shrimplate

Parousia

2012-01-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

OMG Raphael!!!

No prophet am I, Jedi knight nor.

Doesn't it say in that old thing some of those religious folks call "the book" about when Jesus comes back from vacation he'll have gone through a name change?

"I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on them my new name." Snipped out of Revelations 3:12 from the New International Version. Though the truth apparently has to be spoken in many languages, ironically you only have to be able to understand your own language in order to be in on the joke.

Well you know what? This "Christ" dude/entity/god/whatever has already returned, the its new name is...

Science.

Yesterday and Today

2012-01-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

From guest blogger "Ivy:"

That's all I've got. The rest is just passing through. I'll tell you about the Morgan sometime.

Two lungers but only three chest-tubes. Two epidurals. The one lunger was transplanted on the 5th and you'd think they'd be a lot of work but no, not really. It was the middle person. Pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension. He's on Sildenafil ($9 per tablet, three tabs a day,) and the reallly expensive experimental inhaled med too. He'll probably be listed for transplant soon.

Sildenafil is generic Viagra and many people have cheapo insurance that doesn't cover it... for anything, even though it's a life-saver; fuck all, it's the life-saver right now for pulmonary hypertension. Sometimes the doctors buy it themselves to supplement their patient's ability to pay $27 per day for just one of the medications upon which their life lies in fragile and somewhat perilous balance.

May your today give you many of the pleasures from your yesterdays.

Ivy

Staple Guy

2012-01-06T06:58:00.000-08:00

OMG you would not believe some of the absolutely fucked-up stuff I have to do.

So there's this guy from the Prescott area and due to diabetes he couldn't maintain his landscaping business and so he's disabled. His SSI wasn't much so he lost his house. That story. Happens every day. Makes some people proud to be 'Murkin.

But then he lost his lower right leg. He still had surgical staples on his stump. He came to Phoenix because there are really no shelters in Prescott. Plenty of bars though, and the most beautiful town square in our fair country.

He was admitted for a complaint of "chest pain" which almost worked because he's already got about six stents in his heart but his ECHO was normal so I got orders to discharge him from the hospital...

To a homeless shelter. With fucking staples on his fucking stump.

Yay U.S.

*

(Photo from Daily Vexation.)

Oh and here's this weird little thing: I put a couple Percocets at his bedside so he could have some decent pain medicine before he left. (He was in the bathroom when I did that. I told him through the unopened door.)

He never ingested them even though he had complained of pain continually and he seemed to have had a preference for intravenous opioids. He left those two little white oxycodonic embryos right there in the tiny pill cup in which he'd also left a dime. It may well have been all he had to give.

(Cross-posted in The Crack Den.)

Ishmael

2012-01-05T04:26:00.000-08:00

Today I will serve a tentacled corporate juggernaut bent upon squeezing huge profits from people facing ruination. That's one of my problems.

I will solve another thousand problems, none of them my own.

1/1/2012 Begins While Finches Gaze Down from the Tip of the Horn

2012-01-01T06:47:00.001-08:00

If there were a hair on the moon I could find it. I would already have found it long long ago.

No worries though.

The Grand Opposition and Its Friends

2011-12-28T05:09:00.001-08:00

There's always a ton of things to write about; happenings at the Great Muffin Factory Institute of Some Freakish Misunderstanding of the Basic Elements of Health Care, trips to here and there, new musical experiences, and maybe the odd bits and bitters down in the caliche supporting Phoenix life. Sometimes, there's even time in the day to put things down to pixels, bits, and bytes.

Some mornings I have been writing three or four pages. Real pages, on a legal-pad sort of writing surface. With a pen. I like "clicky" pens, as do all nurses. We do not have the time to uncap a pen, write, and cap the pen again. Even a momentary click to raise the writing point from the barrel of the pen, when added up over thousands upon thousands of times, assumes mountainous proportions.

It eats away at your time like radioactive decay chewing off Carbon-14. A persistent hound nipping my ankles, this very weak beta decay to nitrogen-14 with a half-life of approximately 5,730 years tears a little life away from me each moment I live and work. Good quick read. Pretty cool basic article, the kind of thing my child and I can share.

My Kid, Part 415: For a while they were interested in old stuff like H. floresiensis. That was back when I took them to meet Donald Johanson. The man! Can you even imagine this guy? He's fresh out of university on some lonesome dig in a slowly disappearing triangle of the world when he finds The Findingest Find in Finding History of Finding Finds, Ever:

Now shrimpbowl seems more interested in far-away stuff like the recently-documented star-collection 13.1 billion light-years away. (More here.)

So they're this kid and they've met this skeleton-discovering guy who basically invited them to come study at the Institute of Human Origins which is, quite luckily, rather nearby. Already they've had a taste of The Edge.

My lead doctor right now says to tone it down on stuff like this at work. This doctor thinks; and as I consider it too, quite rightly, that I myself have had something of an "exceptional" life. With my history of anxiety, PTSD, depression, and general disturbitude I've never been one to seek input at a merely acceptable level. It had to be more or it would not hold me. And I needed to be held. Held over. Held into. Held back. Held onto. Held from.

I liked music so I auditioned at and gained entry to a New York music school. I had three finger-picking lessons with a local guy back then (he taught me "Freight Train!") but I basically taught myself classical guitar. One summer at a music camp before my high-school senior year I met a musician named Roger Harmon and he set me straight on a lot of things classical guitar-wise.

Then I studied early music with the woman who wrote the definitive music history textbook of that decade, Edith Borroff. I learned to play renaissance lute "thumb-under" style by looking at the facsimiles of old lute books on microfiche at the fine-arts library. Sight-reading the special notation used by lutenists; at the least the "French" style tablature used also by the many wonderful composers of the English Renaissance, is actually a little easier than reading traditional music notation once you get the hang of it.

Not mention stuff like that. People think I'm bragging or something when actually I am marvelling at such fortune and; well, stuff. As if it happened to somebody else, not me. I was just there, or something. Maybe in some ways I wasn't.

Martin-Logans. If you're going to listen to music at home, save save save until you can get something like these. I saved a few dollars a week for like a freaking decade to get these.

Down the listensities: I worked summers at SPAC back then where I heard *everybody* on top of the classical-music orchestral/concerto scene and saw all the George Ballanchine NYCB choreography. One summer was a Stravinsky Festival.

None of my coworkers has ever seen a NYCB performance. I've seen many of them several times over. A whole week of Coppelia. Can you imagine? And who gives a fuck about the two weeks of Ravel? Nobody I currently know.

I shouldn't rub their faces in it. But I am that. But this lead doctor, my EMDR specialist, suggests I can that personal stuff, float through the workday maintaining light and casual interest in my coworkers, and leave my freaking intense esthetically hyper-life out of conversation.

The nursing we do on my little unit is different too. One of my coworkers is very fit and she does triathlons and such. She says that we do "X-Games Nursing," like "Extreme Nursing," because few people get to do exactly what we do. That's why I never mention it. You'd know who I am immediately because I'm one of rather few nurses in The Valley that get to work around the types of patients I do.

I'm not proud. I don't have to try to get myself into these intense little M-space wormholes. It's the way my life works. The way a tree grows, some droopy like a willow, some sway like a pine, some immobile against an ancient sky, it grows me and I grow it and We Are All Together HeeHeeHee HahHahHah HoHoHo.

Maybe your life's like that too. Gonzo. Then you know what I mean.

Doc Hanson gave me an ever-growing appreciation of long musical forms and motivic development. The way Shostakovich turns over that D-Eflat-C-H(B-natural) musical proto-idea in his 8th String Quartet. He never specifically discussed that with us, but we did get a good understanding of fugue, sonata-form, rondo, da-capo arias, binary dance forms, and all that. Later on I sort of independently applied this to manner of invention to analysis in other fields that caught my attention, such as architecture (ohmygoddon'tgetthemgoingontheirhousewiththekoiandmarblefloorsagainstuff,) literature, science, and people.

Then the chess thing. I got so involved in learning opening theories that I don't need an actual board to play the game. I can move the pieces in my head. My housemate G. used to call me at work and tell me moves over the phone and we'd play on-and-off the whole day that way. She'd have a board set up in the living room of our shabby-chic little second-story apartment we shared with a third college woman. I still occasionally drift off into Grunfeld Defenses or whatev.

Then there was the running thing. Not content to take up jogging, I had to enter races. This culminated in six consecutive Boston Marathons and an Empire State Games gold medal for 10,000 meters. I met my spouse in a running club.

Because of my history of childhood abuse (not generally violent; I wasn't hit much but... ) I was in my first three-way when I was 11. Then they got my brother into it and it really got weird. I kid not. Only with EMDR have I even been able to openly admit this without collapsing into bails of clorox tears. Then I was ignored. Then I got hungry. That's probably why I've lost 40 pounds since my peak, most of it over the past four months, neatly coinciding with my recent assholishness and consequent assumption of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, I may be wired a little bit differently from your average bear.

I'm not proud.

I'm not even grammatically identifiable.

Just sayin'.

It's like this life-thing I have has taken me way out of Beavis-and-Butthead Land. The air is different here. The sky is the other Lucy's sky. It was playing on the radio in the camp during the time Johanson found the renowned fossil. Yep. That story.

I had to hear Cecilia Bartoli at The Met. My spouse took me years ago. Awesome. Like when I got to hear Horowitz play. And Siouxsie and the Banshees came to my town! I adore her. Who wouldn't? That was the same day Ice-T broke out Body Count and "Cop-Killer" after a set of hardcore gangsta-West-Coast rap. I got to hear "Cop-Killer" again a year later played by SoundGarden. That was after Ice-T officially withdrew it.

FK Binding Protein 5 single-nucleotide polymorphisms might just be a partial contributor to it, but at this moment I do not know that at all. I sure as all ever act like it, though.

Some people just dance and good on them for it. They are fortunate. Once King Sunny Ade came to Burlington and we had front-row seats. The band members, starting with a very tall man playing a very small hand-drum, came out riffing one by one on that ju-JU signature rhythmic dig until about fifteen drummers, guitarists, dancers, and other variously Dashiki-sporting extremely cool guys were all ON IT.

Then they stopped. It was confusing. Ade came to his microphone, paused, surveyed us (remember this occurred in Vermont,) and gently asked us to, (he smiled,) "Please... Danser!" and the band kicked it back in just as if a switch had been turned suddenly on, the house rose to its feet, the roof opened up, the June stars doubled over Lake Champlain, and then we danced.

A year later we were driving around Montreal looking for something to do when I heard a voice, a voice I loved very much, and a guitarist who outsparkled all the Ponies in FairyLand, with a drumkit and bass, frolicking some real live SouKous. It was freaking Nyboma and Dally Kimoko. Spousie and I were actually arguing at the time, really bad, and my spouse was basically kicking my non-French-speaking ass out of the car onto like Rue St-Catherine and when I opened the door I heard the HighLife music and yelled-

"PARK THE CAR! PARK THE CAR! NOW! NOW!"

They found a spot right away and we ran down to the street stage-front where the band was playing. It was Festival FrancoPhone, et le voila! Nyboma! This music known to me from long-playing vinyls put out by Rounder Records back in the day. I had a beloved copy of Double Double that I made everybody listen to. My god how some days I wished I had been born into a family of Zairean electric guitarists of the Soukous variety, wooden spoon in my mouth but silver Stratocaster in my hand.

That was dancing, too.

Everything is such a big deal to me. I have to go wild with everything. (If you want me to go there I gladly will, but I dare not go voluntarily. For that I will require provocation. And much, much else.)

James Joyce ended it right about there once. So the fuck can I. Because that's the way I am. Over the cliff and yet my foot is slamming the gas pedal against the floor, revving the engine into madness. Over and over again. My spouse asks me to stop it, but I keep crashing the car again and again, like I'm on an intense carnival ride.

It's a bit like bumper cars. But for me it's my life.

I push other people. Other wise they will not show me the devil inside them, and that is what I most need to know about them at the soonest possible time. It makes a lot of sense to me and quite frankly I do not understand how people can abide one another without dispensing with this formality right off from the start. My spouse sort of gets this. That's why I married them.

Two-thirds a rope-length up an anorthosite vertical face on a rainy late April day in the Adirondacks, thunder rolling, clouds rounding up black as bootsoles, lightening over the peak, belayed by my spouse. We scrambled and got to the burger place before the downpour hit. This helped me to get by.

I have looked back and shared things with you that seem to have been essential to my survival, if indeed that word even applies in my special case.

I got called into Some Yahoo's Office at work a few weeks ago because my intensity sometimes applies to my boss and this is not typically accommodated in the workplace. That was uncomfortable. Three against one. In other circumstances another like-person such as myself but less committed to non-violence might have decapitated one of them at the beginning of the meeting, just to set the proper tone. Just to be fair to all parties involved. But people don't see that. They see the fire, not the many firefighters controlling the seething temperament contained in the tall flames.

Later during a kiss-and-make-up session which I initiated myself one of my torturers told me she thought that I was "all over the map and very focused" as if I were supposed to know what the fuck that means because it doesn't make sense really, but I was in "Charm Mode" not my usual "Opposition Mode," so I let it go and smiled. She smiled back, I tilted my head down and a bit away to my left, and said, "yes, I can be like that when I'm a little stressed."

As if.

"Good morning, I'm shrimplate and I'll be your nurse for the next interminably long twelve hours of your life as you're ever likely to face. Five chest tubes? This one is labelled "inferior." That doesn't seem right. It looks just as good as all the other chest tubes..."

And so it goes, as Mr. Vonnuget wrote.

Ave Verum Corpus, Brother Jerome

2011-12-11T04:42:00.000-08:00

Oh my goodness he was a big guy. I shouldn't have been surprised because the St. Vincent brothers had a reputation for savoring life's many good things. Brother Jerome was nothing if not well-fed... and also very good-natured. I could hyphenate a thousand positive adverbs and adjectives yet still not have said but a fraction of the nice things that could you could say about that jolly man.

I was a nurse aide back then, working on a 40-bed(!) medical-surgical unit in an upstate New York community. I still have friends in that town. I visited there last year to hear some music, too. Garrick Ohlsson playing the Rach Three with the Phillies. Awefreakingsome. Anyway, St. Vincent's was a local retirement facility maintained by that church. It was a rest-home for elderly brothers and priests. Once in a while one of the brethren might get sick enough to be admitted to us for a bit.

"Are you a Catholic child?" asked Brother Jerome one morning as I was nurse-aiding him with something.

"Actually no," I said with a smile, then added, "Why? Do I look Catholic?!" (I have a naturally distinctive type of hair not associated with Catholicism, let us say.)

He smiled back but continued. "Do you pray? Would you pray with me?"

"Brother Jerome, every breath I take is a prayer," I replied. He beamed. He was delighted. He didn't give a fuck what my religion was, nor even if I had one. He just wanted to know if there was anybody around who was familiar with some of the literature. It was a great way to start the day.

I firmly believe that a therapeutic nurse-patient relationship is of considerable importance. Without that not much can be done. For example, if your patient is a drug-seeking psychopath with no conscience at all then you as a nurse will never be able to establish such an arrangement. Unpossible. Don't even bother trying. Be prepared for a shift of games.

*

The evilist most deadlieristical molecularational stuffy-stuff ever:

Do NOT be fooled by the innocent appearance!

Yeah, it's a killer alright. No. Not really. Not at all.

I was outside one of the many "clubs" that have sprung up in the wake of Proposition 203. This one is right down the street from the hospital. There's also an evaluation clinic across the street from the hospital campus. They usually feature a doctor who will, for a mere $150, fill out the forms necessary for you to obtain the State-issued card identifying you as a medical user. So... out of the club putters an old man with the most severe neck stoop I've ever seen. Though walking upright his neck was near-parallel to the ground even with his soft neck-brace in place.

"Excuse me sir," I said as I approached him, maintaining the appropriate distance out-of-doors. "I'd like to ask you a few questions if that's okay. I'm a blogger and I've been interviewing medical marijuana cardholders and anonymously writing about them. For a book maybe."

He turned his head like a turtle, smiled, and said "Fine!"

"Well first off, what is your condition and how did you aquire it?" I started out.

"I read the Torah for forty years."

I was puzzled. I am sure he meant to play me a little, and it was fun. He wasn't cat-and-mousing me. He was making me think.

"You stooped over the pages all day long for decades and decades," I said.

"Yes," he replied, "Indeed."

"So how does medical cannabis help you?" I asked.

"Oh, it's not for me," he went on, "I'm a caregiver. I don't have a user card. This is for the Hospice where I volunteer."

He's like about 90 years old, bent over sideways, walks with a cane while looking straight down at the ground, he volunteers at a Hospice and not only that, he gets them their medical marijuana.

Awe. Some.

*

"Don't you know
In this new Dark Age
We're
All
Light."

Andy Partridge and his uber-pal Colin Moulding, often accompanied by many other swell people.

Drop whatever you're doing RIGHT NOW and go purchase as much XTC music as you possibly can. Every one of their collections has several songs that you would consider to be The Best In The World and the others aren't just filler. They just take a few listens to get your ears around them.

*

My conversation with the elderly man outside the club continued:

"So, do you take a cut?" I ventured. I couldn't believe I was so bold, but he had that New Yorker thing about him and I knew he could more than handle himself.

"You mean am I dealer?" he asked. I was expecting a question in response to mine. That "the city" thing. It's pretty cool. I dig it totally. They call it "the city." And that it is. The greatest city the world has ever seen.

"Oh, I don't know if that's quite my first choice of a word," I said. "But..." I trailed off.

"No, I don't take a percentage. Many people do. They are dealers. Me? I'm just a mule."

"A mule!" I laughed. He gave out a little "heh." We exchanged cheerful "shaloms."

*

Another person exited the club, a woman some pounds overweight by corporate standards but nonetheless pretty. I smiled and with my body language indicated that I'd like to approach. She smiled back so I did. I explained to her that I was interviewing medical cannabis users and added that I'd like her permission to ask her a few questions on the record, though anonymously. She agreed.

"What is your condition and how did you get it?" I started the usual way.

"It's for my PERIOD!" she replied. Kinda over-the-top I thought.

"How does medical cannabis help you?" I asked.

"None of your damn business!" she hurled back at me.

Oh well then, I thought. Perhaps I should not have been taking up her time.

"A-83," or "Transfigured Night Part CXXIV"

2011-12-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

In the college logic course I took so many years ago we studied Venn diagrams. A lot. More than enough for it to have changed my life forever.

It is perhaps inaccurate to say that Venn diagrams changed my life; because in fact, Venn diagrams became my life. Or rather, I realized that this simple model upon which we can build, arrange, and especially analyze relationships, had always been there and I had just been notified of this development. And everything is a relationship. Relationships define us.

Maybe the subatomic particles that make up the building blocks of our quantum universe are also just relationships. They may as well be, they're so damn tiny anyway. It isn't like they're "stuff." They're smaller than "stuff."

My spouse is faultless. The whole package. Athletic figure, intelligence, humor, style, and various talents. We met because we both belonged to the same local running club. My dear spouse was actually married to another when we first met, and we'd "seen each other around" a lot, like for years, before we ever spoke to one another. That wasn't a solid marriage and I had nothing at all to do with its failure and break-up. It was an opportunity I acted upon quickly, though.

Ours has been a great marriage and we have the most interesting child, one with features that would gain them entrance to modeling or acting but they currently express great interest in astrophysics.

When you meet another person and have some sort of relationship with them it is sort of like a Venn diagram. You're one circle, I'm another, and we overlap on this blog at this moment.

That may be all.

Or there could be more.

Well of course there's more, stupid! simply because there are so many people. (I speak to myself here.)

shrimplate is like that. Sort of a composite, as if it were being written by a collective rather than an individual. More people. Unlike many other shrimp, shrimplate has these tentacle-like thought-ribbons that can reach round the globe to make visits. shrimplate knows "others" who can similarly unfurl a riband across the greatest span.

shrimplate often steals and borrows from other nurses. One in particular makes repeated appearances, under deep cover, which is sorrowful because they work in a specialty unit at one of the big medical centers here and if I discuss their specialty it will expose them. Not that many people do what they do and it's the only such program in The Valley. They have however made a request...

I hesitate to answer to that request for surely it will likely betray them... so I will not.

Hence, a sketch: (heh)

"It isn't like we were BFF's or anything. We didn't hang out outside work, but sometimes we talked and since she's going back east I've actually revealed quite a bit of myself to her," they told this writer, "But I am surely going to miss them a great deal" they continued. Normally the chatty one they said that they ran out of words when confronted with good-bye.

Why? We don't know, we decided after discussion. You miss the rising stars. They step out of your Venn circles and in a whisper, away. Just away. Nothing else. The sort of "away" that is as far away as you can get. Gone. But you need them! Good nurse STAT! But they're really, really gone.

Except in memory.

Yeah yeah yeah it's a small world but I don't think so.

Hate in Phoenix, 11/22/2011

2011-11-22T21:12:00.000-08:00

He was following me awfully closely behind in his car. He honked. I was travelling along at a reasonable speed, not slowing him down. Then he pulled out to the left up alongside me as we drove along. He motioned for me to put down my window so I could hear him.

He looked twenty-something, driving a black Lexus, and all he wanted to do was tell me my left rear tire was low. I thanked him and pulled over at the next service station.

Later there were two SUV's in front of me. One in the lane to the left and up ahead, and another just in front of me. The light went green and as traffic moved the man in the SUV in front of me pulled next to the other SUV and gave them the finger.

It was completely unprovoked.

When I passed the SUV to the left I saw that the older woman driving it was wearing a hijab. Perhaps she hadn't seen him, she seemed so intent on her old-person manner of motoring. Maybe that would have been best.

Amerika

2011-11-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

The policemen (I am almost certain that none of the jackbooted thugs were women,) who attacked protesters are cowards.

They make me sick.

They are cowards because they are armed and armored to fight what? A bunch of singing people with cellphones?

They are even bigger cowards because they have chosen to serve the one-percenters instead of their fellow Americans. Instead of themselves. Instead of you and me.

They are cowards because they beat our veterans.

If you have already seen the videos available at these links then you are probably just as disgusted as I am, and if you haven't seen these, then you need to just get it done and over with.

Welcome home, soldier.

Tea on a Horse

2011-11-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

Jost once wrote "Everyone must drink their own tea." It was a message to me in a birthday card he once gave me. He had been struggling, he later told me, with choosing the right Zen phrase for me. Then he just gave up and wrote that to go along with the delish loose green tea he provided as a gift.

I love tea. Much more so than coffee, though I love that too. It's a coffee-drinking nation, though.

Leischen secretly lets it be known:
no suitor is to come to my house
unless he promises me,
and it is also written into the marriage contract,
that I will be permitted
to make myself coffee whenever I want.

From the Kaffe Kantate by Bach.

My own spin goes this way: Everyone must ride their own horse.

Horses.

Coffee.

What difference?

October 27th, Sylvia Plath Day

2011-10-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

My favorite. Happy birthday, Sylvia.

By the way, did you notice her "laptop" in the first picture? I used to have one of those. It belonged to my mother. I typed college papers on it. I used to play the little tape-spools as if they were deejay turntables "scratching," so yes, I invented that.

Heh.

Wraiths, Creationists

2011-10-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

This is the first one I read:

Then:

Now I'm forty-or-fifty-or-so pages into this one:

There's also Matthew Chapman's Forty Days and Forty Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania.

It's very dismaying just how bad some creationists can be; lying-assed duplicitous sneaky power-hungry fuckheads. Some wish to destroy science by conflating into it a marshmallowy paste of supernatural unpredictability and general uselessness. So I'm not a real big fan.

Compis Mentis Kewlist

2011-10-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

Marrow

Sometimes patience is required. Often it is rewarded.

Yay!

We have St. Vincent tix!

I was having a bad day, but now I feel much, much better. It's a 16-and-over show unfortunately so we can't take The Young One Who Will Not Be Otherwise Denied.

Annie Clark is going to blow Arcade Fire out.

I like the way the rising figure behind her vocals in the ethereal parts of Marrow shift from a regular diatonic scale to a whole-tone scale before dropping down into that hip-grinding groove. Help me. No kidding.

This came late in the day; at night actually. It was the left turn, the sudden change of mood and direction, that made the story of my day a little more worthwhile.

Annie Clark (who *is* St. Vincent,) seems to really go for those cheap 1960's Italian guitars with weird pickups and switches. I hope she stays with that just due to the analog-crude lo-fi sound her band can generate; indeed, prefers to make. Personally I didn't like playing those guitars back in the day. They were usually set up poorly, difficult and uncomfortable to play. There must be something about the sound of them that appeals to some players. At any rate she doesn't appear to be the $45K vintage Les Paul type. I could be wrong.

Yes Virginia, There Is a Wall Street Protest Going On

2011-10-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to Anthony over in The Crack Den for the link to this Democratic Underground posting:

"...15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress: I didn't fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it's Congress' turn. My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first. Let's see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets."

I am in awe.

REPEAT:

" If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first."

Fuck yeah. I wish I was there standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him. It would be a great honor for me to do so. However that thing about "let's see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets..."

Does that have to happen? I rather hope not.

Dafty Duct

2011-09-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

Baroque specialist Ingrid Matthews (Ingrid Matthews Olson.)

Maybe once or twice a year I go on a Chaconne binge or sometimes even a full-on bender with the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by that old religious freak with all the kids. I am currently swirling about in such an aural flux.

The whole set. Desert-island (which Phoenix is particularly not unlike,) stuff which has already given me a lifetime of enjoyment and I feel like I haven't even started yet.

I have heard of these but having never heard the music itself I'm pretty excited about this.

Overall I think the monumental Chaconne is complete in the original violin manuscript provided by Bach himself.

That's a beautiful sight. His hand was impeccable. I can read the notes right off the pages written in his own script. That is some kind of awesome. Everything is right there. It's a whole world.

Even the tiny little editorial additions typically made by us guitarists (we can supply bass notes and sound out internal counterpoint only suggested by the manuscript,) bother me. Just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean it's worth doing.

You could, I suppose, run a marathon in a revolving door. My spouse says this is not worth the effort. It's "too hard" vis-a-vis rewards (if any?) gained from such an arduous undertaking. I sincerely believe that it is not hard enough and therefore a little less interesting than running a course over hills against the wind on a hot day.

But Schumann was a pretty hip guy so his accompaniments are sure to be at least very interesting.

*

Swimming in a kaleidoscopic sea of feeling-states each itself buoyant upon the rippling waters of memories, I negotiate each day. Quite like you or anyone else, you might basically agree. So I am constantly reminded by concerned others, friends, family, pets... that my intellect will not lead in itself to the resolution of my concerns. They arrive at this conclusion, which though I have many many times before beginning early in my childhood years, by using intellectual processes. If I were to present this observation to them I would expect possible negatives which would need to be worked out. A fucking shitstorm is what it would be, frankly. One strong enough to wipe out entire trailer parks.

Another reason I'm glad I we have six-inch walls, surrounded by outer walls.

"This is the worst trip
I've ever been on."

I want to go home.

Lands Hidden, Lands Nearby

2011-09-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

Upon hearing the call of The Elders, Percival the Dark Guardian has returned to his post at the forefront of The Clawrovian Gates. Beyond this lie old things, dank and forgotten, crowded by flaring gray dust-nebulas... the Shadows Which Underlie The Fridge. Among these roam perhaps the most feared beings from the dismal land of Lotharae: the dreaded Turtle Heads. Murderously aggressive, they are also so well-armored that it is said they can withstand the lava flows of the goddess-mountain: Trymdahl Crater, traditional home of The Lightning Bats, but that my friends is another story with another hero, a soulless enemy, and a wascally wabbit.

Pandemonium #8285, "The Gray Slaying"

2011-09-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Percival The Dark Guardian, laying siege to The Laundry of Lotharae.

On the battlefield, black is white and white is black. Bravery, being nothing but the fear of fear itself, is cast away like a broken bat. The cries of the fallen wounded fade.

The enemy laundry has been slain and its lingering remnants enslaved. Having heard that all goes well at the Clawrovian Gates, beyond which lay the estates, forests, rivers, and lakes of the land of Percival's ancestors, the warrior rests weary but alert.

Like the corpses of the field the sky has gone gray. The wind is still yet no voices carry, only the distant pucking of goose-farts.

Where Did I Put My "Where Did I Put My T-Shirt?" T-Shirt?

2011-09-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

My own personal design for the Threadless World Alzheimer's Month T-Shirt Design Challenge. I seriously don't think I ever had much of a chance winning with a wearable statement like that one.

*

They say "all monkeys are funny." I don't think so. There's one in my pants and he's not funny at all; it's rather serious, actually.

*

We've all met at least one person like this: they cannot keep to agreements. Promises mean nothing to them. An alarming number of such people seem not to be psychopaths. They're just regular folks not much different from you or me. But they do not bother to make certain distinctions that many of us regard as routine. For example, they lie a lot. No big deal. It's part of their nature.

So I'll cut them some slack.

"I'm sorry I'm late. There was a giant laser-eyed squid on the highway and it was blocking a lane." Okay, so maybe a little less obvious, but a casual lie nonetheless. Probably a lie told despite the fact that a truth would have served just as well and at no extra cost. It makes no difference to them. When I myself have privately exposed such a lie I have often incurred anger, misunderstanding, and outright denial in the face of facts. I hardly bother anymore. Water off a duck's back and all that. People deserve some privacy, yes?

Not all lies are even, actually, lies. They may just be boundry markers. I can respect that. No need to probe further.

*

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie."

"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

(Oh I like that one.)

"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.' "

Though I would enjoy doing that all day, that fine quote will have to be Wittgenstein's closer.

*

I was listening to a recording of violist Robin Ireland playing Bach transcriptions. During the Gavottes (from the Cello Suite #6 originally in the key of D-major,) I was inspired by the mathematical elegance and transparent lyricism of the suggestive lines; suggestive, that is, of other musical lines by implication.

Creationists, I have found, often have so little respect for intellectual curiosity. The simplest things; why, why make these seem like impossibilities? This question is one of their favorites: "How can something come from nothing?" They toss this out as if it were a daisy-cutter. It's not.

It's a good question. That's the problem. They don't see it that way.

Well, her it is: the plain fact of the matter is that something does indeed come from nothing. Where else is it going to have come from? Tell me, Sherlock. Besides, there have been observations. Vacuum fluctuations through Casimir plates.

Bach created several strands of counterpoint by suggesting various melodic lines rather than stating these implicitly, which the cello cannot always do by itself. Same thing with particle pairs. Like the virtual counterpoint in the Bach cello suites which just "appears out of nowhere," so do particles.

*

So hoist up the John B. sails. See how the mainsail sets. Maybe the captain will let you go home.

Guitarist/composer Mauro Giuliani.

Marais Puts the Mo' in Sumo

2011-09-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

Marais weighed in at a svelte 18 pounds when we got him about a month ago. He's 8 years old and was dropped off at the Humane Society by the proverbial old lady who couldn't care for him anymore. Sometimes his left ear goes flat and his eye droops a little on that side; years ago he was hurt by a car and he had to have his jaw fixed surgically.

He has a zipper that goes up along the middle of his belly, and if you unzip it out fall many cans of cat food.

Twister Without the Plastic Sheet With the Colored Big Dots

2011-09-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Percival exposes his redolent abdomen. He is flexible. With such power he will be able to conquer many worlds.

Many stout warriors and admirable princesses have fallen before the gaze of Percival.

He is twisted around so his upper and lower body are facing different directions.

He's about half-grown-up and I think he's starting to slow down a little bit. He still ambushes the others and he likes to play in the hot-tub (when it's empty.) There is a pink paper wad he likes. He chases it up the sides of the tub and it slides back down, taunting him. Teasing him. Flouting his spread claws. Yet there must be some vulnerability, some avenue by which it is readily exposed to attack, some way to vanquish it for eternity.

04/11/1994 and My Responses Now

2011-08-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Is love locked in the blackness of this ink,
No. It's not locked in anything except maybe loops and transactions
of neurotransmitters.
or somehow nestled on the fibers of
Little sparkly birds "nestling" in the blingy pink
manes of shiny pink ponies! Yay!
this paper? Did the jeweler make distinct
an alloy ring, amalgam gold and love?
That's probably it.
Yes. That's it right there.
Sometimes old age and failing health make poor
the circulation of life's blood,
I suppose I could have trimmed a little
fat from the bone there. Too late now.
and rings
must then be cut from swollen finger four,
omg I did that once or twice.
Pesky little lapdog, that memory.
and words on paper meet all mortal things...
Yawn. Yes of course, because eventually
there won't be any men to breath nor
eyes to see.
Yet somewhere, in the Book of Time, there is writ
all happenings,
Yawn. omg can you believe that it is
me who wrote that? Me?!
Look! A squirrel!

all circles, joining hands
Ouch. Where's my hacksaw? Or the cheese-knife. That could do it.
and barefoot celebrations of the spirit.
Okay, so it's a comedy now.
Where's my green hosiery?
Though that is a book which we can never read,
Sheesh. That's the best line? Really?
at Weddings, everybody understands
that love is found in fulfillment of its need.
No. *That* is the best line.
Just saying.

I titled it "Where Love Is."

It was my portion of our wedding vows. We were do-it-yourselfers. I wrote a sonnet. My betrothed made a primitive painting of a couple, acrylics on paper, with a written dedication on the back. We framed it in a shadow box with glass on each side so both text and painting could be seen. It looks pretty cool suspended from the ceiling of the music room.

Well, soon it will be. We're painting the walls of an "office" room, which before that stage of its life as a room was a nursery connected to the main bedroom. We moved our Martin-Logans up there with other music stuff. It will be in turn a sanctuary (mine) and a music room shared by all of us.

I'm anticipating how good it will be to listen to these in a proper setting: out from the corners of the short wall facing into the long part of the room with me the listener about equidistant from each. For overkill I have a small subwoofer with a variable crossover frequency. Sometimes I like them in a corner, sometimes I like them along the wall between the stereo speakers.

So we have an anniversary of sorts coming up. The Anniversary of Our Second Kiss. It's not easy to explain. The first time we kissed was an accident, really. I was not brought up properly. It's as if I thought it were entirely appropriate to kiss even very remotely familiar people. We were in the same running club. That was it. Their hair went up; a situation which caught my attention and which I felt I needed to eventually address personally.

That became a reality but somewhat later on.

Then a miracle occurred.

These Musicians Can Be Heard on NPM and BBC Radio

2011-08-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

Camilla Tilling, soprano.

Susan Gritton, soprano.

Sarah Chang, now a prominent established concert solo violinist of the previous generation.

Violinist Julia Fischer.

Natalie Clein, cellist.

Something to Do to Earn a Slice of Pie Even Though You Suck, Or Journalism: How to Slack By and Avoid Math

2011-08-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

"The agency [the Department of Homeland Security] has spent more than $85 million over the past eight years to transport Mexican illegal immigrants far beyond the border in a humanitarian effort aimed at saving lives by deterring migrants from making another dangerous border crossing."

[snip]

"Since 2004, the government has repatriated 102,201 migrants to Mexico under the program..."

$85,000,000 divided by 102,201 is $843 and a few cents.

The Arizona Republic feature dated Aug. 21, 2001 1200 a.m., by Daniel Gonzalez, goes on to state:

"Records obtained by The Arizona Republic show that within months, hundreds of the migrants flown back to Mexico - each at a cost of more than $500 - are caught crossing illegally again." "More than $500?" Really. I do not like that. We're out more than $300 each. It must have gone somewhere. I say there's a story in this.

Then I looked at the cost of one-way flights from, say for example Tucson. According to Expedia, US Airways 2835 goes out at 5:00 p.m. today for $426.74. (Some days are cheaper.) Since it connects in Phoenix before going to Mexico City it could pick up more people there for an even less expensive ticket each.

Rut-roh. We're short a few more bucks here now. But perhaps there's an explanation.

You see, after arriving in Mexico City the returned immigrants have bus tickets to take them out into their home towns. That could account for a few dollars/pesos, and then maybe there's some hidden "processing fees." Would that get us up to an individual cost of $843 for each person so deported? It does not seem add up. Not without a proper accounting.

The article itself does not address the discrepancy in the numbers. It emptily acknowledges only this:

"But some humanitarian groups say it is a waste of money because migrant deaths have continued to rise, and the Government Accountability Office has been critical of the lack of accountability." Lack of accountability? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Well, that's it then. Nothing else to see here folks. Move along now.

"These are my views on the matter: the law is the law and immigrants who cross into our country illegally from Mexico will be apprehended and flown to Mexico City as soon as can be arranged, all at a profit of $300 each for me. Me me me. Just me."

(That was just me saying that.)

Of course "we have an illegal immigration problem." At least as it appears in this Arizona Republic article, it's a money-maker. And it's been graciously incentivized! The more illegal immigrants, the more flights to Mexico City, each multiplied by $300. 23,384 people just last year alone (though a record year.) Multiplied by $300? A cool $7 million; $5 million maybe after payroll and expenses. Even at half that price it's a solid business plan and growth has been the recent trend.

Nah. I have to be wrong. Maybe a bus pass from Mexico City to El Este Podunkalupe does cost $300. What with the cost of fuel and all, and Mexico is a big country.

Of course there could be an explanation, a documented and legitimate money trail that would make all the math questions go away. But conspiracy theorists nor journalists need to dig into that to make a living, apparently. That's my real problem here. Numbers are not peanuts. You cannot be allergic to them. Phones all have calculator apps now so journalists have no excuse; no excuse at all, to gloss the numbers at the heart of the story. My guess is that money goes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to cover their costs for each detainee. A bus ride to the Tucson airport and the price of a fast meal or two. A night in the paddy.

And then a very interesting little slice of the pie that just seems to disappear somewhere, I think. Like a vapor or an apparition. But that's just the little link in the chain.

But why are we paying for all this, anyways? That's the big link that attaches the anchor to the rest of the heavy chain. Would it have taken all day for Gonzales to call staff at the Mexican consulate in Tucson and the government program providers in Mexico City to ask them why we are paying for transporting their own citizens back to them? We negotiated this with Mexico? Somebody got their axle greased. At least there's that. Another missed story line. In modern U.S. journalism this is regarded as "conventional wisdom:" seeing neither forest nor trees.

Thus spoke Percival, Dark Guardian of the Clawrovian Gates, Beyond Which Few Survive.

One more little thing from the article:

"The entire cost of transportation is borne by the U.S. government." That's us, folks. Unless you happen to have contacts in the government, a charter airline company in Tucson, and a Mexico City bus company, you're losing money on this one.

Oh wait. There's a second one more little thing from the article:

"The government is expected to spend $9 million to $11 million on the program this year, ICE officials have said."

I don't think so. Remember, it's incentivized. Personally I assure you it will cost *at least* $11 million and probably much, much more. I'd like to see an article on that in about a year. They either overspend or they don't. Either one would be an awesome story.

Dearest, the Measure by Which I Miss You

2011-08-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

Suppose the good people of Gilligan's Island were never rescued.

They either did or they didn't. Get rescued, I mean. Maybe they did. After The Professor hailed a passing commercial ship they all returned to San Diego or wherever. La Jolla for the Howells. L.A. for Ginger. Wine country for Mary Ann. Maybe the Skipper dropped dead five minutes after landing, he was so excited. The Professor went on to publish several books and noted peer-reviewed articles on the subject of higher primate behavior in small groups; their assumption of roles based upon family models, partial group degenderization, shared power, currency, and many other issues. Gilligan, of course, took over as drummer for The Beatles.

*

There are two basic kinds of "I will do this."

First let's go with the "I will do this" that one person might say to anotherwhile directly confronting them at a very short distance with a powerful weapon. Perhaps a gun to the head. And then there's the other kind, like when your spouse offers to clear the table after an elaborate meal.

*

So getting back to the sit-com about those stranded together by the shipwreck of the Minnow...

What if they were never rescued and they all grew old with only one another on that forsaken island? Frail each and prone to illness or injury. Or possibly both. What's the best thing that could happen?

A pirate Physical Therapist crash-lands onto the island with a plane-load of contraband scooters, wheelchairs, walkers, canes and such? Really. In the sand? Oh, that's rich. As in not.

Rhymes with rich...

*

I propose that there should be a measure by which we calculate the level of discomfort you feel when your beloved is away. Like "For-Each-Day-Your Love is Away" as if it were an assignable value. Hold on a moment... maybe this is a very bad idea. Some things, many things, perhaps even all the minutest of all sub-atomic fields (the very foundations of reality,) are all ultimately nonassignable in values that may tend to run off towards either Infinity or Zero as a denominator.

But I do feel a discomfort. A sense of someone or something being presently missing. It's spectral. Another facet of Death. A temporary death that will soon be over, but Death nonetheless.

My dear spouse, off to a distant state for a business weekend, often says that they experience this phenomenon on just a level of feeling. As if they could sense some change in things on a super-string (or at least what they used to call "super-string,") level of fluctuation.

"Something just shifted," they'll say as they stop dead in their tracks, holding up a "hush" finger. I hear only the counterpoint in my head. And then the feral lovebirds nesting up in the palms. One of the dogs has sat to scratch at its neck. The collar jingles. Then we resume the walk.

*

The New Kitten Who Carries a License to Kill.

*

The Eighteen-pound Siamese Sumo Wrestler.

The kitten will hide among the chairs and houseplants then pounce upon one of the bigger cats like a hungry lioness taking down a stumbling water-buffalo.

*

For a while he just stood attentively and respectively, honorably quiet. But as the game wound down and the outcome became obvious he began trying to banter with the players.

"I used to play quite a bit," he said. "I've got a pretty good memory. Like that book you have there. I know all those games. They're good. Actually, Botvinnik has always been one of my favorite players. So rock-solid."

"You know all these games?" one of the players asked this shaggy-looking older guy with a scruffy ponytail. The player stroked through the pages of an old paperback containing Botvinnik's 100 Best Games.

"Well, I know all 1,197 catalogued Botvinnik games, including those," the messy man said. There was a moment of looks all around. Then the banter resumed, with the newcomer doing most of it. The one player was setting up the pieces on the board, arranging them in a position from the Botvinnik gamebook.

"I love Keres too," he said. "He unfortunately loses the game, probably with that move. Botvinnik never lets the White kingside into play."

"Yes, sure, but then... what game is it?" the other player pressed.

"Oh, it's from the 1941 USSR Championship. That's just after Keres as White castles queenside on his 8th move."

The two seated players began to set up the table for a fresh game when one of them said "I can't believe you remembered that. When did you learn chess?"

"My father taught me when I was a little boy," he replied.

"Was he a professional gamer?" one asked?

"No, he was a drama professor. But really good at chess. He was really good," the man said before going up to the counter when they called him for his coffee.

*

So you are staunchly conservative. You believe that private enterprise always provides superior products and services. You are quite a bit more than disdainful of government programs such as AHCCCS and Medicare. As a matter of admitted fact you fully support the expected attrition from AHCCCS registration by childless adults in the forthcoming months. After all, this may just be what those dumbass lazy slackers need: a good kick in their collective fat ass to finally get them pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, eh? Weekly dialysis be damned.

You are the sort of guy who thinks that doctors are over-educated bullshit-artists. Nurses however are pretentiously under-educated amoral slackers who never answer the call light right when you need more ice and your drink has gotten just a shade too inappropriately less cool.

You are unreceptive to the fact that the policies you advocate really boil down to one thing, and one thing only, for me and my ilk: You make hospital nursing, already a difficult job, even more difficult.

Thanks.

*

The dogz and I were out on our morning stroll. Cloudy and nice. A wisp of a breeze. They stopped to inspect some moist grass. It was all still wet from last night's light rains. A woman of shall I say retirement age was setting out her bins.

She called over cheerfully "You got your pooper-scooper?" as more of an exclamation than an inquiry. Or an accusation.

I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket and waved a friendly wave. "I always carry three," I explain earnestly, "One for each dog and an extra one just in case the need strikes."

She stood there momentarily as if I had just reminded her of something that she needed to do, then turned. "Oh. Well have a good morning then!" she said as she went back to her clean and fashionable condo.

"You also!" I offered as the gurlz and I continued.

*

I guess I'm the same way at work. The moment I see bullshit I call it. If nobody helps out then I bury it myself, usually in about a baker's dozen truckloads (with Union drivers) of metric tons of return-addressed bullshit. Because I'm ironic as all hell.

*

The hospital was having half-hour-long mandatory inservices about response to hazardous materials. They taught us how to set up a little cubical 8'x8'x8' tent made of plastic piping and tarps. They showed us a HAZMAT suit that we needed to know how to wear in case we were the ones who had to decontaminate people.

I was explaining this to The Young Person Above Them All as I drove them to school. The radio had just voiced the term "hazmat" and I sensed that an explanation would be helpful. It was. They hadn't been previously familiarized with the word.

It was a community hospital that served an area of homes, schools, and workplaces of over a hundred thousand people. Train tracks rolled right by hospital property.

"So," I asked as the presentation wound down, "If a train car tips over and spills hazardous materials all over the neighborhood, how many HAZMAT suits do we have?"

The instructors whispered among one another.

"Five," one of them replied.

"Actually six if you include this one," said another instructor, indicating the one all of us had been using during the try-on demonstrations.

"The fire department may have more that can be put to use," the first instructor said, but the third teacher, the guy who actually was from the fire department, was shaking his head "no."

"Any other questions?" asked the lead instructor before we all trundled away.

"You see," I said to The Young One Above All Others, "That's bullshit" and they commented approvingly.

"One of the things about me, TYOAAO, is that I guess I'm too sensitive to bullshit. On the one hand, that's a good thing because I can figure out what's really bullshit and then I can do something about it."

"But before you can do anything about a problem you have to be able to see it," TYOAAO said.

"You have it," I replied, and added "The problem is that there's so much of it. There's bullshit everywhere, almost."

We rode along to the school.

"Not here, though," I concluded. "Not with just us."

"Just us," they replied and then immediately they sprung back with "Justice."

"You have it again!" I said.

Two Out of Three Ain't Meatloaf

2011-08-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

Cats and dogs have a far more sensitive and stronger sense of smell than we do, by many factors. We tend to note this phenomenon in a particular way. We marvel at the profound difference.

"Oh my," we say, "That is a very keen sense of smell indeed."

Of course.

But I would suggest another focus for us to take regarding this: for cats and dogs, the senses of smell and taste do not track one another. For example, a cat may think that a houseplant has a powerful and distinct pungent smell, but it has no problem chewing on it daily because the taste is not bothersome; probably hardly discernible.

I mean, look at the stuff they eat.

Thought experiment: You can imagine the smell. You can put yourself in that fish house and take in the aroma. The fish are well-iced and it is a cool day, but you certainly feel your sense of smell activated by just the image. Now imagine that you are a cat in that same place. The smell would be intense, vastly more so than our own experience.

Yet there is a further departure: the cat would likely try to eat some of the raw fish right then and there.

Okay, so it's a subtle point.

It seems we humans have a strong sense of taste and many of us are quite willing to invest heavily in this.

*

What is it called when you have conversations going on in your head but you are a non-participating mere spectator of these?

What if one of the "conversations" you are listening to is music? Just the counterpoint of that itself is pleasing to my ears.

I was going to go for a joke with that but it turned all serious/deep on me.

*

If the U.S. Dollar were to collapse on the world market, the first thing I'd do would be to obtain a patent and copyrights to a kind of local currency which could be used in many of the most common daily transactions. I would be The Mint. This would require a complete change of wardrobe for my part.

Maybe a long white mink coat and a flashy broad-brimmed hat.

But this is Phoenix, so scratch the mink. I wouldn't wear fur anyway. Faux fur is a hundred times more stylish, if worn in the appropriate setting. (If you do a web search for "faux fur nurse scrubs," for example, you get nothing.)

I can't believe I googled that. And my spouse came in with the dogz just as I did so. Busted.

"So, what are you googling?" they asked.

Pause.

"Faux fur nurse scrubs," I timidly replied.

"Why?" my spouse above all others continued, "Do you want some?"

"Well," I pondered, "No. But I guess what I'm asking is do you think there's some kind of market for "hot nurse uniforms" even on just a costume market? Halloween and holidays? Or maybe for pornography? Aren't people doing this already?"

"Oh I'd bet," spouse above all others said, "And isn't that a wonderful thought."

"Then how would you google it?" I further asked.

Lots of unnaturally blond hair and vinyl here for example but no faux fur. Maybe there is indeed a buck to be made on this.

Christmas Nurse with red faux fur trim on their uniform. Transvestite Nurse with pastels or bolds, depending. Your call on that one. Easter Playboy Bunny Nurse could wear tight satin with faux fur. That worked once, didn't it? Isn't there a new television show coming up which reincarnates this archetype? Valentine's Day Nurse with red white and pink.

"Furry" costumes. I mean, not everyone has the time and skill to fashion their own by themselves.

"Wouldn't faux feathers and boas be a lot easier?" asked my spouse.

*

Obviously

2011-07-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Oh my god the drama. A whole lot of cat drama. As in Felis catus.

First came The Arrival of The Kitten. (Cue the recording of Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.)

Simon Mayor - Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba by pattynan

Who came not just to be cute but to conquer. A week or so later one of our beloved old cats passed away quickly but not entirely suddenly. The young person above them all took the loss pretty hard. They had also decided in their own mind that the immediate acquisition of another cat, an adult instead of just a kitten like the one we got a week ago, would be just the thing to do to parlay the sadness of our recent loss. I conceded that when the right cat comes along at the right time, I would make a decision.

A few minutes later my child above them all came running to me with their laptop and plopped it in front of me asking "How about this one?" and I'd shake my head and then they'd skim to another and ask "This one maybe?" and I said that this was happening a little quickly and then they showed me one whose "thirty days were all up tomorrow."

Gulp.

So then came The 18-Pound Siamese Sumo-Cat.

Wow. So the clock was ticking for that one. It turns out that the shelter is "no-kill" so that didn't mean what I thought it meant. Anyways, he's a big, affectionate, loquacious, morbidly obese, swirl-around-your-legs Seal-Point; eight years old. Elderly owners couldn't care for him anymore. He rapidly approaches any human who happens into proximity.

While these adoptions were ongoing I became rather ill-feeling and I missed several days of work. I kept thinking that I was "over it" when another little aspect of sickness would rear up: lower digestive tract, upper, nausea all the while... I went to work more of those days off than not, only to beg off to go back home. Missing work also has this affect on me: it rattles me. I get nerved out about it. Beyond the circumspect loss of time on the job and the absence from possible learning experiences, there is also a formidable feeling of estrangement from the workplace. For me this is not an entirely relaxing emotional position.

Then came another cat issue: The Great Neutering. While fully cognitively accepting the policy of spaying and neutering pets unless you plan on raising them yourself or selling them to other boutique breeders and owners, the child above them all still was emotionally distraught with empathy for the cat's physical suffering after the operation. We would try to allay this for the kitten by asking the veterinarian for a pain medicine we could give the cat at home.

"Then what do they do with them?" the child above them all asked me.

"With what?" I asked.

"With, you know," they said, "Them."

"Oh," I said. "Now I get it. Well, if you want we could give them a decent christian burial," to which I got a scowl in response.

"You're an idiot," my child above them all said before they stomped away.

*

"So," I asked my spouse, the clever one, "If you were going to take over the entire world, where would you start?"

"Bismarck" they immediately replied.

"You mean Bismarck North Dakota?" I quizzed.

"Yes, that one," the spouse above them all said, as if there were other sorts of Bismarckian geological Earthly planetary surface areas which might be under consideration.

That was the one. The one with the sign and the big yard.

So what followed was an explanation of why Bismarck would be such a great place at which to begin domination of the globe: It's a pushover. Nobody would fight us for it.

"Not even the people that live there?" I asked.

"Nope" my spouse replied, adding "And we won't have to worry about it while we're off taking over the rest of this great green orb."

Obviously.

*

We were trying to get our heads around it. I pointed out a diagram in a book and said "If space were just two-dimensional, like a plane," I indicated, "Then gravity created by mass would bend the space the way a bowling ball in the middle bends a trampoline surface."

"I'm having a little trouble trying to picture that in three-dimensional space," the child above all others said. I couldn't help much after that.

"Fossils I get," I said.

"Me too," they replied, "You and me and Lucy."

*

By four-year-old son Julian Lennon.

For Suddenly

2011-07-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite games goes something like this: A Person says Something Wildly Obscure, and then Everybody Else has to Guess What They Really Mean.

It would happen during one of those fleeting moments when a bunch of us have congregated around a focal point. It's at times like that in which I have become accustomed to expect to hear something like this:

"I Am a Wild Bird."

That could go either way. It might flash by in an instant releasing all its energy at once gaining no attraction. Or perhaps it would find a seat on the merry-go-round. (Much more about things like that here.)

Compact Muon Solenoid

Apple should be coming out with a 4G version soon, before the year-end holidays.

"Only 168 days and 12 hours until Christmas!" somebody will say as they stride by while already talking to another person on their cell. Or cells.

At work we nurses generally all carry two phones. That way if one of us is busy on the phone you can still get through to them on their other phone. Sometimes a nurse is walking down the hallway with their hands full of medications and paperwork and both of the nurse's phones ring simultaneously.

This is a common enough occurrence that it no longer attracts sympathy from others. It's part of the air.

After work Thursday night I didn't go home. Spousie had booked a couple of rooms at this lovely local time-machine, the Clarendon Hotel. One for the kid and friends, one room for us. It was a breezy night. The views from the SkyDeck were awesome and the less-intense night air allowed for some outdoor comfort. It was a nice little "staycation." After we checked out we all stayed for breakfast at their groovy little restaurant, Gallo Blanco.

The kidz wolfed down breakfast burritos and pancakes. I had crepas. Which are more-or-less circular.

Circular but somewhat smaller than the Large Hadron Collider.

"When protons arrive in the LHC they are travelling at 0.999997828 times the speed of light. Each proton goes around the 27km ring over 11,000 times a second.

A nominal proton beam in the LHC will have an energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1,700 kph."

My spouse drives an Outback with a luggage pod on top.

Apparently we would need to build a somewhat larger particle collider in order to sufficiently expand our testing ability.

"Obviously when we talk about the utility of a particle accelerator for discovering new phenomena, the important quantity is the energy of the beam, not the physical size. But do the two scale together? Roughly, yes." This website spells it all out pretty nicely for interested people like myself who have no formal education in these matters.

"Running a trend line through the data gives us the average relationship between the two parameters, which in this case tells us:

Beam energy = 280.14 x Track length - 652.46

So if the LHC is capable of 7000 GeV and we want 10^15 times that, we're up to 7 x 10^18 GeV. (That's 7000 yotta electron-volts, for those of you keeping track.) Then we just solve the above equation for track length, and the result is roughly 2.5 x 10^16 km, or about 2600 lightyears."

That suggests design difficulties.

From the Iliad:

"For suddenly, just as the men tried to cross,
A fatal bird sign flashed before their eyes,
An eagle clutching a monstrous bloody serpent in both talons,
Still alive, still struggling - it had not lost its fight,
Writhing back to strike it fanged the chest of its captor
Right beside the throat - and agonized by the bites
The eagle flung it away to earth, dashed it down
Amidst the milling fighters, loosed a shriek
And the bird veered off along the gusting wind."

Book 12, lines 230-239

A wounded venomous snake, fangs dripping with the fresh blood of an eagle, falls from the sky and lands among Trojans already at furious battle against the wall which defends the Achaeans' ships.

Yeah, I know; as if things weren't bad enough.

Docendo Discimus

2011-07-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's my rant:

I am the oldest and most experienced nurse on my unit. I have myself precepted the vast majority of them. I have a pair of shoes (a nice old set of classic black leather Italians,) that are older than some of the nurses I work with. I have experienced more years of this kind of stress. I have worked in hospitals (not always as a nurse because I was a nurse-aide/unit-secretary/monitor-tech for a while as I plodded through nursing school,) for about 28 years and I work with many nurses who are younger than that.

"Experience" just means I've been down that road before. It may or may have not gone well.

We are a band of about two dozen nurses, "core" staff, who steadily do what we do within our urban area of 3.6 million people.

Most people do not care what we do. I don't take that personally. It's just that it's not my fault if they do not care. So don't blame me because a bunch of assholes decided that it was a good idea to offset tax cuts for the rich by eliminating 200K people from Arizona's AHCCCS rolls.

To the Major Offenders, and you know who you are:

I am paying every kid within three neighborhoods around you to spit their chewed gum into your precious yards. Cash bonuses for those who can lob one farthest.

Now there's a market for that.

What Nurses Have Said in Pre- and Post-Roosevelt Eras

2011-06-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

This:

"You have to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps," and then they would add "Here's some boots. Now get out of here."

In my almost three decades of hospital work I have never heard this spoken by a nurse. It's too raw and essential. So please just consider it as maybe an extract of something that underlies what we find ourselves saying over the course of a typical 13-hour shift. Perhaps one of the many in-the-know technicians we interact with may have overheard something we let slip out.

Some good-natured snark let out at one of the doctors:

"You know what was in that Phoenix Magazine yearly write-up about the best physicians in the valley? Well, Dr. BigSmileySquareHead was listed as one of the best hospitalists."

And the nurse speaking would go on to say "I approached him here about this and asked him how that happened? Like, what universe were the results derived from? Seriously!"

But they would not prevail. Dr. BigSmileySquareHead always has the last word. He isn't just too clever by half. He's two powers many times over of that. (See what I mean?)

OMG I have such a migraine as I write this. The loud-wringing half-a-helmet kind. But I'm almost to the end of Maggie Cole's Goldberg's. Then maybe I can listen to something a little gentler. I generally really like her recordings but the harpsichord sound she derives, however beautifully rhythmically sculptured, on this one is less sweet than is my preference. Maybe it's just the instrument itself, a 1988 Andrew Garlick built in the manner of J.C. Goujon. Two of Goujon's instruments are at the Musee Instrumental Paris, including a double-manual harpsichord.

On the companion disc she puts on display a 1612 Jan Ruckers. I wish I could listen to it immediately but until this headache subsides I just don't have the ears for it.

Oh heck. The Ruckers (perhaps one like this) she plays is a little less jangly. Not treacly though.

Maybe it's the recording itself. It seems to lack some bottom end weight, maybe allowing for the sake of good clarity overall. Then again maybe it's just my head today.

Is there something going on with cigarettes, or rather the control of cigarette advertising? Like pictures on packs? Do you really think that it is worldly possible to contemplate anything that could make smoking seem even more disgusting than it already appears now?

No.

I didn't think so.

Though as a hospital nurse I must declare that I often work with patients with lung disease. So smoke up, people. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

I wish Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, and Bono, to say nothing of Mick Jagger, would all just give it up. Buy homes somewhere where the weather is nice. Urban, but a quiet corner. Maybe in the same Texas subdivision at the end of their own turnaround.

They'd see one another out there with a hose watering their front lawns.

"Hey mate," Bono would say to Bruce,"I'm dashing out in a bit to pick up something for the grill. Can I make it a run for you too?"

"What are you having?" Bruce would ask in reply.

"Danny's cousin's grandmother slaughtered a lamb. He's got it in his store."

"You've had it before?" asks Bruce.

"Yes. You remember, a few months back?" replies Bono.

"Right. That was great stuff. Put me in. I'll get you a few bottles of the stash."

Then they'd each finish watering down the daisies. Except maybe Mick. He'd be snoozing among the blossoms, face down in Keith Richards' vomit.

Am I at the crux of some complex but controlling Wall Street interest upon which swings the balance of profitability and loss? Probably not. I cannot fancy that being so. Yet there seems to be developing some political movement to muffle the voice of many workers. Teachers have been condemned. Firefighters, police, and social workers have also been excoriated. As if any of them as a group or individually had anything at all to do with the recent mortgage-meltdown fandango. In a way, nurses have always been party to this; maybe just because of sexism.

It was a different thing, nursing, back in New York. We were unionized, if only because the New York State Nurses Association itself gave us access to legal representation if we required. That tended to be just a formal process because generally the management genuinely cooperated with the Union.

They even presented this to us during one of the three-year contract renegotiations: Some of our nurses had worked there so long that their yearly pay increases had maxed out. The hospital was in a bit of a budget crunch as usual but they offered us this compromise: The top-tier nurses would begin to receive commensurate yearly pay and benefit increases, but for this year and this year only, by contract, the rest of us would limit our own yearly increases to just two percent.

At that time this may have been considered to be a concession made by the staff nurses. We could have said no.

Our Nursing Administrator told us that she herself was completely foregoing any yearly increase this time around. That was the deal right there. Good move.

I really liked her. I knew her from working at a different hospital. She was a department manager then and I was still working as a hospital nurse aide while finishing up nursing school. It was interesting that we both ended up at the same hospital again, though a different one and in a quite rural setting. There was an X-Ray nurse who also worked with us back then at the same previous hospital, and then an ICU nurse that I worked with there and again.

I honor those people in my own ongoing work.

Funny, the people who move from a college-town styled small city to remote villages north in the mountains. Some just liked outdoor sports. Hikers, rock-climbers, people who hunted and fished, nature photographers, and others whose personal businesses ran upon the influx of tourist money; tourists who came from other regions.

Steven Reich's Different Trains from 1988. I am rather of the highway generation and I have rarely been on trains. At least I do not have any fond or profound memories of being on them. Maybe very long ago.

Every once in a while, no matter the season, we spend a weekend or a long weekend at Juniper Well Ranch. The cabins are within earshot if not all within direct sight of a freight railroad. It's the best Doppler effect; with an almost rainbow-like tonal range, especially at night.

Yet for me (and I suspect many of my generation) trains aren't much more than images and sounds from old movies. Now they're not even that.

My god we got the coolest plants. Six-feet tall; palms. Just two, one on each side of the sliding-glass back door. I love it here. They've always helped us out. I like being around plants. It's as if they make the air appreciably better (which of course they do.)

"I'm not stupid," you'd hear someone say. But it doesn't pick up steam (old metaphor) with enough interest to be introduced into mainstream common workspeak. Maybe just an in-family thing. Or maybe it received an honorable mention on some old sit-com. Steam-stream. Shrimplate! Or stream of steam.

Eyeglasses:

Awesome.

Nursing is often a way of seeing.

Recent Resentments

2011-06-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

The young family person had an event last night. The pool was warm and some of them went in with all of their clothes on. That's the explanation. There was rending of hair and the washing of many garments. Then more recently the morning rush: one goes to sports lessons, two have to be taken home, and there was something else about the other one. The clothes were not yet dry.

So we, or rather my spouse, gave them a plastic bag and sent them home to dry their clothes there. Total hardass. Not playing. I chose not to intervene. I preferred instead to finish a cup of coffee while listening to a Valentini concerto for four violins. In a minor. One of my favorite Baroque keys. Played by La Serenissima. OMG!

I imagine the following:

This child goes home and presents their mother with a bag of wet laundry. "Why didn't they let you finish it at their house?" their mother would ask, and ask with my understanding. "I dunno," the kid would reply, adding "They had to take the twins home and they had to go to a lesson and they were late and their parents are a bunch of total hardasses. I guess."

Which reminds me to say that a modern atheist using that term "omg" is no more acknowleding a Higher Being than would a person from another era who might have exclaimed "by Jove" sometime or another. I have Bach, just about all of him, in mind while noting this.

It's hard enough coming out as an atheist here in "modern" America, what with the whole intelligent design thing among many other prominent and divisive issues. I cannot imagine what a free-thinker had to keep to just themselves in the culture Bach worked in. He had to hold down a long gig as a church cantor just to maintain a good livelihood, god help the poor bastard. No wonder he was described as devout Lutheran. Who wouldn't have been?

OMG! The Cantatas!

See what I mean? So much implied by just those three "words." And the exclamation point. That helps a little.

There are things that are just generally interesting, then there are things that attract the attention of fewer people, then of fewer people still. For example, you may know someone who says that they "like" music. Subsequently you learn that the last time they purchased any recorded music it was an "Ace of Base" CD and it was actually given to them on one of their birthdays.

Which just goes to show how both psychological and emotional distance, and the difference in distance from the present to that past time, can parallel one another, at least for some people.

So you might say that your own musical tastes are somewhat more refined, as if you breathed a different air.

That's what I mean when I say that generally there are two kinds of people: those for whom punk happened and those for whom it didn't. It's more than just to say that it was a specific generation that grew up in a specific period within an even further specific cultural setting; it's on the cusp of New York City and everything else, beginning with its immediate geographical surroundings. The state university at Binghamton being it for me personally. My very spouse graduated from another state university, the one in Albany.

Allow me to offer something like an example: Many years after "punk" rolled through and made all the previous things mere history, its generation strode out into the world to make liberating changes. There was a time when a small but prominent northeastern city provided easy access to heroine recovery treatment. Addicts from New York City moved to Vermont to use these services and the system strained as its resources became overwhelmed.

Then it became controversial. There were people who wanted the program completely abandoned immediately. There were those who advocated for more spending to help cover all the applicants. The advocates and the applicants were themselves not overlapping classes, but at that time the people trying to effectively address this problem from an ethical point of view were those for whom "punk happened," at least at that time. You could understand if there was any confusion. The era's clothing styles didn't help any. Everyone wore tight or loose jeans.

At one time I lived with an apartment-mate who dated the director of the local rape crisis center. As you know, I myself am a registered nurse, though one with perhaps a variety of interests. My spouse has a master's degree in social work. Now many of my coworkers are much younger. Half my age. Pre-family, meaning their own kids by however they assume parenthood of them, by marriage, adoption official and unofficial, or copulation.

Many of them carry within them a self-sense of that thing "punk happened" even though they were not of that time. In part I hope that it is the now-assumed feminism that lingered at the edges of wider acceptibility three or four decades ago. Now it's a tacit assumption, isn't it?

So what I intend to say to my spouse and family when they get home is this: there's the generally accepted culture-thing, and then there are subsets, and then there are further subsets, eventually settling just on us.

Furthermore I would add, now circling outward, that the manner by which we proceeded to get to this place was mere growth. Sometimes it takes years to accomplish that. Sometimes, days or hours. How long did it take for you to be born? Over a long time, or in a flash as the cavity opened? Were you round-headed?

Then the question of stitches. Then we divert our attention to Vivaldi.

Vivaldi had access to every sort of musician then widely and generally considered. The young women at the extraordinary Ospedale della Pietà could readily answer to any of his musical inspirations. It was as if he had a Baroque equivalent of a modern synthesizer. He had access to all the sounds of his imagination plus more than he could ever live to fully explore.

Just as the musicians of the Ospedale della Pieta provided a palette from which Vivaldi could draw shapes and colors, likewise his compositions provide moderns who like Baroque music a wide spectrum from which to draw upon musical interpretations. This is nowehere more apparent than in the musical history of my own generation, in which Baroque performance practice invited study leading to performances based upon appropriate historical writings. Yet you can still hear Vivaldi played by orchestras which would have seemed overly large in Brahms' days. This sort of thing really caught my attention during my early college/university years. Long live the difference.

You could go beyond "us" as you proceed along the trails from beyond the circle's edge, to the cusp, to the inner circles, gradually approaching that limit after which you can only take introspection. But that would still belong to "us," wouldn't it?

Is that why they call it spacetime?

Probably not.

I'm not even sure that you could form a scientific hypothesis regarding that, nor even around forming a real hypothesis.

Now we're off. It's beyond mutual understanding. It has sunk into a black hole.

Wait, What Kind of Period?

2011-06-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Steve Harvey can take his 90-day waiting period before fucking (he says women entering relationships should wait that long, and presumably just that long, before agreeing to sex,) and he can shove it up his soon-to-be war-torn asshole. He says it's like the probationary period when you first obtain a job. I don't know... He looks like a rapist to me. Or plainly like someone who has a compulsion to tell women (and men) how they should behave in their most personal interactions.

This is my counter-advice to Mr. Harvey: Go jerk off and cum on your mother's face.

So long as we're sharing advice.

Mr. Harvey was recently on the Piers Morgan interview television show, spouting silly nonsense about how men and women should relate. "Relashunships iz hard," as a certain ex-POTUS would have said. Another alpha-male. Apparently his sort of garbage is considered acceptable. Sadly it is not.

I shouldn't single out Mr. Harvey. There are thousands of sexist knuckleheads who do roughly the same thing he's doing. There are entire industries devoted to the promotion of this stuff. "Men Are (fill in the blank) and Women Aren't" half-baked inchoate ideas, allegedly obtained from observation, that serve only to maintain a thoroughly sexist paradigm, such as the one it seems apparent that Mr. Harvey himself grew up in and within which he remains immersed. Don't take my word for this. I can only stand to offer one link, like maybe this Modest Example and then I'll have to stop. Please.

*

Destruction and reconstruction. I don't much like construction itself. It's too creative. Be gone with it.

What? Who wants to be an artist?

You?

Didn't think so.

At this stage of the game or whatever it is, I think that it would be tender and poignant to absolve oneself from all creative activities. To just steal. Not to make anything. Take something that's already there instead of trying to force something new into existence. Then bust it all up and if that's not enough fun, put it back together again in some good old-fashioned way. There you go.

It can't be that difficult. I know a restaurant that does this with fish tacos. And the dish is wonderful.

You could also do it just by taking some shit Steve Harvey said and then give it a royal rogering, for example.

*

I don't wear it around my neck.

When I am either asked or confronted about it, I have developed a short-cut reusable stock answer which I can employ to resemble responding, yes, actually genuinely responding or a passing semblance of so doing. Here it is:

"I generally stick to these things where I don't talk much about any of my relationships, whether they are real or not."

Does that wrongly impart?

I remain to be assured that I have shown just who can be the one who is more direct in these matters. Those are the ground rules, wouldn't we all agree? It seems clear to me.

*

Time is clear. Anyone can easily allow themselves the luxury of some insight into it. At least, I think, since some sort of language was made useful to us. The ability to cast our gaze about to different aspects, features, and discrete individual statements unfolding in time itself. That seems a neat trick.

There was probably a time when we as a species were generally unable to do this. It seems like a trait that could very well have been naturally selected.

There was probably also a time, albeit brief, when spacetime was not transparent and electromagnetic radiation was unable to pass through unobstructed. But that's another story.

*

Snipped from the superb butterfliesandwheels:

"I have a new project. My new project is to convince people on the left that they must work together with Tea Partiers.

This may seem like a difficult thing to do, but I like a challenge. There are many urgent problems in the world, such as countless people who still have the wrong kind of light bulbs, and the only way those problems can be solved is if I – yes I, I alone, I personally, I bravely yet gently yet determinedly yet lovingly – build a bridge between the left and the Tea Party. The division between the left and the Tea Party is divisive, and when there is divisiveness, problems don’t get solved, because people don’t work together, so it is urgent and vital and very important to heal this tragic divide by telling the left to forget about all the things they disagree with the Tea Party about. It would be pointless to tell the Tea Party to reciprocate, of course, and besides, the left is…well you know."

That's going to get much more than just a casual nod.

*

Violinist Robert McDuffie has been getting some serious attention for quite a while now:

And so has this fellow traveler, Ram Narayan, sarangi player.

*

When I sat at my laptop to write this I perhaps started on a rather hostile note. But I see now that I have arrived at another place. This is the sort of thing I am referring to when I talk about "form."

*

This is what I will say to my spouse when they come down from their slumber:

"You know, I sometimes talk about you; well, you and us really, with some of the people at work," I'll say, and "But there's really a lot more to us, then, isn't there?"

After I say that or something like it I have come to fully expect some sort "Of Look."

To which I might respond with "It's not like you're merely of a gender to me. No, not quite that at all. It's like you're a gender artist at what you do, and that's amazing."

It Leads To

2011-06-18T04:22:00.000-07:00

“I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished. Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other!"

Luke 12, 49-51.

*

"In videotaped confessions, the defendants said the motive behind the massacre was that the groom was Shiite and the bride was Sunni.

[snip]

"...the insurgents threw 15 screaming children into the Tigris River after hanging concrete blocks around their necks. Blindfolded men were lined on the river bank with their hands tied behind their backs and were shot dead execution-style.

Then the insurgents raped the women, including the bride, who had her chest slashed and was left to bleed to death in front of her husband."

15 Get Death for Horrific Iraq Wedding-Party Massacre.

*

"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

2004 American raid on an Iraqi remote village wedding.

*

Barrett's encyclopedia sought to count each human being in each religion and religious subcategory in each country as of 1900, 1970, 1990, 1995 and 2000, with projections to 2025.

The 2001 edition, successor to his 1982 first edition, which took a decade to compile, identifies 10,000 distinct religions, of which 150 have 1 million or more followers. Within Christianity, he counts 33,820 denominations.

33,820 denominations.

*

More than 100,000 people are putting their lives on hold, waiting for organ transplants across the U.S.

17 hundred of them are living in Arizona.

That's one reason why Governor Jan Brewer has deemed April, "Donate to Life Month." There are more than one million donors signed up in Arizona already but still 19 patients die every day waiting for their transplant.

Thousands of Arizonans wait for organ donations.

*

Cystic Fibrosis is a nasty thing. It clogs up the lungs and pancreas with gooey viscous slime that eventually kills, usually before a person fully matures and despite even the best of care.

I am thinking specifically of one high-school-age person. They died a year ago today. Sometime before that they approached the Arizona state capitol accompanied by news cameras. They confronted our well-known state Senate leader Russell Pearce. Pearce, a Mormon like the young person under discussion, approved of legislative changes that would allow the youth to obtain a lung transplant with financial support from the state Medicaid program.

The young person then later received donated lungs. They remained quite sick however and they were hospitalized often. Somehow they managed to graduate from high-school. Their graduation took place in the hospital itself, though.

Shortly after this child (yes, they were a child, really,) died, Senator Pearce worked to rescind this sort of coverage for transplants. After all, the young person who shamed him into it was now gone.

*

International Master Anna Zatonskih, rating 2493. Ukrainian-American. Her parents first taught her to play chess at age five.

A Whiteness of Swans

2011-06-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

One afternoon on my day off I was puttering in the kitchen while listening to Adele Anthony play the Violin Concerto by Philip Glass. Scrubbing a pot when my spouse came in. There was still a little spot on the bottom the the pot. Like a flea.

"See that?" I said to my lifelong love, whom we both call "The Most MagisTerial (capital "T" intended) and Adored (three syllables) Walsingham Thing-Thing."

Spouse wondered what.

"That spot," I said as Thing-Thing peered into the pan. It's a well-lit kitchen. Oddly, James Joyce used the word "illlit" in one of those books. The one I read.

"That's not good enough!" I said. "I grew up in a restaurant."

The music passes by in units that are repeated a few times before changing to another different motive, for lack of a better word, appears. It seems that history passes that way. Only the music compresses it into its own artificial sense of time. Instead of building up and growing towards an eventual route of sequential repetitive periods, Glass leaves out the "social" build-up and moves straight to the concluding economic swings of each society. Then moves on to something else just as repetitive. A musical Marxist. Or just a Buddhist. Same thing, practically.

Sibelius did the same thing at the end of his 5th Symphony, or at least the version of the three that I've ever listended to, having never heard the unused Adagio or the missing 1916 version. The "Thor's Hammer" thing. Thing. That I've heard.

We reciprocate and mutually conclude that life is probably quite different for the people who belong to untouched-by-the-outside-world remote villages.

According to Miriam Ross of Survival International, a group that works to protect the world's remaining indigenous peoples, "These tribes represent the incredible diversity of humankind. Unless we want to condemn yet more of the earth's peoples to extinction, we must respect their choice. Any contact they have with outsiders must happen in their own time and on their own terms."

[snip]

"Aside from the fear of tampering with a primitive society, the risk of transmitting diseases is significant; these people have virtually no immunities and would likely be hit hard."

Who's happier?

Me, no doubt about it.

Us.

That's what I really meant. I'm not breaking any speed limits today.

The Young One came down and inquired after the special vanilla soda I was supposed to get them. They rummaged around in the back alleys of the fridge, found it, opened it and pronounced it "good." No, "pretty good." They set the half-full (heh) bottle on the table along with its tossed cap. I let it go for a bit before it kind of got to me. Then I called up to them.

They responded by coming down and grabbing the bottle and cap before I could get out "I know you're always in such a hurry to get on with things, but you could at least not just leave such stuff there." They smiled, took care of it, and disappeared. Just like that.

I may be a bit behind on my best shots today, but I can still play some sort of part.

This Young One has decided to do away with the wall-posters of past days. They want a new look to their space. A layered repaint. Maybe a rich dark ocean blue underbase. A floor-to-ceiling mirror. A secondary study area, or whatever.

"You want better posters, or art?" I asked.

"Art," they immediately responded.

I am somehow very okay with this.

There are a lot more people at work who talk quite a bit among themselves, probably way more than I do. But when I contribute, I'll have tried to put some energy into it.

One day I didn't wear my usual TAG-Heuer, but instead a nice old estate Fendi. Andrea called me on it. "You're not wearing your watch," she said.

"This is my watch," I replied, adding "I wouldn't wear anybody else's watch. Well, this was somebody else's watch, but I bought it. In a way, we share it."

"Is that so?" asked Andrea.

My spouse does not like it when I do not wear the TAG. They bought it for me. This requires me to behave in a certain way. It modifies my watch-wearing most highly assured American right to put different stuff on my wrist; wholly unnecessary now that everybody has hand-held computers which can also be used as texting devices, but still important to me. I don't know why. I've tried to figure that out.

Brazil has imposed an embargo on its exports of rosewood since 1969. This is of dire importance to me.

There are other rosewoods. They sound great. Many of them are also under legal protection, which in turn has increased their economic value. I'd hate to see such a very useful collection of species suffer a demise, due not to the art of instrument-making, but due to money and short-sightedness. Valuable resources should be developed. Not obliterated.

I have one. A small one. I saved up money over some time and paid cash for it. I'm not proud.

Time to feed the fish. Little wiggly Sirens, those.

Elvis is Dead and I'm Glad But Now I Wish Coldplay Would Die Too

2011-06-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

The rental we stayed at is hidden in the trees in the center of the picture as viewed from a weathered outcropping of red Schnebly Hill Sandstone. This layer is eight to nine hundred feet thick in places. The little village of Oak Creek seen here occupies the low plain that opens out from the southern end of the canyon. As you head north through the village of Sedona itself and up along Oak Creek the canyon narrows appreciably and the variously-colored spires and cliffs close in on the road.

Bell Rock viewed from the kitchen. We could let the dogz run around loose beyond the low wall. Doing this fired up the wild hound-passions in their hearts.

This is how the mountains begin to fall; a crack initially appears and then the elements further their unrelenting work. In a bit of time these mountains will become as flat as the plain that spreads out in the first picture posted above. Behind and above in the right-upper corner of my phone-photo there's a horizontal strip of Fort Apache Limestone. This isn't always seen. There's more Schebly Hill red Sandstone and lighter Coconino Sandstone above that. This far south in the Oak Creek Canyon much of the uppermost layers of Toroweap Sandstone and Kaibab Limestone have been worn away.

The Little Brown One heads out to chase bunnies, harrass quail, and pee in odd places.

A resilient Century Plant in bloom.

Alaskan Oil As Viewed From Sedona

2011-06-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

From a blurb by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas:

The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate. The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.

This does not compare favorably with our rate of oil consumption, which has been recently calculated as 19.6 million barrels per *day.*

Go ahead. Try telling that to your right-wing pals at work. You know, the "drill baby drill" types. Have them do the math.

In the meantime we are in a rented A-frame in the village of Oak Creek, sipping morning coffee, letting the dogs run around free just byond the low red-stone wall, watching the morning sun light up Bell Rock a short distance away. Sedona is one of the most beautiful places on this good Earth.

It's not just why we live here in Arizona; it's why we live.

Superintendent Bootz' Idea

2011-05-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

" I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!"

Nathan Bootz, the superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools in Michigan.

Here in the education-starved land of Arizona we spend $7,608 per year for each public school student. In the same period measured and discussed in this report released last June the national average was $10,259.

Arizona spends $61.74 per day (according the the Arizona Department of Corrections website,) to imprison each of its inmates. That comes out to $22,535 per year for each prisoner.

But of course public schools students aren't housed 365 days per year. Only about 180, so if you take that number and multiply it out by the same amount it costs us to incarcerate a person for their first-time marijuana bust, you get $11,113 per student per year. A far cry from the amount we now spend, and cuts to education will only make the numbers even worse.

Le voila!

The answer to our spending problems for public schools is to simply turn them into prisons, as suggested by Superintendent Bootz.

However, it will be argued that unlike prisoners, students are housed for only part of the day; about 8 hours. That of course would reduce the amount spent on students to about $3,704 per year.

Maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

Less Pink Clouds

2011-05-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

I love my dog, a red Texas Blue Lacy, but she has a very high energy level and sometimes I just want it all to stop.

She herds the poor cats, leaving them cowering under the bed in shrimpbowl's room. She stands at the top of the stairs looking out the front window and she barks at passing chimeras. Nasty threatening things, those chimeras, though they are supremely disadvantaged because they don't really exist. She bolts around the house jumping on the carefully-arranged human furniture, which turns out to not be for mere human use after all. They are launching-assist devices.

I think bad things about her. I want to toss her into a volcano and sacrifice her to the canine lava-goddess, eight-armed (or is it eight legged?) Collie, mistress of doggie hell-fire.

Additional thoughts:

If there were some enormous Bank of Dumb-Ass where stupidity was stored like bullion, you can be sure someone would try to rob it.

Far from now many thousands of years in the distant future some David Johanson type is going to dig up what by then will be an ancient container of Cool Whip and it will still be edible.

Some of the surgeons I get to work with specialize in thoracic and esophageal stuff. Tough cases from around the Valley get referred to them. Beware of bariatric surgery.

I am actually a big fan of bariatric surgery. When I see a morbidly obese person, I do not think "that person needs to seriously cut back on the Mars Bars." Instead I think "that person needs surgery." It's really the only way some people, those who are just plain genetically determined to be fat, can successfully get their weight down. A good bariatric surgeon can help people get their lives back from the hellish brink of morbid obesity, at least until they invent some sort of recombinant-DNA kit that you can buy at CostCo to make you into a Lance Armstrong or Calista Flockheart type.

The problem is that not all bariatric surgeons are the same.

This poor guy had some major fuck-ups in his original bariatric surgery and he ended up with segments of necrotic bowel that had to be removed. After that he couldn't eat at all, and his nutrition was maintained intravenously for months before he had recovered enough strength to undergo restorative procedures. A new Roux-en-Y. A gastroplasty. A distal esophagectomy. Lysis of multiple adhesions. Re-anastomoses of of the esophagus and gastric outlets and a double-anastomosis of duodenal and jejuenal sections. There was more in the surgical report but I cannot remember it all. It went on and on.

They unzipped him. His stapled surgical incision ran down from his sternum all the way to his groin. He had G-tube, a J-tube, a JP drain, a PICC line for TPN and fluids, a peripheral line for antibiotics, an epidural for pain control, and a patient-controlled anesthesia pump for additional pain medication. We ran four pumps (some were double pumps) into him continually.

This didn't have to happen.

If you ever need to consider bariatric surgery please contact me and I will assist you with your search for a surgeon who specializes in these procedures. I might be able to point you in the right direction. There some really really good ones out there. For example, I know these people and they are tres formidable. I've seen their work. They do good things. I know of this surgeon by reputation only, but it's good.

Nurses hear things that you probably don't. Dog whistles.

Au Fait

2011-05-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

Initially I bought the Valenti book for my kid to read because it's written in short easily digestible bits that would not tax the attention span of a relatively young person, but I like it too. Not that I have the longest attention sp... Squirrel!

The Ariel we all grew up with was not the one that Plath wrote; not the one that was found sitting on her desk completed.

You can never know enough about evolution and teeny little particle field-thingies.

Hitch won't be around much longer, sadly. His writing is so eloquent. I'd have loved to have had him over for a party, along with say Molly Ivins. Boy howdy!

Now Is the Month

2011-05-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Now is the month of Maying, when merry lads are playing! Fa la la la la!
Each with his bonny lass, a-dancing on the grass, fa la la la la!

The Spring, clad all in gladness, doth laugh at Winter's sadness! Fa la la la la!
And to the bagpipes’ sound, the nymphs tread out the ground! Fa la la la la!

Fie! Then why sit we musing, youth’s sweet delight refusing? Fa la la la la!
Say, dainty nymphs and speak! Shall we play barley break? Fa la la la la!

Thomas Morley was an English composer who was born in either 1557 or 1558 and died in the first decade of the 17th century. I studied and played much of his music when I was in college. One of my best musical experiences was when Roger Harmon, a lutenist from the Peabody Institute, came to our school with a passel of instruments including an Orpharion (basically a small Bandora,) and a Cittern.

The Orpharion looked something like this:

One of the graduate students in our little guitar department was selected to play that. I was handed a Cittern and my tablature parts to learn, over the weekend, for a performance of several of pieces from Morley's Consort Lessons, first published in 1599.

The Cittern looked something like this one:

It didn't exactly have frets; instead, the fingerboard was scalloped at each fret position. Probably because Citterns were wire-strung, not strung with gut with gut frets tied around the neck as on a lute of that period.

A few more students who had some interest in early music were also drafted into this mixed Consort: we had a couple Viol players and a flautist who worked on the recorder a lot. Morley wrote for a "broken consort" which contained a variety of different instruments. Other consorts were made up of instruments from one family: a consort of viols, recorders, sackbutts, krumhorns, or whatever. The flautist got to play a wooden transverse flute; basically a stick with holes in it. I got selected to be a part of this thing because I could read tablature, the notation employed by Renaissance composers for plucked string instruments. Here's an example from the Cherbury Lute Book:

Lord Herbert of Cherbury liked lute music and his collection contains the above as well as a lot of other music, mostly French like that intabulation of the chanson En me Revenant. A guitar-music version in modern musical notation looks like this. (I couldn't load the pdf file to post it here.)

It looks daunting but it's actually easier to read tablature than it is to read "music."

We had a great time rehearsing and performing.

But here it is, May 1st 2011, and I am a nurse. I haven't had a Cittern in my hands in years.

"Now Is the Month of Maying" is probably Morley's most famous madrigal, though technically speaking it's a ballett, which is basically a madrigal with "fa-la-la's" in it.

The English went for madrigals like crazy after Musica Transalpina was published there in 1588. Developed in Italy, madrigals were taken up by English composers and these became staples of household entertainment.

Transalpina has Italian music in it with the words changed to English. To English ears the "fa-la-la's" made these part-songs sound Italian.

Really.

Morley was a teacher, too. I have a copy of "A Plaine and Easie Introdvction to Practicall Musicke."

It's sitting on a shelf somewhere. It's handy to have it around, just in case.

Here's "Now Is the Month of Maying" in modern notation:

T-Ball

2011-04-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

She wasn't on the unit when I arrived at work in the morning because she had already been sent to Nuclear Medicine to finish up her stress test. The "stress" portion was done the day before and that was clear.

Though young and athletic (she was in fact a school gymnastics instructor,) she had come to the hospital for chest pains and was found to have an arrhythmia; rapid atrial fibrillation. She felt palpitations at home, took two aspirin because she had heard that was good for the heart, and a family member brought her to our doorstep.

She converted to normal sinus rhythm after being on a Cardizem drip for a bit; that was stopped and now she was to take this medicine orally. The cardiology physician's assistant had seen her and their service signed off. The internal medicine doctor wrote orders for her to go home. I provided educational materials on aspirin and cardizem. We had our most excellent dietitian chat with her about a proper cardiac diet. Unlike many people I serve, she was motivated, intelligent, and likely to comply. Everything looked good.

We weren't even going to wait for the nuke med results. The doctor said he'd call her later at home to talk about that with her. She was eager to leave the hospital because her son was playing a game that night and she wanted to be there.

I had removed her telemetry monitor and we were finalizing her discharge instructions; in fact, she was just about to sign a copy for our chart on her when my phone interrupted me.

I hate that.

It was the radiologist. The nuclear portion of the stress test showed a small reversible ischemia in the inferolateral area of her heart, at about four-o'clock to six-o'clock. Ruh-roh, Reorge. We had to stop.

If she infarcted it could look like this:

Big black holes aren't allowed. I don't care what Stephen Hawkings says. By the way, doesn't he look just fabulous in this early photo?

He's incredible. I love that guy.

When I called the cardiologist we received orders to hold up the discharge and consent her for a cardiac catheterization that afternoon. When I told the patient, she cried. I explained everything in plain but explicit and sympathetic terms. I spoke to my boss about her and they also saw the patient to console her and help her understand what needed to be done. The patient decided that she'd rather not bother and asked to leave and have the cath done in a few days on Monday.

She allowed me to run that by the cardiology team, but when I again called them they reluctantly insisted that the testing be completed before leaving. Aside from the legal considerations that's just proper medical practice. We are accountable to complete investigations of issues such as young healthy athletic people who suddenly and unexplicably develop cardiac arrhythmias.

"She knows this!" my boss said while talking with us at the nurses' station, adding "She's a bloody gymnastics teacher, for fuck's sake!"

Ah... that's my boss. Ever the subtle one. They're the best.

After phoning relatives (some of which talked to me on the phone so I could explain the situation,) she decided to stay.

She went to the cath lab at three p.m. and was done in an hour. In report the cath lab nurse said everything was clear and I heard the cardiologist in the background say that the patient could go home later. She had to maintain bedrest for a bit afterwards when she returned to her room on our unit. Generally she was gracious; very much so, and glad it was over and all she would have to do is take some aspirin and cardizem and see the cardiologist once in a while.

I had her out by six-o'clock. Just in time for her to get her son to his game.

Cogi Qui Potest Nescit Mori

2011-04-19T03:51:00.000-07:00

When I know what to do next, I am generally satisfied.

The little time indicator located at the top right hand corner of my wonderful MacBook Pro says 3:53 AM. Insomnia. The radio has just featured The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, a masterpiece of American Impressionism. Yes.

The radio directs my attention. What to do next? Listen to it. It throws change-ups. This is rather a different listening experience than popping in a compact disc or selecting a download, because that involves making a choice.

When I got home from work last night at the very reasonable time of 8 p.m., I checked the mail. The snail-mail. It's part of my homecoming ritual. The mailbox was full of nice expectations realized. We got our federal tax return check. Also in the mailbox were a book and some CD's.

I wanted to get the check into the bank. I'm just like that. It could have waited until later this morning instead of last night. But, I do not wait. I just don't. Ever. Even the tiny pause caused by a mere grammatical comma thrusts anxiety upon me.

We listened to the opening track "Stamps." (My spouse had accompanied me to the bank teller machine.) I cannot successfully attempt to describe this music, except to say that is is jazz of a very far out kind. After the head there follows a group improvisation in a non-pulsatile gangly loose rhythm. The drummer shimmers and scoots over his kit without laying down a beat. The cello and bass thump and scratch. The two saxophonists wander about bumping into one another.

My spouse was dumbfounded but delighted. "It's so tight," they said. I was surprised by that comment because most people would probably hear randomness in it. At the college radio station I hung out at back in the day someone had written "spastic drumming" and other insulting misunderstandings on the cover of the original vinyl record. That had also surprised me, because I'd have expected the deejays there to have an understanding of such things. Oh well.

Who would desecrate such a thing?

A coward.

When I do not know what to do next, either one of two things generally happens: I become overwhelmed by the myriad of choices presented to me, as at work where I must make instant prioritizations amid a jumble of demands upon my time and skills, or I become bored because it is three-o'clock in the morning and there is very little around me to sufficiently capture my attention and I must fend for myself.

Boredom kills me.

Conscientia Mille Testes

2011-04-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

I saw this over at Feministing and like all good ideas, I had to steal it.

Bravo.

Juniper Well Ranch, Skull Valley Arizona, April 9th 2011

2011-04-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

Fractals.

Four-wheel drive. The trunk of the juniper tree in the background is over three feet in diameter, which makes it rather old.

Snow on the charcoal-ash can.

The driveway to the cabin.

Contreras Road, a dirt country lane. Four miles from pavement.

No television, no internet, woodstove heat, and maybe two radio stations if the wind is right. About twenty degrees Sunday morning, and a sunny seventy-ish when we got back to Phoenix. Arizona is weird that way. We started the day in the midst of late winter and we finished it in the sunny desert warmth.

The kids and the dogs loved it. I welcomed the time to take a break.

We had recently spent a week on Oahu. I think the best way to deal with the let-down of returning from a trip is to take another trip. So we did.

Astra Inclinant, Non Necessitant

2011-04-03T06:31:00.001-07:00

Our sweet old Siamese cat died peacefully last night, snoozing off the running-boards of existence while in his favorite chair. We want to bury him on the property under a Meyer lemon tree we had planted there in honor of one of our neighors; a friend who died at his own hand. But we share this property with others.

There's a pool area out front with lawn and trees wrapping around it. That's where the lemon tree is. I don't want us to be caught burying a dead pet on the premises. I just don't want it to even come up for discussion with others. So we intend to do this under cover of night.

In the meantime, what do we do? Leave him in the chair? What if we have visitors?

"Wait wait! Don't sit there! That's where our dead cat is!" Do I want to have to deal with that?

*

In order to get a new patient onto our unit, another patient has to go. On rare enough occasion, a room opens up because a patient died. Then a new one gets the room.

I usually don't bring it up, for fear of how the conversation will go:

Me, "So I hear you were waiting all day in the Emergency Room."

Patient, "Yes, it was since I came in last night."

"Well it's a good thing that guy died when he did, or you might have ended up waiting down there for another few hours," I would answer. "But *I* wasn't that guy's nurse," I would quickly add.

*

This zero-after-the-nine thing I wrote about below is still bugging me. Yet now I have another problem to go along with it.

Suppose you write this:

(1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)+... it ends up being =0. But suppose you write the same thing a slightly different way:

1+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+... it ends up being =1.

You could substitute any number for the 1 (except zero... I think maybe,) and you'd still have the same conundrum. It's making me feel a bit paranoid, actually.

All the Lights Are On But the Blinds Are Down

2011-04-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

Squeeze.

"Hourglass."

One of the great pop bands from the past performing at the top of their game. Glenn, thinking fast on his feet, recovers instantly when he accidentally leap-frogs a line of lyrics (in the first verse he should have sung "the crew have abandoned ship" instead of "the little hand shakes its fist" which rightly belongs in the second verse.) I'd probably never have noticed without a few repeated listenings to the various live videos available.

They're still out and about. It would be fun to catch a show. I missed them the first time around in my halcyon college days, and now I certainly have a greater appreciation for their stuff.

I love the way the melodic phrases arch. Glenn's singing bobs and weaves.

So much rock/pop music today offers too little. Melodies, hookless, are hardly worth the name, chord changes are stale and unimaginative, mid-tempo rhythms lack drive, and lyrics are whiney and over-wrought with cosmetic sincerity. We need a "new" New Wave. STAT.

Good-Bye, Joe

2011-03-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

May he rest in peace.

Joe Bageant:

If you haven't read his book Deer Hunting With Jesus, Dispatches From America's Class War, please go out and buy a copy today, preferably from an actual bookstore. These are dying off and I'd like to see them get all the support possible. Or download it to your eReader. To each their own.

While the book is essentially about people "whose TV set that works is sitting on top of one that doesn't," it is beautifully written. Bageant always maintained a genuine compassion for the people he described in this book, though he certainly wrote with a clear eye for their foibles and tragic flaws.

Aeger Eger, Gravatus

2011-03-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

My nose and lungs are filled with more snot than the Arizona Republican party. I'm dead tired because I haven't been sleeping much due to coughing and sneezing. I haven't been able to use my wonderful CPAP machine because of nasal stuffiness.

(Not a picture of me. I stole it from the web.)

I am sick.

And because I am sick, I am guilt-ridden. Missing work causes me great anguish. Nurses are not the sick ones, you see. The patients are.

They let me leave work early yesterday. The only reason I even went in was because I was out sick on Thursday and I felt I should try to shake it off and show up.

Before I finished up a few things and left I told them how guilty, ashamed, and troublesome I felt for being sick.

Andy said "But what if it were me instead? Wouldn't you want me to go home?"

"Yes," I said.

"If I were still sick wouldn't you want me to stay home tomorrow too?" she asked, and again I replied in the affirmative.

Over the course of an average 12-hour shift I probably wash my hands a hundred times. But bacteria and viruses are sneaky and insidious. They can get around. I masked up and wore a gown for things like doing dressing changes. I always wear gloves if there's the least chance I might be in contact with fluids of any kind: body fluids, IV medications, tubing, whatever.

But I was recently out-of-state. Maybe I picked up something during the flights or while I was on the island. What if I contributed something new to the local Arizona germ pool?

That might be bad.

Yet still I feel horrible about missing work. I fantasize that my boss will punish me. Fire me, even.

In the not-so-distant past, American workers agitated for paid sick leave. They struggled for me. I thank them. I am fortunate to have it. So are the patients who did not have to have a sick nurse care for them today.

A Fronte Praecipitium a Tergo Lupi

2011-03-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

Tobias Wolff

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jorges Luis Borges

Raymond Carver

Katherine Mansfield

When I was little I discovered short stories. This was probably about when I was in third grade, because I remember finding the spot in the Lafayette School's library where they kept the books containing myths. I read Greek mythology and American Indian myths, most of which were in short form. Things just took off from there and I have always had a soft spot for stories.

Later on I indulged in novels and I read many of the usual culprits; Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Melville, John Hersey, Chinua Achebe, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and of course Hesse. When I was in college you pretty much had to read that stuff and much more, and I did so even though I did not take literature classes.

It just seemed like those thing were part of a shared culture. I had friends who stayed up late reading Faulkner just for fun.

"What did you read over the summer break?" my friend Larry asked me one autumn upon return to Crane.

"Euripides," I replied. "How about yourself?" I asked in return.

"Joyce," he said.

"Oh, which book?" I asked.

"All of them," he replied.

I had a radio show once a week when I was at Binghamton. It started at 10 p.m. with a fifteen-minute news-break at midnight. After that I would read a short story and then finish up with more music until I got off the air at 1 a.m. I read a lot of stories then as "research" for my radio show.

Those were the days. Our college station also featured a show called "Words" whose jock engineered for various people reading a variety of poetry mostly. I was very impressed by that. Radio is such an excellent medium. It's my favorite of them all.

Our lives are stories.

Stories need to be told.

You can tell me yours anytime.

Interludium Telefonica

2011-03-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Each shift we are issued not-so-little phones at work which we carry on our scrub-belts or in our pockets. If a doctor or another unit calls, the secretary can transfer it directly to one of us. It's meant to be a convenience but because it so often interrupts our care these are generally reviled. If us nurses had our way we'd toss our phones out the windows and they would lie in various pieces scattered about the patio areas and streets that surround the hospital.

There have been instances in which I was trying desperately to thread an intravenous catheter into a tiny little evasive vein in some poor old lady's arm when my phone would ring, blowing my concentration and sometimes the vein I was trying to access. Or maybe I was into something really filthy like a very messy bed; I'd have to stop and quickly wash my hands so I could take the call.

You have to take the call. Otherwise how can you prioritize it? Maybe it's just my spouse wanting to tell me that they love me. Maybe it's a doctor inquiring about a patient. Or maybe it's one of the nursing assistants calling to tell me that another one of my patients just fell and pulled out a chest tube. You never know.

I went up the the desk at the nurses' station. My charge nurse and the secretary were there and they seemed to be in-between things. They were just chatting a little about this or that. Charlie Sheen, some dumbass thing one of their husbands did, or whatever. I waited for a break in their conversation.

"There's something wrong with my phone," I said. Andrea the secretary asked me if I had put a fresh battery in it, and I said that I had a different problem.

"Look at it, " I said. Andrea wanted me to hand it to her and she checked it out. She used her desk phone to dial it and it rang and when she picked it up it was working okay.

"No, that's not it," I said. "Look at it." They both examined it and said there was nothing wrong.

"Of course there's something wrong!" I claimed. "The zero comes after the nine. Zero doesn't come after nine. Ten does. The zero belongs before the one!"

They agreed and then started talking about how it was the same on old phones that actually had dials. You never see those anymore.

I'd like to have an old phone that has a dial. I think it would go well in our house, which has a sort of step-ahead-into-the-sixties modernity to it. Maybe a Princess phone in some groovy retro color:

My child and I were out exploring the various old-stuff shops once and came across a Mickey phone. They really really wanted it, but the store person said it wasn't operational. We would want to actually use it, so we didn't buy it. It was totally cool though.

"Soooo," said Andrea. "Shrimp, when did you first notice this about the zeroes? They've always been that way, you know" and she smiled that sarcastic way she always does.

"Really?" I asked, baiting her.

"Well yeah, you big dork-burger! You mean you've never noticed before?" she asked.

"I guess I haven't been paying attention," I said mischievously and then I walked away to go back to work.

More of Our Thursday Morning Stroll

2011-03-17T16:43:00.000-07:00

You could rent yurts, camping spots, and little huts at this privately-owned area between Kamehameha Highway and Maleakahana Beach. Free WiFi!

Feral peacocks also wander around the rural areas along the east shore.

Typical local home, showing its age. Nice location, though!

I stood in the driveway of our rental and looked one way...

Then I looked another way!

Thursday Morning Walk

2011-03-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

Morning surfers at Maleakahana Beach.

There are thousands of feral chickens roaming around the windward side of Oahu.

An old cut-down telephone pole that has decided to grow.

Windmill farm on the northeast corner of the island.

This moth on our screen has about a three-inch wingspan. He stuck around all morning.

Tuesday, North Shore

2011-03-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

The waves were high today. Way high. Sunset and Banzai Pipeline were closed altogether. They were taped off like a crime scene. Waimea Bay was closed to swimmers. There were only a few surfing gurus out there, but still the lifeguards were on their bullhorns. Shark's Cove was all froth. The Young Amphibians were a little disappointed because they couldn't go in the water.

The surfers coming in said it was "different." They didn't seem to have had much fun.

The waves out on the reef in front of our rental were also high. The water gets shallow there; it's only about five or six feet deep even a few hundred yards away from shore. The waves don't break on the beach, but way out on the reef. I don't think people surf there at all. If they go under (and the waves can hold you under for a while, like minutes,) you could get torn up. It's great for snorkeling and splashing around, though, and safe for the Y.A.'s because it's calm from the sea-wall on out to the reef.

We cooked up food that we bought at the roadside places. The best things to eat here are not found in stores or restaurants, but from trucks. There are shrimp ponds on the northeast corner of the island at Kahuku and we passed them several times as we went back and forth from the famous beaches on the north shore. Open stands sell fresh fruit, too.

I have seen no Hispanic nor native southwestern faces here like you do in Phoenix but there's a great mix of people out and about. There have been several waves of immigration to Hawaii; from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and the mainland. I've read that there are only about 9,000 people on the islands who are of original Hawaiian descent. As in Phoenix you hear a variety of languages; but unlike there, no Spanish.

Signage tends to be hand-painted.

Much of the housing here is in some mild state of disrepair upon close inspection. It's not an upscale area. As I mentioned before: think "chickens in the road." The climate must be rough on wooden homes, which is what they're almost all made of. Peeling paint, rusty vehicles, mud, but with lush tropical greenery. The beaches are immaculate.

Lava stones are used for outside walls that function as fences, but not as walls for homes. That's too bad because it's obviously a plentiful local material and quite beautiful.

There's a cute little medical center nearby. It has eleven(!) acute-care beds and ten long-term care beds. I currently work in a hospital roughly thirty times bigger than that. I don't think they need my services as a nurse here anyways.

I'd have better luck opening up a professional sign shop.

Sunday Going About Gathering

2011-03-13T15:45:00.000-07:00

While the Young Amphibians were spending the morning splashing about in the shallow reef-protected waters in front of the place, we went out by ourselves for a bit. A short drive south at Kahana Bay is an ancient (by Hawaiian standards) fish pond, built some time ago for harvesting fish.

There's a low spot in the tightly-fitted lava-stone walls which allows tidal currents to come in bringing fish. Then the people could wade around within the shallow sandy-bottomed artificial cove to catch them.

While we were visiting the site there was a brief sea-surge which flowed into the enclosure. Over a few minutes the water level rose five or six inches. Then, just as suddenly, it receded. I had checked tide charts earlier; we may have witnessed its peak for the day.

We drove up past our rental and stopped at a roadside fish-stand. They had fresh mahi-mahi (the "fish so good they named it twice,") ahi, and marlin. They gave us a sample of ahi they had just cooked up in a bit of butter and garlic. Good enough for Anthony Bourdain! We also got a couple containers of poke.

It's ceviche-style, raw and buttery, with garlic and chunks of the most tender ahi. Melts in the mouth, it does. Sweet chili style and sesame style. We got one of each for snacks, or even full meals, later. Five bucks a pound. (The marlin was four dollars a pound.) Amazing stuff. It was fun chatting with the vendors.

For dessert we got mochi at the stand next door. It's a rich cakey pudding.

We went back to wait for the tide to continue going out and washed down our snacks with local sodas.

I had the Lilikoi, which tasted a bit like a fizzy lightly sweetened mix of watermelon, peach, and strawberry. Passion fruit, I guess. They use cane sugar, as you would probably expect, but it's actually rather crisp. Later I'll have the pineapple.

The reason we're waiting for the tide to get to its lowest (at about three this afternoon,) is so we can wade out to Goat Island.

It's a bit over seven-hundred feet off the beach at Malaekahana. The water's only about five feet deep at the most, but the waves come around both sides of the island criss-crossing together at right angles just at the narrowest place to wade over. If it's too rough we may have to wait for a calmer day. (We did end up making it out to there. The water was only thigh-deep at that time but the waves did knock us around some.)

This is not a resort area. Hau'ula is basically a few scrappy old wooden houses dropped dropped by the side of the two-lane highway that rolls along the eastern coast of Oahu. It's literally a chickens-in-the-road sort of place.

North of here it's different. Laie, a few miles up, is a Mormon stronghold that has a Brigham Young satellite campus. We stopped there briefly yesterday because spousie had a yen for ice cream. There seemed to be a preponderance of young closely-groomed white people there. Many of the women were either pregnant of carrying very young children. My surmise was that they were Mormon girls who had come to the college, hooked up, and married early to start families while the freshly-domesticated husbands finished school.

The ice cream shop was at a decent-sized strip mall that would not have seemed out-of-scale for Phoenix, but it had no bar nor a restaurant that served alcohol. Not that I care; I'm not much of a drinker at all myself. I think, though, that this was because of the general Mormon bent of the whole town. The whole place closes up on Sundays.

Laie also is home to the Polynesian Center, a tourist trap if ever there was one. Just looking at it while going by makes me puke.

Though I am certainly no expert, the way I size up recent Hawaiian culture is thus: Island people got here only about nine-hundred years ago. Later, Europeans and Americans discovered the place. The usual things happened. The newer explorers took land, resources, commerce, and dignity away from the locals and in exchange they gave them religion.

A lousy deal.

Morning Walk

2011-03-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

The mountains are as interesting as the ocean.

Walking back along the beach I found a bowl of water.

The little store is a few feet down the highway from this place. If you can't buy it there, then you really don't need it that much, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor.

Back at the rental I cooked up home-made waffles for the Young Amphibians. The money we don't spend on eating out makes this trip a little more affordable on a nurse's pay. I've nothing to complain about as far as that's concerned; for my level of education I think I'm paid rather well. It simply baffles me that there are people who are insanely rich who would like to see that working people could never afford to do such things as this.

I think I'll take the surfboard out to the reef and try not to break my neck.

Vidi Turbam Magnam

2011-03-10T06:39:00.000-08:00

Ruth Laredo, my favorite Scriabin player.

Horszowski was 94 years old when he made that recording.

Ingrid Fliter, presently owns Chopin.

Maria Joao Pires, another great Chopin player.

And finally Horowitz. I heard him play once when I was in college. He did the "Funeral March" sonata by Chopin, some of his signature Rachmaninov, some Clementi, and several encores. That was probably the single greatest concert I have ever been to, out of hundreds and hundreds.

Victus Coram Deo

2011-03-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

Shawna Forde, the woman on the left, has recently been sentenced to death for murdering Brisenia Flores and her father during a home invasion in 2009. Defense lawyers contend that Forde, like Charlie Manson in the infamous 1968 Tate-LaBlanca slaughters, was not present for the slayings, but the jury found that she masterminded the spree. Others will be tried soon.

Brisenia's and Forde's faces are the faces of Arizona's border wars.

Let there be absolutely no doubt about that. Hate feeds hate. It inevitably escalates unless, like a disease (and strictly speaking it *is* a disease,) it is treated, preferable by incarceration and silencing those who funnel such hatred into the minds of their radio listeners, website readers, and television viewers.

Forde, a self-styled leader of a rabid pack of violent crazies called the Minutemen American Defense, had some idea that there were drugs in the home which they could steal and sell to finance their anti-immigrant schemes. Isn't that special. The victims were, however, American-born and no drugs were found. Instead the murderers made off with some cheap jewelry.

Chris Simcox, leader of the equally unsavory Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, apparently considered Forde too nuts even for their bag of loons so they kicked her out in 2007 because "she was pretty unbalanced." Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist however maintained ties to Forde right on up until he found out about the shootings.

Shawna Forde, Jim Gilchrist, and Chris Simcox think like lizards. As does Russell Pearce. As does Janet Brewer. As do their supporters throughout the state and country. Bill O'Reilly even lied about young Brisenia, with his on-air statement that she was an illegal alien. But that's nothing new; O'Reilly lies every fucking night on his television program. That's what he's paid to do, though many others are quite willing to do this for free.

Arizona harbors others of its other own special brand of various lizard people too:

The church, at 7901 N. Central Ave., had appealed a hearing officer's decision that feeding the homeless at a place of worship can be banned by city ordinance. In November, retired Arizona Supreme Court Justice Robert Corcoran, serving as a hearing officer, ruled that the city can restrict where the homeless and poor can be fed and that zoning regulations apply to everyone equally.

More here.

Such wisdom. A judgement coming straight from the corpus amygdaloideum. Such are our laws.

Ultra Posse Nemo Obligatur

2011-03-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

Visibilium Omnium et Invisibilium

2011-03-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

When I first saw her she was tied to the bed. Wrist restraints and a posey vest. We can do that here in Arizona. In New York, "double restraints" are illegal. Even closing the patient's door is considered to be a restraint. When I lived and worked there, the doors to patient's room were always open unless a clean procedure was underway, such as peritoneal dialysis, and you didn't want someone to enter and waft germs through the air.

At one time she was a respectable cardiologist but her mind had been eaten away by Alzheimer's disease. She apparently had been pulling at her Foley catheter, and the bag of urine dangling from the frame of her hospital bed was wine-dark red. Not all that an unusual occurrence. Confused patients pull their catheters all the time. They also pull out intravenous lines, nasogastric tubes, and whatever else they can get their hands on. It's only natural. But it can make treatment impossible, so god said "Let their be restraints! Tie unto them their wrists of fury! Hedge their catapulting torsos with vests of strong fibers!" and his merciful angels did apply them abundantly.

She had devoted family members. I always undo restraints when family members are at the bedside. They can come tell me if the patient is pulling out something.

I had a day off and when I returned to work the patient was still there, but I was not assigned to her. Her room was just across the hall from the medication room, and yesterday morning when I was going to fetch some nasty poisonous very expensive drug to administer to some poor sick bastard who probably wouldn't live without it and who couldn't afford it if he had to pay for it himself (he was an engineer,) I saw one of the Alzheimer's woman's daughters go into her room.

"You've got to cut that shit out," I heard her say to her mother. "You can't pull on that anymore. That shit's over."

Appalling.

I was going to speak to her nurse about it. But I was busy as all hell and I never had time to do so. I hit the floor running at 6:30 a.m. yesterday, took a 15-minute lunch at 3 p.m., and finished up my charting at 9:30 last night. I got my ass kicked.

Besides, the woman *did* stop pulling her lines. The physical therapists had her up in a chair and later walking in the halls. She was smiling that unknowing but happy Alzheimer's smile; you know, the "Reagan smile." Clueless and empty-headed, but genuinely happy about the way things were happening for them.

She went home before the shift ended. Content in her own bed, unrestrained except by her own plaque-ridden brain, home. While I was still typing up notes trying to remember all that I did for my own patients that day.

I was so busy I had forgotten to hang an IV mini-bag of Magnesium on one of my patients, and I apologized profusely to the oncoming nurse. She told me to relax and that she'd take care of it, and she called Pharmacy for the dose.

As I was waiting at the elevator to finally leave, she came up to me and said "Shrimp, you *did* give that Mag. You signed it off at 1 o'clock. I don't have to give it."

I didn't remember doing it. Not a clue. Just an empty spot.

Finally I got home at 10 p.m. You know what I did?

Laundry.

AZ GOP = KKK

2011-02-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

I was cooking up Chinese-style pepper-steak and I needed peppers, so I went out to the store while the beef was cooking up. There was once a time when this would have been unheard-of for me. In college I stuck to a vegetarian diet. I balanced my amino acids, took vitamin B-12 supplements, and did everything I thought I should have and I still felt lousy, so after about four years of that I quit and added a little animal protein to my diet.

We buy beef and pork from The Meat Shop here in Phoenix. Grass-fed Angus beef and grain-fed Yorkshire pork. It's good to shop local whenever you can. Besides, it's better.

Anyways, I was standing at the checkout and the clerk asked me "How are you today" and I replied "Fine, thank you."

There was a man behind me who chimed in with "Then you must not need a heart transplant."

"It's funny you should mention that," I said, adding that I was a transplant nurse at a hospital in this region.

"You probably won't be doing many of those now," he said, in reference to recent controversy regarding our governor's removal of transplant coverage from the Arizona state medicaid program. The powers-that-be are continuing to go back-and-forth on this issue. A couple people have died; they were initially eligible for coverage, then died after they had it cut by Governor Brewer. It looked bad politically so some AHCCCS transplant coverage has been renewed, I think.

"Well," I said, "They have insurance." Meaning that you don't get transplants without insurance.

"You must be a Republican then if you think everybody has insurance," he said.

"FUCK YOU!" I replied. "Don't EVER call me a Republican!" I was bristling.

The clerk asked me to cool it, but I had already mopped up by proclaiming "Patients have DIED because of Republicans!" About fifteen people stopped what they were doing to watch. Time stood still.

I guess I had misunderstood the guy. He was really of the same mind as me.

I took my bag and went out, but I went back in and apologized to him. He took me to his car because he wanted to show me his bumper-stickers. He opened the driver-side door of his Camry saying "I have to take this one off or Republicans will scratch my car," and he produced a normal-sized but rubber-magnet styled bumper-sticker that read "AZ GOP = KKK." We shook hands and made up.

He was an older dude. He explained that he was a small-business owner who was familiar with the problem of providing insurance for his workers. He seemed like a salt-of-the-earth pretty nice guy. Lifelong Democratic sort.

Then I went home, sliced up the green, red, and yellow bell peppers, some onion, cooked the rice, and finished making dinner.

Fasciculus Murrae Dilectus Meus Mihi

2011-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

“Scott: Once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time,” says the caller identified as David Koch.

Walker replies: “All right, that would be outstanding.”

That's Governor Scott Walker, conservative Republican whore, putting the "pro" in Quid Pro Quo.

"But At Spring Mending-Time We Find Them There."

2011-02-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

We are like this: (holds two fingers crossed together.)

Teen's new expression: "Go die in a hole."

I swear to god, that crossing-guard came out of nowhere!

Ouch. You're on my hair.

Men are lemurs.

Taupe is so not tope.

If somebody starts to say something and they begin with "I remember when..." that means you do not have to continue listening. Nothing of importance ever happened in the past.

They should put it in the water. (Guess what: they already do.)

"Let the sky rain potatos! let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves!" (Bardish skirt-lifting and hugs.)

"Well you see," explained the Chicago-school free-market economist, "There's birds, and then there's birds."

Quantum particles and fields are to your hand as your hand is to the expanding universe. Your hand is "in-between." The blackbird sitting on a wire is also "in-between." Try telling that to Wallace Stevens; you can't. He's no longer "in-between."

How to tell good salt from the bad or merely mediocre: Good salt is sticky.

Pepper-spray somebody. I don't care who. Just go out and do it.

It is rather easy; indeed, almost impossible not to, to imagine any number of people saying one of the above things.

There's a point in The Iliad, about the middle of book fourteen, in which Hector attacks the giant Ajax by throwing a spear at him. The spear hits Ajax square in the chest. But that's where the thick leather straps are crossed, the straps which hold Ajax's weapons, so the spear just bounces off. However Ajax gets seriously pissed by this so he picks up a rock, a really big one, and tosses it at Hector, hitting him in the throat and nearly killing him. Hector collapses and his weapons clatter about him. His fellow Trojans surround him to prevent the Achaeans from finishing him off, forming a phalanx with their shields while others pull their fallen leader out of the fray.

Does heaven (in the unlikelihood that there even is one) contain evidence?

An End to Borders

2011-02-17T05:39:00.001-08:00

It always seemed busy when we went there, which was weekly. Sometimes more often. Usually we go on Tuesdays because that's when they put out the new books that have just been published. My child's school had an early dismissal yesterday so we went then. I got a copy of the Fagles translation of The Iliad.

I read the Fitzgerald translation in highschool, then the Lattimore version in college. That one was something else. Recently I became re-interested in classical Greek literature and philosophy and I plan on reading Homer again, so I wanted a new translation.

The story of the Trojan War is amazingly relevant. It was fought over the most specious argument. Nobody really gave a flying fuck about Helen and Menelaus. He was a crappy leader. They thought the war would be a cakewalk. It wasn't. It consumed too many resources and probably was the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greek culture. (Sounds familiar?)

Being of a tender age my child presently prefers age-appropriate fiction, but they also have recent books on the Romanovs, ocean waves, Lucy, and other items of non-fiction. Yesterday they got Angelire by Courtney Allison Moulton.

Last week they got I Am Number Four, which they read in a day.

I do not know where we will go to buy new books now. All of the Borders in Phoenix proper are closing. I am familiar with all the local used bookstores but they have far less to offer. And the local Barnes and Noble outlet on Camelback road also closed a few months ago.

I do not blame this on Al Gore for inventing the Intertubules. Of course technology has changed the way a lot of us read. It has augmented the media of written words. I am thankful for that. My kid has an iPad and occasionally downloads books but they mostly read pages on paper. I read an awful lot of stuff on this laptop. But it's not the same.

I love books. So does my child. And my spouse is a writer.

The problem, I am quite sure, is not changing technology. It is rather a general lack of interest in reading, period.

From Orange Crate Art, who got it second-hand from links which he denotes:

Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.

42% of U.S. college graduates never read another book.

58% of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school.

70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

And on an ironic note:
81% of the U.S. population feels "they have a book inside them."

Mr. S. is a Borders employee. He is a writer himself and he is also widely-read; has been all his life. He recommended "The Outsiders" to my kid. He is a stroke survivor. The doctors initially told him that he would never recover, but now you'd never know he'd had one. He was brilliant in his little under-emplyed niche at Borders.

Where will he work? 140 local jobs will be lost when these Borders stores are closed.

Hypatia. A great and widely-known teacher, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer of ancient Alexandria. She was associated with the great library there. An estmated 600,000 scrolls were housed in it, along with another 40,000 at a smaller branch.

Julius Caesar was the first fucker to really have at go at destroying the great library in 47 B.C.E. The next major blow to all the world's accumulated knowledge came at the hand of the Christians under Theophilus in 391. That's when Hypatia lived. The branch library at Serapis was destroyed then.

Later in 415 C.E. Saint Cyrille's deranged army of five-hundred monks/enforcers killed Hypatia by flaying her alive with clamshells. Then the tore her limb from limb and burned the remains. All because she was an uppity woman who knew more than they did.

I will *never* forgive Christianity for killing Hypatia.

Never.

Rachel Weisz. You must see this.

All of Hypatia's works are now lost, as are many many others, having at last been destroyed by that dumbass motherfucking Caliph Omar during his invasion of Egypt in 645 C.E. Tradition has it that he said "If the books agree with the Koran, they are not necessary. If they disagree, they are not desired. Therefore, destroy them," though this is probably a legend created much later.

We may not be destroying books, databases, and computer files in their entirety now. But we are certainly somehow ensuring that the wide distribution of knowledge is relegated to lower rungs of importance. There's virtually no science in daily newspapers anymore. Television news does extremely little to cover science. Literature itself has all but disappeared from the public sphere.

Without that local Borders, where will we buy new books? Where will I buy copies of The Progressive, The Nation, and Acoustic Guitar magazines? At the drugstore? No.

It will all be washed into the tawdry and undiscerning sea of the internet. And the internet can be turned off. Instantly. Capriciously. Maliciously.

Nunc dimittis

2011-02-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

Art Pepper
Steve Coleman
Jane Ira Bloom
Jan Garbarek
Steve Lacy

Composers

2011-02-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

Pierre Boulez
Andy Partridge
Kaija Saariaho
Anthony Braxton
Bela Bartok

Recordatio Fallibilis

2011-02-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

Reagan was an idiot. He betrayed his own stated principles. His administrations created greater deficits than all other presidents that came before him, combined. He raised payroll taxes after ranting against tax hikes.

His grip on reality was ever loose. His verbal gaffs were embarrassing to the extreme. He held no love for the American people; at least not those who were unfortunate, and he regularly mischaracterized and demonized the poor.

Even his own economic advisors now admit that their "trickle-down" theories were utter nonsense. He talked a good game about downsizing government, all the while growing it. He lived in his own world of cartoonish fantasy, and he had the numbers to prove it. He based his economic policies on a hump drawn on the back of a napkin: the infamous Laffer Curve.

He was our Brezhnev. As if we really needed that. Soviet kitsch with Alzheimer's dementia.

Cal Thomas, in a column I have unfortunately read just this morning but refuse to link, continues to fluff Reagan. We can anticipate more due to Reagan's upcoming centennial on the 6th.

Gah.

Ron junior's new book will likely have no surprises in it for me, having read Patti Davis's autobiography. I already have some idea how dysfunctional the Reagan family was, and much of that stems from Reagan the man. He was remote, uncurious, and inconsiderate of others. Michael, the (adopted) son who now habituates one of the outer rings of the rightwing hate-radio inferno, slept on the couch of the Reagan home. Patty distanced herself from the others by flirting with addiction. Her rebellion likely saved her. Ron himself was fortunate to be born homosexual, for that helped him to distance himself from his fucked-up father. Maureen died of skin cancer some years ago, after attaining some status as a conservative munchkin.

Ron will have his moment, but it will be drowned out by mythologizing, authoritarian canonization, and rank stupidity fostered in our corporate media. Just as Patti experienced when she came out with "The Way I See It" back in 1992.

We do not want to know the "real" Ronald Wilson Reagan. Collectively, we never will. Truth does not become us. We prefer ignorance. That's how Reagan got elected to begin with.

Behold, his legacy continues. Reagan, our Ozymandias, our Brezhnev, our naked emperor.

*

Addendum: There's a lot more rancor and vile, or what we on the left like to call "the truth," over at The Exiled: click here, and at Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread here.

*

One final thought from Neponset over in "The Crack Den:" From a completely selfish perspective I'd like to thank the Egyptian protesters for helping blow Reagan's birthday off the front page. If it weren't for Egypt blowing up it would have been Ronnie 24/7 all week on the cables. If you have a choice between pictures of Reagan clearing brush and guys on camels charging a crowd, the camels win.

Though, in the very literal sense, I will be disappointed if the camels do in fact win.

O Quam Gloriosum

2011-02-03T04:14:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to the most wonderful Digby on high.

Seattle now has permanent tent cities. Digby rightly suggests that we now have a permanent underclass of homeless and unemployed individuals and often entire families. Reagan's fabled "morning in America" has arrived. And it sucks.

I told you so.

Addendum: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread has a nifty run-down of Reagan's "folksy fascism" that sums things up very nicely.

Seraphim Incessabili Voce

2011-01-15T05:39:00.000-08:00

Shorter Charles Krauthammer: "Mountains. Molehills. They're the same thing!"

Fossil fuels; they're what's for dinner. A good portion of the calories you consume are there because of petroleum-derived agricultural fertilizers. Then there's transportation, because much of the food you eat comes from places very far away, unless you happen to be living on a kiwi-fruit farm. As the world's oil reserves decline, food production will decline with it, until the Leviathan of hunger rears its head and human populations drop precipitously.

There's a gun show in Tucson this weekend.

Cynaegeirus was one of the 192 Greeks who lost their lives at the battle of Marathon. He was attacking one of the Persian ships when it is said his hand was cut off. He was the brother of the famous tragedian Aeschylus.

Julia Fischer isn't just a sensational violinist. She is also a formidable pianist and on occasion she has played both a concerto for violin and another for piano during the same concert.

PorkPie!

What's a Reince Priebus? One may similarly inquire, as did Rowan and Martin, "What's an orange gopher?" (The answer is "about a quarter each.")

Janacek. He drinks out of the bowl by dipping his paw in then licking the water off it. If I do not awaken at an appropriate time he gently paws my face in the very early morning. My spouse found him hiding under a car during a hot summer long ago, when he was still a kitten.

Arizona state senator Lori Klein, Republican, carries a Ruger in her purse while serving in the Capitol even though signs on the doors indicate that it is a weapons-free zone.

New Developments in Evolutionary Biology

2011-01-12T17:22:00.000-08:00

Other countries do not automatically confer citizenship to the children of (illegal) immigrants, so we should be like that, too.

Other countries also have single-payer universal healthcare. But we should never ever do *that,* because it would be gay and socialist and it would undo The American Dream of going bankrupt because of family healthcare crises.

Crimes can only be attributed to those who commit them, because words and images ultimately cannot be proven to have any direct effect upon our actions.

We now pause for this commercial, which will subtly and surreptitiously persuade you to go buy a new Lexus and vote for Sarah Palin.

Telling people to take to Second Amendment Remedies, to not retreat but to reload, and to threaten to meet census workers coming to their door by aiming guns at them is Sacred Free Speech and should be subject to the deference of all.

Calls for civil debate are anathema and those who make such suggestions are toying evilly with the fragile emotions of pious gunslingers and they should just keep their sorry mouths shut or somebody's going to get hurt.

Children are our future.

But religious bigots deserve our respect for showing us the connection between that girl's tragic shooting death and gay marriage and she can just burn in hell for it.

It's a miracle that Gabby Giffords is still alive; god himself must have saved her.

Those who died, not so much as a peep from said god.

Christina Taylor Green.

The insanely religious Phelps clan will actually hold no protests in Tucson; they will be given airtime on local hate-radio instead. Equal time will be given to Noam Chomsky and P.Z. Myers to offer their rebuttals.

It's wrong to exploit tragedies like the Tucson shootings for political gain.

911! 911! 911! If you criticize our war-lust, you are a traitor!

The Catalogue of Ships (Homage to Homer Shamelessly Lifted from William Rivers Pitt)

2011-01-11T06:40:00.000-08:00

The eloquent Mr. Pitt:

Rush Limbaugh
James Hansen
Phil Gramm
Ann Coulter
John Berbyshire
Don Davis

And many many more.

"You false patriots who bring assault rifles to political rallies, you hack politicians and media personalities who lied through your stinking teeth about "death panels" and "Obama is coming for your guns" and "He isn't a citizen" and "He's a secret Muslim" and "Sharia Law is coming to America," you who spread this bastard gospel and you who swallowed it whole, I am talking to you, because this was your doing just as surely as it was the doing of the deranged damned soul who pulled the trigger. The poison you injected into our culture is deeply culpable for this carnage."

From William Rivers Pitt in a recent edition of truthout.

Many speak, but many do not listen. Many others speak, and too many listen uncritically.

Build Up

2011-01-10T03:39:00.000-08:00

"You choose your side. You either build up or tear down. You either keep in the light where you can see, or you stand in the dark and fight everything that comes near you, because you can't see and you think it's an enemy.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, "The Lost Prince."

Hat tip to Pentimenti over in the Eschaton rabble-rousing, mostly-enlightened (almost completely, actually,) Echo-enfeebled crack den.

Another hat tip to Gromit, who suggests that you peruse the April 2009 report issued by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis; a link to the full report can be found here, which references a few of its highlights. The Shrill One also links to it.

My own analysis of recent speculations: "The shooter was an advocate of currency backed by gold and silver. Glenn Beck shills for gold on his television show. Therefore, the shooter was a leftist."

Domestic Terrorism

2011-01-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

And many others.

May the survivors recover fully and speedily. May the dead rest. May the rest of us work to make things right.

"Second Amendment Remedy"

2011-01-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

Sharron Angle, this is on you. Gabrielle Gifford's blood, as well as the blood of the other victims, is on your hands.

Sarah Palin has already quickly removed this from her website.

Four PorkPies, a Fechiene, and a Lilly

2011-01-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

PorkPie-Wan Kenobi

2011-01-04T12:07:00.000-08:00

"These aren't the droids you're looking for."

Walk Away

2010-12-31T07:17:00.000-08:00

" Mortgage defaults continue to set new records. Foreclosures continue to set new records. Home repossessions by banks continue to set new records. The number of homes being constructed and the number of Americans applying for home loans is at stunningly low levels. For decades, owning a home has been touted as the very heart of "the American Dream", but today that dream is out of reach for an increasing number of Americans. Why? It is because there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone."

You can read the read the rest of that good news at The American Dream. You can look to see if your city is on this recent "Case-Shiller Price Cumulative Declines From Peak" graph over on Calculated Risk.

This is my advice to you if you have lost your job and face home foreclosure: Walk Away. Things are so fucked-up right now that doing so is the only thing that would make sense for you and your family if you unfortunately land in such a situation.

Ugly House Photos has even more lovely pictures of Phoenix neighborhoods. The more people that walk away from messes like these, the better.

Luke, I Am Your Father

2010-12-31T05:51:00.001-08:00

This is odd. Neither Barack Obama Senior nor Frank Marshall Davis served in the second world war:

The working theory is that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama's father, and as such he is listed on the "real" Hawaiian birth certificate. Not Barack Senior.

Davis:

Barack Senior:

The whole little conspiracy theory is laid out at The Astute Bloggers. I ran into it over at bartcop in his recent issue #2630. He just gives it a link.

Apparently Obama's grandfather used to take him to visit Davis often when our president was but little. Davis and Stanley Dunham (Obama's grandfather) were close friends. The claim that his "father served in World War II" seems not to be the case; it isn't mentioned in the brief online biographies I have read, such as this one at Poets.org

I don't really care one way or another. It's just gossip. No matter who his father is, Obama is still cute. What could be more important than that?

How I Got My Nursing License

2010-12-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

Nursing school was basically free (or at least very inexpensive) for me. I was working at a community hospital while taking classes and 8-hour-long clinicals. The hospital had a pool of money available to share among its employees who were taking work-related courses. I paid up-front for tuition each semester and afterwards submitted grades to the nice lady in the financial office. A grade of B or better would mean I got a check to cover my tuition. Sweet.

I hardly ever bought texts. The RN's I worked with either loaned or gave me theirs. All the good parts were already underlined or highlighted for me.

I didn't stick my neck out. I got through nursing school by avoiding eye contact and keeping my head down. I'd let other students comment in class, then I'd either chime in or stay quiet depending upon how the instructors reacted to the question or opinion.

I wore solid black to every class.

Except sometimes, often in fact, I wore red sneakers. I like the shoes that collegiate wrestlers wear. These are light and have little sole. They come up around the ankles. Plus, nobody else wears them out and about. People would ask me where I got them, and I would tell them about the sports catalogues from which these things could be purchased. Wrestling shoes. Be the first kid on your block to sport them around.

I only missed two classes of the whole of them. One was to go to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins were the warm-ups. At the end of their set, Billy Corgin purposely left his guitar leaning up against a speaker cabinet and the arena was filled with screeching feedback as they left the stage. Very cool. The other was for the Public Enemy and Anthrax tour, with Primus and the Young Black Teenagers opening. Flavor Flav came out in pink bunny slippers and his trademark clock medallion. Anthrax did a speed-of-light version of Joe Jackson's "Got the Time."

I claimed to be sick for the first, and said in half-truth that I had to go to traffic court the second time. Truth is not always your friend.

Nursing schools pride themselves on their graduation rates and the percentage of their graduates who pass the boards on the first go. They mercilessly weed out any student that they even remotely think might fail the board exams. Many people who I wanted to pull along because I thought they would be good nurses were flunked because the instructors just plain didn't like their board prospects. Secretly I tried to help some of my fellow classmates. If it became apparent that they were getting help it drew negative attention to them. I would meet them in their cars in the parking lot after class.

One young woman I helped in this way was cut. We were making our "drug cards" together in her car after a clinical and one of the instructors saw us together. This young girl, fresh out of high school and eager to be a nurse, got the dump after being pommeled, scrutinized, and harrassed by our mostly elderly nurse instructors; people who hadn't worked at the bedside in many years.

One of my male classmates who had already had a physical-therapy degree was bumped off the rails simply because one of the more mean-spirited old-fashioned instructors didn't like him personally, I am quite sure. I saw single mothers struggling through school get dumped in the last semester just because some entrenched instructor didn't like one of their patient care-plans. That was particularly sad. One had two kids. Her mother cared for them so she could go to school and study.

Zap.

I am luckily one of those people who "tests well," and I graduated in the top four of my class. Not that I'm proud. I maintained my training schedule during nursing school, qualifying for and running in the Boston Marathon in those years. That was probably easier than nursing school itself.

Though most of my teachers and clinical instructors were jack-assed throwbacks, I did like a few. Our mental-health nurse teacher was great. We had "positive group" at the end of our clinicals, in which she randomly challenged us to say good things that we observed one another do.

There was a drug bust during one of those 8-hour sessions in the mental-health unit. One of the younger patients was caught dealing cocaine to other patients. State troopers hauled him away. I have no idea how he managed to get his friends to sneak cocaine into a locked unit such as that one.

One of my classroom instructors was one of those people who had a wide variety of interests. I liked her and she liked me. She herself had graduated from the famed Boston University nursing school, and she knew well of my interests in Boston at that time. She said she could pull a few strings and get me a job there after graduation. That didn't pan out because I followed the love of my life to The Dismal Wilderness instead. The things we do for love...

I wrote papers on suicide, Menier's disease, and the moral development of children, among other things, for that instructor. I thought she graded them rather generously. As part of my research I visited suicide self-help groups for family members of people who had killed themselves, and I visited Montessori schools. I read Freud, Erickson, and Kohlberg and learned to pretty much hate one of those guys. I think that teacher appreciated my outside work, as if it were an effort. I actually just did it for enjoyment.

I also remember reading Paradise Lost while eating at the college snackbar between work and class, watching Sam Nunn cast his vote in favor of Clarence Thomas on the television news. Fucking bastards the both of them. While doing that I stumbled across one of my favorite words, said to have been coined by Milton: Pandemonium.

I paid about $200 to take my nursing board exams back in the day. But before the results were mailed out to us, the company that administered the tests for the state of New York demanded about another $180 from each of us. They raised the price of the licensing exam retroactively!

Fuckers.

When I received the congratulatory letter in the mail months later, it wasn't for me but for another nursing graduate with a similar name. I called them up (they lived in Malone, about an hours' drive from where I was living at the time,) to tell them that they passed.

That person did not, however, have my results, as I had hoped. After several phone calls and an annoying written appeal or two, I finally got my passing grade and was able to collect an RN's pay instead of a "graduate nurse" pay.

Fucking incompetent greedy fuckers.

I was in the last class of NY nurses that took exams the old-fashioned way: on paper, with some skinny bitch exam proctor wandering among us to make sure we didn't cheat and to follow us to the bathroom. I took this test with about 4,000 others in a large convention room at the state capitol hundreds of miles from my home. The exam took two days. Many of my classmates pooled resources and shared local hotel rooms. I instead drove from Albany to my father's place in Saratoga Springs and he put me up for the night.

He said he was proud of me. He never obtained a college degree nor did he practice a profession.

I was lucky.

The cost of national board certification for teachers totals up to $2,500. That's sick. That's more than doctors pay for their basic three stages of exams.

Now, back to the Crack Den.

Hidden Argument

2010-12-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

One of the best "nurse bloggers" is Jo over at Head Nurse. She does neuro intensive care stuff at her job, but of course being a nurse is so much more than just a job and her writings reflect that.

She has been through a lot lately and she has come through it well from a clinical standpoint. Her health problems appear to basically be done with, but at each ending there is a beginning. She writes:

You told Rosie up at the Magic Prosthetist Elf's that you wouldn't cover but about a grand of the cost of my oral prosthetic. That's less, BCBS-TX, than Medicare covers on the same sort of prosthetic. You are actually reimbursing *less than Medicare* for something that allows me to eat, talk, and breathe properly.

Medicare operates on about a 3% administrative overhead. Their top executives receive well under $200K per year in pay; more accurately about $180K. Compare this to the multi-million-dollar payouts to corporate executives, and you might get some idea as to just why private insurance companies maintain about a 20% skim for overhead.

Private insurance companies would be even less efficient if it were not for one thing: the law. They are required by law to spend at least 80% of their premium intake on patients' claims. Even then they use accounting tricks to fudge this a little.

They'd take it all if they could.

And for what?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

"I think — I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. "It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you."

Even the rich themselves appear not to know why they need so much money nor upon what exactly they spend it.

Why is this?

According to some, the McCains aren't even all that wealthy. They are rather what is called "pikers."

A few years ago they sold the home that contains this room. Cindy grew up there. It's on Central Avenue in Phoenix across from the shady Bridle Path where I like to walk or run on my days off. I think they got about $4 million for the place. The purchaser "renovated" it (in other words, further ruined it) by among other things covering the backyard with nice warm summer-sunlight-absorbing pavers. Ouch. That's hot!

The idiot.

He tried to get $11 million for it. Rotsa ruck. That's a lot of money for generic dreck.

Oh well. Who summers in Phoenix anyways? That's what the ranch in Sedona is for.

Some say that money doesn't buy happiness. They will tell you that the wealthy also have problems. Indeed, they will insist, some poor people are in fact much more satisfied with their lives than the richest of the rich. Well then, let us take everything from the rich and make them poor, so they can show us just how happy one can be with little or nothing. If they are as talented and deserving as so many of them claim, they will quickly pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. No worries then. Merry Xmas.

Gummo's Grand Experience and ludkmr, voted for Debs' Additional Mighty Lesson

2010-12-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

Posted by "Gummo" over at the Crack Den:

One of the most valuable courses I took in college was called The History and Psychology of the Holocaust.

For one assignment, the professors had us read Sartre's Anti-Semite & Jew. The day it was due they asked the lecture hall at large what we all thought of it. People heaped praise on how it destroyed every anti-Semitic argument step-by-step.

The psych professor listened for a minute then said, Forget it. It's crap. We were aghast.

He then explained that you can never trump an emotional argument with a logical one; that the emotional brain is eons older and more powerful than the relatively recent overlay of logic and reason and that people will always reject a logical argument in favor of an emotional one.

It was a powerful lesson, one I've never forgotten, and one the fascists have used to their advantage for the last hundred years.
7:50:11 AM MST 12/17/10

And now we have a study showing that those people who watch Fox News are, despite the strength with which they hold their opinions, the least-informed about important current issues. We have What's the Matter With Kansas, The Movie. We have two years of exhorbitant tax cuts for the richest 6,600 families in the country and 13 months of unemployemnt benefit extensions for those millions of people who are likely permanently out of their jobs.

It's like Xmas every day. For spin and propaganda.

Oh, what's that under your holiday tree? Bullshit. The gifts and toys may all have been made in China, Mexico, Pakistan, and Indonesia, but the bullshit is pure Yoo-Ess-of-Ay.

Have some more.

From ludkmr, who voted for Debs who also regularly contributes to the semi-illustrious Crack Den. Like many there, too many to catalogue deservedly, he has interesting things to say:

The press in this country started out as one person/one printing press operations. In reading the history of the colonial press I found the style and content amazingly similar to blogging.
[T]here were a few powerful papers around when the amendment was written and the revolution owed them, but by and large the right of those small operations to publish unfettered was what it was intended to protect.
7:58:26 AM MST 12/17/10

Today'a U.S. major media are just yesterday's Soviet Pravda on steroids and crystal-laced three-martini lunches. Today's bloggers are samizdat. That is, after you sort through all the redstate freerepublic little green republichick manure-piles. This is, after all, a country in which people are allowed some degree of mean-spiritedness and abject stupidity.

It's sickening.

Glint.

A Rat in the Kitchen

2010-12-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

Sister McBride and Bishop Olmstead.

Quoted in the local rag:"

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said a hospital's first responsibility must be to its patients, not to a religious leader.

"Religiously affiliated hospitals are not exempt from federal laws that protect a patient's right to receive emergency care and cannot invoke their religious status to jeopardize the health and lives of pregnant women," she said. "Women should never have to be afraid that they will be denied life-saving medical care when they enter a hospital."

It's a surprisingly good article. And the reader comments that follow seem to generally and widely support the hospital in question. Another snip:

Lois Uttley of MergerWatch, a New York organization that reviews issues that arise when secular and religious hospitals merge, said that in her opinion, St. Joseph has "tried mightily to balance its religious heritage with its provision of medical care." She said Catholic Healthcare West generally handles such issues well.

"They know better than the bishop how to do this," Uttley said.

I have been working as a nurse here in The Valley for about ten years and I have at least a passing familiarity with the hospitals here. Nurses travel. Nurses switch jobs frequently. We discuss the reputations, specialties, and working conditions at various institutions here. I have developed this unverified understanding of the story:

St. Joe's has a doctor that specializes in pulmonary hypertension, a condition had by the pregnant young woman in question. This doctor has license to use certain still-experimental drugs and treatments for this disease, unlike doctors at other area hospitals. So St. Joe's could not simply transfer the patient to a non-Catholic hospital; she would not have obtained the necessary treatments there.

Ethically confronted, the hospital decided to "save the only life they could" and they aborted the fetus that surely would have killed both the unfortunate woman and itself died in so doing. I don't think they had much of a choice. Perhaps Bishop Olmstead would rather that they both died, just to satisfy the primitive demands of his own religious delusions.

I have never been much satisfied with the Kohlbergian "Obedience and Punishment Orientation" of moral development, the lowest of stages according to that theory. This is the level from which Bishop Olmstead seems to operate. Fear of punishment is the only motivation for acting morally for such people. It's low. It's less than juvenile.

I think I might be justified in questioning the presence of a "moral center" in people like the bishop. Lacking that, one need only to follow "the rules" as enforced by some indemonstrable supernatural pretender. I have difficulty placing full trust in people like that. Their ideas concerning ethical performance all-too-often just happen to coincide with their own interests.

Of course it is never so simple.

There are however laws. One of those laws protects confidentiality between hospital patients and their caregivers, whether they be doctors, nurses, therapists, chaplains, whoever. And somebody, perhaps a nurse like myself, broke that law, probably deliberately, or this story would never have gone beyond the bounds of St. Joseph's Hospital in the first place.

We should never have heard about this. It's none of the bishop's business. It is by law a private matter between the patient and her treatment team.

I imagine that the person who originally leaked the story is one of those "obedience and punishment" types. Catholic herself, I would guess. That person has broken a trust, ironically because they likely believe that women as a whole cannot be trusted to make their own reproductive choices.

Gah.

Almost as an afterthought: I've been keeping up on the story both in traditional media like the internet and the gossip stream, and Sister McBride is the only member of the hospital ethics committee ever named. Who are these other people? Are they all non-Catholics? Why has the bishop singled her out with the threat of excommunication?

Teabaggers Are Not Racist.

2010-12-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

A white separatist has caused outrage by building a 10-foot-tall Ku Klux Klan snowman in his Idaho yard.
The pointed-hood wearing, noose-holding, dark-eyed sculpture sat in front of Mark Eliseuson's Hayden home, just down the street from a local elementary school.

The Daily Mail story is here.

It features a photograph of the artist. Sigh. Once again, as a First Amendment fan, I find myself defending shit. Oh well.

Just remember, Teabaggers Aren't Racist. Tell all your friends.

A Squadron of Pelicans

2010-12-02T10:03:00.001-08:00

We were all chatting about our children. Many of us have kids who are coming-of-age, and it seems that this brings about differences in them. Newly adolescent girls, for example, we noted to have become moody and verbally aggressive at times. Terms like "total bitch on wheels" and "such a nasty little fucker" were heard among us parents.

Why would this be the case? Why would girls who are reaching reproductive age develop personality traits that might drive others away from them? This seems like a rather poor evolutionary strategy, unless it is meant to keep others away from these girls until they are older.

*

I was told that dogs are colorblind. Then why do dogs come in such a variety of colors? As it turns out, they are not completely colorblind at all.

*

Violinist Janine Jansen. Her recent recording of the Beethoven concerto is the one I consider to be the best in my collection. She also has out a recording of the Bach two-part-inventions and sinfonias played chamber-music style with other string players, and that's a lot of fun.

*

The Black Sea used to be a freshwater lake. It was much smaller and its surface then was probably over four hundred feet lower than it is now. Sometime over 7,000 years ago the Bosporus was breached and the Black Sea was quickly inundated with Mediterranean seawater. This is the origin of the flood myths familiar to us from Genesis and the Gilgamesh epic.

*

If you have a friend or relative in the hospital and you wish to call to inquire about their condition, their nurse will not be able to provide you with any information unless the patient has authorized this. Even then, since identification is practically impossible just over the phone, such authorization doesn't really extend to phone calls. The nurse cannot legally admit that the patient is even there. This is federal law.

It's also a big waste of my precious time. Time which I would rather spend on patient care, not explaining to callers that I cannot tell them anything.

I might be patiently trying to thread a small-bore intravenous catheter into a wiggly little rubbery vein in a sweet little old lady's arm when the phone rings and a caller, without identifying themselves of course, demands information on another of my patients. I hate that.

Phone rings, I answer. "Why yes Mr. MethMouth, your Aunt Zelda is here. She just got out of surgery and though doing well she's probably going to be in the hospital for several days, so feel free to burglerize her home and jack her car. She won't be home to notice."

A Knob of Widgeons

2010-11-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

There's a scene around the kitchen table in one of the Godfather movies, probably the second one. They are discussing Vietnam. Micheal reveals that he has signed up for the Marines, after one of his brothers, I think it was Sonny, derided enlistees as saps.

So why did Michael join? It is never explained in the movie. Perhaps it was because he was a psychopath and he wanted to hone his skills.

*

I keep my laptop computer screen scrupulously clean. Yet I often find that someone has left grimy fingerprints and such on it. I will get a fingerprint-identification kit and find out exactly who has been doing this. Then I will confront them. I will derate them for their slovenliness. I will give them very harsh looks.

*

"You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force them to take their Levaquin."

*

When did such things begin, these new American norms? Was it with the infamous photograph of the naked Vietnamese girl running away from the napalm? Was it when Reagan sold armaments and spare parts to our Iranian foes in order to fund the Contras? Or was it much further back, with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments?

Waterboarding is acceptable now. Pundits openly call for the summary execution of flood victims who have been forced to loot stores to get bread to survive. Material witnesses are detained without charges forever. We bomb weddings.

It was always this way, wasn't it? This is how we are. We are not guided by words on paper. We do not read.

*

The Union troops could plainly see the mortally wounded Confederate soldier that lay in the field between the opposing forces. They watched as he loaded his rifle, put it to his chin, then fired.

What was the Civil War all about? I do not know. Power, I suppose, like all things. Like the abortion debate. Like tax cuts for billionaires. Like Marshall guitar amplifiers. Like poetry.

Stilts

2010-11-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Glenn Gould
Anna-Sophie Mutter
Catrin Finch
Eroica Trio
Jan Cizmar

A Flight of Comorants

2010-10-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

It is not unthinkable to propose that any given person's, say for example, musical talent, lies along a gradient. Some people are naturally very good musicians, Mozart probably being the best example of one born with supreme innate musical ability. Similarly, some people are good ball players and some people are not.

I would consider that the ability to change your mind also lies along a spectrum. At the upper end of such a scale there are people who change their minds quite easily as new evidence presents itself. Scientists do this. And at the other end of the scale there are people who cannot change their minds at all.

Such people may even be able to hold two contradictory ideas at once in their heads; even their own beliefs will not persuade them to change their thinking. We all know such people. We see them on television all the time. Often we put these people in positions of leadership in political or religious matters.

*

Your fellow citizens do not all like you. Sorry. Some of them would slit your throat for fifty bucks; others might do so just for kicks. They do not care that your children receive access to education. They would ship your job overseas to pay a third-world laborer mere pennies if they could. Many already have. Of course there are some nice people. Like nurses, who generally are a supportive and social lot. But aren't they the exception?

We seem to villify and hate one another. What's the point of even having a country if we are all behaving like self-centered greedy little monads? The very idea of having a country for such people seems ridiculous. I have to wonder if "countries" even present our species with evolutionary disadvantages. All the better for us to kill one another off.

*

Consider this news:

"A 9-year-old boy was flown to a hospital after he was found lying unconscious in a street in Gilbert Sunday afternoon.

[snip]

It was unclear whether the other occupants of the car knew the boy had fallen out or if they had left the scene."

*

Cross Bayou Elementary School is just down the street from the hospice that treated Terri Schiavo back when that was all over the news. A man called the school one day during the protests and said that he was going to hold the entire school hostage and kill a young student every ten minutes unless feedings were resumed for Schiavo.

School officials just couldn't take anymore and over that weekend they abandoned Cross Bayou Elementary.

Things are back to normal there now.

*

Hilary Hahn's new recording of the Higdon concerto, which was written for her, coupled with the Tchaikovsky. Talk about talent. This music is a treasure. I'm especially fond of the Higdon. If you knew me, you would already know that.

*

We had brunch yesterday at St. Francis. It was excellent. Outside and down a few seats from us a hipster and a young woman were getting to know one another. "I feel sorry for people," I said to my spouse, "Because they have to get to know one another. It's so much easier with a person when you already know them." The orange juice was freshly-squeezed.

*

Nursing stuff:

We were in the car waiting at the corner of 19th Avenue to turn onto Camelback. A woman staggered through the crosswalk in front of us. She looked to be about fifty, or maybe thirty-five-going-on-fifty-five. Her blue eyes stared blankly ahead. "What's she on?" my spouse asked me. "Probably just alcohol," I replied.

When a staggering middle-aged alcoholic woman looks at the sea, how does she look at it and what does she see? Is the ocean a repository of memories for her? Does she, like Citizen Cane, see Rosebud? or does she see herself merely drowning?

"How do you look at the sea" is the question I silently ask of the patients I work with.

*

Girls surfing in Gaza.

“What do you wear when you swim in America?” she asks. I hesitate before replying, “Not much.”

Rawand nods sagely. “When you surf in America, do people stare at you?”

“No,” I answer.

“They do here,” she sighs.

Surfing in Gaza. That is so cool. It might just save the world.

A Chattering of Starlings

2010-10-16T05:40:00.001-07:00

The Greek hoplites, ountnumbered at least 20,000 to 10,000 at Marathon, had to attack the Persians early in the day. They were basically done slaughtering them by about 9 a.m. which gave them time to run 25 miles back to Athens to protect it from invading Persian ships. The famous "marathon run" was not made by Phedipides. Instead, the Greek army made the run. Phedipedes did however run from Athens to Sparta, about 140 miles, to implore them for help. That, amazingly, took him about a day-and-a-half one-way. The Spartans, being sticklers for religious observation, said they'd come help fight when the moon was right. 6,400 Persians will killed at Marathon, while the wildly outnumbered Greeks lost 192 men and their allies the Plataeans lost 11.

Knowledge is constantly subject to revision. Belief, not so much.

Everyone must drink their own tea. But the cat you pet belongs to no one.

Twenty-six out of the approximately 8,600 species of birds use tools. Even then only a few individual birds have been observed to do so. Good for them.

The Greeks made a thorough counting of Persian bodies on the Marathon plains because they had promised the goddess Athena that they would sacrifice a goat for every enemy soldier killed. 6,400 was way too many, so they made arrangements to offer the goats on an installment plan of 500 per year. That's still a lot of goats.

A Trip of Dotterel

2010-10-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

When I am inserting a peripheral venous catheter into someone's vein, I am doing nothing. When I am in love I am doing nothing. When I am picking up groceries I am doing nothing. This is how I survive. By doing as little as possible.

The ancient Persians carried large wicker shields that protected them from arrows and spears. They would march their line to within about one-hundred meters of the opposing army and set up their shields like a wall. From behind this they would take to their bows and darken the sky with arrows. After this initial attack, the cavalry would ride in among the enemy and do battle with those who had not been killed or injured by the archers. Meanwhile the foot-soldiers would again attack but now with their spears and swords. They were usually successful.

We are repeating a more recent past.

It looked like asystole to me. I was assigned to the defibrillator so I figured the doctor would call it done and I could leave and get on to other things. "It could be fine v-fib," he said and he asked me to shock the patient again. We all looked at each other. "Clear?" I said, and then I pressed the button for 360 joules. The husband of the patient was standing in the corner of the room. Nobody was explaining anything to him. I could see that he was on the verge of tears.

Rachel Podger is my favorite Vivaldi player and her solo Bach is great, too. She specializes in Baroque violin, but I'd really like to hear her do the Beethoven concerto someday.

An omniscient and omnipotent deity would know what he was going to do next. Indeed, he would have to do what he was going to do next, and he'd know it. He would be like Sisyphus.

It pleases me that dogs dream.

White Roof Walk Us

2010-10-02T03:24:00.000-07:00

We live smack in the middle, geometrically, of Phoenix.

View Larger Map

As you move east from Central Avenue, every fourth street is zoned for retail. 12th has the car wash, a nice restaurant, a convenience store, a liquor shop, and a coin laundromat. One of the bays of the do-it-yourself carwash has been fenced and converted into a "dogwash." Shrimpbowl and friends can always make a few bucks by sudsing up the dogz.

Atrios came to our house and in the interests of energy reflection painted the roof white.

16th street has several gourmet restaurants as well as fast food. There's a running store, an electronics trade and repair place, a couple coffee shops including a drive-through Starbucks, an excellent butcher shop, a Japanese bakery, and many other delights. The Italian grocer and the Polish bakery are also nice to have around.

The next major corner north (a few streets up and about a ten-minute walk from home) has a large local chain grocer and a drugstore that mostly sells wines and spirits; I assume that because half the store is occupied by such. You can eat sushi while the woman at the dry-cleaners fixes buttons missing from clothing you dropped off to be mended there.

The other way down 16th leads to the corner with the school and Senator McCain's office, outside which is encamped a group in support of the Dream Act.

I like the idea of universal education. It should be free or at least easily affordable to all who work to pursue it to any level they wish. What would result? Would we end up a nation with bus-drivers who held doctorate degrees?

Who's to say.

I am convinced of one thing though: education makes us better.

Us.

That's another thing that education can make us.

The Cat in Catholic

2010-09-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

This is an image from the most wonderful and ancient Book of Kells, which is probably about a thousand years old. It appears to show a mouse gnawing on a communion wafer. Hence the importance of church cats.

A Dole of Doves

2010-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Sisyphus did not push the boulder up the hill over and over. He did not have reconciliatory thoughts as he padded his way down the slope. Sisyphus did not suffer endless monotonous back-breaking toil.

Because he did not exist.

You, however, do.

I am making a sauce. I will not put too many things in it.

Dogs, generally speaking having four legs, love to walk. They jump and skitter about when we go for their leashes. Not so the cats.

What does it mean, really, to finish? I am not trying to be obtuse. I just do not understand the term.

Sam Phillips

2010-09-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

Baby I Can't Please You

Songs like these are just too good.

Hopefully, not too good for you.

Search for them.

A Wisp of Snipe

2010-09-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

A cat may look at a king. A particularly human-like cat may look at a mouse and think it a king.

I heard it explained this way: The singer was offering praises to his woman in long melismatic and rhythmically flexible melodic lines. The guitars and drums were percolating away. People danced. But the talking drum, that was literally another story, for it was saying to the singer's woman that the singer had been sleeping with her sister.

The criminalist dusted the crime scene and obtained fingerprint specimens. He then ran these through the computer system that catalogues the prints of other individuals. He finds that there is a match. The prints are those of god. However, fingerprints that match those of Mozart are also found on the scene, making certain conclusions impossible.

The warm desert air is perfect for drying clothes, and the smell of sheets dried out-of-doors is just wonderful. Jeans are stiff when you pull them down off the line but then they soften and cleave to your legs when you put them on.

How many times have you genuinely looked as hard as you could, yet you just couldn't see it? You may have nodded in agreement anyways. You wanted to remain friends. In fact, you are quite the "friendster."

Fiordiligi and Dorabella think they are going to marry Albanians! What a joke. Cosi fan Tutte.

For Eve Who Found the Grace to Fall From Adam (MacLeish)

2010-09-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

She was found down somewhere out on the edges. Parts of this megalopolis abut reservation. The highway divides the sprawl from the wispy and scrawny rural fields and widely-separated dilapidated shacks.

They beat her up pretty good. She had a cervical collar on until Neuro-Surg cleared her. Lacerations above the eye and it was swollen shut. I cleansed that area very gently and put some anti-bacterial ointment on it. Nurse K. from the night shift told me that she had pushed a little harder and she could feel the pulpy fragmented orbital bones just beneath the rough laceration.

She reeked of alcohol. Nurse K. couldn't get a history from her. I had better luck during the day as she woke up a little bit. Thinking that she was an alcoholic, the docs had me scoring her for withdrawal. I didn't really see any evidence of that.

She said she had been homeless for two months because her boyfriend stole her truck and kicked her out. She also said that she ran out of her medications, listing Tegretol, Seroquel (which she spelled for me on a scrap of paper,) and Haldol. She took them "to help stop the voices." She had a job at an auto-upholstery shop on the south side. She also said that she only drank occasionally, although to excess, again to "stop the voices."

Don't we all.

Trauma and Plastics were on her case, and we added Neuro, Psych, and a Medicalist to help. Good. The more the better.

The Plastics surgeon did a great job on her but it left her looking rather strange. He shaved the front portion of her hair to expose the scalp, then cut from ear-to-ear over the top of her head. That way he could peel her forehead skin down to work on her crushed-up orbital bones underneath. When her hair grows back she will appear as if nothing had happened to her.

Initially she came out with a mummy-wrap dressing around her head. Yes, we get this stuff all the time on our thoracic telemetry unit. When the Plastics doctor came by the next day he removed the dressing and wrote orders to just put ointment on the staple line. She also had a bulb drain sticking out of the right side of her head. A fourteen-inch tube about an eighth of an inch in diameter, leading to a grenade-sized clear-plastic bulb which, when compressed, applied a little suction to the line and drew bloody drainage from her head to reduce swelling. It fit into the pocket of her hospital gown.

"Well," said the Plastics guy, "I'm all done and she can go home. Just have her see me on Friday."

She doesn't have a home.

She doesn't have her medications.

Fucking A she didn't even have any clothes.

I had asked her about that. She had no family to call, and the nearest thing she had to a home was the downtown shelter. Being a schizophrenic, she had varying unsubstantial stories about how she obtained her medications. She told me she got them from "somebody."

I did not want to discharge her to a shelter with a fucking drain sticking out of her head and a row of coronal staples openly exposed, though she promised me that "would not let any germs get in there."

I desperately called the medicalist and since it was getting late anyways, Case Management wouldn't have time to help us arrange things for her discharge.

"Don't hurry," the patient said to me.

The thing aboiut being a hospital nurse is that you never have the time to hurry.

We finagled her another night in the hospital despite that all the teams had already signed off on her. She kept thanking me.

It's one thing if it were you or me. We could sit home and watch Law & Order reruns and take quite good care of our drains and incisions ourselves. But this was a schizophrenic under-medicated street person with no family ties. Imagine if you were walking down the street and you saw this woman coming at you from other way with a drain sticking out of her head.

Imagine what you might say to her.

Hello.

Having a nice day?

A Dray of Squirrels

2010-08-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

The dog chewed my eyeglasses. This is not the first time that such a thing has happened. I have tried to explain to the dog that eyeglasses have no nutritional value.

Similarly I have tried to explain Social Security insurance to libertarians, with as much success.

Mud and adulthood.

"I am not much for forgiveness," I said to my spouse.
They were little concerned, but asked "Is there anything I have done for which you have yet to forgive me?"
"Yes," I said. "Once fifteen years ago you stepped on my foot and you never apologized for it."
"Well, I'm sorry now," they said.
"You should be," I replied.

The phone rang and I actually picked up the receiver because I knew the person calling and it was for my spouse so I would not be obliged to talk for very long. At the end of our brief exchange I said "I'll see you later, Cort," and I realized then that yes, I probably would be seeing her later but she will be all fuzzy because I do not have my eyeglasses.

Last week we travelled to New York and I met with someone I used to love very deeply. It was nice. I will never forget it.

We also heard Garrick Ohlsson play the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He made it look easy, which of course it isn't. Rachmaninoff himself said he "wrote it for elephants." A week previously we saw "The Magic Flute" performed in Santa Fe. It's been a good month. Except for eyeglasses.

The patient had been with us for a very long time, many months. He had been plagued by chronic diarrhea and for a while we had been using rectal tubes. With much patience on our part, the nursing staff, and much work from him, yesterday we assisted him to sit on the commode to pass stool. He did not have any episodes of fecal incontinence in bed nor chair. For the entire day. "Mr. D., you're continent now!" I told him. He cried a little and said, "Yes, you helped me get some of my manhood back." That was really cool. I congratulated him for his hard work and I asked him to pat himself on the back for that.

A Rafter of Turkeys

2010-07-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

I am on trial for my life. The courtroom is packed with onlookers and members of the media. From behind the desk at which I am seated with my lawyers, I look over at the jury box. The jurors are all dogs. I like dogs, and dogs like me.

I look forward to the day when Leonardo DiCaprio and John Cusack make a movie together.

I am a hospital nurse but due to the specialty nature of the unit I work on, I cannot much discuss some of the things that we do. Just the occasional interesting tidbit. For example, I recently had a patient who had been suffering from diarrhea. For months. The routine tests for such things as clostridium difficile were negative, but we kept sending the tests anyways. We switched around his tube feedings. We stopped these for awhile. Nothing seems to work. He did not have surgery on his digestive tract. I remain puzzled, but a devoted and attendant nurse. Lots of gentle cleansing and protective ointments for his raw skin areas. The patient has become really depressed, but I never give up.

In the wild, cats (Felis catus) do not "meow." They only do this in the realm of humans. Conversely, when I am in the wild I often struggle with the desire to meow and make gutteral hissing noises at birds and small woodland creatures. Which reminds me, today I have to refill the birdfeeder.

Tycho Brahe computed the procession of equinoxes as 51 seconds of arc per year. He didn't have a telescope because they hadn't been invented yet. The modern value is accepted as 50.23 seconds of arc. Not bad for a guy who lost the bridge of his nose in a duel. He wore a silver and gold fake.

Lemonade

2010-07-07T06:51:00.001-07:00

So this knucklehead is driving around with his family and they happen upon some kids selling lemonade. Well, actually they were not selling it. It was a very hot day so they were giving it away. So what does Mr. Knucklehead do? He gives them a lecture on free-market ideology.

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

Yes. He has regular readers. Ones who have bowel movements on a routine schedule. They read him here. God in heaven I so hated providing that link.

No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.

He says.

I call a straw-man argument. Nobody thinks this stuff is free. We all know the costs. This information is everywhere.

The cost of war. Over $1 trillion dollars and growing daily, and so far we've gotten absolutely nothing out of it except a few thousand dead and ruined soldiers.

Chump change, though. Remember the bank bailouts? You have to google that, because your average journalist has the attention span of a heroin-addicted housefly so there's no headlining that today. How does $4 trillion sound to you? Good? Free? Not free?

But of course Mr. Knucklehead doesn't mention those things. No.

And so the voters demand more -- more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.

The real problem with America and its profligate government is voters. Especially those who have homes. Or those who have lost their jobs. They're not worth a few billion dollars. Well, a little more than that. The unemployment benefits extension recently stymied by Republicans would have cost about $33.9 billion. That's a lot of cash, though a tiny number compared to what we spend on war and banks. It's cash that would get immediately spent and circulated throughout our economy though, unlike the hundreds of billions we spend on ordinance that ends up buried in the sands of Araby or bailout cash that winds up in some rich Republican's Swiss bank account. Whatever.

Anyways, Savage is an idiot. There's no arguing with him, I am sure. Ideology like his is impermeable. Fossilized. Never changing. Not reality based.

And because he is that deranged, he lectures little girls on a hot summer day, trying to persuade them out of their joyful kindness.

What an asshole.

There Goes Half

2010-07-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

Fired for speaking Tagalog at work.

Well, there goes half the night shift.

I personally work with nurses and other staff members from the Philippines, England, Mexico, Nigeria, Italy, Ethiopia, Canada, India, and even the faraway and exotic realms of Idaho, to name a few places off the top of my head. I hear languages other than American English all the time. Even the doctors can be heard conversing in other languages sometimes.

From ABS-CBN News:

BALTIMORE, Maryland - Four Filipina ex-staffers of a Baltimore City hospital haven’t gotten over the shock of being summarily fired from their jobs, allegedly because they spoke Pilipino during their lunch break.

[snip]

“They claimed they heard us speaking in Pilipino and that is the only basis of the termination. It wasn’t because of my functions as a nurse. There were no negative write-ups, no warning before the termination,” she added.

The nurses were previously required to sign paperwork agreeing to limit lunch and snack breaks, and included in it was an English-only policy that "directs that English should be the only language spoken while the nurses are on ER duty."

Fair enough. Like the guy says, in a code situation you don't want people yelling out commands in a variety of different languages. It's bad enough we still have to deal with all the crappy Latin abbreviations and such that we use everyday. But these nurses were allegedly overheard while they were at lunch. The hospital hasn't actually specified when exactly the nurses violated policy.

And they were fired for this?! What, is there an oversupply of E.D. nurses in Baltimore?! It's going to cost that hospital a good 10K a piece to train replacements. If they can find any. I wouldn't work there. In times of stress I sometimes let out a string of words from Olde Englishe. That would be bad.

Of course, this being Arizona, here it could actually get worse.

"The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English," The Wall Street Journal reported.

So, joo con be fired por sayeeng "biolet" eensted uff "violet."

Los yikes. There goes half the teachers in south Phoenix.

News You Can Use

2010-06-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

Oscar the bionic cat.

Hat tip to Chris Tucker:GOP Delenda Est! over in The Crack Den. Like he says: Science Works.

Have a Heart, Not a Kidney

2010-06-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

A sign put up by a Florida urologist who apparently has a problem treating people because of how they vote. Story here.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), the congressman who represents the district of the Florida doctor discriminating against Obama voters, said, “Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no good.’ If this is the face of the right-wing in America, it’s the face of cruelty.”

Cruelty indeed.

I suppose this is where I once again proclaim my Constitutional right as a nurse to refuse to defibrillate Republicans. I just won't do it. I don't give code drugs or do compressions, either. I'll record, and if it's my patient I will facilitate communication with the doctors and staff at the bedside, minimally. But I just don't see the point. I don't defibrillate clams, either.

I walk away and check other patients. They are always ignored during codes, anyway. Well, not if I'm around and the decaying cardiac rhythm belongs to a Republican.

If you cannot tell whether or not this is snark, please refer to the article about the Florida urologist. Do you think he was snarking?

Oh, and by the way, fuck you, doctor.