Category Archives: Health

October 30, 2014 · 23:42

Flash Fiction: The People’s Plague

It’s All Hallow’s Eve Eve, so this week’s  Flash Fiction Challenge of course involves horror. Inspired by the fact that Ebola hysteria is running rampant through the mainstream media and the halls of government, our assignment is to write a horror story involving some sort of disease.

This might not have turned out as well as I wanted — too serious to be slapstick, trying too hard for a punchline to be horror. But the dozen political calls a day and hundreds of TV ads every day may be having an effect on my brain.

THE PEOPLE’S PLAGUE

“We have another one, ma’am. This report just came in from Phoenix.”

Doctor Helen Fletcher, the CDC’s lead investigator, looked at the window that popped up on her console, attached to a pin dropped on the map in Arizona. Ten cases already there, along with all of the other boxes and pins displayed all over the country. Thousands of cases nationwide and spreading like wildfire.

“We’re running out of time to get this under control,” she said to the row of faces shown in the small boxes lining the bottom of her computer screen.

“Doctor Fletcher,” the Midwest section head said, “it’s too early to even tell if it’s airborne or not. We’re going to need at least a couple of days to determine the distribution vector.”

“You do all realize this is an attack, not a disease, don’t you?” A new window had opened up, with the medical liaison to the FBI shown. “Look at the pattern that’s showing up. The first cases were seen in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago, but now it’s popping up everywhere overnight. Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Indianapolis, now Phoenix. But also Trenton, Hartford, Nashville, Richmond. Can’t any of you see what that means?”

There was a pause while all of the medical experts tried looking at their data for a pattern they had missed so far. Most of them had been awake for the better part of seventy-two hours and were function solely on caffeine and adrenaline.

“What are we missing? I don’t see it,” Doctor Fletcher said. “It looks like it’s spread all over the country at random. They’re all metropolitan areas, but there’s no obvious vector based on wind, weather, animal population, food distribution, or transportation routes.”

“Another report coming in,” said the sergeant. “Juneau, eight cases suspected.”

“How in hell did it jump so fast to Alaska?” asked the CDC director for the Pacific Northwest. “That can’t be natural, it’s got to be based on travel, some agent introduced into the air transportation fleet somehow, or…”

“Stop it!” shouted the FBI agent. “Did any of you study anything other than biology in high school?”

“State capitals,” said the CDC Southwest director. “With the exception of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they’re all state capitals.”

“Exactly,” said the FBI agent. “This is an attack on the government of the United States. I’m going to be briefing the President on this in ten minutes. What else can I tell him?”

“If it’s an attack on the government with a biological agent,” asked Southwest, “wouldn’t it be aimed at the people who run the government, the politicians themselves and their staffs? Do any of the infected fit that profile?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Doctor Fletcher, “we certainly would have heard if any of the infected were governors, Senators, or Members of Congress.” She gestured to one of her aides hovering behind her. “Start checking on who the infected people are, what they do, where they work.”

A new window opened up on the conference call screen, showing columns of data including names, location, age, sex, religion, and occupation. Data fields started to populate the chart, seemingly at random.

“Lawyers, advertising, film editors, clerical workers, computer programmers, graphic designers, sound engineers, CPAs – it seems random.”

“Wait, it’s not what we see, it’s what we don’t see,” said the FBI agent. “There aren’t any housewives, any unemployed, any students, or any children. I want to see something. Can you show just the people in the cities that are not state capitals, and also show the company they work for?”

The data once again shifted and shuffled and finally pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. The data for the infected patients began to clump into groups with multiple data records showing people working together at the same companies.

“Does anyone recognize any of these companies?” asked the FBI agent. “Can we see a couple of their web pages real quickly?” The new windows popped open. “See, they’re all related to advertising in some way. Most are ad agencies or production companies for television or radio. A few are printers. Now, let’s look at a couple of the state capitals.”

The data set expanded, to include the infected patient data for five of the smaller cities.

“There’s your link. It’s an election year. I’ll bet when we dig deeper, every one of these people is involved in some way with a political campaign.”

“Doctor Fletcher,” said Mid-Atlantic, “we’re just getting word from Annapolis and Richmond that new cases include a couple of state politicians and candidates.”

“Same here,” said Northwest. “We’re taking a closer look at the data for patients in Salem and Boise, and some of them are state legislators.”

“Okay, I’m going to go brief the President,” said the FBI agent. “Am I correct that so far there have been no fatalities or permanent disabilities?”

“You are correct, no fatalities,” said Doctor Fletcher. “It’s too early to tell about long term disabilities, and given this new information, we might have to reassess how we use that term.”

“Please clarify that for me and do it quickly, the President’s waiting.”

“The symptoms we’ve been concentrating on were the fever, dehydration, convulsions, and unexplained breathing difficulties. But there have been other symptoms reported which we’ve discounted, assuming they were side effects of the fever, perhaps delusions or hallucinations. We need to reevaluate that.”

“Why?”

“We’ve had reports the convulsions and breathing difficulties were experienced specifically when people tried to lie. The more egregious the lie, the more severe the symptoms appear to be.”

“You don’t mean…”

“Yes, I do. This might be an engineered virus which forces the victims to tell the truth or suffer horribly. And it’s targeting politicians.”

There was stunned silence across the conference call.

“Alright, I’ve got to go,” said the FBI agent. “I’ll get people at my end started on tracking down the terrorist monsters that might have done this.”

“’Monsters’? Don’t you mean ‘geniuses’?” Doctor Fletcher muttered under her breath.

“Say again, Doctor?”

“Nothing. We’re on it.”

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Filed under Disasters, Health, Politics, Science Fiction, Writing

September 28, 2014 · 22:07

Juicy Chunks O’ Wisdom For Sunday, September 28th

‘Cause the baseball postseason is here and my beloved Angels have the best record in baseball, that’s why.

  • In addition to the moon in the evening sky, there are a couple of bright planets. Look for them all! Last night (Saturday, 09/27) the Moon was very close to a very bright Saturn. Tonight, the Moon was getting close to a somewhat bright but very reddish Mars. The Moon will keep heading up higher into the sky each night and getting brighter, but if you’ve got binoculars, it’s a great time to be looking. Before it starts getting cold. Like GRRM said…
  • The Long-Suffering Wife cut her finger yesterday in the kitchen. I put a bandage on it, and the one immediately at hand in the kitchen cupboard was an old SpongeBob SquarePants bandage. Not a big issue, until much later, when the lights got turned off in the bedroom and she realized that it glowed in the dark. Her reaction was quite interesting, to say the least.
  • Is it unreasonable to think that our air traffic system should be robust enough so that a single disgruntled employee can cause massive disruptions of thousands of flights, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded, a mess than continues to be a mess three days later and will continue to be a mess for days more? Did no one anywhere in the FAA or Transportation Department think that there should be some sort of backup plan if a single TRACON had to go offline?
  • Jessie went out on Wednesday morning and was stunned to find her prized squirrel carcass gone from the patio sidewalk. For two days, every time she went out in back she went straight to that spot and started sniffing around and looking for it. Then she would look at me with sad, accusing, old dog eyes. I swear, I didn’t touch it, I left it there. I’m figuring there’s a coyote or raccoon or owl or hawk or crow that found an easy, more or less freshly dead meal and took off with it.
  • Pumpkin spice Oreos? Really? I will make a bold statement here — I have never had “pumpkin spice” anything. Not lattes, not beer, not cookies, not cheesecake, not ice cream, not pickles — nothing! As such, I feel fully qualified to feel like I’m the last guy who can tell humanity about the pods in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” or Charlton Heston at the end of “Soylent Green.” “It’s pumpkin spice, humans! Stop eating it! It’s sent by aliens to take over your brains! Don’t eat the pumpkin spice!”
  • At least the glow in the dark SpongeBob SquarePants bandage is on her “driving” finger. At least, that’s what we call it here in Los Angeles.
  • It’s hockey preseason and I’m learning that I need to get my gimpy shoulder into mid-season form quickly. My usual reaction to a Kings goal is to instinctively and immediately throw my arms in the air. If my arm hurts when I do that, we’ve got a problem. (The Vuvuzela of Victory only sings its sweet, sweet song during the playoffs. We have to save the juju for when it’s really needed.)
  • How much does a wagon cost these days? You know — small, red, kid sized, used for hauling toys, dirt, and little sisters. I’m asking for a canine friend.
  • The reports I’ve seen said that the contract employee who sabotaged the FAA air traffic control center in Chicago was upset because they had just been informed they were being transferred to Hawaii. Further developments and information are most certainly coming, but for the moment, let’s examine that allegation. Now, mind you, I absolutely love the city of Chicago. I spent a couple of years there as a kid (junior high school years) in the suburbs, still love going back to visit. I’ve never had a bad time there. But is it so good that when “threatened” with a transfer to freakin’ HAWAII I would go berserk? Are we talking about a different Hawaii than the one I see on TV with the beaches, the jungles, the weather, the surfing, blah, blah, blah?
  • Or the squirrel RE-ANIMATED and its rotting, evil, zombie squirrel body is stalking the trees, waiting for its chance to catch Jessie unawares so that it can WREAK ITS VENGEANCE!!
  • That comma is really important in the “It’s pumpkin spice, humans!” line.
  • Los Angeles about ten days ago, lunch time, near Beverly Hills. South of Sunset, by the Pacific Design Center, between San Vicente and La Cienega. One of the million little, itty-bitty strip malls that cover LA like scabs. As usual for the breed, this one might have had 12 to 15 parking spaces, all full. I’m sitting there eating outside when a brand new, white, shiny, Maserati Quattorporte pulls into the lot. He’s in luck! There’s a full size SUV, an Urban Assault Vehicle, just pulling out of a space. The SUV departs and the person driving (the windows were blacked out, couldn’t see them) whips it around and tries to pull into the just-vacated parking spot. “Tries” is the key word here. They back up and try again, unsuccessfully. And again. And again. All of this despite the fact that a vehicle twice as big just pulled out of that spot. Just about the time I’m ready to start laughing and go offer to park it for them, they give up. They ROAR out of the parking lot, tires screaming — because they have a Maserati Quattroporte and they have to show the world how insanely cool they are. As they leave, another SUV, just as large as the previous one, pulls in and swings into that parking spot in one try. The conclusion is obvious — despite that $140K price tag, the Maserati Quattroporte has the turning radius of a battleship and is a pig to handle in tight spaces! Well, that or someone was seriously overcompensating for something, and it wasn’t the fact that they can’t drive for beans.

Remember, “Some days you win, some days you lose. Some days it rains.” That’s deep. Really. Not even being snarky. From Bull Durham, one of the finest baseball movies ever made. (It happens to be about baseball. A bit. And other things.) ((I’ll shut up now.))

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Filed under Astronomy, Dogs, Freakin' Idiots!, Health, Juicy Chunks, LA Angels, Los Angeles, Ronnie, Sports

August 20, 2014 · 20:42

Tripping Back To The Sixties

I tweaked a shoulder a couple of months ago (getting old is not for the timid) and finally had it looked at when it didn’t heal on its own. Today I got to see a physical therapist, which had me humming this song all afternoon.

That in turn got me going off into hyperlink heaven (or hell – it’s a fine line) with a string of the other “related” videos that YouTube suggested. Boyce & Hart. The Status Quo. Small Faces. Manfred Mann. (Our neighbors across the street were the Quinn family, I was young enough to think they might be related.) The Cowsills! Paul Revere & The Raiders. (I think we actually saw them, or at least some current incarnation of them, at a Cal State Northridge Fourth of July fireworks show about fifteen year ago.)

Jeez Louise, will that mess up your head. It’s only fair, goes along with my messed up arm. (It will be fine, just makes me wince and cry out in anguish any time I have to reach in back of me right now, like when I pull my keys out of my pants pocket or try to put on a shirt or jacket. The Long Suffering Wife hates it when I whimper.)

Meanwhile, back in the Twenty-First Century, the poor PT tech probably doesn’t get many folks with my sense of humor. That could be a good thing, or not. But, for example, when he wants to use the ultrasound machine to get some heat into the damaged shoulder, he was confused when I asked if we would be able to tell if it was a boy or a girl.

In general, I’ve found that most medical professionals have issues with people with a weird sense of humor. What I think of as snappy repartee to lighten up what could be a grim and painful encounter, they often want to take as a literal description of a physical problem. (Or signs of an obvious mental problem, but so far I’ve managed to dodge that bullet.) And they really, really don’t like smart ass comments about the annual prostate exam. (Like this one.) I have learned through experience that the prostate exam jokes are best delivered after the exam rather than before. Fewer opportunities for them to express their opinion of my material while they’ve got a finger buried to the second knuckle.

On the other hand, most (not all) of the receptionists and desk workers seem to be happy to talk to anyone who isn’t either in terrible pain, horribly depressed, or just wanting to dump on them because of something that wasn’t their fault. When they try to sign you up for a 6AM appointment, a couple of friendly wisecracks will get you the much better 8:45 appointment. (I wouldn’t show up for a 6AM appointment if it were for my own funeral! For Rush Limbaugh’s funeral, yes, but not for mine. Ba-da-dum-BAM! Thank you, I’ll be here all week, tip your waitress, and I’ll see you at 8:45.)

The doctor’s office. A tough crowd. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

 

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Filed under Health, Music

August 11, 2014 · 20:54

SHAZZBATT!!!

Today turned ugly in a heartbeat with the news of Robin Williams’ death.

My mind keeps spinning through all of the amazing roles. “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “Dead Poet’s Society.” “Good Morning, Vietnam.” “The Fisher King.” “Good Will Hunting.” And on and on.

It wasn’t just the comedic roles either. He scared the hell out of me as the psychotic killer in “One Hour Photo.” He can still reduce me to tears in “What Dreams May Come.”

Then you would see him on some talk show or another, just going off, impromptu, twice as funny off the top of his head as anyone else was after months of polishing their routine.

The “Comic Relief” telethons, where after hours of some of the best and funniest had done their acts, Robin, Billy, and Whoopi would come out as hosts, only to have it devolve into Robin & Billy spinning off into an alternate reality while Whoopi occasionally threw them a straight line, which was like throwing raw meat into a pool of piranha. The rest of us couldn’t catch our breath for laughing.

Who else could have ever, ever been Mork from Ork?

I generally don’t get too upset over celebrity deaths, but some hit me hard. Jim Henson. George Carlin. And now Robin Williams. I guess I’ve got a thing for people who can make me smile and laugh.

We’ll never know what demons he was fighting and the depth of the pain his depression gave him. We can only pray that he’s found a release and can now rest in peace.

For those of us still here, let’s remember Robin Williams by fighting harder against the disease that took his life. Depression isn’t a mood, it isn’t a weakness, and it isn’t something to be ashamed of, any more than you should feel weak or ashamed if you got cancer or appendicitis. Depression is a liar, a stealer of souls, a demonic voice that no one else can hear, constantly telling you that everything is useless, you’re worthless, no one loves you, and no one can help you.

All of those messages that depression bombards you with are lies.

If there’s any good to be found in this, let it be that we spread the word far and wide and loud:

If you are suffering from depression, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. There are people who care, people who will help you.

If you’re in the United States, call any time from anywhere,

1-800-273-8255 (TALK)

or go online at SuicidePreventionHotline.org.

You can also go to Suicide.org for an immediate connection to local hotlines in every US state, international hotlines, as well as immediate help by chat on that site.

If you’re a veteran or on active duty in the military, the Twitter account @realwarriors is staffed 24×7 to help.

If you are anywhere else in the world, check here or here for a list of crisis hotlines in your country.

If you want to read an excellent personal account of the battle against depression, read Wil Wheaton’s story here and here.

The bottom line is simple — talk to someone, get help, you are not alone. It might be terribly hard to do, to accept, to ask for help, to break through the disease. You have to find a way to do it, to ask for help, to talk to someone.

Talk to a friend, a teacher, a doctor, a nurse, a counselor on a hotline, a radio call-in talk show, whatever. Hell, call and talk to me if you need to, 24/7/365. I want us all to be on this fantastic ride for as long as we each possibly can.

Tonight we’re grieving and trying to understand what’s impossible to understand. Over the next few days we’ll see news reports and documentaries and retrospectives and interviews. None of that will help us understand, but with time we’ll laugh again. Probably at some old Robin Williams movie or television show, the laughter now mixed with a dose of melancholy. But as his family has asked, we will remember him for his life, not for his death.

On Facebook I said, “Days like this I almost hope I’m wrong and God exists – there are more than a few choice comments I would like to make about her job performance.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever actually get to have that conversation, but if I do, one of my questions will be, “Why do funny, intelligent, and wonderful people like Robin Williams have to be so tortured? Doesn’t that qualify as a design flaw in the universe?”

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Filed under Entertainment, Health, Paul

July 27, 2014 · 21:00

Yesterday I Was Sore, Today…

Big disclaimer to start: I’m not a doctor or a trainer, and you should ALWAYS consult and work with your medical professionals before starting any major exercise routine. That goes double for anyone just starting training for a long-distance race, even a 5K or 10K. Anyone with a heart condition who goes out and runs five or ten miles and dies because “Paul said it would be okay” is going to be looked at askance. Seriously askance. Let’s keep a firm grip on our common sense here, folks.

Also, when I talk about my legs “hurting,” I’m talking about the muscle-wide fatigue and “broad pain” from muscles that are being used and used hard to do things they hadn’t done in a while, if ever. I am not talking about the “sharp pain” that occurs in one spot, usually suddenly, that indicates that something really bad may have happened. If you have any reason to suspect that something might be broken or torn (“sharp, sudden pain”) as opposed to just exercised hard (“broad pain” the next day or so), STOP and get immediate medical attention. Again, I am not a doctor or a trainer, just someone who’s done this once or twice and wants to rant about it in the hopes of possibly giving others an insight into what’s going on.

As mentioned yesterday, I got off the dime and did my first run for the Disney World Marathon in January. Not a biggie, just three miles and change.

If you’ve never run, or more to the point, if you’ve never run and you’re thinking about starting, there are a few things “they” don’t tell you. I’m here to make a few observations and give you a heads up.

I just said, correctly, “Not a biggie, just three miles and change.” If you think that walking around the block is in the same category as the Bataan Death March, that sounds like a ludicrous statement. I’ve been there.

This is one of the reasons that running has lessons to teach about “life” if you’re willing to learn. The first lesson is that progress and accomplishment are made of thousands and millions of little steps. If you get out of your Lazy Boy today, out of shape and seriously obese, yes, you could very well DIE if you tried to run a marathon.

But unless you’re a complete idiot, or the zombie hordes have marched over the horizon after the EMP has fried every bit of technology in the world so you have no choice, you don’t do that. You simply start taking the first of those thousands and millions little steps, with some faith that you’ll get there.

You start walking. You walk to the end of the block and back. You walk around the block. You walk a mile or so. You walk three or four miles. You sign up for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and train over about six months, building up your endurance and strength, possibly (probably?) losing some weight.

Once you can walk a marathon distance in ten or eleven hours (that is not a killer pace – I set an aggressive pace and did it in just under eight hours, but they give you much more time to finish if you need it) and you’ve got a tremendous, hard-earned, well-deserved sense of accomplishment, then you can start jogging. You keep walking, but you start mixing in a bit of jogging. You can get with a training group and learn a “walk/run” pace. When I trained for the 2012 LA Marathon we had groups doing 5-1 (three minutes of running, one minute of walking), 4-1, 3-1, 3-2, and just walking (looking for an 8:00 finish).

The first weekend of training we did three miles (“Not a biggie!”) just to see how you feel and how accurate your judgement of your fitness level is. You run (typically) on Tuesday and Thursday (two miles each day early in training, building up to six or so) and then have a “long run” every Saturday. Week Two you do four miles, Week Three you do five, and so on. Every now and then you have a “cut back week” where you give your body some time to heal a bit. For example, in the middle of the training routine, you might be doing 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 8, 12, 14 miles on consecutive Saturdays over a two month period.

That first three mile run can catch you off guard if you’re not running regularly. You may have run in the past, but if it’s been a year (guilty!), you’ll do it because you know you can. Hell, you’ve run full marathons before, three miles is no biggie, right? Except that’s your head talking — your legs have gotten soft. So you’re sucking wind by the one-mile mark and while your head thought you would do the three miles in thirty to thirty-five minutes, a pace which would get you about a 4:45 finishing time, your legs barely drag you home in under forty-two minutes, a pace which would just barely give you a 6:00 finishing time.

And while you’re sore that evening, you keep moving and your body has lots of endorphin (and perhaps some ibuprofen) so you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself. Then you wake up the next morning and all of those muscles have had a chance to talk among themselves and take a strike vote. Surprise! Every time you try to walk or sit down or get up or move you hurt like hell.

That’s where I’m at today, and that’s where you may be if you choose to travel this path at some point. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’m here to tell you — KEEP MOVING. It’s important on that next day, because you have to get through this, you can’t dodge it. As Frost said, “The only way out is through.”

Just keep moving as normally as possible, wincing a lot, and generally pissing off everyone else in the house. (Hi, Long Suffering Wife!) Then keep moving the next day and by about the third day after (probably Tuesday, if you did your “big run” on Saturday), when you start to feel okay again, go running.

That second run is going to be a bitch. Your brain is not going to want to go. About ten feet into it you’re going to be really tempted to just declare victory and go back to the Lazy Boy.

Don’t!

You’re going to run enough to get you loose and remind your legs who’s the boss, a mile or two. And on Wednesday you’ll be sore — but not nearly as sore as you were after the first run. Then Thursday’s going to get there and you need to do it again.

The third run, mentally, is in my experience the hardest to get yourself going on. Do it anyway. Again, just a couple of miles. Easy peasy.

The next Saturday is your next “big run” and you’re doing four miles. You’ll still suck wind — but not nearly as much. You’ll still be sore on Sunday — but not nearly as much. And after you do your short runs on Tuesday and Thursday, you’re now in a groove, on the bandwagon, with the program, and it will get a lot easier mentally to get going, to stay motivated. You’ve got a goal.

The oddest thing will happen. Every week you’ll push the boundaries, you’ll push yourself further. You’ll be so caught up in the process, so focused on the next increment, that you’ll lose sight of the big picture. Then you’ll hit one of those cut back days.

The “ah-ha!” moment for me was about a month before the marathon. We had done 16, 18, and 20 miles (all hard, but all accomplished successfully) when we had a cut back week to 16 miles. We were all thrilled that we had a “short” day, an “easy” day, a “fun run.”

A short, easy, fun run of sixteen freakin’ miles.

That really caught me off guard. But it’s real. You’ve done the 18 and 20 miles and lived, and in a month you’re going to do 26.2 miles and kick that course’s ass. You know it.

But looking back, you’re still less than six months removed from the mindset where you thought you would die after three miles. You couldn’t even conceive of running 26.2 and figured that you must be totally insane. And now you’re scoffing at how easy and short sixteen miles are.

That was an amazing moment for me. Not quite as amazing as getting to the finish line, especially at the 2012 LA Marathon, but it’s a good, close second.

So today I’m staggering around like I’m eighty-five years old. My thighs and shins are on fire every time I stand, sit, or move.

But I am moving. I’ll keep on moving. I will run again on Tuesday, and again on Thursday. On Saturday I’ll run four miles, maybe four and a half if the weather’s not too hot.

The greatest benefit you get from finishing a marathon is knowing that you can. When you know that, you know that you can do anything. And then you can do it again as you look for the next boundary to push away.

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Filed under Health, Running

July 23, 2014 · 18:59

Odds & Sods For Wednesday, July 23rd

Item The First: Since you’re all cool and wonderful and “in the know” type folks (hey, you read this every day, right?) I’m sure you’ve all already seen this ultra-fantastic video. But just in case you’ve been too busy fighting crime and saving civilization, go watch it now! It’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that?!” things where it’s obvious once someone else has done it and now you’ll see everyone doing it, but this is the first that I’ve seen and it is just awe-inspiring.

Jos Stiglingh took a DJI Phantom 2 amateur drone capable of going up several hundred feet and (probably) a half-mile or so from the operator, attached a high-def GoPro camera – then flew it into the Sunfest 2014 fireworks display in West Palm Beach, Florida! The soundtrack was originally “Con Te Partiro” by tenor Andrea Bocelli and it was perfect — apparently there were copyright issues and now it’s got a hard-driving techno soundtrack that SoundHound can’t identify.

Either way, if this isn’t the most stunning video you see today, you’ve obviously had a much more interesting day than I have!

Item The Second: And then there’s that moment when you hear your computer going nuts, the “Windows Default Beep” sounding off like DingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDingDing… You figure that it’s probably smoking and tossing bits of the hard disk all over the room and you’re desperately trying to remember how recent your last full backup was, until you find that it’s just the freakin’ cat who decided to sit down on the keyboard and start bathing.

Item The Third: Has anyone else noticed that the ebola outbreak in Africa is still growing? Even three and a half months after we were told not to worry, “it’s quite difficult to transmit” and “the risks are quite small.” Now it’s blown way past all previous outbreaks to be the largest ever, both in terms of the number of people infected (over a thousand), the number of fatalities (632), and the size of the region showing cases (started in Guinea, has now spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone as well). To show just how bad it’s getting, the top researcher in Sierra Leone’s effort to combat the outbreak now has contracted the disease himself.

They will let us know when to worry, right? Or do we wait until we see Brad Pitt running past us, pursued by zombies?

Item The Fourth: As a long, LONG time fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s music, it’s great to see his new “Mandatory Fun” album hitting the charts at #1. We’ve seen him a couple of times in concert over the years and he really puts on a great show. His parodies are great and many of his original songs are wonderful. The “polka mashups” on many of his albums are sheer genius. He’s a treasure.

Over the last week he’s been releasing videos from the new album, eight videos in eight days. The first couple, “Tacky” (apparently one long tracking shot?!) and “Word Crimes” (superb and clever animation) were outstanding, and on “First World Problems,” one of my other all-time favorite people-who-happen-to-be-musicians, Amanda Palmer, sings backup.

Item The Fifth: Speaking of music, what’s your walk-up music? I asked this question a while back and I’m sure that you’ve all been giving it a lot of thought. Feel free to drop your answers into the comments, but for me, I think it would depend on my mood.

If I wanted to freak out the opposition and see if anyone was actually listening to the words of a song they almost certainly hadn’t heard before, I would use the chorus of Julia Ecklar’s “Temper of Revenge.” I would use the more upbeat and angry version off of the “Divine Intervention” album (which you can buy here, hint, hint). “Find me a horse / As red as the sun / Find me a blade / That will make their blood run / I will ride out at dawn / While the sun’s in the sky / So the buzzards can see / Where the bodies will lie.” Yeah, that would get their attention.

If I just wanted to be unconventional and weird, what better than some of the above-mentioned “Weird Al” Yankovic? Although it would be tough to decide whether to use one of his parodies (to see if anyone’s actually listening and notices that it’s not the original) or one of his great original songs.

But let’s say that those plans are nixed by either a stodgy team management or by the Prince of Darkness himself. What can I get away with for a more “conventional” choice? After all, they’ve allowed “Sympathy For The Devil” and heavy metal tunes such as “Enter Sandman” have become routine. So, surely I could use something like Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London” or Frank Zappa’s (NSFW!) “Dinah Moe Humm”

To push the boundaries completely, how about TonioK’s (pretty NSFW) “H-A-T-R-E-D” or The Nails’ (yeah, a great song, but NSFW) “Eighty-Eight Lines About Forty-Four Women”? Or go completely to the opposite extreme (as Josh Reddick of the Oakland A’s did) and use something like “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked” or Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne”?

What mood would I be in today?

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July 9, 2014 · 23:06

Ghost Story

How am I supposed to get any work done this evening if they’re going to put “Ghostbusters” on television for me to watch? I mean, jeez Louise!

The story in the family is that I was visited by ghosts once – I told the story many, many years ago to my mother and she believes it still. I have long ago accepted an alternate explanation.

In 1974 I spent the final six months of my senior year in high school living alone in Vermont. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores, but the bottom line was that my parents and brothers and sisters were in Southern California while I was living in our house in Vermont.

The house in question was three stories, eight bedrooms, three baths, and the entire third floor was a family room the size of a basketball court. It was over a hundred years old then and had been many things over the years. We were told that it had originally been built as a parsonage or convent, but then had spent a couple decades or more as a nursing home. When we got it (as a serious fixer-upper) it had been empty for several years. (Who needs an eight bedroom home in Vermont?)

While staying there alone, in order to keep heating costs down, we had closed off the second and third floors and the wing of the house that had the dining room and garage. I stayed in the master bedroom downstairs.

At one point I got sick, the flu of some sort, and spent a couple days bedridden. One late night, I woke to hear footsteps upstairs. I was sick as a dog and didn’t much care, but listened as multiple sets of footsteps walked through the second floor, down the grand staircase at the front of the house, through the study, the big living room, and the dining room.

At this point I saw several figures come into the room, two of them at the forefront, a man and a woman. The woman came and sat on the edge of the bed while the man stood behind her and a few other figures behind him. The woman said that she was one of the former tenants of the house when it was a nursing home. (We knew that there were more than a few of the elderly tenants who had passed away in the house many years earlier.) She and the other former tenants knew that I was there alone and ill, so she wanted to let me know that I would be alright in the morning. They would sit and watch over me during the night, so I should just get some sleep.

I was pretty zonked, between whatever early 70’s over-the-counter cold and flu medicine I was hopped up on and the exhaustion of several days with little food or water with significant “unpleasant bodily functions” to boot. I was probably also seriously dehydrated. Between one thing and the other, I wasn’t freaked out at all by this visitation. I remember it as being very calming and soothing.

I went to sleep as instructed and woke up the next morning feeling much better. In a day or so I was up and about as normal.

I had very vivid memories of the “visitation”, so I told my mother about it when next we talked. To this day, she’s convinced that it was real. She claims to have experienced other poltergeist-like events while she would be alone in the house during the day. Things like the radio station changing or the volume suddenly turning way up loud when she was off in another part of the house completely. Toilets flushing by themselves. That sort of thing.

My explanation for the “visitation” is much more prosaic and boring. Flu + dehydration + hunger and low blood sugar + lack of sleep + intense fever + any cold or flu medication I could get my paws on = hallucinations! We knew the history of the house, so it wasn’t like a seed of suggestion hadn’t been planted. As for my mother’s poltergeist, it was a very, very old building with very, very old wiring and plumbing. We had done the best we could to upgrade and repair, but given a choice between it being proof of the afterlife or just a leaky toilet and a loose wire in a building over one hundred years old, well…

Sorry, my degree is in physics, not psychics, and I’m an amateur astronomer, not an astrologer. And as I had to explain to a cocktail waitress (who truly was a wonderful person) when I was working as a room service waiter for Marriott in college, studying on my dinner break, I studied cosmology, not cosmetology, so no, I couldn’t do her hair for her.

Sorry. It’s a good story, but I have to disagree with my mother on the root cause.

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May 27, 2014 · 15:21

Big Toe & Little Gripe

Pain meds can be really great, but they leave me with the attention span of Oooh, look, a hummingbird outside the window!

I need to start running again and I’ve had an ingrown toenail that’s been getting worse. It’s a problem I’ve had as an adult every two to four years for as long as I can remember. In 2012 I had one cut out in January, just eight weeks before the LA Marathon. I’ve often wondered if that might have had something to do with the serious cramps in the soles of my feet that day.

I’ll leave the details and gory descriptions of the procedure to another day (maybe), but the last time I had this done the doctor mentioned a procedure other than just removing the nail, where they remove it and kill some nerves or cells down underneath the nail to prevent it from ever growing back. They get some kind of acid or “bad gunk” (to use the technical term) and pack it down in there after the nail’s gone. Whatever works! I will be just as happy to not have to do this again in 2016 or 2017 (or any other time).

Here are the before and after pictures:

photo 1

photo 2The funky green color is not my natural skin tone, but some kind of antiseptic they put on, sort of like Bill Cosby spreading the lime jello to save himself from the Chicken Heart. (Although green skin would be pretty cool…)

In part because it’s tough to wear shoes for the next forty-eight hours, in part because I’m just a touch loopy from the pain meds, I’ll be staying off the roads and chilling at home for a couple of days.

Which means that I’ll be spending time on the computer, which is what brings me to the little gripe, which is this little message I get on a regular basis while trying to use FaceBook:

FacebookDotCom Is Not Responding Due To A Long-Running Script

FaceBook has some of the best programmers on the planet working there (ask them, they’ll tell you!), so don’t you think they could come up with a few more and/or better options than “Stop script?” Maybe they need help, so here are some suggestions:

  • Never run a script longer than XX seconds ever again.
  • Please go to “Settings” where you can pick how long the maximum script time (XX) allowed.
  • Please go to “Settings” where you can choose to have any script longer than XX seconds to identify itself and ask permission to run.
  • Please go to “Settings” and turn on the display which shows how many scripts are running, what they do, and how long they’re going to take.
  • Please hit the “Esc” key a few hundred more times so that the program knows that you think it actually does what it’s supposed to do.
  • I apologize for interrupting your script oh wise ones, please forgive this humble servant and be merciful in your punishment.
  • Please piss off and remember that you sold your soul when you signed on to FaceBook — you’ll do what you’re told!
  • Please go to “Settings’ and turn on the “Pay more attention to *ME* than to your freakin’ advertisers” option.
  • Please press the button to stop the script and smile to your webcam which we’ve taken control of so we can file your picture and all of the personal information you’ve given us in our “troublemaker” department.
  • Please rearrange the Universe so that every time I have to wait and hit this stupid button, some programmer at FaceBook gets festering hemorrhoids.
  • Please tell me that the long-running script is working for my protection and to ensure the sanctity of my privacy. Please, I need the laugh!

I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg reads this blog, this problem should be taken care of in a few days. You can thank me later.

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May 18, 2014 · 22:37

Dreams Are Weird

This is not a big discovery of mine, not anything new or revolutionary, just a statement of fact that’s been brought home to me today by my adventures last night in the land of Nod.

For one thing, it’s weird how you can have a dream that seems to be ongoing or recurring over several REM cycles or sleep segments during the night. I rarely sleep for six or eight hours at a stretch. If I’m lucky, I can get three or four stretches of an hour to two hours a night, more or less. That’s what happened last night, yet I woke up this morning pretty sure that I had experienced some variation of the same “anxiety dream” in each sleep segment.

Or is that a false memory? I’ve heard that you only remember the dream that you were dreaming when you woke up. Maybe as I woke up I was dreaming that I was having a dream broken up into several segments over the night, but in reality the dream (of a dream) which I remembered occurred in just a few seconds or minutes before I woke up.

No way to tell, but thinking about it gets very “Inception“-like very quickly.

Either way, the “anxiety” in the “anxiety dream” came (all night or in the dream within the dream) in the form of finding out that some of our passports were expired just as we were packing to get on the plane in a few hours for a trip to London. (What a freakin’ idiot my subconscious must think I am to let that detail go until the last minute. Has my subconscious ever looked in a mirror and seen the somewhat obsessive, detail oriented, control freak that plans our trips?) From there it was “how can we get new passports,” “can we get our money back,” “can we find another way out of this,” blah, blah, blah. Like I said — anxiety.

All day I’ve been wondering — what was my subconscious trying to tell me? Is there a warning in there? Am I forgetting or overlooking something on an upcoming trip or some other big event?

Or was my subconscious just screwing with my head — literally. “Hey, Id and Superego, come here! Look at what I can do to him, and he can’t even stop me! He’ll be shitting bricks over this for days!”

On the final pass through the basic scenario, the dream changed to a situation where I was meeting new neighbors, being sniffed by their dog, and having him lick my hand. At which point I woke up to find Jessie licking my hand to wake me up…

It’s so odd how your brain can take real-world phenomenon and warp them a bit to stick them into your dream. Again, is it trying to let you know something the only way it can, like Lassie barking to tell you that Timmy’s fallen down the well?

At least I didn’t dream that I was eating the world’s biggest marshmallow, only to wake up and find my pillow gone.

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April 23, 2014 · 22:38

Marathons

On Monday, the 2014 Boston Marathon was run. We all remember how the 2013 race was disrupted by the terrorist bombings that killed three while maiming and wounding hundreds. For the last year, the lock screen on my iPad has been this one, from the London Marathon which was run a week after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Finish For BostonLeon Neal / AFP / Getty Images / Boston Globe

On Tuesday, in only marginally related news, registration opened for the 2015 Disney World Marathon in Florida.

I signed up and paid my fees to run the Disney Marathon next January.

I’ve run the Los Angeles Marathon twice, as well as a couple half marathons while training, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’m signing up for. I just wish that I were more enthusiastic about the training and running.

If I had a FaceBook status for my relationship with running, it would be “It’s complicated.”

Get ready for some whiplash here. The classic angel on one shoulder and devil on the other are going to spell it out for you.

On the “pro” side, I know from experience that I feel better after I run. Maybe it’s just the endorphin, maybe it’s dodging the guilt of not running for another day, but I really do feel better.

On the “con” side, I hate having a run coming up, particularly the longer ones later in training. The day or two of dread feels worse than the actual run itself.

Pro: It’s psychologically and physically good for me to get my butt moving in the morning. It keeps me feeling young, shows the world that I’m not as old as the calendar says, proves that I’ve still “got it.”

Con: I hate getting out of a nice, warm bed to go out into the cold (and sometimes wet and sometimes windy) morning. Maybe I really am getting older and it’s time to admit it and allow myself to be lazier.

Pro: Assuming that I’m not ready to find a comfy chair and sit in it waiting for the Grim Reaper, I benefit a lot from the exercise. Big time! Cardiovascular health, better respiration and endurance, better strength (I also throw in some weight training with the running). All go a long way toward not only letting me live to 90 instead of 75 or 110 instead of 90 (I have a lot of faith in medical advances over the next forty to fifty years). In addition, it’s more likely that I’ll be active at 90 instead of bedridden and in a wheelchair at 80.

Con: While it might be better for the cardio and weight loss and overall fitness and making my 80’s and 90’s possible and better, running hurts right now. There are muscle aches up one side and down the other, no matter how careful you are. Blisters. The actual races can be an absolute hell — there’s a reason that Pheidippides died at the end of the first marathon.

Pro: While the physical part is not to be discounted or ignored, in the end getting through a marathon is about 90% mental. You have got to learn how to hit your limits and force yourself to keep going. You have got to learn how to persevere. You have got to find depths of “intestinal fortitude” and self-discipline that you never knew were possible. All of these things are very good things to know and have in your skill set when life throws other crap at you.

Con: Did I mention that it’s hard?

Pro: Running a marathon will drastically improve your mental self-image. Less than 0.5% of Americans ever attempt a marathon, and many of them don’t finish. If you’ve gotten to the finish line, you will have a sense of accomplishment that no one can ever take away from you. (More below on this.)

Con: Did I mention the warm bed?

Pro: Running a marathon will drastically improve my physical image. No amount of surgery and/or Hollywood special effects are going to make me a stud muffin, but I can at least try to get back to the point where I can wear a checkered shirt without it looking like the latitude and longitude lines on a Mercator projection globe.

Con: I don’t waaaaannnaaaaaaa!

Pro: I’ve always preferred to have the mental attitude of, “Plenty of time to rest when I’m dead!”

Con: Yeah, yeah, whatever. That sounds like an awful lot of hard work. Couldn’t I just sit here on the couch, watch TV, and eat ice cream? Please?

Side Note: For the record, when I say “running a marathon” anywhere here, the same thing goes for running a half-marathon, a 10K, a 5K, a mile, or whatever it is that pushes your limits out to where you didn’t think they could go. Don’t justify doing nothing because you can’t run a marathon. If you can barely make it around the block, you can set the goal for a mile. If you can do a mile, you can work toward a 5K. And so on.

So why am I running again, and why something on the other side of the country? Because I promised my niece that I would. She wants to run a marathon and she wants it to be that one, the Disney World Marathon. A year ago or so, when I happened to be in town and we ran a 5K together. We talked about marathons, and she asked if I would run Disney with her at some point. “Sure!” I said, probably confident that we were talking about a hypothetical scenario that would never come to pass. But then…

With all of what I’ve said, in the end my primary motivation these days is guilt. (Great, my Catholic grade school education is finally proving its worth!) Left to my own devices, that bed stays warm and comfy and the training miles stay unrun. That’s why my first marathon time was 7:21:18. Of course, the torrential downpour and near-freezing conditions didn’t help.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The second time, I joined a running group, which helped a lot. I made a lot of good friends, we motivated each other, and it made it a little easier to get up at 5AM every Saturday for seven months for a 7AM training session. Again, guilt (in the form of not wanting to let your friends down) helped a lot.

IMG_3316_smallYes, it was that cold. It doesn’t matter if it’s SoCal, in January and February it’s less than 40F out there, which is cold no matter where you are. It helped my finish time quite a bit. Which brings me to that final point that I promised above, the ultimate “pro” argument.

For that second LA Marathon, I trained hard. I had been training for a sub-6:00 finish, and had fantasies about maybe a 5:45 or even a 5:30-ish finish. Despite all of my pre-race training to set my pace and keep to it, I went out much faster than I expected. (Adrenaline! Ask for it by name!) But by Mile Six I settled down into my pace at about 13:10 per mile. That would make a 5:45 finish possible, if I could hold it.

Then about Mile Nine in Hollywood, I started getting really bad cramps in the soles of my feet. (It was very odd, I’ve never had cramps there before or after. I usually get them in my calves.) By about Mile Seventeen I could barely walk. I steadily watched as my estimated finish time (there are some really good apps out there) went up and up. My tracking message at the 20K mark (you can get these sent to your phone in most big races at 10K, 20K, 30K, 40K, and finish) estimated a 6:00:04 finishing time. At 30K, it was up to an estimated 6:18:25 finishing time. There went my sub-6:00 target!

2012 LA Marathon PaceAs you can see, at the 40K mark (which is about 100 yards before the Mile Twenty-Four banner), I was at a 15:01 minutes per mile pace, and the system estimated my finishing time at 6:33:43. Right then and there, I decided that I was NOT going to finish with a time over 6:30. It was going to hurt, I was going to be in agony, I had seen several target goals come and go, but I was not going to go past the 6:30 mark. Being carried off the course unconscious was the only acceptable option other than hitting that 6:30 target.

So I started running. And running. At the end of twenty-four painful miles where I had started at a sub-13:00 pace, then slipped to 13:30, to 14:00, to 15:00, I ran that last segment of San Vicente and hit the left turn onto Ocean Boulevard faster than I had been at the start of the race.

I could see the finish line ahead. The final marker at Mile Twenty-Six had a race clock on it, which was just getting to 6:34 elapsed time as I went past it. But I had crossed the start line six and a half minutes after the elite runners, so I knew that I was at somewhere around 6:27:30 with 385 yards to go, a little over a fifth of a mile.

Sitting here, “a fifth of a mile” sounds trivial. Just down to the end of the block or so. But then and there, I was in agony. I couldn’t breath, both feet were cramping, I was sweating like a stuck pig, and I could barely see. But I ran that final 385 yards in about 2:20.

You’ve seen pictures of people hitting the pavement face first within twenty or thirty yards of the finish line? I was almost that guy. I hit the finish line, didn’t slow down for at least another twenty feet just to make sure, then just concentrated on staying on my feet. I immediately felt the phone vibrate and ding, indicating that my final times were in, but I had to get wrapped in a mylar blanket, get my medal, go get something to eat and drink, and keep moving because if you go down at that point you’ll stay down. Even with the race over, I still had over a mile to walk to get to my car through huge crowds of runners, families, and volunteers.

I finally checked the time, praying that it wasn’t 6:30:01 or something that would really piss me off.

6:29:53. I had made it by seven seconds.

That’s a 12:17 pace for that final 1.36 miles, and about an 11:40 pace for that last fifth of a mile. I hadn’t “won”, I wasn’t even close to being first in my age group. (If I had been a woman between 80 and 85, I would have been kicking ass and taking names!) None of that mattered. I had pushed through and refused to quit.

Now, if I can just remember that feeling of accomplishment — three or four days a week — at six in the morning — when the bed is warm and dry and the road isn’t either — and I’m sore.

Or at least remember that I promised my niece and bragged here to all of you, so I’ll really look like rancid worm slime if I bail out and bag it.

Pride is much better than guilt, but often not as powerful.

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