Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Month: July 2002 Page 1 of 2

Happy Birthday…

to delennara! I got your lovely postcard today, by the way! Thanks so much, and I hope you had a wonderful day!

Love,
-R

Your house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it…

kitanzi mentioned the wonderful new bookcase we got from telynor. It’s a wonderful piece of furniture, which she said was hand-made by her uncle, but she simply had nowhere to put in her new house, and we could have it if we wanted it.

RIP Dave Carter

I heard about it last night, and I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.

Godspeed to you sir. You leave the world a better place than you found it. And thanks for all the music.

Dave Carter obituary in the Oreganian

Today’s satire: The TIPS program

The Bush administration wants to recruit citizens to keep a watch on one another. It might go something like this:

http://www.truthlaidbear.com/001214.html

Today’s Reading

An interesting, alternative perspective on the whole Pledge of Allegiance flap.

” NEW YORK, July 15 (UPI) — When I say “one nation under God,” I can take or leave the “under God” part, but I’m a fanatic about the “one nation” part. Has anyone ever considered that we’re possibly arguing over the wrong words?

The screwy thing about the self-righteous posturing of the past two weeks — and, by the way, you can stop sending me e-mail with Red Skelton’s interpretation of the Pledge of Allegiance, I already have 39,000 copies — is that “under God” is at best just a throwaway line, which is why it wasn’t in the pledge to begin with.

It just expresses a vague desire to acknowledge that, yes, the Big Guy is watching what we do. It was actually added to slam communist Russia.

But the “one nation” thing is the meat of the Hungry Man dinner, considered so important that the pledge hammers it home with the word “indivisible.” I’ll bet there are lots more people who disagree with THAT part of the pledge than there are people who bridle at the words “under God.””

Read the whole article at:

Assignment America: Taking the pledge

NEW YORK, July 15 (UPI) — When I say “one nation under God,” I can take or leave the “under God” part, but I’m a fanatic about the “one nation” part. Has anyone ever considered that we’re possibly arguing over the wrong words?

Quote of the Day

From an interview at CNN:

“Into what? I retired at 21 or whenever I decided to become a musician. What do I retire into? Accounting. I will retire into accounting, maybe.”
–David Bowie, asked if he ever thinks of retiring

Today’s reading: the HIV Muppet Controversy

Great column by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Gate:

“So it has come to this. It has come to an orphan HIV-positive female Muppet on “Sesame Street” in Africa. Let there be quiet and tragic applause.

It has come to the point where we can no longer avoid intermingling the worlds of sunny happy sing-songin’ innocent Cookie-Monster days and brutal ravaging epidemic disease and deathly nights, and man is Big Bird ever confused and sad and lost.

But this is a good thing, this new character. Everyone says so, everyone with any sort of conscience or even mild awareness of the horrors of the AIDS epidemic senses this is probably the right kind of thing to do, even if it feels like it’s not. ”

Read the whole article:

Condoms To Cookie Monster / An HIV+ Muppet comes to AIDS-ravaged Africa, and the world will never be the same

The idea, of course, is to gently raise the awareness among African kids (an estimated 18 million of whom have been orphaned due to the disease), prepare them all-too-early to confront a very painful adult problem they’re seeing every day in the street anyway, try to recast the afflicted as people not to be feared or loathed or shunned, much like introducing a gun-toting proto-American war zealot into the cast of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Welcome to the madhouse…

After much resistance, my sweetie has finally succumbed the madness that is LiveJournal. She says she doesn’t know how much she’ll say in it, but she’s onboard with the rest of us lunatics now.

Go say hi to kitanzi

It’s good to be back…

48 hours after getting the new medicine, things are very much better. Today I actually felt almost human, and while there is still a little discomfort, it’s mostly gone. This evening, in fact, I stopped taking the prescription painkillers and went back to Tylenol.

Kitanzi says she’s glad to have me back.. She missed me while I was gone.

Thanks again for all the well-wishers and virtual hugs. You guys are the greatest bunch of friends.

Health Update

By Friday morning, I still hadn’t seen any improvement on the condition of my ear, so I called my doctor and made another appointment to see him. He confirmed that little progress had been made, and arranged for me to see an ENT specialist that afternoon.

The ENT was very nice, even though I affectionately think of him now as Dr. Torquemada. After the requisite examination, he had my hearing tested to see how well the eardrums were responding, and then proceeded to vacuum out the wax buildup in my infected ear. If you’ve never had this done, it’s a somewhat uncomfortable procedure during the best of times — when the ear canal is infected and inflamed, it becomes an exquisite torture form. I clutched the armrests of the chair and resolutely refused to give them anything other than my name, rank, and serial number.

The doctor then proceeded to insert two “wicks” into my ear canal. These are designed to help the medicine (in the form of ear drops) actually get down through the swollen passage to where they need to go to be effective. I’ve often wondered what it would feel like to drive a pair of nails into the side of my skull. Now I know.

I left the ENT with three new prescriptions — two new kinds of antibiotics in drop form, and one painkiller. I stopped by Wal-Mart to have these filled on the way home.

24 hours later, I’m pleased to say that there’s now some real progress. I’m completely in a fog as a result of the painkiller, but it has taken the edge off the intense sharp shooting pain that I was suffering, and the new antibiotics seem to be kicking in. I hope by Monday I’ll actually feel vaguely like a human being again.

Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and virtual hugs — they are greatly appreciated and a tremendous comfort to me.

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