... the 'fashion' world must be stopped. I felt weird when someone started telling people what to wear. And I can't imagine letting someone else decorate my home. But imposing adult fashion on Babies?!?! really? How about Baby's first mascara? AAA cup training bras? Baby's first Botox? Fetal breast implants? It's bad enough LA is infested with women who have every curve sucked out of them until they look like little boys, then inject their lips, breasts, and gawd knows what else with the fat they sucked out of somewhere else. But do we have to start them on this track before they can develop a normal adult psychosis about their looks? GAAA!

You cannot deny a man a stick, who lives in the woods.

Newspapers have been sighing this dying gasp: "But, where will you get your investigative journalism?" To which I've always cynically replied, same place we've gotten it since watergate... no where. Part of the point of investigative journalism is secrecy and the incapability of information to get out. Now with photo cell phones, everyone with $100 and a 7-11 can become part of the information flow. If watergate were to happen nowadays, it'd be some maid snapping pictures rather than a journalist who couldn't sleep.

Well, here we go. All the US and canadian journalists were thrown out of Iran before the election (probably because they knew they would have to steal the election) but the information network we built (ie the Internet) simply cannot be stopped. This tremendous access to information delivery systems has made the old investigatory measures less necessary, and in many ways less effective. Everything is becoming more transparent. Modern bloggers can see through walls and hear through doors that no flatfooted ink monkey could have ever dreamed of achieving. And as technology gets better, so will this effect.

Print is dying because it's already been replaced... in every way... by better stuff. Instead of paying a few people with limited connections to investigate, we've made the entire world our reporting team. The news media outlets get it. half the time they're citing the net. Print needs to catch up or die. And then where will we get information that's 1-100 days old?

On elevation

There's been a quiet debate over the choice to put elevators or escalators into a building. Elevators are safe, they take people in wheelchairs, large loads, strollers, etc with the same aplomb. The down side is that they don't work without power.

Escalators, on the other hand, turn into a set of stairs when the power is turned off. Their down side is that they use power constantly, even when they're not in use, until they're turned off completely.

Okay, so, here's an idea for some entrepreneur, for what it's worth:
Create a wide-step escalator that has a button at the entrance point. A wheelchair can enter the stationary step, hit the button and be taken exactly to the exit point (and no further). Add a 20 second delay to insure that someone else doesn't activate the thing while the chair disembarks. Then, people who don't need it, can "take the stairs", and those who do, get escalated at whim.

Someone really creative might make that button a "stop/start request" button. The stairs would have weight or laser sensors to let them know if someone is on, and they keep rolling, only while needed, then automatically shut down when not in use. The button at the entrance would then either stop the escalator while running or start it up while not running. If it's used to start running, it runs through the above, single trip cycle before starting it's auto-roll again.