Been there, done that, or rather Doctor Ming did.

If the Republicans get their way and repeal the Affordable Care Act's new benefits, payments for things like screenings for colon cancer are going to be strictly out-of-pocket. Most seniors (or near-seniors) can't afford that. Just paying for prescription medicine may be difficult for many people.

Seriously, it sounds bad:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-jan-schakowsky/on-45th-anniversary-medic_b_888514.html

And I'm scared, because I could not afford the care I need without Medicare. I could not survive without that care. One of the things that Medicare currently pays for is a piece of equipment that forces the lymphatic fluid to circulate through my body. It won't do that on its own. It's like dialysis for lymphedemics.

If I didn't have this machine, I would not be able to walk. The lightest touch or pressure on my legs would cause shrieking agony. I don't know how long it would take my heart to drown, but I cannot think the interim would be pleasant.

I wish to hell I lived in a country that didn't consider the health of its citizens optional.

160 is the character code on windows for non-breaking space, accessed by typing shift-spacebar.
In Unicode it is an undefined code point, which causes an error.
This is the main cause of encoding failures when copy and pasting text in blog posts, leading to mojibake.

Kevin Marks @ #3:

Ah, is that what causes that? I had wondered.

I has a Fidelio until Monday! :-D

Kevin Marks @ 3 ...
... and yet another reason to check your bloody character set before presuming that changing character sets won't cause any problems...

I am so not looking forward to the first colonoscopy, which will be sometime this fall, I suppose.

Not so much the test, but the fasting and cleaning out.

And I have to pick a new regular doctor first. Hopefully we won't change health plans again . . .

Tracey, #2: Yes. My partner is into the age range where this should be done, but finding the money (not to mention the time, with our unpredictable schedule) is difficult.

Stefan @ #7, the test is nothing. The anesthesia knocks you out. It's the gallon of crud (I had GaviLyte-C) and its result the night before that's unpleasant.

OTOH, this was the second time in three years I've had it done. Unlike the first time they found no polyps, so they said "come back in five years."

I went the fecal occult blood sample route rather than the colonoscopy, because it's much cheaper and less invasive. Has to be done a bit more often to have the same screening effectiveness; it's a reasonable substitute for colonoscopy.

Non-urgent shout to the moderators: this open thread seems to have been scientifictionally dated a year into the future as July 01, 2012...

There's a national fecal occult blood screening program in effect over here -- kicks in automatically at 50. Given my family history[*] I looked into signing up for it early -- but according to my GP, it's inflexible: if I want an earlier test, it's colonoscopy or bust. And as I've got less than forty months to go, it didn't seem worth it. I will of course be in there like a shot if there are any worrying symptoms in the meantime ...

[*] Dad, aged 87, is a colon cancer survivor. His dad died of it, aged 69 -- but in 1963. That's one first and one second degree relative: not quite enough to shunt me up to the priority list, especially as neither case was early-onset (defined as "younger than 60").

Steve With a Book @11:

Sorted. It's true that we live in the future, but not that much.

I notice that the Blogads Book Hive feed in the sidebar has a link to "Gabriel Josipovici on New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani". New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani is a novel that I started reading yesterday, and I recommend it. (Nice bookseller yesterday asked me why I was the second person that day to buy this seemingly-obscure book from a smallish press; I told her I was buying it on the strength of Nicholas Lezard's review in the Guardian a few weekends ago. Summary: speechless-through-brain-injury WWII sailor is retaught language by his doctor. The language the sailor has lost is not Finnish, but that's what he gets taught).

Serge Broom @1: Been there, done that, or rather Doctor Ming did.

"Not the Bore Worms!"

Rob Rusick @ 15... That line had occurred to me. I don't look as good as Ornella Muti though so I passed. And did I tell you of the time I took my wife to the ER where she was treated by Doctor Faust? No, it wasn't because of a problem with her foot's sole.

The idea of polyps in my colon always make me think I'd be hosting some sort of Lovecraftian monster.

I have vague memories of the test itself (in my case, colonoscopy + endoscopy)--they gave me something that didn't quite knock me out but that did keep me too fuzzy to worry about what they were ramming up my a-- and down my throat. But yeah, the prep the night before is like having really incredible amounts of watery diarrhea with no other symptoms. You're not ill or anything, you're just chained to the toilet for an evening.

The anesthesia is what worries me, in some ways. The last (only) time I had general anesthesia, I wound up unable to tolerate the taste hot peppers, and with an intermittent but recurring weird not-exactly congestion feeling in the back of my mouth.

There may be no causal connection, but the timing is suggestive. It would make as much temporal sense to blame these on no longer having a gall bladder, but that seems even less plausible logically. That's because this is a taste/tongue problem: if I swallow the capsaicins anyhow, my digestive system has no problem with them. But hot pepper has gone from being a set of flavors I often enjoyed (though not at the extreme spicy end) to a set I can eat only in extreme moderation (for example, small amounts of smoked paprika are okay, sometimes). This is frustrating, in part because I miss enjoying things like chili and curries. I can still eat and enjoy other things called "spicy"--horseradish and ginger and garlic and mustard and black pepper are all fine--but it's not the same.

Still, when the time comes I will have the test; reasonably, even if I frame this as "the anesthesiologist took out my ability to eat hot pepper," that seems to be an anomaly, and I don't really think they'll take out the "garlic is good" module next time.

When I turned 50 my doctor had my referral for a colonoscopy ready for me. It did not show anything abnormal. Four years later I nearly died of diverticulosis. There are other things in your colon than cancer that can kill you.

Each journey's not a problem for the road
but recollection tricks us into tears,
each sudden image coming unawares
and then revealing there's a complex code
that we'd forgotten. Then time overflowed
into each heart and took away our fears,
washed out the sad crustation of the years
displaying all the good that was bestowed
in this refraction. What we see is clear
to older heads unbowed by weight of age
whose eyes preserve a proper youthful sight
with memory of that softer mountain air,
of solemn words declared on rustic stage
before a passage into tropic light.

I've had a "top and tail." No pain at all during the procedure, and afterward the only problem I remember is a sore throat from the "top." (Gotta do that again soon. Sigh. Oh well, better to prevent trouble.)

Vicki @c 19... No anesthesia. They give you something that completely messes up your short-term memory so that you don't remember the discomfort from one moment to the next.

Vicki @19 -- ISTR that the reason people like hot peppers is that the capsaicin releases endorphins in most people; and if the endorphin receptors get blocked, then the hot peppers stop being pleasant. So there's actually a reason the anaesthetic might have killed your enjoyment. (Marci used to refer to hot peppers as "Marci-repellant" because they gave her no pleasure, and thought it might be because her receptors were wired differently -- found some research to indicate that opiate receptor blockers made people not enjoy it. I don't know the research here....)

My brother (who has had Crohn's disease since he was 20) is now struggling with disturbingly advanced colon cancer at age 56. He might be okay' it's hard to say. His one request of everyone is the request Jim posted in this thread.

Trust me, you don't want to be on the kind of chemo regimen he's on ten months of. Get tested.

Kaiser's protocol is to do a sigmoidoscopy rather than a colonoscopy, starting at age 50. Everyone I know who's gotten a sigmoidoscopy reported serious/major discomfort/pain, and I'm a wimp, so I told my PCP I wouldn't do it. There's no colon cancer in my family. Starting at age 50 I got regular occult blood screenings. They always came back negative.

Around my 63rd birthday, my PCP scheduled me for a colonoscopy. I water-fasted for 48 hours before the test, and I did a split prep -- I ingested half of the disgusting stuff you have to drink the night before, and half in the early am -- for a test at 2 pm in the afternoon. The stuff was truly disgusting (to me, anyway, YMMV) but the sitting on the can part was no big deal, because my gut was empty.

The test itself was a breeze. I remember nothing of it -- they give you excellent sedatives -- and I have no memory of recovery or even of being driven home. They gave me some charming pictures of my pink polyp-less colon.

One thing you should know: they recommend that you stay on a soft diet for 2-3 days after the test. They didn't tell me this beforehand -- it would have been helpful if they had. As it turned out, it was not a big deal, since I had appropriate stuff in the fridge...

TexAnne @ 5... Yay!

albatross #18: A bit more unpleasant for me; I spent *all day* and a good portion of the night in the small room, after an initial episode of near-fainting.

Serge #23: I am informed that I attempted to hold a serious philosophical discussion on the mind/body problem while I was under. I, of course, was more embarrassed by that than by whatever was being done to me.

somehow I am inspired to foist this link on you.

http://www.scaredofbees.com/upbuttcoconut.htm

Kevin, #3: What makes you think 160 is an undefined codepoint in Unicode? It has been there since at least version 2.0:

00A0;NO-BREAK SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;NON-BREAKING SPACE;;;;

Vicki @19: "the anesthesiologist took out my ability to eat hot pepper,"

Huh. I wonder if the anesthesia did something to your endorphin metabolism. Turns out (via Jon Singer) that the pleasure kick people get from capsaicins is apparently an endorphin rush. Feed them endorphin blockers, and they just hurt.

I've never acquired (nor had any desire to) this connection, so I have to be rather careful when ordering restaurant food around here. Jalapeño has been an increasingly favored seasoning in the last decade or so. Annoys the crap out of me. Bought some lovely fresh smoked oysers from Whole Foods few weeks ago, only to discover when I ate them that they were larded with Tabasco sauce. Who the hell puts Tabasco sauce on smoked oysters, fer Ghu's sake!?

Seems to be a Boulder local thing, because when I was in Denver for Denvention, I had no trouble at all.
</rant>

The idea of polyps in my colon always make me think I'd be hosting some sort of Lovecraftian monster.

...And far away, into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green...

Tennyson, of course. Britain's first and finest Science Fiction Poet. (Seriously, read "Locksley Hall" and tell me that's not SF.)

...and of course Whitmore got there first.

I'm on the hook for various screenings, but I'm trying to cycle yearly things around to take care of them in October. I can remember Halloween. I try to tag all the yearly stuff to that date, so I can just go down the list and be done with it.

My embarrassment at the one colonoscopy I've done so far was that I wanted to watch the video feed, so I woke up in tears, with vague memories of wailing "Wait! Wait! I want to see!" and the nurse trying unsuccessfully (of course) to explain that it was just the medicine.

My doc had a very sour look on his face. I later parted ways with that doc; I got the very strong impression from this guy that if you didn't have cancer, you weren't worth his time. I have ulcerative colitis, and they seemed to think that chronic bleeding, cramping, and pain were acceptable outcomes of treatment. Me: not so much, no. He was also spectacularly determined to disregard my accounts of my own experience.

So I need to find a new gastroenterologist. One that regards an absence of symptoms and pain as success.

I also had an unhappy go-round with the nurse who checked me out. While they had told me that I needed to have someone come pick me up and, no, a cab wasn't good enough, they neglected to inform me that they wanted to have someone stay with me through the day.

Then, as she was going over release information, she was talking only to the friend who was there to pick me up, and I had to kind of verbally club her over the head to get her to answer my questions. Yes, I get that some people are out of it and non compos mentis at that point. But I was all there, thankyouverymuch, and I'd already had enough of being treated like a can of soup by the anesthesiologist.

Did I mention that this whole thing was not an experience I'm burning to repeat, and none of it had anything to do with the medical side?

TNH's Particle "Plot Device"?

Gowatchit!Gowatchit!Gowatchit!Gowatchit!Gowatchit!

Josh Jasper @ 17: I do now wonder how much of that kind of association went into the Mythos's particular... morphological and metaphorical choices. They have that sort of flavour. In one of my own Lovecraft-touched yarns many years back, the standard (and not exactly unwarranted) hostile epithet for Hastur was 'the Cancer in the Sky' - so the reverse association must have been working big-time for me.

Pond hydras are cute, and even sea anemones are as attractive as they're weird disturbing; but did anybody ever have a positive association with a nakedly generic polyp?

Jacque @34: I'll second that endorsement.

HLN: Area woman attends Friday-night going-away party for good friends who are relocating to the East Coast. During dinner, woman realizes that one of her molars has broken; fortunately, woman experiences no pain and is able to stay for the rest of the party.

Dentist of woman's choice is open on Saturdays (yay!) and has time available, so woman spends two hours in dentist's chair being fitted with a temporary crown. Also, dentist is okay with payment plans for the uninsured!

Woman returns to car to discover an expired meter and a $58 parking ticket.

***sigh***

Jacque (34): Waaaah! I can't get it to load! *sniff*

I think it's running afoul of my NoScript, but I've temporarily allowed all the scripts I'm willing to, and it still won't load.

Just one more note on colonoscopy. Failing to get any colonoscopies is a bad idea. If the first one is negative and you don't have family history, failing to get repeated ones is much less of a big deal, though you might as well get them if they are on offer.

News that makes my week (already made, as I'm at home with my parents/siblings/assorted spice and kinder):

Cory Maye will soon be free

Some days, I'm proud to lean libertarian.

Thomas @39: on the flip side, too many colonoscopies is a risk factor: I was told (by my dad's surgeon, during a pre-op meeting) that there was roughly a 1:500 risk of something going wrong during a colonoscopy, for values of "ripped intestinal wall" wrongness (i.e. peritonitis and haemorrhaging). Not necessarily fatal, but seriously hazardous.

This is not an argument for avoiding colonoscopy procedures; it's an argument for not undergoing them unnecessarily or excessively. (Yes, screening is good cause, especially if you're in an at-risk group. Excessively frequent screening is another matter.)

Hamster problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVzCze0adWs#t=00m08s

Mary Aileen @38: Try the You Tube version?

@42:

O.o

I'm amused that I haven't seen any typographical puns in this thread.

I think this is relevant to some people in the conversation: people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry are susceptible to a kind of colorectal cancer which is somewhat different from what is normally meant by hereditary, early onset disease in the general population. The Ashkenazi kind is hardly a pleasant thing to have in one's genetic legacy, but it's more likely than not for people to die with it at advanced ages (rather than specifically dying of it). My great-uncle, for example, died at the age of 94 (the last of his generation), some 15 years after a bowel cancer diagnosis.

So, if you have a lot of relatives who've had colon or bowel cancer, but they were diagnosed after retirement age, and your family is ethnically Ashkenazi, there's no real benefit in starting screening younger than 50. And, statistically speaking, you probably have a tendency to something slow growing and treatable, even if the treatment is itself extremely unpleasant.

I've seen one relative on the Ex's side die way too soon of colon cancer that was diagnosed too late -- she never even made it to the chemo -- and my cousin on my Dad's side is fighting it now. He's survived longer than the median survival time for his initial grade, but it's rough and he may well die of this cancer eventually. Colon cancer screening: whichever methods your doctor uses, do it.

In brighter news, I visited my son today in the psych hospital; he has new meds and is cheerful, goofy, smiling and sleepy. He hugged me at once, chatted nicely, and enjoyed himself tremendously.

This is my son.

I feel a diagnosis congealing for me, at least; it's going to be a combination of his long-standing anxiety (a family trait plus his early childhood conditions), his not-quite-as-longstanding ADHD, his newly-triggered depression, possibly topped off by a drug-induced psychosis and a girlfriend with her own pathology on top. As more than one Luminous Poster mentioned, he's better off having his issues show up now, rather than later in life.

The FG is making a fabulous dinner tonight, so I need to feed my animals, pack the freshly-laundered clothing to be sent off to my nephews, and make tracks northwards.

Ginger: Hooray!

Jacque (43): Thanks!

Everyone else: You *definitely* want to watch that. And don't skip out before the end of the credits.

Ginger (47): Hooray x 2! That sounds extremely promising.

Linkmeister @ 9:

I've had a colonoscopy screen 3 times since I turned 50, and had various other low-dignity procedures like barium-contrast X-rays (with enema) so I have much more experience with that nasty liquid than I care for. I have never yet been able to drink it all; along about 50-75%, I start to bring it all back up - ewww.

My first screen removed some polyps; the second and third screens showed none, so I don't need to get the next one until 10 years have passed from the third. This is long enough that my proctologist has retired.

individ-ewe-al @46:
That's interesting; it must be the case that all those factors have to be present. I'm Ashkenazi, but I don't have a history of colorectal cancer in my family, and as I said I did have polyps on my first screen.

The anesthetic they've used on me is Verced; it allows you to be conscious through the whole procedure, and not remember any of it. In fact, as you come out of, you will often be awake and lucid for 5 or 10 minutes, and have no subsequent memory of what happened. It also appears to cause a mild depression for a few days after use. That may just be me, or it may be cumulative over multiple doses; I've been getting Verced fairly regularly in the last 10 years for things like spinal steroid injections and a recent removal of an infected cyst. This last time I felt like I'd been through a wringer for the next couple of weeks.

Dropping by to wonder if others are at Westercon (but also getting their fix of Fluorosphere, if you're reading this)

I've moved on from worrying about colon cancer and colonoscopies to worrying about Fosamax. It's a preventive med for osteoporosis with a nasty set of potential side effects, including causing brittle bones. A local woman just sued the maker (Merck) because after seven years of using the drug her thigh bone shattered. There are plenty of lawsuits in process.

The docs did a bone density exam a few months back and decided I had a precursor to osteoporosis called osteopenia. My PCP put me on Vitamin D3, but after the exam they sent me to a specialist who ordered calcium and a weekly dose of Fosamax. I've had it for about two months now. I'm beginning to think I want no part of it.

Dead modem replaced.
Now I try to catch up on all the stuff I missed....

Linkmeister, so far the atypical fractures associated with Fosamax seem to be in people who have taken it for (at least) several years. So it's not a matter for immediate worry. If your bone density stabilizes, your doc may decide you don't need the drug--that's what happened with my husband (who also has osteopenia).

Weight-bearing exercise is also very important for bone density. If your primary exercise is something like biking or swimming, you may need to add some walking or a weight workout.

Colonoscopies have greatly improved since I first started having them (back in the 1970's). The first one I had took place in a doctor's office. I was fully awake for the whole thing, and was allowed to use one of the two eyepieces on the equipment (called "the silver broomstick"). It really did feel like a broomstick. It felt as though rather than the device bending, it simply straightened out my colon, like putting on a long, wadded-up sock.

The next one was better, done in a hospital. They made a tape, which I got to keep. You can plainly hear the surgeon saying "There it is" at the same time you are looking at the picture (river of hundreds of pink bumps) and thinking "There what is?" But the surgeons know these things. He nipped it out, and sure enough, there it was, according to the pathology report. (The first one couldn't have been missed, even by a lay person -- it was inches long and resembled a morel.)

For the third and all later such events, I have been either anesthetized, or amnesiized, or simply sedated a whole lot. I never remember them. The doctor comes in when I have awakened, and tells me that I'm fine, and my husband gives me a ride home.

I was told years ago that since I had been free of any cancerous material for ten years, I need no longer have them regularly, but I feel an (almost, but not quite, irrational) attachment to every surviving inch of my colon, and I want to keep up the regular schedule. Fortunately, my insurance company agrees.

Last year, one of my sisters-in-law had some polyps diagnosed. Just to be sure, they took a chunk out of her intestine. Her answer to the question, "Do you have cancer?" is "Nope, it's all in a bucket!"

On that note, don't forget to check your moles, too. My mom just had one removed via liquid nitrogen (the day after she noticed it was odd, too.) Pre-cancerous, so good catch.

"Getting old isn't for wimps."

On the general topic of cancer screening: someone asked a while back about lung cancer screening for smokers (?B. Durbin).

The final results of a big US trial are now out.

They gave 26,000 people annual spiral CT scans (and 26,000 controls got regular chest X-rays) for three years. The group with CT scans had 70 more cancers diagnosed, and 50 fewer deaths from lung cancer. On the other hand, about 6000 people in the CT group had positive scans that needed further investigation.

The cynics (like me) were right that the false-positive rate would be appalling, but we were wrong in thinking that the there wouldn't be any gain. Not only is the death rate down, but there hasn't been much unhelpful earlier diagnosis of untreatable disease (in contrast to prostate cancer screening, for example).

On the other hand, per life saved you have 500 people getting 3 CT scans and about 120 of them getting follow-ups for false-positives. The cost is going to be on the order of $1 million per life saved.

Anyone want to comment on the the rather open-ended rights grant in the fifth paragraph of Dropbox's TOS, the one beginning "We sometimes need your permission"?

C Wingate @59, Dropbox themselves have commented upon it:

Some of you have written us with very understandable concerns about the legal-sounding parts. In particular, our new TOS talks about the licenses we need to run Dropbox. We want to be 100% clear that you own what you put in your Dropbox. We don't own your stuff. And the license you give us is really limited. It only allows us to provide the service to you. Nothing else. [...] It's about the permissions you give us to run the service, things like creating public links when you ask us to, allowing you to collaborate with colleagues in shared folders, generating web previews or thumbnails of your files, encrypting files, creating backups... the basic things that make Dropbox safe and easy to use.

bryan @ #45:

Yes. All this talk about people having trouble with their colons...

Older: Colonoscopies have greatly improved since I first started having them...The next one was better, done in a hospital. They made a tape, which I got to keep.

Adding a new definition to "must see TV."

Linkmeister: STOP THE FOSAMAX IMMEDIATELY!

From the info page on drugs.com:
"Some people using medicines similar to Fosamax have developed bone loss in the jaw, also called osteonecrosis of the jaw. Symptoms may include jaw pain, swelling, numbness, loose teeth, gum infection, or slow healing after injury or surgery involving the gums."

That's what happened to my wife Hilde in 1999, after taking Fosamax for about a year. The impersonal paragraph above doesn't even begin to touch on what she went thru.

That osteonecrosis took four years to get rid of. Let me repeat that: four years. FOUR YEARS. FOUR FUCKING YEARS. FOUR FUCKING YEARS OF THE WORST FUCKING HELL SHE EVER WENT THRU.

Hilde's had severe rheumatoid arthritis since 1968. Pain's not a stranger. Severe pain's not a stranger.

The arthritis pain, even at its worst, was NOTHING compared to what the osteonecrosis caused. Imagine having an abscessed tooth. Now imagine having ALL your lower teeth being abscessed at the same time.

Now try to imagine having that kind of pain last for weeks. For months. Imagine having to have all your lower teeth extracted because the jawbone is rotting out from under them. Imagine having to have an oral surgeon go in and scrape out the decayed bone, repeatedly.

Now try to imagine, after weeks and months of pain and doctors and surgeries, when you finally think the necrosis has been cut out and treated with antibiotics and the rot killed and -- oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, God -- it's over...

...and the necrosis comes back again.

And again.

And again.

FOR. FOUR. FUCKING. YEARS.

It wasn't until about 2002 that we finally began to get a handle on the osteonecrosis. That was when her oral surgeon attended the dental conference where the first paper raising the possibility of Fosamax causing osteonecrosis was presented. And when he heard that paper's presentation, his first thought was of Hilde. When he got back, he contacted us and had Hilde stop taking the Fosamax. It was only after that, that there was actual progress on not only pushing back the necrosis, but getting rid of it entirely.

(Because Hilde had continued to take the Fosamax all that time. Because it was supposed to strengthen bones. And when your jaw is rotting away, of course you're going to continue a medication that might, that should, make your bones harder and denser and stronger. The idea that Fosamax might be causing the necrosis... well, that was as silly and bizarre a thought as thinking anti-depressants might cause suicidal thoughts.)

The last of the necrosis was finally rooted out by a combination of hyperbaric therapy (30 daily sessions in an enriched-oxygen chamber), and three months of daily doses of intravenous antibiotics, administered by a visiting home nurse.

(And let's not even mention our insurance company trying to claim the necrosis was a "dental problem" and not covered. I'm generally highly satisified with our insurance company, and problems have been rare, but there were times during those four years when I wanted to hop on a plane to the Midwest, walk into their headquarters with a baseball bat, and start breaking jaws.)

The Fosamax-related osteonecrosis is supposed to be pretty rare -- about 1 in 20,000 patients -- but when I think of what Hilde went thru in those years, even 1 in 20,000 is unacceptable. Nearly a decade later, and I still shake with anger about it. I'd like to see that stuff off the market completely, not just come with a warning.

some cancers don't scare me much. My mother has had a form of skin cancer all the time I've been alive I think it might be squamous cell, it presents as a little pearl of oddness in her skin. the treatments have gotten better, when I was little they took out a great hunk of skin around the nodule, then they used a drop of acid and now they use a little nitrogen-frozen probe to zap it.

On the other hand, the whole lung cancer/smoker thing scare the shit out of me... about a lot of friends. Or any other cancer. A lot of friends who have smoked, even if they quit, have gotten cancer in some form or another.

A dear friend wasn't diagnosed until he was having bone pain and it was pretty much Too Late despite the fact he did everything he could to make it go away. Another friend is undergoing chemo after having part of a lung removed. I hope the best, but he was also a long-term smoker.

I'm really glad I never developed the habit. I've had exactly one drag off a cigarette and that was back when I was smoking something else and we passed it around.We were at a con and the owner of the smoke (and a diet pepsi can filled with a lethal mix of diet pepsi and vodka) gave both to me to go deal with a security issue. I reflexively took a 'hit' off the cig and apparently turned green. I know I gagged. Just as she turned back to me, and she laughed her ass off.

Mary Aileen @49: These people are just astonishingly good. I'm putting them on my List of People to Watch, right up there with Sorkin and Whedon.

If you haven't already, watch the making of video, too. Yes, it's a shameless plug for the software,* but it's fun, too. "I really wanted my neighbor to wake up in the morning and look his window to see a horde of zombies."

* Which, after all, was the motive for making the short in the first place. But who am I to argue, with results like this?

Ginger: ::Kermit cheer with flappy hands!::

In the category of, "gee I feel lucky"...

I am glad I have a massive disability rating from the VA, as it's probably going to be the only way I can afford to get old; barring being one of those people who never has any age related conditions.

Because I don't see that I will be able to afford medical insurance (much less care) the way things are presently going.

Lila @ #55, that's my sense too, that you have to take it for a while before these effects occur. I'm certainly glad your husband didn't suffer what Bruce's wife did.

Bruce Arthurs @ #63, that's terrifying. As you say, it makes no sense that something which is supposed to improve bone density (or stop its decreasing, anyway) should have such a horrific effect. You've just added to my sense that the cure is quite possibly worse than the disease. I think I'll call the doc (Terry, this is the VA system, by the way) and say "got any other ideas?"

I have just, with completely un-ironic (but half-flippant) intent, asked a computer system to remind me the name of "that kook who is on about the singularity" (direct quote, typed into Google as a search request) since I was blanking on his name and wanted it for a comment, and it correctly told me "Kurzweil".

And then I realized just exactly what I had done. Wow.

Bruce @51, yes, all those factors. Ashkenazis are just as susceptible as anyone else to what's called "sporadic" cancer. Most colorectal cancer falls into this class, it "just happens", there's no particular family connection or trigger. But that kind of bad luck needs a sequence of bad rolls with low enough probability that you rarely see it younger than 60. That's exactly the reason why general screening programmes are worth it for older people, but not worth it for younger people unless there is a clear family history.

C. Wingate, Avram, @59 and 60

Those issues, especially backups, are problems which have plagued internet services since the day it started getting commercial. They're good reasons. They're not easy to put into terms that, if the arguments started, a court would "understand" without them scaring a layman. And I've given up on counting over the number of times the company lawyers have ended up looking as if they didn't know what the company did.

But it's a good sign that Dropbox are trying to talk to customers about what they need to do, and not just through lawyers.

individ-ewe-al @70: the Ashkenazi/colorectal cancer thing applies to me, for sure (as mentioned upstream: dad is now being checked regularly for recurrences, granddad died of it in 1963). However, there's an additional factor: it turns out that there's a correlation between colorectal cancer and working in the textile industries -- it's believed that some fabric dyes still in use may be mildly carcinogenic.

And as granddad was a Shoddy magnate in Batley, and dad continued to run the family business for 40 years (until the Shoddy industry curled up and died -- late 1950s through 1970s), that's one risk factor I'm not likely to succumb to.

On another note, just in case I missed it coming up here the first time, here are Cats in Tanks! (SLYT)

After I broke my hip last year, I had a bone density scan and a few other tests.

But I was never told anything about the results. I don't worry, but the follow-up on the surgery feels a bit too minimal. I seem to be OK, but nobody took the trouble to tell me what to expect.

On the other hand, I don't have to worry about medical bills, just about politicians.

Ginger @ 47... The FG is making a fabulous dinner tonight, so I need to feed my animals

I like the sequitur.

On that note, don't forget to check your moles, too.

I have a lot of moles, one of which was itchy two Sundays ago. And I was scratching it idly, as one does, and a scab came off.

Hie me to the dermatologist, and they say it's likely nothing but they'll take it off if I like. Which I do.

Just got the biopsy results in the mail Friday, and it was just that I irritated it with scratching; it was perfectly normal. I'm glad of that, but I'm also glad I had it off. From now on, that's a mole I don't have to worry about.

Bruce Arthurs: Jesus Christ. My sincere sympathies to Hilde! Did your insurance cover the hyperbaric treatments? That stuff is expensive as hell, but for some things (nonhealing diabetic ulcers come to mind) it's the only game in town. I think I remember from my tour of the hyperbaric facility here that osteonecrosis is one of the approved uses.

Re moles: oh yeah. I have dozens of them. Most of them are on my back. I've had to have one suspicious one removed but it turned out to be benign. OTOH, I have 3 siblings, and 2 of them were diagnosed with cancer in the same year (breast cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma). Since then I've pretty much counted on cancer catching up with me eventually. (Sibs are fine, over a decade after diagnosis, but the one with lymphoma had to go through a bone marrow transplant.)

HLN: Woman finds Internet friends' presence soothing. She said, "I've gotten more done in the last two days than I have in the previous two weeks. Okay, so one of those weeks I was at a con." She added that google-double-plus-chatting makes her nearly as productive as an in-person visit, with the added excitement of OMG VIDEOPHONES.

In other news, Fidelio is awesome and water is wet.

My family has a history of colon cancer so my mother has needed to get regular colonoscopies since I was a young teen. She ran into one complication from the testing (although, fortunately, she is quite healthy). As the addressee of near-constant cries of "Moooooooommm, where is the x?", her most frequent answer came back to haunt her during out serious medical discussion about her upcoming colonoscopy: "If it was up your ass you'd know it!"

So, um, TANGENT ('cause this thread's a bit down):

Fireworks, personal. Like? Don't like? Are you allowed them in your area?

I grew up in California, so "safe & sane" is the type we're allowed. The fountains have gotten much prettier over the years but we apparently don't have "roses" any more (probably jumped too much.) The stands are only open for two weeks at most (which may have gotten reduced to one week) and are exclusively operated as fundraisers for various and sundry high schools and charities. So you can pick your Shriners or your Elks or your high school band to buy your fireworks from, and despite the various names and brands the deals are virtually identical.

I *love* personal fireworks, to the point where if they got banned I'd ask Evil Rob to re-up his pyrotechnicist's license so we could still have a show. But then, I live in suburbia and there's no more perfect place than the bottom of a cul-de-sac to set off short-range fireworks. Lots of concrete surrounded by well-watered lawns and lots of people with hoses—if you employ basic common sense, there's little risk.

But I can totally see where the idiocy comes in, so what do you all think?

B. Durbin (79): Fireworks are pretty, but I hate the barrage of noise when I'm trying to sleep. And I *really* hate finding spent ones under my car the next morning--it makes me retroactively afraid that one will destroy my car.

Private ones are also illegal here (as far as I know), but that doesn't seem to stop anyone. In fact, we've had isolated bangs starting several nights ago. Idiots.

I say NO, very forcefully.

B. Durbin: I live in Edinburgh. There's no point having personal fireworks -- in about eight weeks the City Council are going to torch off about ten tons of them in half an hour to mark the end of the Festival, and the same again on December 31st. Meanwhile, the Royal Tattoo get through a small artillery barrage every night around 11pm for the whole of August.

I'm not talking household stuff, or exaggerating the scale, either. It's audible several miles away and the annual city fireworks budget is in the multiple millions of pounds.

Fourth of July? Not so much. What's to celebrate?

Living as I do in what is currently labeled An Area Of Extreme Droughth, I say *Quintuple* NO, with emphasizers and stars and bars.

Fire danger around here is appallingly high; there's been a rush effort to mow many fields. The city has canceled their fireworks show *and* the symphony concert that goes with it. Sale of fireworks has been completely banned.

I can only hope that the cherry bombs that our next door neighbors set off last year (right under my study window) shortly after they moved in were the last of their stash.

joann, 82: If not, call 911.

joan @ 82... An Area Of Extreme Drought

So do I and the neighborhood's desert is tinder-dry. Nature's mishaps are enough already, as shown by the Los Conchas fire that shut down the Los Alamos Lab for a whole week. There was a fire in the mountain behind our house a few weeks ago and, had there been any winds, our abode might not be there anymore.

My Fourth of July celebrations will involve hot dogs, and possibly the musical "1776". We will watch fireworks, but from the comfort of home, thus ensuring that, if an idiot starts a conflagration nearby, we'd be there to do what we can to stop it.

I'm with joann. If I didn't live in an area that regularly suffers from drought and high-fire-risk conditions, I might feel differently.

That wildfire around Waco/Bryan/College Station a couple of weeks ago? That started from somebody being careless with a backyard cookout. Fireworks are an order of magnitude worse. They're pretty, but (1) I can live without them (in multiple senses of the word) and (2) I can get my fix by watching professional shows.

Addendum: With fireworks, you don't need idiocy to have a disaster -- an ill-timed gust of wind, or other factors beyond your control, will do just as well. And IMO my personal fun shouldn't be able to put someone else's life or home at risk.

I personally like personal fireworks (safe and sane much more than noisy ones) and have generally lived in areas where they were relatively safe and legal. Seattle, unfortunately -- not legal. And I don't want to terrorize neighborhood cats.

TexAnne #83:

Without fail. They've known we would since that incident, burn ban or no.

Texanne @77--

*cracks whip*

Pack books! Pack books!

This year, the Los Angeles law enforcement agencies (and probably, behind the scenes, the various fire departments) have put up many posters telling people to go to a fireworks show, instead of setting off stuff in their neighborhood. It's a lot safer.

Tom #87:

Cats are definitely a consideration. The cherry bombs were under my window. This means they were four feet away from the library wall, on the inside of which is the Holy Cat Bed. I was convinced Mona the Forest Cat had gone a bit deaf for several days after.

In a miracle of bad placement[*], Austin's civic animal shelter is just the other side of Town Lake from the fireworks, and on the same side as the cannons used for the "1812 Overture" that leads into the display. Predictably, July 4 is a bad night for the dog and cat denizens.

[*] It's moving, sometime, well away from all that and very close to the flight path.

Hm, don't know what fireworks will be like in my new neighborhood. Haven't heard any yet. But Oklahoma's pretty drought-y right now too, and large portions of the state are under burn bans, including my city and county, where personal fireworks are prohibited. I enjoy sparklers, but other personal fireworks don't do much for me. It's too hot to grill -- I'm thinking baked beans, sausage, and coleslaw in front of the air conditioner sounds about right.

Fragano @ #20: It wasn't the diverticulosis that nearly did you in, it was the diverticulitis. I've been having colonoscopies ever two or three years since my mid-fifties, and even then the diverticulosis was evident. But an attack of diverticulitis in my late sixties nearly killed me and required removal of about 20 cm of my sigmoid colon.

I dislike personal fireworks. I live in a state where fireworks used to be completely illegal (which didn't stop people from driving across the line and filling up their car trunks with fireworks. While smoking cigarettes. On the TV news). Now sparklers etc. are legal, but there are still plenty of illegal ones around too.

Our city cancelled its fireworks display for want of money (along with all the rest of the festivities--face painting, Moon Jumps, band concert). The local country club will still have its private display, which is close enough to panic my dogs, and can be viewed from the shopping center parking lot a mile from my house. We typically have high fire danger most days of most summers, except for when it's actually raining.

At least I no longer live in the neighborhood where I used to find spent bottle rockets on my ROOF.

Also, let me mention here that if you use Librarything, you can use the Tags or Private Comments section to note which box you packed a book, CD, DVD or other media item in.

This may turn out to be useful information later on.

Bruce Arthurs @ 63: "The idea that Fosamax might be causing the necrosis... well, that was as silly and bizarre a thought as thinking anti-depressants might cause suicidal thoughts."

You mean like Zoloft and other SSRIs?

(Yours is a truly horrifying story. My heart goes out to you and your wife.)

Comment taken into isolation by the gnomes.

Mentions of certain drugs get automatic gnome-inspection. I hope y'all understand why.

Honolulu finally passed a law which partially bans fireworks, after years of trying by the usual advocates (Am. Lung Ass'n., police, fire, etc.). Most consumer-level ones are banned (including sparklers, which puzzles some of us), but for a $25 fee you can buy a permit to buy and set off up to 5,000 firecrackers.

The 4th of July has always been loud here, but it pales in comparison to New Year's Eve. It will be interesting to see what happens this Dec. 31.

joann @91: Take up a special collection for kitty and doggie tranqs?

Fireworks are one of those forms of eye-candy for which I satisfied my curiosity millenia ago. I find the innevitable neighborhood pops tedious. The guineas mostly cope, as long as I don't jump too much.

The occassional Earth-Shattering Kaboom in the near distance, I could certainly live without.

Interesting side note: I happened to be watching the Boston display on TV a few years ago, and it struck me that it was a lot smokier than I remembered professional shows typtically being. Watching more closely, it seemed that the designer was making a lot of use of back- and diffuse-lighting, and it suddenly struck me how much the display resembled Hubble imagery of nebulas. I wonder if there's any influence going on, there?

@0: e-Patient Dave on TED.

<chant>
Let patients help!
Let patients help!
Let patients help!
Let patients help!

See also: Visible body and Google body

Bruce Arthurs at 63, I want to add my sympathies to Hilde and to you. That's an awful story, and an awful ordeal.

Re personal fireworks: The uncut grass/weeds in the lawns of the abandoned houses in my neighborhood is 4 feet high. A lot of my neighbors are also pretty lazy about keeping their weeds down. I say NO to personal fireworks. However, I know that some of my neighbors will set some off in the streets tonight and tomorrow night.

Don't know if the local city/county fireworks display got canceled 'cause there is no money for it. But if they found some money and scheduled the event, I will sit on my front porch tomorrow night and enjoy a line of sight view. I'll be a bit far away, but that's fine.

The cats will hide. The dog has never been much bothered by noises as long as they aren't too close. I think he just watches me, sees that I am unconcerned, and relaxes.

I have to admit it. I am an explosions enthusiast. I like the look of fireworks, but even more I like the sound. These days I watch the local display from a site where I can hear the explosions reflected in a few seconds back from nearby hills with tall buildings. BOOOM ... ... ... rumblerumblerumble

In my younger days, I was a launcher of cans. A ladyfinger will launch a soup can, and a really big explosive will launch a garbage can. Be sure to allow plenty of room for it to come down in; light fuse and retire at once! (a favorite phrase at our house, and oh such good advice).

I am proud to say I taught all my kids the safe way to launch cans. (1. gather materials, 2. check for roaming police cars . . .) I no longer indulge, because it is too much trouble to get, or assemble, the necessary explosive device these days, what with the "new" laws.

B. Durbin @79 spoke of personal fireworks.

We were just remarking that our (downmarket, lots of foreclosures, heavily-pigmented population) neighborhood is showing significant signs of recession this year.

How did we know? We only started getting lots of fireworks noise a couple of weeks ago. All previous years we've lived here, 'fireworks season' runs from early May until mid-October, with 3-5 gusts of lots of popping noises (at minimum) every single night through that range.

This ranges from the legal ones -- Illinois is exceedingly conservative in its laws -- through illegal M80s and other flashbangs bought across the line in Indiana or Wisconsin, up to illegal-anywheres like the two separate amateur pyrotechs in our neighborhood who enjoy setting off mortar chrysanthemums and the like several times a month each.

Nobody bothers calling the cops. And my neighborhood-of-origin was similar enough (minus the mortar-ers) that I do reflexively discriminate between 'huge firecracker' and 'gunshot' -- a useful skill, at least to avoid excessive stress and freaking out in Fireworks Season.

All summer, the city has free fireworks displays choreographed to music out at Navy Pier twice a week, but that's a significant distances from where we live.

I've got a bad history with personal fireworks, and living in a place that has one of the best Fourth of July fireworks displays in the western US, I find them rather redundant.

First off, I've kept dogs for most of my life, and the random loud booms are a major pain for them. The border collie I had a few years ago was especially bothered by the noise, and required Acepromazine to calm him down, rather than a milder anti-anxiety medication like Fluoxetine. Ace reduced him to drooling and uncoordinated movement, and I hated to use it, but it was that or have him hiding and shivering for the better part of the 4 days the celebration usually lasts.

And the other part of my dislike comes from my neighbor's children, when I lived in California many years ago, setting fire to my house with sparklers they threw up on the roof. I was able to put it out myself before the fire department arrived, but it wasn't exactly a happy experience.

Oh, rats, I mentioned a drug and the gnomes got suspicious and grabbed my last post. Honestly, I was talking about dog medication.

My son's fireworks story: He used to work nights as a baker for a large hotel. He'd get home around 1 am and watch TV for a while to relax so he could sleep. One night he noticed a strange flickering light in the room, and looked out of his living room window to see that his front yard was on fire. His first thought was, "I must be tired, I'm hallucinating". But it really was on fire; the kids across the street had been misusing bottle rockets. Moral: no matter how careful you are, someone else can still burn down your front yard, house, car, etc.

Some friends of mine declared their house and yard a fireworks-free zone after the New Year's Eve party when a rocket came in through the open front door, lodged under the couch, and set fire to the carpet. Fortunately, someone standing nearby had the presence of mind to douse it with their glass of wine, so no great harm was done. Except to everyone's nerves.

I suppose they were lucky s/he wasn't drinking something with a higher alcohol content. Would whiskey, say, have doused the flames or spread them?

There's some concern in the UK about the increasing popularity of Chinese lanterns, which can very easily set fire to things. Safety officers at oil refineries and chemical works get understandably nervous about them. Even if they don't start a fire, they drop to the ground as litter which cattle can be tempted to eat, with Bad Veterinary Consequences.

At room temp, 80-proof spirits will damp rather than spread flames. As they warm, they will ignite -- thus, to "flame" a plum pudding, one warms the brandy on the stove first. Whiskey with ice: definite damping effect. Whiskey neat -- less of one. Brandy warmed in the snifter -- still less.

Half my parents' house got burned down one summer when Someone was playing with a sparkler inside the house sparks fell in bedding, and my brothers didn't notice until there was a serious fire. I'm told who did it, but I have a good alibi -- I was in Russia at the time.

re dropbox: They seem to have limited the rights they are claiming, to just what they need to provide the service.

As is so often the case, the Dutch are on another planet about fireworks. Their sale is limited to the few weeks before New Year's and the few weeks before Queen's Day (30 April). But during that time, you can get some serious stuff: not just fountains and sparklers, but quite powerful rockets.

My mother was visiting when we got our New Year's fireworks, and though we were quite moderate and modest in our purchases, her eyes bugged out. We had a very funny conversation about fireworks and firearms as a result.

People here set them off for hours on the nights in question, well into the wee hours of the morning. For days afterwards, everyone is cleaning up the red paper and picking sticks up from gardens. We still have one in our gutter; I must get a ladder up and get it down.

It helps that this is a very wet country, even in the current drought, and that there is such an abundance of hard landscaping in most gardens.

I've always found personal fireworks knd of unexciting, compared to the big ones. Lot of noise and danger for not much payoff, is how I feel.

I quite like the big ones though. Especially the ones that crackle.

Steve, #108: Thanks for providing the link. I was initially confused, since my mental associations to "Chinese lantern" are either this or this! I'd heard of the sky lanterns, but that's not what "Chinese lantern" maps to for me.

My take on fireworks... not what it used to be.

If I know they are going on, or I can see them. No real problem. If I don't, or I can't, I get a little antsy.

I wasn't home this time last year (as I recall, I was in Memphis on 03 July). It's a bit... loud. Lots of firecrackers, and a lot of bigger stuff. Get them far enough away and the sound like a firefight just out of range.

When the bigger stuff is going off too,, that sounds like artillery support. It's not too bad; I know it's not any of that, but it does keep me a little nervous.

Our fireworks laws are supposed to be 'strictly enforced', KC, MO prohibits everything except sparklers and snakes. BUT there is a booming fireworks business in KC, KS and in the non-incorporated portions of Jackson, Cass, Platte and etc. surrounding the city.

We've been hearing fireworks for days. The only good fortune here is that things are so damp that I'm surprised that I'm not seeing more mushrooms.

We go to a pot luck at a friend's house. they live near a large municipal fireworks display that we can see from their back deck. that will do,.

As a kid, we got to hold sparklers. In the sandbox. (20 feet square, cinderblock wall on three sides and concrete patio on the fourth.) With a hose handy. It is possible to start a fire with one, under the right conditions. (But much more likely with bottle rockets. I had a little talk with a younger neighbor once, after he and his friends were setting off bottle rockets under a pine tree.)

I remember seeing a report once, in the San Jose paper, of a firetruck called to a roof fire caused by fireworks, near the intersection of Partridge and Peartree.

Lee@114: I always used to associate 'Chinese lantern' with this sort of thing, but the sky-lantern meaning seems to have become standard over here in the last few years: if I ask Google for Chinese lanterns it assumes I want sites where I can buy the flying versions.

Mention of Chinese lanterns—the paper ones—has dug up a memory of something that I read about in the 'Old Yorkshire Diary' section of the Yorkshire Evening Post many years ago... a particularly upsetting disaster in Wortley, near Leeds, on New Year's Day, 1891. New York Times report. The memorial in the churchyard.

I used to love fireworks, but they don't seem to be doing much for me this year. I saw a few last night, and it wasn't a big deal.

There will be a big show tomorrow night, though unfortunately there will be giant video screens that will be a bit of a distraction. I might go.

It's possible part of my malaise is that a few years ago, I had something close to fireworks overload.

I was on the roof of a 5 story building in northeast Philadelphia. I could see just about every legal and illegal firework display in Philadelphia and nearby bit of New Jersey-- we're talking about 360 degrees of fireworks. It lacked intimacy, but there were a *lot* of them.

While there are personal fireworks being set off within hearing, I haven't heard/seen any close to my house. We've had enough rain that it wouldn't be easy to start a fire. While I enjoy fireworks displays, I have zero interest in actually setting off my own personal fireworks. (My mother's cautions are too deeply ingrained at this point)

Relatives who have lived on the farm their entire lives have been moving to the house in town for about a year and now they're living in town full time. He is a Korean War Vet and the fireworks going off are causing him some stress.

I think moving to town was a good idea for them. I'm afraid living in a neighborhood where you can sit on your deck and chat with the neighbors sitting on their deck might take some serious adjustment for them.

One year while I was on Kwajalein the offshore barge from which the fireworks were fired suffered a slight malfunction. The next batch in line was inadvertently set off while still on the barge rather than up in the air above the ocean.

Fortunately no one was seriously hurt.

Are there separate endorphin receptors for different parts of the body?

I still have some endorphin reactions, so either it's different parts of the body, or that isn't why I no longer enjoy capsaicins.

Vicki @122 -- the short answer is, apparently yes. There are longer answers which would qualify that which I am not competent to give.

I did some knitting a couple of months ago: a cross-cap. It's about four inches across. The horns (the bottom part in this picture) are figure-8 rows, which are not as hard as they sound, but not easy.

I don't much care for setting off most fireworks myself, but I do like to watch. Whatever the fireworks laws are in my neighborhood, they don't seem to be particularly enforced around July 4, Labor Day*, and New Year's.

Last year the recession seemed to be hitting harder than this year, since we didn't hear anything going off until the 4th last year, while this year I've been hearing fireworks since Friday the 1st.

Tomorrow we'll probably end up at a neighbor's house and watch them shoot off their collection. The nice thing about that is if I want to watch and drink, there is no problem with getting home - I just walk across the street, no driving required. (Obviously, drinking is contraindicated while shooting off fireworks. Or ought to be obvious, anyway.)

Several years ago my husband came up with an excellent tactic for parties where the kids** are allowed to play with sparklers. When it gets too dark to adequately supervise kids with sparklers, as each sparkler goes out, the child is given a chemical light stick instead. Glows nicely, won't burn anyone, and allows the adults to track where all the kids are.

*One of the radio stations in Cincinnati sponsors a major fireworks show Labor Day weekend. Therefore, it is a local "fireworks weekend", and people shoot off their own as well.

** Other people's. We don't have any of our own.

I'll be going over to my sister's for their family gathering. US/VA-Legal fireworks in the yard.

Right now, Mother Nature is providing her own fireworks outside the window. If this note ends with hangup noise, you'll know why. ;-)

Bah. The local pyromaniacal doofuses are out in force tonight.

Singing Wren@125: I went to see one of those Cincinnati shows a few years back (my birth mother lives there). We watched it from the top of a boat anchored in the river. There were things there that I'd never seen or even thought of before -- I was thoroughly impressed. I was told that there's a major fireworks factory in Cincinnati, and they use that show as a place to showcase their wares.

P J Evans, #117: There was a really ugly case in Houston some years back. A big, fancy development with an active HOA that required, among other things, cedar-shake shingles on all houses. A dry 4th, a bunch of kids with fireworks, one landed on a roof and that house -- plus the ones on each side -- were cinders. The kicker? The owner of the house that originally caught fire had petitioned the HOA for permission to install fireproof shingles... and was refused. The resulting lawsuit broke the HOA, and resulted in some changes to the local fire codes to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Steve, #117: Interesting -- my understanding was that if you use scissors, it's no longer origami but kirigami. OTOH, if that's a fun-crafts site for English speakers, I can see why they might run the two categories together.

Also, ISTR reading somewhere about kite-flyers taking out (hydrogen) dirigibles by sending scraps of burning paper up the string to ignite the gas-bag. But I don't remember if that was a historical incident or something in a story.

Linkmeister, #121: Yeah, even the pros get hurt sometimes. One of our friends here in Houston has been a professional pyro tech for over 25 years -- and a couple of years ago something glitched and he caught some facial injuries and was in the hospital for a week or so. Fortunately nothing permanent or disabling, and the scars have pretty well faded now, but still.

Personal fireworks petrify me. I remember watching the neighbor kids deliberately firing bottle rockets at animals, people they didn't like... If I'd been older and even slightly more coherent and self-confident I'd've called the cops myself. People are stupid about fireworks. I've seen people set fireworks off in close crowds where no one could get out of the way if it went wrong, I've seen folks set them off in-hand, in ways that are just begging for disaster, ignoring even basic safety precautions... and that's in California, where what you can get your hands on is theoretically limited.

My husband, on the other hand, feels strongly that you should expose kids to legal personal fireworks early in a heavily supervised setting, so they can learn that they are dangerous, how to treat them with respect and appropriate caution, and to be careful but not paranoid. I can appreciate his approach intellectually, but the whole thing still leaves me cold.

One cautionary tale about fireworks keeps coming back to me. Some years ago, I think it was somewhere in Ohio, a couple of young boys (10 yo IIRC) got bored while walking around the outside of a big tent where fireworks were being sold, so they lit a firecracker and tossed it into the tent. I think 3 people were killed.

Terry Karney @ 115:

Yeah, I had the same reaction for the first few years after I got out of the service, but it seems to have gone away over the years since. On the other hand I still have the reflex to look for where the helicopters are going when they fly overhead.

Lee @ #129, the Kwajalein accident caused a great deal of gallows humor to be bandied around. The people doing the shooting weren't professional pyro techs, but they were working at what was then officially called the Kwajalein Test Range Facility, which housed a great number of . . . rocket scientists.

(I think the fireworks handlers actually worked for Global Associates, the logistics contractor, rather than for McDonnell Douglas, GE, or Kentron, all of which had technical service contracts at the time).

Open Threadiness: Is anyone else going to be at the North American Discworld Convention this coming weekend? If so, drop by and say hi -- my partner and I will be in the dealer room there.

Lee @133 -- we made the first one, but just can't manage this year. It sounds utterly tremendous, though!

Stefan Jones (#7)

Being a subset of the group Men Of A Certain Age I had my first colonoscopy* done a few years ago.

Went trough the whole prep thing, and they found a polyp in part of the tract. The GI guy/urologist who did the procedure dutifully marked off the estimated position on the chart.

Much consternation and non-hilarity ensue. Got referred to the GI surgeon who would do the removal/resection. *His* usual practice is to do this through endoscopic surgery (I asked about healing times, etc, and he reassured me. I asked if it was less painful than some of the other "procedures" (gotta love that word..) I've had done. "Nope. You'll feel like you've been hit by a truck." I actually felt better that he was being honest.

So, they scheduled the surgery, I set up the pre-notification with the insurance company about the short-term disability, arranged for the use of my remaining medical paid-time-off, yada, yada, yada.

Part of this surgeon's standard protocol is to do another colonoscopy, so he, as the Pro From Dover, can verify the exact location (considering that this kind of thing is pretty much what he does all the time he kind of regards the urologists who do this as not *quite* rank newbies).

Go through the pre-prep again. Get into his office, get the shot to relax me, get asked if I want to watch the screen (I said "OK," knowing full well that the "relaxation" would have me pretty much zoned out).

During the procedure he finds the polyp, checks the location (the location was about 2 centimeters off from the GI guy's estimate), and verifies that there are not any others, then I hear him say "Oh I can take care of this right now." It appears that the equipment has little pincers and a cauterization loop built in, so he just chopped it off then and there**. The biopsy showed it as being "benign."

Insurance left me with a 20% co-pay. I don't want to think about *that* anymore, Thank You Very Much.

I'm scheduled for a new colonoscopy in a few weeks. Paradoxically, because I'm currently in the ranks of the unemployed (just went through my one-year anniversary last week for that) and live in Massachusetts, the state-provided health insurance will handle all this with no co-pays. Otherwise I'd have to say "no thanks, I'll just have to shoot the dice with my health."

F*** these people who want the population to just be quiet and die off.

As a side note, the same health plan structure also allows for no-co-pay dental care for both my kids.

Of course, according to bunches of the conservative pseudo-libertarian neo-Darwinists, I'm just a parasite.

---------
* when first encountered, the Firefox spell-checker suggested "colonizations" as the correct spelling, which is strangely appropriate, in context.

** If he had been the stereotyped-Greedy_Moneygrubber physicians are often painted as, he simply could have *not* done his little slash-and-burn and gone ahead with the endoscopic surgery, and gotten a hugely bigger paycheck out of it.

On the (grim) Open Thread Irony Front

Motorcyclist Protesting Helmet Law Dies Of Head Injury

We have a name for motorcyclists who refuse to wear helmets. They're called "organ donors."

Xopher, regarding radioactivity:

Today's NYTimes "Metropolitan Diary" column, which offers tidbits from around the city, includes this:

Dear Diary:

I had a stress test on May 12, during which I was injected with radioactive thallium. Afterward, the technician gave me a card that reads, in part, “Attn: Security Personnel & Law Enforcement/Notification of Recent Nuclear Procedure.”

The technician said that as far as he knew, no one had ever been stopped.

Coming out of the 34th Street subway station four days later, I was followed and stopped by a cop, who told me that his machine indicated that I was radioactive. He was polite, but firm and wary.

I pulled out the card and showed it to him, he wrote up the incident on a form, and I continued on my way into Macy’s.

Oliver Dixon

Hmph. My neighbors apparently decided that last night was the night to do the neighborhood fireworks thing (where everybody brings the fireworks they've bought and sets them off in front of the houses with the giant conjoined driveway.) *I* was at work and caught a short snippet of the end.

To give you an idea of why that bugs me, let me explain that I am an extrovert who is a stay-at-home mom with two small kids and no car, and I basically get no social interaction during the week*. At all. And unfortunately, neither do my kids. So I've been looking forward to this as an opportunity to socialize with the neighbors. And see fireworks. The single public fireworks display is about four miles away, completely screened by trees... and it's a really bad idea to take a car to it. There's basically one road out and you can walk it faster... at least, if you can take the heat. Supposed to be over 100º today.

Dammit.

*Not really the weekend, either. My Sunday night job is about the limit of the socialization I get.

HLN: After many, many years of being obese, local man registers BMI of 29.9 and is merely overweight.

I see that ²⁰¹Tl has a 73-hour half-life, so you might well be showing up on detectors for a week or more.

The last apartment I lived in had a weed-ridden empty lot across the street. The rest of the neighborhood was no great shakes either. Being in L.A., it was usually tinder-dry by the 4th. Nevertheless, the a*holes next door would light off illegal fireworks all weekend anywhere near the 4th. We'd go down the next day to ashes and burnt paper on the cars in the (covered but not enclosed) carport. Someone called the cops one year, but that just caused them to wait until a couple of hours after the visit to start blowing shit up.

The new neighborhood is a deal nicer, but there was still a bit of firework activity last year. Never saw any ashes or anything, and most people here have eco-disaster landscaping with lush water-hogging lawns. My dog still dislikes the noise, but she has a thundershirt and I am less anxious not worrying about my apartment catching fire, so we should generally be OK.

In unrelated news, it appears that I have a mud dauber wasp nest on my front door. I'm trying to decide whether I want to have management remove it, or if I should just do it myself at night when it's safer to do so, using some sort of wasp killer spray. The instructions that one should use an alternate entrance if spraying near a door are unhelpful, as I don't have a bosun's chair to lower myself or Ardala from our third floor balcony.

Hyperlocal News: Local man still wondering whether the poor quality of 1974's Magazine of F&SF is to be blamed on the proofreader or on the typesetter, or whether the relative ease of modern composition has just spoiled him.

Fragano @ 140... Glad to hear.

Huh. My info was not here: it's been that kind of a weekend.

HLN: local woman finds other ways in which google is so very evil. After battling the tall grass all day, and losing track of time, Julia E. S-R, old enough to know better, stumbled into the house with the sure knowledge that she needed food, put toast in the toaster, and went to check her BG, which was 65. Dismayed to find that the only sugar source in her snack drawer was ginger Altoids (do not try this on an empty stomach!), her attempt to contact her husband by phone was stymied when both his cell and blackberry rang in the living room. Guided by habit, she fumbled to her gmail account, only to find that autofill did not work and her contact list was missing when she could not remember her daughter's whole texting addie.

(Seriously, folks, this was not fun, and what I can perceive of the new and improved gmail indicates it is not going to be much use to me, any more than the eighty-gazillion menu features I don't use on my phone serve any purpose at all except to make it harder to use when I'm in a BG crash).

(All this healthy hard work out in the fresh air is either going to make me much healthier, or possibly kill me dead. Time to start packing food in my pockets again).

136/137

On getting to the market Saturday morning, I found a block of street blocked with yellow police tape (and a black-and-white in the middle of that rather long block). Later I found out that a motorcycle had run into a car that was crossing the street from one shopping center to the other. (Not a good idea when it's a busy street. It's quite possible to go out to one of the two cross streets and enter the other shopping center.)
The motorcyclist died; he was wearing a helmet, but this was a case where it didn't help.

Re: Fireworks, personal

As someone upthread mentioned, there's really no point. Between St. Jean Baptiste Day, Canada Day, and the International Fireworks competition, personal fireworks just seem like a letdown (so small! no music!).

Well, Sunny is making her Final Approach. I'm sitting here with her curled up on my chest.

Wup, she's gone. Via con dios, Sweet Lady.

David Goldfarb @128:

That would be Rozzi Famous Fireworks, and they are indeed awesome. Labor Day is their big local show of the year, but they also do a number of other shows, including July 4th at various locations, and after Friday night home baseball games.

I thought about posting this on the Shame On You, Google thread, but decided it wasn't sufficiently on point.

Jim,

What percentage of traffic fatalities in your area are motorcyclists? Here in Austin less than 1% of the vehicles on the road are motorcycles yet they produce 30% of the traffic fatalities. I wonder what part of it is baby boomers with reflexes not up to the task or is it the hot sporty bikes and riders with insufficient judgment and skill to cope with them. What do you see?

Jacque (148): I'm sorry for your loss.

Jacque @148: Sincere sympathies. At least you were there with her at the end.

Jacque @148, sympathies

Fragano Ledgister @140, congratulations.

Jacque, 148: I am so very sorry.

Fidelio has continued her travels, but not before helping me empty 3 bookcases completely and 3 more mostly--I more than doubled my number of filled boxes. She also left me an emergency chocolate supply. I highly recommend her as a source of moral support and chivvying.

The particle about Dropbox, the Shame On You, Google thread, and the link I posted in #150 all combine to produce a particular thought: The more clearly the terms of service of Web 2.0-type providers are stated, the less people like them.

Jacque: I'm sorry for your loss.

Jacque: My sympathies.

Thanks, all. She went peacefully, and I'm really glad she doesn't have to be hungry all the time, now.

My sympathies, Jacque.

Jacque, #148: My condolences.

Jacque, #148:

My condolences.

Test post to see whether my name etc. stays in their boxes.

Jacque, my condolences. Like you, I am glad she's not hungry all the time anymore. Peace to you.

Jacque:

Condolences for the loss of your companion. May you remember her always with love.

Jacque @148:

My condolences. At least she died in a good place.

I'm sorry to hear that, Jacque, but I'm glad she had you there with her.

Sorry to hear that, Jacque. As others said, at least you could be there with her. This week my BF had to take one of our cats on the final visit to the vet while I was out of state and couldn't get back.

Some people have mentioned having the vet make a house call so that the pet can die at home, and we've done that in the past. But Hunter was the rare cat who actually liked visiting the vet, so he wasn't afraid. He was held up to enjoy one last look out the lobby window, but he was too weak to greet the other animals and people in the waiting room. It was his time.

People might not dread colonoscopies so much if the drugs took away memory of the prep work as well as of the procedure itself.

Actually mine wasn't as bad as some people have experienced. I didn't camp out in the bathroom. I was able to sit on the sofa and watch DVDs. Periodically I would jump up and my boyfriend would put it on pause. But the interruptions were not so long or numerous that I lost track of the plot of the movie.

The drugs certainly work a number on short-term memory though. Apparently I told my BF several times that the doctor's name was pronounced differently than I had thought. And all I could remember of the post-procedure discussion was that the number three was prominent in it. When I reviewed the paperwork, it said 3 polyps and come back in 3 years.

We'll see if the fireworks situation in Omaha is different than usual this year. The Missouri River flooding has closed I-29, making it harder to smuggle back the kinds that can be sold legally only in Missouri.

Actually what I notice in Omaha is not the kinds of fireworks people have but how they are sold. A week or two before the 4th, tents sprout in every supermarket and shopping mall parking lot. Giant inflatable figures call attention to them, mostly monsters of one sort or another. This year I have to see a purple gorilla outside my bedroom window. Photo album on my Facebook is world-readable for the time being.

HLN: After Jacque's announcement above, I hate even more having to report that our cat Gremlin -- who I wrote abut on Open Thread 159 -- was put to sleep this afternoon. We were with him. He went quietly, while I was holding him in my arms.

After the two late-night dashes to the emergency clinic I wrote about on OT 159, he came back home last Wednesday morning, but a third choking episode happened early Friday morning. He'd been at the emergency clinic since then, in an oxygen cage.

The most frustrating thing was that as long as he was in that oxygen cage, he seemed okay. Alert, active, with no breathing difficulties. Out of it, he'd slowly get more and more labored in his breathing, with his tongue and gums slowly turning cyanotic, and eventually getting to the CHOKING-TO-DEATH-HERE! stage.

Never got a confirmed diagnosis, despite the tests and endoscopys and ultracounds and x-rays. We were waiting this weekend to see the results of a test for Valley Fever, to see if that's what was wrecking that lobe of his lung. But it came back negative. Which left probable diagnoses of 1) something foreign had gotten lodged in the lung, causing the infection, fluids, etc, or 2) cancer.

I don't think it was a foreign object. Having myself managed to aspirate a vitamin pill a few years ago, I'd expect something like that to produce immediate symptoms -- choking, coughing, agitation, all the sort of things I did after sucking in that vitamin -- not just sit in the lung and slowly build up problems until they jumped to a critical level.

So I think it was most likely cancer in Gremlin's lung. That's something that could grow undetected for weeks or months before causing visible problems.

Either of those two diagnoses would have required major surgery. And if it was cancer, there'd be no guarantee it hadn't metatasized to elsewhere.

Let's not mention money. No, come to think of it, let's especially mention money. Because Gremlin's care had already reached about $8,000, and surgery and aftercare would have pushed it well into five-figure range. Did that play a part in the decision to put Gremlin to sleep? I wish I could say no, but yes, yes it did.

(Now think about the fact that millions of people, those without medical insurance, have to think about those same kind of considerations with their own health or the health of their family.)

So I like to think it was cancer, and I want to think it was cancer, because that's the most likely scenario where surgery wouldn't have helped, because that's the most guilt-free scenario. Because that's how we can best tell ourselves we were saving him future pain and misery.

This afternoon was especially hard on Hilde, because she's always had a preference for Siamese (she bred Siamese for a few years, back before we got together) and has always been more attached to our Siamese than the other cats. Gremlin was attached to Hilde, as well. When Hilde was in her recliner, reading or watching TV, it was almost always Gremlin happing in her lap. And Gremlin was the cat that would snuggle up to her legs in bed at night.

God dammit. I'm going to miss him. God fucking dammit.

Bruce Arthurs (172): I'm so sorry.

Bruce Arthurs #172: My deepest condolences. You put more effort and resources into trying to help him than most people could have; it does suck that sometimes nothing will stop the Reaper.

Jacque and Bruce, my sympathies to both of you and to your families.

Bruce, my condolences to you and Hilde.

Jacque, Bruce and Hilde, I'm so sorry.

Bruce, I'm so sorry for your loss. Farewell Gremlin.

Allan Beatty @169: Some people have mentioned having the vet make a house call so that the pet can die at home, and we've done that in the past. But Hunter was the rare cat who actually liked visiting the vet, so he wasn't afraid. He was held up to enjoy one last look out the lobby window, but he was too weak to greet the other animals and people in the waiting room. It was his time.

Actually, my current vet will do this, and on very short notice, too. It's a real blessing. (Junior was able to go while still in the midst of his "Girls! Giiirrrls!! Wonderful girls!" and I wonder if he even noticed his own passing.

I'm grateful that Sunny was able to go on her own initiative, though. I think she would have been okay with being taken to the vet one last time, but instead she was home, in bed, with Silkie nearby keeping an eye on her, until I came and collected her for her Last Snuggle.

Bruce Arthurs @172: After Jacque's announcement above, I hate even more having to report that our cat Gremlin was put to sleep this afternoon. We were with him. He went quietly, while I was holding him in my arms.

Oh, Bruce! {{{{{{{Bruce & Hilde}}}}}}

Let's imagine them trotting over the Rainbow Bridge together. "They're very sweet, those humans, and I'm sorry to leave them behind. But you know, the most bizarre thing my human does...? Does yours do this too?"

The most frustrating thing ... as long as he was in that oxygen cage, he seemed okay.

Oof. That's kinda what it was like with Sunny. She was bright and happy and cheerful—and starving to death. I've actually concluded that it was some form of guinea pig ALS that progressively robbed her of muscle mass and strength, and made it progressively more difficult until it was impossible for her to use her mouth muscles effectively. But while she seemed happy and cheerful, I just wasn't right in my soul about putting her down.

I wonder if Gremlin was suffering something similarly exotic and obscure. Cancer might be a good bet; it can cause some really strange non-local effects.

let's especially mention money. .... Did that play a part in the decision to put Gremlin to sleep? I wish I could say no, but yes, yes it did.

I know it certainly did play a part in my decisions. (I've got another one coming up in the next year or so. Tiny has breast cancer—diagnosed about the same time Sunny started to decline. In a way, it actually made it easier to decide. Guinea pigs are smaller, shorter lived, and generally more fragile than cats, so that clarifies things, too.

My calaculation of the expense / likelihood of recovery / misery caused by the treatments versus loving, watchful waiting and palliative care came very much out on the side of the latter. I don't recall you saying how old Gremlin was, but it's really tough to make these kinds of decisions when you don't have a clear sense of the prognosis or chances for success.

And on the other hand, you can't not do anything. I finally broke down and took her to have her teeth checked, per dcb's recommendation. I was pretty sure that was wasted money.

I had the advantage, though, of having been through variations of this experience literally dozens of times before. I remember back to my first few times, and it was agonizing.

(Now think about the fact that millions of people, those without medical insurance, have to think about those same kind of considerations with their own health or the health of their family.)

And what's worse is that even with health insurance, it can break a family's finances. A coworker had a spouse go through treatment for advance cancer that was caught too late (as a result of test results accidentally getting switched with another patient, for chrissake!). As far as I know, they didn't go bankrupt. But they did have to sell their house. She was a mess for most of a year. And this was with our employers actually comparatively good health insurance. Terrifying. In her case, they got luck, and three years out, her husband is still okay. But, wow.

Because that's how we can best tell ourselves we were saving him future pain and misery.

You did the best you could, in all loving heart. It might feel like it wasn't enough, because it never feels like it was enough, but you did good. You loved him, and you made a valiant effort, and you made hard decisions, and he's okay now. You did good.

This afternoon was especially hard on Hilde, ... it was almost always Gremlin happing in her lap. And Gremlin was the cat that would snuggle up to her legs in bed at night.

It's hard. I remember after we put my dog down when I was a teenager. It wasn't like there was one big hole in my life. It was a lot of little ones; I'd turn around, expecting to see him shadowing me in the kitchen— and see only carpet. Time to feed him—except that it's not. Grocery list? Cross off dog food.

God dammit. I'm going to miss him. God fucking dammit.

It probably doesn't help any that that hurt is a measure of your love for him—and his for you.

{{{{{{{Bruce & Hilde}}}}}}

Bruce, #172: My condolences to you and Hilde. It's never easy, but you did the best you could, and that's all you can do.

I'm crying a bit for all of you, Allen, Jacque, Bruce and Hilde. I know I'll be torn up when it's time for Kitten to go for the last visit, and I'm hoping that the arthritis she has in her hips holds off so she doesn't end up too uncomfortable. (More research on pain meds for cats needed! Also, a glucosamine supplement she likes the taste of!) Know that loving them enough to be aware of their suffering and wanting to prevent it makes you a great pet owner.

Sincere condolences, Bruce, Hildy, Jacque, Allen. Not much more to say. Sad for you.

Bruce Arthurs @172:

I'm sorry for your loss.

Dunno whether any of you are still active in LOTR fandom (or whether any of you might have been active in LOTR fandom) but the latest case of "Imma Gonna Make Money From Them Thar Intarwebs" is currently taking place.

Quick summary: Keith Mander is a British-born and based twenty-something who's decided to make a living out of site flipping. He seeks out sites which aren't advertised for sale, and purchases them from their current owners/maintainers. The latest site he's tried this with is LOTRFanFiction.com, thinking he's in on the ground floor when the Hobbit movies come out and he can make huge amounts of money from the boom.

Unfortunately for him, fandom don't work like that.

Elf has a linkspam which details what happened next. So far it's made Fandom Wank, and Mr Mander is now being cheerfully referred to as "SaruMander" all over the place. Highlights include his absolute ignorance of the workings of UK intellectual property law, and his belief that the site being owned by his company incorporated in the UK somehow renders him safe from IP infringement lawsuits.

So far the sleeping dragon of the Tolkien Estate has yet to find him crunchy and good with ketchup.

Jacque and Bruce, I'm so sorry for your loss. Our last big one was completely unexpected, Badb Catha was only 10. Jim found her in the dining room last September, laying on her side and starting to have rigor. He'd walked past her once, then his brain went, 'that's not right' and checked her out. The other cat most recent to pass was Melisande, our queen, and she did it with announcing her passing to Margene, the only human who was where she could get to, then curling up on a rug and going from this world to the next.

For both it was a Good thing, they hated the car, they hated the trip (well, Badb was scared of everything, so upsetting her routine really scared the hell out of her after we lost her Fergal-cat, the daddy that loved her to bits).

Our Angelina is on the bubble. We figure she could be 20 or 21 or maybe even 22, the person who gave her to us lied at the time and told us she was 10 (in 2003). She was a co-worker and left for another job for a time, then came back. when she did, she said her mother (Angelina's former owner) had passed away, and they found paperwork that stated the cat could have been 13 or 14 at the time.

We still love her to pieces, she turned out to be a great cat despite having a really mean previous owner. And I dread the day when she needs that long last trip.

Bruce, I'm so very sorry.

Bruce Arthurs @ 172: Symathies and condolences. It's so difficult to make that decision - and sometimes so necessary, and the last thing you can do for your beloved pet.

Allan Beatty @ 169: sympathies and condolences as well.

EClaire @181: I'm lucky, in that my beloved Freya, who is now on a daily glucosamine supplement for bladder protection (too many bouts of cystitis, probably stress-related when I go away), has no objection to the Cystaid powder sprinked over her teasponful of "treat" (soft) food every evening. If you have to stick pills down your Kitten, have you considered positive reinforcement: giving a treat immediately after the dread deed, so it becomes less dreadful? I did that - initially having to throw it to her from several feet away - and Freya no longer runs away after I've popped the pill down her throat (nor tries so hard to run away beforehand), just stands there and waits for the treat.

Hyperlocal news... Man's wife dreams of Nathan Fillion, who at some point got sick and said the only thing that could save him was to have someone play "Chopsticks". Man's wife couldn't so instead she got a choir to sing "Chopsticks".

Many hugs to all the recently pet-bereaved.

It's not like there's a big hole left behind, or even many little holes; it's more like you've suddenly acquired a ghost--who only slowly fades away.

My condolences, Bruce, Hildy, Jacque, and Allen.

It never gets easier...

PNH -- that Sidelight on the SF Encyclopedia goes to a PDF that (in my reader) has no text -- any other ways to find the info? As you might expect, I'm interested....

Neil Gaiman listens to Adam Savage as Gollum singing "I will Survive"

Bruce, Hilde, Jacque, and Allen: My condolences.

115, 131

In Canada we often have municipal fireworks May 24th (nominal) Victoria Day weekend. Circa 1975, that weekend, my father was taking an after-dinner nap. The pops and bangs woke him, he was reaching for his tin hat and on the way to the door before he became really awake. This was 30 years after being an air raid warden in WWII.

Your conscious mind may be over the reaction, but the subconscious may not be.

Tom Whitmore @ 191 -

I had the same problem, but then I downloaded the file instead of opening in another browser window. Opening the DL'd PDF in Acrobat enabled me to view it.

Thanks for the tip, Steve (and thanks to Bill Higgins who sent me the text as well) -- this is a very nice community.

Jacque, Hilde, Bruce, Allan - we are sorry for your sad losses. Losing a beloved housemate is always very hard.

More on the unlabelled:

I was just on a clothing store site which offered, among other things:

Sport Shirts - Adult
Sport Shirts - Ladies

My apologies to all my good colleagues here and elsewhere who aren't considered adult.

Yes, I realize that some women dislike "women's cut" shirts or prefer "men's cut" - but still; "adult" and "ladies"?

Not quite about the unlabeled, but related:

Why are the connotations of "dominator" and "dominatrix" so very different, and not just a gender identification?

I have tried positive reinforcement, but she's not nearly as food motivated as our other cat is, and she'll turn down treats in a huff if she feels she's been wronged. Cooper will squirm and try desperately to get away from the pill, but happily come right back afterwards if he thinks there's a chance for more food. I think he's part Lab or something.

Mycroft @ #198 -

I have stopped buying nerdly t-shirts because as a fat lady I am expected to buy the "Unisex" shirts, which are cut for men. The few times I have been able to find nerdly t-shirts for my gender, they have been "Girly" or "Babydoll" cut, meaning that a 2XL could realistically fit on a 10-year-old boy. (and yes, they're called "Girly" or "Babydoll" - so either you're hawt sexy jailbait, or you're "unisex".)

I suspect marking the sports shirts "Adult" makes the store think that fat ladies are more likely to buy men's shirts without shame, regardless of whether the arm-hole exposes our entire side-boob, or the lack of gentle curve of the torso of the shirt means it bunches up above our midsection.

Found while looking for something else:
Dear Photograph

Find an old photo. Go to the place it was originally taken. Hold it in place, and take a new photo.

Write your note to the photograph.

I think my current favourite is at the top of page 2: "Where did all my superpowers go?"

Jacque, Bruce & Hilde, and anyone else who's lost a pet recently, my sympthies.

HLN, petrelated: One of the cats got outside on Sunday night, and has not yet returned. He's not an outdoor cat, and he's chipped, but no collar. I've been looking under the local bushes, informed the neighbors, filed with one of the 2 local animal shelters, and made up (though not yet hung up) flyers. I'm told to look in a 4 block radius. I will be putting out one of the litter boxes, so his smell is around here. Is there anything else I should do?

[[sigh]] I miss my boycat.

Allan Beatty @169: I'm terribly sorry! Doubly so, as I missed the "this week" in your comment. I'd read it as an annecdote from the past.

That's really rough, not being there when It's Time. Hard on the BF, too, I'll wager. At least Hunter got to check in with his buds at the vet's office one last time. Hugs for you and BF, when you can!

EClaire @181: Thank you for your sympathy. I'm comforted by all the sympathy here. (You guys are GREAT, you know that?) Also, I have the rest of the ravening horde herd to keep me company.

I'm hoping that the arthritis she has in her hips holds off so she doesn't end up too uncomfortable.

Modulo budgetary constraints, you might ask your vet about K-Laser Therapy. It's a new service my vet offers. They (shhhh! don't spread this around!) tried it on themselves, and it's apparently effective.

joann @189: I had a literal ghost one time. The night after Tigger died, I kept waking up to the sensation of warm soft fur snuggling against my cheek. It was the spookiest thing.

nerdycellist, #201: Professional note -- "babydoll" is in fact the industry designation for a specific style of T-shirt, with very short sleeves and a V-neck. So at least WRT that style, the choice of name doesn't reflect deliberate sexism on the part of the nerdly shirt-seller.

Also (FWIW) some brands of those stretch amazingly. At 210 pounds, I could wear a Bella or Hanes Silver brand babydoll XL without it feeling or looking sprayed-on. (Personally, I prefer the Silvers -- they have a softer finish.)

Allan Beatty @171: not the kinds of fireworks people have but how they are sold.

Ya mean, kinda like this?

@188: Man's wife has very weird dreams, though reader can't argue with the casting.

@192: Oh dear. Neil Gaiman with heavily shadowed cheek-bones and a salty beard. Hm. (Chews on knuckle.)

201 nerdycellist: Well, for a nice change the women's cut shirts really look like they will fit any woman with a cut waist. I have no idea what the pear-shaped people do - they don't have pictures of those shirts being worn.

Ah, checked again. So, the women's cut shirts go to a 3XL. After that, you'd better be built like a large man, or you are going to be "bunching up above your midsection", as you so delicately put it. And of course that always happens - the big woman with tiny breasts.

"Babydoll" name for that particular cut ranks right up there with "wifebeater" for the equivalently-cut men's shirt (different attack, but still 'ick'). "You really have a low opinion of your customers, don't you?"

Oh, dear Ghu. Following @192 led me to this. Which, in turn, led me to this.

Jacque #206: Oh dear. Neil Gaiman with heavily shadowed cheek-bones and a salty beard. Hm.

I was thinking he oughta update his blog picture. The one he's got up there looks like a kid... the dude is older than me, and I've got a salt-and-pepper beard.

Allan: Like Jacque, I misread the time stamp. Apologies and condolences.

Regarding feline ghosts: My first cat visited repeatedly after her death. I saw her flitting around corners more than once; she wrapped herself around my ankles several times and slept on my bed at least once. There was another cat in the home but she did not interact with me like that. She stopped coming around after a few months and she's the only cat to have ever done that (though my current beast may be a reincarnation of a previous fellow).

Jacque @ 206... Man was tempted to say "If you like French-Canadians so much, why don't you marry one?", but then man remembered that she had.

Jacque at # 206: Yes, that kind of fireworks tent, but with a green and yellow Mark Parisi city-devouring monster bobbing over it.

Allan & BF, Bruce and Hilde, Jacque --- Many hugs to all of you. Our 20 y.o. shorthair is getting weaker by the week, and I'm dreading the loss of the last of our original Pride... But no matter how many times we have to go through this, we always end up back at the Humane Society, with new furballs to wreak havoc on the furniture. I wish many new feline friends on you all...

Allan Beatty @212: Yes, that kind of fireworks tent

One devoutly hopes they left out the background props. ::shudder::

edward oleander @213: In my case, at least, no wishing needed. As we speak, Mr. Bobby Frost* is skulking around under my footstool. I might have food, but he's still at that age when I might be thinking of eating him, too. (One can never be too careful about these things, you know.)

* The arms and smile belong to Ana, who is the vet tech intern. She was on duty the day he went in for his dental work. As you can tell (if you speak any guinea pig) from his smile, she's got The Vibe. (She evidently has her own guinea pig.)

Jacque, 214: Handsome fellow! Do guinea pigs smile with their ears?

201 nerdycellist

Altering big men's tees to fit fat women

Found at Fat Liberation, a fat-acceptance RSS feed.

Note from the Fatosphere, the other fat acceptance RSS feed-- or at least, I only know of two of them.

I've got a post in moderation, presumably because there are three links.

Jacque 214 - He is utterly adorable! I love anything rodentlike almost as much as cats... And a good vet tech is almost as rare and wonderful a find as a good vet, especially in the same office! Congrats!

HLN: Woman, moving, stares at calendar, map; wonders if she knows anyone along I-70.

#219: Where are you moving from/to? I live in Pittsburgh if you need crashspace. :)

TexAnne @ 219... wonders if she knows anyone along I-70

I work near the intersection of I-40 and I-25. That only adds up to I-65 though, and the difference is I-5, which goes along the West Coast.

TexAnne @215: Handsome fellow! Do guinea pigs smile with their ears?

They do, but aactually, they smile with their eyes and their mouths, much like humans do. It's subtle, and that's not the best angle to show it from. Here's an excellent example of a piggy smile. (Not my kids.) It's the teefs that really seal the deal.

TexAnne @219: HLN: Woman, moving, stares at calendar, map; wonders if she knows anyone along I-70.

Denver is spang on the intersection of I-70 & I-25. Dinner expeditions could be mounted, I'm confident. Also, given sufficient notice, crash-space could be generated in Boulder, which is 30 mins north.

edward oleander @218: The audio track for those photos is hilarious: "I love the way guinea pigs smell." If you look closely at a couple of the photos in that set, she's sniffing him.

Re: Pet ghosts -- my first Chihuahua, Pedro, came back for visits for years. He wasn't visible -- I would hear the click of toenails on linoleum even in totally carpeted rooms. His visits stopped when I got my second Siamese, Pyewacket.

I've always thought Pye was Pedro's reincarnation, but I could never come up with a way to prove it.

Our most recent ghost is Jan's Balinese, Robin. He used to show up frequently, but I haven't "seen/heard" him since his brother D'Artangnan died. His hauntings ranged from jumping on to my bed at night to playing with the living cats.

I wish Her late Majesty would visit me. But I think I'm blind in that spectrum.

Anyway! I should have specified "I-70 between Indianapolis and Philadelphia." I've got places to stay on both ends, but that middle bit is making me nervous. I really shouldn't be driving more than 8 hrs/day.

TexAnne: When are you going to be on the move? There won't be anyone much in my house the first two weeks of August.

Carrie S., mid-August.

Serge Broom @ 192: you have lightened an otherwise dismaying afternoon. I think the best part was watching both Neil and the host trying not to lose it completely during the song.

TexAnne: Well, Pennsic's over Sunday the 14th. I have crash space for one, two if they're well-acquainted.

A question recently came to mind that has been bugging me occasionally for a few years now, that I thought some of the quotation hounds around here might be able to help out with...

Orhan Pamuk gives as the epigraph to his White Castle, this "mistranslation of Marcel Proust" -- "To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?" (And bear in mind that this is Victoria Holbrook's rendering of a mistranslation given in Turkish). Not having read any Proust, more than a couple pages, I had no idea where to begin to track this down and figure out what the source passage is, what a correct translation might be... Any takers?

Ambar @ 229... Glad to be of service.

The Modesto Kid @231 -- lots of other people have wondered the same thing, but I didn't find a good answer (by Googling Proust "love of great passion") -- just many people with the question.

Yeah -- the primary reason the question keeps nagging at me is that every week or two, somebody will hit my blog via a similar Google search.

FWIW, the original (well, intermediate) Turkish epigraph seems to be:

"Alakamızı uyandıran bir kimseyi,bizce meçhul ve meçhullüğü derecesinde cazibeli bir hayatın unsurlarına karışmış sanmak ve hayata ancak onun sevgisiyle girebileceğimizi düşünmek bir aşk başlangıcından başka neyi ifade eder?"

Plugging the search string Karaosmanoğlu "n'est pas fidèle, comme l'ont vu" into Google websearch pulls up a fragmentary preview that suggests that the entire article may identify the original Proustian passage, but full access costs $40 :b

(Ack-- sorry for the serial-posting, y'all) I think I might've found the original passage in Du côté de chez Swann:

"Que nous croyions qu'un être participe à une vie inconnue où son amour nous ferait pénétrer, c'est, de tout ce qu'exige l'amour pour naître, ce à quoi il tient le plus, et qui lui fait faire bon marché du reste."

Someone else (Serge?) will have to tackle an accurate translation into English, though-- all I can do is pick out some key words.

Ooh thanks, Julie, that is certainly useful knowledge.

(238 posted before 237, to which I can only say, far out!)

"Que nous croyions qu'un être participe à une vie inconnue où son amour nous ferait pénétrer, c'est, de tout ce qu'exige l'amour pour naître, ce à quoi il tient le plus, et qui lui fait faire bon marché du reste."

"That we believe that a being participates in an unknown life where his love could send us, it is, of all things which love demands for its birth, that which it holds most important, and which causes it to hold the rest cheaply."

I'm pretty sure, anyway. Serge or Mrs. Praisegod should check the last clause.

So how many Fluorospherians will be at Pennsic? I'll be at my usual spot in the market, by the corner of the barn.
mark

This seems to be one English translation of the same passage, via Google Books:

"All that love requires to be born is that we should believe that a being participates in an unknown life in which our love will enables us to penetrate."

It's in the text of The Nature of Love: The Modern World by Irving Singer; I don't know whether that translation is his own or whether he credits someone else elsewhere in the text.

A wordier translation in full context (bottom of the page):

"Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes hinm generous or indifferent as to the rest."

Wow, thanks so much Julie -- this is great. I'm posting your info as a comment at my blog, perhaps the next Google searcher to hit my place will find what s/he's looking for.

I read with sadness of the passing of pets of all sorts; it effects me so badly when I lose one of mine (although I can tolerate the translation of old barren cows to hamburger much better than I can them dying in the field of old age, or the horror of losing young ones to lightening or illness) that there's a bit of me who steps aside and asks "why do you take on more?"

My sheep is a charming young man, and I am not paying sufficient attention to him this week for wanting to take care of my chicken housing and cow watering needs. He's tiny- much less than knee high- and prefers company in numbers. On the 4th he was visited by three generations and two sorts of new friends- my cousin the biker and his girlfriend, their daughters, and their daughter's toddlers, and four of my daughter's old Thespian's buddies. He thought it was the best thing ever, and has now taken to calling for attention to the kids in the day-care as well as the cows and calves walking by.

I am rather looking forward to having one or two fewer chickens soon; either Bjorn or Bennie started crowing this morning, answering Ian's full throated crow with something...unfinished, sounding much like a cat whose tail has been trod on. Anyone want a four month old Blue Laced Red Wyandotte Rooster?

Nancy C. Mittens @203 on finding a lost cat - it depends a lot on how bright the cat is, how skittish it is, and how easy it is to find his/her way back. One of my cats was bright enough to get out fairly often, but fairly calm, and would mostly go out and sit there saying "Ha! I got out!" and we could bring him in, or we'd lock up the other cat and leave the front door open and he'd come back for dinner. Another cat was really skittish, not very bright, and we lived on a second floor so there was no good smell trail for him to find his way home, but at least he was willing to wear a collar so a neighbor was able to recognize him and call us about three weeks later. Sometimes catnip or dried fish have been useful bribes to get them to come back.

One thing that's been really strange about living here in California is that houses don't have airlocks. Most places I've lived back east did, so you could keep the heat in in the winter and maybe hang up coats, and keep the cats inside and most of the crickets out.

The "Three McDonalds" stories linked in Teresa's Particles are really outstanding. Who is this dannye?

Or rather, this igloowhite

Linkmeister@53, on osteopenia (pre-osteoporosis) - A few years back, I'd broken a couple of toe bones in the same year, and my doctor suggested I get my bone density checked. The local YMCA was having a testing clinic for osteoporosis and diabetes, and I was the youngest patient in the room by about 20 years (:-) And they found I had osteopenia, but being male, rather than giving me the (drugs of power discussed earlier), they told me to try taking a couple of grams of calcium a day and generally keeping up on my vitamins. I got retested about two years later and was back to normal. Keeping taking pills is easy; I really have to put in the effort to get back to lifting weights. The test the first time was a little clamp thing that looks through your wrists; the second time they did several hip X-rays to get a more precise look at those joints.

HLN: Man discovers that installing Mac OS update has deleterious effects, and causes a "kernel panic" along with a Klong*. After feverish research, discovers it's caused by a conflict between third-party keyboard and Mac OS 10.6.8 and is able to reboot safely after switching back to original Apple keyboard.

*Klong - a sudden rush of shit straight to the heart.

Today's Astronomy Picture may be color-free, but it's certainly dramatic.

Nancy C. Mittens @ 203: One of the cats got outside on Sunday night, and has not yet returned. He's not an outdoor cat, and he's chipped, but no collar. I've been looking under the local bushes, informed the neighbors, filed with one of the 2 local animal shelters, and made up (though not yet hung up) flyers. I'm told to look in a 4 block radius. I will be putting out one of the litter boxes, so his smell is around here. Is there anything else I should do?

Sounds like you're doing all the right things. Our indoor cat got out a few years ago. We read about how indoor cats can become terrified outside, hide nearby, and not come to you. We looked all over, and tried sitting quietly on the porch at dusk and dawn, with no luck.

We put a dish of food on the front porch. Came home from work to find it empty, refilled it and kept an eye on it, and the miscreant appeared within a half hour. Had to stalk him, but the magical pull of the mylar-strips-on-a-stick toy helped us nab him. This whole process took about a day. If it hadn't worked, our next step was going to be to put the food dish in a have-a-heart trap.

The headline: Ludicrous.
The photograph: Ewwwwie! (Though perhaps of use to Jim Macdonald.)
The link: Priceless Free of charge.

I was once working at a summer camp in a national forest. If you stayed up on Saturday night (when there were no campers), there was a dance at the resort across and down the lake. There was one year I went to that on a day near the Fourth and some jackass started shooting off fireworks... which is completely illegal in a national forest. These were little bang bangs, the kind you hear set off at Chinese New Year parades.

There was a large friendly dog tied up at the side who started panicking. I went over and tried to calm him down and the jackass threw a strip under the dog. I recall the poor dog was bucking in terror.

The happy ending is that said jackass got caught and got arrested. Me, I got a minor sparkler-level burn and a serious mad on. The dog was okay but probably traumatized for life.

Teresa, don't look at John A Arkansawyer's link.

After our lovely dog Tasmin died, I would sometimes hear her pacing the house after we'd gone to bed, or settling down in a corner of our room at night. There are many ways to interpret that, you are free to pick whichever one makes most sense to you. My condolences to the bereaved.

Condolences to all who have lost loved ones recently. Allan, Jacque, Bruce... Electric hugs offered all round. Nancy, here's hoping your boycat turns up soon.

TexAnne, at which end of your travel time is the Indianapolis end of your travel? Hubby and I and a variation on the usual crew will be attending Gen Con.

Nicole, 257: The beginning. Possibly the second day, if sisuile is available for an overnight instead of a mere lunch. The mover tells me I can have a trusted local friend sign off on this end, and the landlady is OK with somebody else doing the walkthrough. Which means I can do a bunch of 5hr days. But I'd still like to pause with somebody in maybe Columbus-ish, OH.

Bill Stewart @ #249, thanks. The calcium I mentioned is a 600mg tablet with 400 addition IU of Vitamin D, taken twice daily. In addition I've been taking a 1000 unit tablet of Vitamin D3 twice daily. I would think that would be sufficient without the Fosamax, but we'll see. (Those are all prescribed for me; I'm not self-medicating by guess.)

The bone density exam I had was like the one described here: flat on my back on a table which had a sliding wand on a rail. The wand was slowly passed over my body. Pretty pictures then magically appeared on a monitor a few feet away.

Oh, Allan, Jacque, Bruce, Hilde...I ache in sympathy. Our non-human people are such bright stars. I'm so sorry.

JESR @245: He's tiny- much less than knee high

Pix! Pix!

#253 ::: John A Arkansawyer

Call 9-1-1
Make sure the scene is safe
Direct pressure
Treat for shock

Jacque... Regarding Gaiman, did you ever see THIS comic-strip?

HLN: Local man dreamed last night about accidentally clicking the link to activate Google+.

TexAnne @ 255: I wish I hadn't looked at the photo, either. Perhaps "Ewwwie!" wasn't a strong enough warning. But the headline was so strikingly stupid--and why should I make people click to read it, anyway?--it was "Teen Attacked by Firework".

Hyperlocal news... Man learns that 1980's "Flash Gordon" will soon be released on BluRay. Man suggests to wife this'd make an excellent birthday present. Wife says not to expect her to stay in the same room when man watches it.

Serge, 265: I have no desire to see it again, but I have very fond memories of seeing it with my dad when it came out. He made me giggle for months afterward by singing "FLASH! chung-chung-chung-chung-chung-chung-chung AH-AHHHH...he'll save every oneofus!" It was also a valuable lesson in "cheese" and "so bad it's good."

Alas for the 1980 Flash Gordon, the parody had already been made before it came out.

I admit it. I'm ashamed, but I love Toto's "Africa".

But I also laughed helplessly at Steve Almond's deconstruction of it.

Deconstructing Africa

TexAnne @ 266... It was also a valuable lesson in "cheese" and "so bad it's good."

That it was.

It also showed that singing Beatles songs to yourself will prevent Evil Machines from flushing out your mind's contents.

James Macdonald @ 267... That one indeed was hard to top. Provided one thinks of the 'top' as being wayyyyy at the bottom. :-)

TexAnne -- I'm in Central Ohio (Clintonville). Crash space is limited (as in air mattress) and we're in the process of attempting to housebreak two puppies.

You would be more than welcome to stay.

texanne @ 219/258 - Of course you are welcome to stay, though the front hall will probably still be full of stuff. I should be home from Pennsic on the 13th.

gaukler @ 241 - I will be in my usual spot chained to the performing arts pavilion at Pennsic.

David Harmon @ #209: I was thinking he oughta update his blog picture. The one he's got up there looks like a kid...

There's a set of photos that rotate when you reload the page. Some of them look like a kid. At least one of them is a kid. Some of them are more mature in appearance. There's also one co-starring a satanic vegetable.

gaukler @#241: I'll be up for landgrab and most likely for the duration, modulo a trip or two home to reassure the cats that they haven't been entirely abandoned--I live in the BMDL, so it's less than an hour home from this particular little local event. :)

Perhaps I'll even make it to some classes this year. Though I don't think Thora's going to be at War, so no warp-weighted loom class for me! *glyph of sadness*

Hyperlocal news: Hyperlocal man goes to GP's surgery to have skin tags (otherwise known as "polyps") removed. As usual, one tag is missed when the local anaesthetic is applied. Hyperlocal man is somewhat distressed when that tag is removed with tweezers and scalpel. Hyperlocal man's neck now looks as though he was attacked by a dozen tiny vampires.

In an interview later, the doctor reports that hyperlocal man does not need to have his colon checked for polyps until he is 60.

Teresa and our resident Veterinarians -- I have a co-worker who has a hamster (2 years old) with kidney problems.

Her vet is treating it as a kidney infection, but there is a possibilitly that it may be chronic renal failure.

Any recommendations as to care for the little one?

Open-threadiness: Anyone have any tips on wresting very late money from a freelance client, besides just e-mailing them with regular, increasingly desperate reminders/requests/pleas, as I have been doing since MAY 21 when the money came due? Shall I send the publisher in question (I will tell you which company, if you'd like! I'm that mad!) an audio file of my husband having an asthma attack for which he cannot afford the medicine?

JM, sometimes snail mail can have a greater impact than an email.

That said, 45 days is way more than long enough to pay any bill. If you know any other writers who contribute to that publisher, you might ask them about the publisher's payment history.

JM @277 -- I'm told that sending them a link to the procedures involved in small claims court, with a note that the next time they will see you will be in that court, can have remarkable powers of stimulating wallets.

You're not even 60 days past due yet. Sending audio of husband is very unlikely to affect them as much as it does you. Threatening them with the serious inconvenience of small claims is much more likely to affect them, though it may mean you won't get any more work from them. It's a balancing act.

I sympathize with your not having been paid, and only offer this advice because you explicitly asked for advice.

Lori Coulson @ 276: Chronic Renal Failure (CRF) or Chronic Progressive Nephropathy (CPN) is not curable, but also not outright painful. For all species, fluid therapy -- which can be injections of fluids under the skin -- along with nutritional support are the main course of treatment. Depending on the cause of this hamster's nephropathy, they may want to consider a low-protein diet.

OK, now I'm in need of fluorospherian help.

I'm supposed to have a contrast MRI tomorrow (where they shoot you up with gadolinium or whatever before the test). Usually I get a call before one of these tests telling me what to do and not do, but no one called me this time. I called them and got no answer.

Anyone know where I can go to find out whether I need to fast before the test (as I did before the PET scan)? Whether I can have water? Whether I should take my morning meds (Nqqreny and Cebgbavk)?

WebMD is no help. Describes the test, gives lots of ads. No preparation protocols.

Thanks Ginger! I'll pass that on. The hampster was given sub-q fluids during her vet visit. Now to find out who makes a low-protein feed... (And cross my fingers that she's only dealing with an infection here.)

Xopher -- I can't find any dietary restrictions wrt an MRI, all the warnings seem to be about not wearing something with metal into it.

Thanks Lori.

As it turns out I now have to say <Emily Latella>Never mind!</Emily>

I reached someone finally and she said I can eat lightly, drink all the water I want, and take my meds. So stand down fluorospherian data commandos!

JM @ #277:

Collections is an area I'm pretty lousy at myself, as a businessperson, but in general it works *much* better to keep the personal out of it rather than injecting the personal into it.

Rather than desperate pleas, a written letter in a more neutral but authoritative tone will probably work a lot better, something along the lines of:

"Dear ____:
This is a reminder that my payment terms, which you accepted in our contract of mm/dd/yy, are Net 15.* Your payment for the work invoiced in invoice #ZZZZZ is now 30 days past due, and I am sorry to inform you that it is now incurring a finance charge of X% per month. I hope you will pay in full before MM/DD/YYYY, but if you are unable to, please contact me at once at xxx-zzzz. I understand that the current state of the economy is difficult for all businesses, but if you need to arrange a payment plan, you will need to contact me in advance, so that it is not necessary to proceed to collection steps."

* Or whatever your actual payment terms are: Net 10, Due on presentation, etc. If you didn't specify them, state them now, and in the future you should specify in your invoice.

Send it US Postal Service; optionally spend about $3 extra to mail it certified and/or return receipt requested, which means the recipient should know you've established proof it was sent, should there be a dispute, which means they will know you are taking this seriously.

I wouldn't bring up Small Claims court in a first formal letter, unless they completely fail to respond to that. If you do it this way, you have been completely professional and reasonable, you haven't burned any bridges and have given them no reason not to send more work your way. If they actually are having severe cash problems themselves, you've given them an opening to make a partial payment at once which would help you some and pay the rest later.

If they fail to respond at all to a formal and polite request for payment, then you have to escalate and mention Small Claims court or collections agencies, but at that point you probably would not want to trust them to pay you for future work either so there's little lost.

Steve, Tom, and Clifton: Thanks for the advice. I was, of course, kidding about the asthma recording! If the situation escalates, I'll look into a more formal approach, as suggested. I did finally get an e-mail suggesting that they really might be sending me a check tomorrow, so we'll see...

JM -- my partner Karen just had a client who was reliable at 30 days go to 90 on one set of invoices, so it's not being uncommon in the current economy. They'd just been bought out by an Indian company, and There Were Changes. Clifton's idea is better for a first step than mine, of course; and I'm glad to hear that you may be getting results without even going that far.

Xopher #284:

If you had not asked us, you would not have gotten hold of the appropriate personage.

This slow-pay business has become policy for large corporations.

Yet effective March 31, 2010, Cisco announced to its small business suppliers that as a rule Cisco would wait sixty days after receipt of an invoice—or net 60, in business jargon—before cutting a check.

On the late-payment subthread:

If the entity doing the paying works on a fiscal year budget, there are any number of reasons why an invoice submitted in May might still be unpaid. (In my workplace they are sorted by piles, so that when a given issue gets fixed, we can attack the appropriate pile, oldest to newest.)

In our case, most of these issues will be sorted out by the end of July. Which sucks, if you're waiting for the money, but those of us who shuffle the paperwork would like it to have gotten done two months ago, too.

Linkmeister @289: The State of Illinois healthcare plan for employees is 'self-funded,' meaning they have Cigna manage it, but the state writes checks (after Cigna determines that the invoice should be paid and how much).

We just got the notification of how much co-pay we owe on the birth of our child, which means the hospital JUST got the check for the majority of the birth expenses, etc.

She is over 28 months old.

SERIOUSLY???

Those poor doctors, hanging on the line for it for over two years. And we can't even look at that procedure's price profile, because only 'the current year' (fiscal year, meaning right now it has 7 days in it) and 'the past year' are accessible on Cigna's online check-your-claims interface ...

joann: I doubt it not.

Thena @290: Or, as in the case at my husband's workplace, any invoices not 'actioned' by the end of the fiscal year may just be deleted. Without notice to the person who made the request.

This is seriously the official policy for inter-departmental work orders from anyone to Physical Plant For example, if the Computer Center wants to pull new fiberoptic cable through university ducting and piping, that's a job for Physical Plant. So they submit a request, and it gradually works its way through five months of sitting on desks, and then it's suddenly July and POOF, because nobody's actually put any hours on the work order, it disappears and the originating department has to re-submit a NEW request, complete with its own 5-9 months of lying around on desks ...

I feel bad for complaining about one late payment -- of course the payers have financial and administrative troubles of their own and are not fueled by evil. It's just that during the summer we're running on less than a third of our fairly paltry school-year income and would be barely scraping by even with checks coming in on time. And that they told me in April that my invoices would be paid on 30 days. And that the reason my last check from them took 60-some days and much badgering was that the CFO left for a long vacation right before it was due.

However! Apparently a check for both the 77-days-out invoice and the one that just came due went out this afternoon. Hooray! May all others be so fortunate. Sorry to start a whiny subthread.

I just got a piece of spam from "Col. Fablous [sic] Dingle."

I erased it, of course. But now I feel compelled to find a use for that name.

Steve C. @ #258, I admit that I love it too--especially Perpetuum Jazzile's version--but I can't disagree with Steve Almond. Though I had difficulty figuring out whether he meant to imply that Duke Ellington died right before Toto got together in order to avoid their badness, or merely that he was able to predict badness that would arise after he departed.

289
I was hearing that about large companies in the 80s. (I have a fannish friend who's a systems consultant: his larger clients are small businesses, because they're more reliable in terms of both work and payments. Large companies are pretty much occasional jobs.)

http://www.disemvowelment.com/reemvowel.html

A noble effort but unfortunately it doesn't work right.

Elliot #291:

The way medical billing is done is pretty-much optimized for fraud and error. We had similar experiences--I recall having bills trickle in from the birth of our first child over the course of the next year or so. Since we were busy with our new child, my job, and my wife's graduate school, and since we had only spotty records, it's quite possible we paid for things multiple times, and I strongly suspect we paid for things we didn't owe. For whatever reason, we had less problem with this with our two later children.

JM* @294: Apparently a check for both the 77-days-out invoice and the one that just came due went out this afternoon.

The proverbial check is in the proverbial mail? Let's hope!

* BTW, I do a double-take every time I see your initials: "Wait! What? Oh, that's not me...."

Jacque @300: Not only the initials -- my J stands for Jacqueline!

albatross @ 299:

The way medical billing is done is pretty-much optimized for fraud and error.

• errors caused over-reimbursement of billing claims in about 5% of records


• errors results in under-reimbursement in 16.8% of claims

Erik @ 298

Still, if they could get it to work right, it'd be exceedingly voweluble...

We're at the Discworld con. Never trust the hotel. They promised us 8' tables and gave us 6'! But we found a workaround. Still not completely set up, but we hope to be by the time the room formally opens. I've run into Jon Singer, but no one else from here yet.

The current active threads are much too active for me to track in the little time I'm going to have online. See you all next week!

Helpful hamster.

Bad payout seems to be the "solution" for every big corporation's cashflow problems these days. One of the nurseries I frequent is on the ropes in part because Verizon waited something like 120 days to pay for snow removal.

Lila @ #296:

My interpretation was that his addendum to the Ellington quote about bad music specifically identifying "Africa" was supposed to be understood as part of the quote itself, and that therefore Ellington was able to decry the badness of the song before it had even been written.

Erik Nelson @ #298:

It's worth noting that you're not constrained to accept the initial output: highlighted words are those with other possible expansions, and you can click on them to explore the alternatives if the first suggestion doesn't look right.

Open Thread:

I'm watching the end of an era, the end of a generation of dreams.

At on point, I wanted nothing more than to work on the shuttle program. I didn't care where - PR, textile preservation, grunt work, to work for NASA was my goal, because I dreamed of stars. And now, I sit watching Atlantis on her pad, queen of spacecraft, about to launch for the last time.

Fly, lady, fly.

David Harmon @305: by the looks of the tail, that's a gerbil.

Cute all the same.

John #302:

I have this ugly feeling that medical billing/payment is fractally broken--like, at every level of resolution, you will find more complicated leaky horrible systems by which each party in the transaction tries to get something past all the others. I suspect this is closely related to whatever feedback loops are driving endless inflation of medical costs over time.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an astronaut. My plan was to join the Navy and learn to fly jets, and then apply to NASA. Failing that, I wanted to work on submarines.

I was too short to fly and back then women weren't allowed to serve on subs. So, no Navy. No NASA.

My heart still mourns, sometimes.

My daughter wants to work for NASA, and I have a friend from my high school years who already does (waves in case said friend's wife is reading this--she tends to frequent ML). I am clinging tightly to the notion that the end of the shuttle program does not mean the end of American space exploration. OTOH, I'm also glad my daughter is currently in Moscow learning to speak Russian.

Melissa Singer @312: My sister is in her 3rd year at Annapolis. Some of her yearmates are the first middies ever (going) to be posted directly to subs straight out of the Academy as their first assignment. In order to have a new-ensign-safe environment, they had to work enough female officers through subs that they could have a female XO, which they do now apparently.

Sometimes I really notice we're living in the future, y'know?

They are also aiming to eventually have female-commanded, majority-female subs, rather than planning to integrate the silent service across the board. Because wives of senior submariners are screaming bloody murder at the thought that there might be WIMMEN working with THEIR MENFOLKZ and ZOMG that means they could, y'know, be boinking their heads off on tour for the months and months they are away from home.

Sometimes I wonder why they stay married to the creeps if they think the ONLY thing standing in the way of their infidelity is complete lack of access to amenable sexual partners?

Speaking of NOT living in the future. :->

Elliott Mason: Sometimes I wonder why they stay married to the creeps if they think the ONLY thing standing in the way of their infidelity is complete lack of access to amenable sexual partners?

Because men can't control themselves--didn't you know that? No man can resist boinking any available woman. That's why a woman must always be segregated from any man who's not authorized to have sex with her; otherwise he'd be unable to prevent himself violating some other man's property rights. It's not that they're creeps; they're just male, and thus have no control over their penises.

And they say feminists have a low opinion of men.

Elliott Mason @314: Cool! Tell your sister she has a fan.

The stuff about the Navy wives does not surprise me. Cops' wives still have similar concerns--as do cops' husbands, according to friends. This was one of the reasons the Navy would not allow women on subs back then--they were afraid the women would become pregnant. (I know, I know, so what, but this was the 1970s.)

I'm still a sucker for books and films about submarines and recently read through a collection of true-life sub tales. Now I need to track down a few of the books excerpted in the collection, because some were new to me.

Submarines and spaceships: not so different.

Speaking of living in the future: NPR had a story yesterday talking about race and advertising. The Old Spice guy, for example: not aimed at the "black" demographic; he's THE Old Spice guy.

Up next: Pixar finally gets around to having a female protagonist.

Ever since I was a child, I've dreamed about someday having the money to go to Florida and cheer her away. "Now I sing within a spaceship's heart. Does anybody hear?" Queen Isabel', where are you now?

If I let myself think about it, I'll be weepy all day. So here's a link I was suprised not to see in the Particles or Sidelights:

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1277925.html

Summary: FanLib 2.0. Or, Privilege Boy and the Femmefans Who Are Old Enough to Be His Moms. Or, as the poster put it, "One does not simply walk into fandom."

Women on subs:

I've heard* that women on aircraft carriers come back from deployments pregnant as the rule and not the exception; on nuclear subs, you're a lot closer to the glowy bits and can't cut the tour short. That was the explanation in the past anyway.

* woman from a 3+ generation navy family; may not be a reliable source.

As far as fidelity in marriage: This is something I've given some thought in my personal life. (My wife is most of the way through her second 3-month business trip.)

As far as cheating: Think of it as risk reduction. There's a failure diagram they draw, I don't remember the exact name, which looks like a series of fuzzy AND and OR gates: your car crashes if you fall asleep. OR if (you drive drunk AND something unexpected happens.) OR (your brakes fail AND your steering fails.) Et cetera.

I've given this some thought because my wife is most of the way through a second 3-month business trip. Cheating is much less likely if [me in this case] is getting regular sex from spouse AND if I'm around spouse and/or talk regularly (so I remember why they're so awesome) AND if I don't hang out with a lot of single women for a long time AND so forth.

If your spouse is isolated from you for six months AND your spouse is no more than a hundred yards from some number of women who are mostly healthy 18-30 year olds it increases risk. A lot. The path to failure is much shorter and higher-likelihood. I don't know, maybe if you're that close for that long you class each other like fictive siblings. I've never been on a sub with someone for six months.

Space: Don't tell anyone, but part of the reason I got into renewable energy is that I want Americans to have access to a LOT of energy. A LOT. So much that the energy to get an American into space is a 2-year expense instead of a 20-year expense. It currently costs about $1 million to get a 100-kg person into orbit according to some stranger on the web. If we can raise the standard of living (in energy usage) by a factor of 10, we can afford to go there pretty cheaply. More power!

JM @301: Not only the initials -- my J stands for Jacqueline!

ACK! [They/We]'re everywhere! Did I metastasize and not notice?

I was the only Jacque(Jackie) in my acquaintance until about fifteen years ago, and now they're turning up everywhere. I find it very confusing, because I never developed the reflexes that, say, a Matt or a Dave* would have in dealing with occurances of my name that are not mine.

So I'm in the grocery store, innocently picking over lettuce for the guinea pigs, and I hear "Jackie, line one, please. Jackie, line one."

And every freaking time I react with. "What? Oh."

I can't complain too much though because (I'm sure I've told this story here before) I narrowly escaped getting tagged with Scheherazade. The double whammy would have been that "Sherry" was the most common name in my age group. Thank Ghu my mom prevailed.

* Cue discussion of Minn-Stf's League of Super-Davids

Melissa Singer @310: by the looks of the tail, that's a gerbil.

Thank you. I was figuratively biting my tongue.

What is it with hamster tails, anyway? They look like Ghod was sort of half paying attention, started to add the tail, then stopped. "No, too many rodents already have long tails. That's enough."

They're weird, I tell you.

Jacque @320 and JM @301 re duplicate names

One year at summer camp, many years ago, there was a boy's cabin of 8 campers that included 7 Mikes and a Mickey. Apparently someone in the office had noticed an unusual number of Michaels registered for that session and stacked the deck, so to speak. They just called everyone by their last name.

Jacque @321: It's the nitpicker in me. Or, why I am an editor, lol.

My brother had gerbils for a bit, until his furry-things allergy manifested seriously. They do not set off my "eek" reflex as a result--unlike mice, which make me go all squiffy (I think it's the speed). However, even when feeling squiffy, I will run for a container to try to imprison the mouse before The Cat notices. Because once he does, that mouse is his. And tasty, too.

Hamsters are much cuter than gerbils imo but I totally get the weirdness about the tail. There are some cat and dog breeds that have similar afterthought appendages (without docking, ewww).

(btw, my daughter has the same problem with the name as you. However, it is still a relatively unused name, especially with that spelling, according to the US gov't. I run into a lot of Melissas too, so much sympathy!)

I'm 'Mary Aileen' because when I was 11, I knew 7 other people named 'Mary', and I got tired of the confusion.

My mom had several names picked out for me before I was born. Dad vetoed Melissa ("...what if the kids call her 'Mel'?") and Jessica ("... I don't want people calling my daughter Jesse.") so eventually the settled on a completely sensible name. Which rhymes neatly with "boy". In elementary school I would be taunted with that, but in later jr. hi and high school, my introduction was met with the more good-natured, but still highly irritating, singing of christmas carols.

In childhood, I shared my nickname with a neighbor's poodle.

When I started in a new school in 7th grade, I stopped using that nickname.

Lila @ #317: Up next: Pixar finally gets around to having a female protagonist.

I've heard this was also to have been Pixar finally getting around to having a female director, but she and the production have parted company. I find that worrying.

nerdycellist #325:

A close friend in high school had that name--just around the time that Three Dog Night came out with That Song.

nerdycellist #325:

Could have been worse. You could have been named "Flee Fornication."

I came close to being named Wolfgang.

Melissa Singer @ #326:

Let's see if I can get this in before Serge does:

"You are named after the dog?"
"I've got a lot of fond memories of that dog."

Though I'm also reminded of John Wayne, who shared his childhood nickname with his dog (the dog was Little Duke; he was Big Duke). He kept his nickname into 7th grade and beyond, though, because it was vastly preferable to his actual name.

Paul A. @330: making matters worse, it was a _toy_ poodle.

If I'd been a boy, one of the names in contention was Seth. Which in itself is fine, but my surname begins with /sh/. One hopes my parents would have backed away from the brink.

Oddly enough, the only time I was ever in a group with other Janets was in library school. There were four of us. It IS a very librarian-y sort of name. The only other Janet Croft I know is a doctor at the CDC; once in a while I get mail intended for her.

Melissa Singer @323: I raised gerbils for a while when I was a kid, so they are therefore People in my Universe. (Not as much People as guinea pigs are, but I've had more GPs, longer, and they live longer, so it may be mostly a matter of exposure.)

I've never known a hamster well, and my primary experiences of them are divided about equally between pulling their teeth out of my finger tip, and their not being there when you try to pet them. I'm sure hamsters are lovely people when you get to know them; I've just never had the chance.

Although, one of the neighbor kids had hamsters. One time, I picked up the runny-ball that was rolling around while mom cleaned the cage. Unscrewed the little cap and looked in. Hamster stood up on his hind legs (for all the world giving the impression of putting his little hands on his little hips), and clear as telepathy looked me in the eye and said, "Yes? And what the hell do you want?"

Mice strike me as being miniature rats, and rats are most assuredly People.

Melissa Singer @ #316, you know that Das Boot was just released in Blu Ray format (as well as HD in the same box set), don't you?

I narrowly escaped being named Priscilla. My classmates would probably have nicknamed me either* Prissy or Silly; I can't decide which is worse.

*or both

"Brian" was once considered for my name, according to my Mom. I'm quite used to "Steve" or "Steven", but Brian sounds all right to me.

A friend of mine has what I consider the perfect name: Donovan Buck. That's a name that stands up and says, "Hey, here I am!"

Jacque @#334 I have little direct experience with hamsters or guinea pigs, but friends with the latter have said much the same as you. The size of the piglets appeals to me more than that of hamsters. However, it appears that I am, gasp, a cat person, so any ventures into rodenthood are indefinitely postponed. (and yes, I know some cats and some rodents get along just fine. I suspect that would not be the case with the current Occupant, who is decidedly a predator. if there weren't screens on our windows, he would be dead by now from trying to catch birds.)

I completely agree that Rats are People. A childhood friend had a large black and white one that seemed to believe it was a dog, just like the Huskies the family bred. Every year, the neighborhood kids helped socialize that year's puppies, and it was a common sight to see a large, romping group of children, puppies, and rat (he kept up quite well).

Linkmeister @#335: I have neither Blu-Ray nor HD devices, alas. I have Das Boot on DVD, though, and sometimes watch it in German. I can understand some of the jokes that aren't translated, and other bits and pieces here and there, mostly because of my tiny knowledge of Yiddish (and a steady diet of WWII movies in my youth--my dad loved them, because the Good Guys always won).

<self-promotion>

If you don't like songs from the psychedelic era (e.g. "White Rabbit," "I Am The Walrus," "Walk Away Renee," "Pictures of Matchstick Men"), you will certainly not enjoy the debut performance of my* cover band The Flower Furnace, tomorrow night at the historic Continental Club (1658 12th Street, Oakland, CA).

If you do like those songs, we do them pretty well.

</self-promotion>

*"My" as in "the band I am a member of," not as in "the band I am the leader of." I wish I knew a concise, unambiguous way to make that distinction.

Tim @ #339 "our" vs. "my?"

Tim @ 339: I'm with Linkmeister @ 340.

TexAnne @258 - sadly, we're nowhere along your travel route in the normal way of things. However, we'll have a hotel room in Indy from (check-in) Aug 3 through (check-out) Aug 7, as part of attending Gen Con. It sounds like you're not looking for an overnight in Indy, unless I misunderstand; but if your schedule and stress levels allow it would be awesome to say hi to a fellow Fluorospherian and fiber geek.

Good luck in your travel, and if we can do anything for you and/or if our paths might intersect, I think you have my email address. (If not, it's gettable from my website.)

Nicole, 342: Alas, we won't overlap; Aug 3-7 is prime ZOMG TEN DAYZ WHY AM I NOT PACKED YET territory.

On the other hand, time for some WIKTORY ARMS: I have cleared all but one-half of one living room bookcase. \o/ I still have one looming in the study, which is chock-full of scholarly works I haven't looked at since I've been here. It'll take forever to stare at all the books individually, but it shouldn't add too many boxes to the load.

Linkmeister, John A Arkansawyer: If I read "the debut performance of our cover band" I would think "when did I join a cover band?" Or maybe "Making Light has a cover band?"

Re names: I've seldom met another Lila, but in our class of 20 in PTA school we had 2 Lauras, a Lauren, a Lori, and me. That got confusing.

Tim @ 344 - we *should* have a cover band.

The only question then becomes, who are we covering?

sisuile @ 346: The only question then becomes, who are we covering?

Peter Blegvad ("growing luminous by eating light") seems like the obvious choice. I'd certainly join that band.

The band would have to cover Manfred Mann's Blinded by the Light, right? (Video)

Peter Blegvad, King Strut (whence "growing luminous by eating light")

Things you learn on the Internet. Manfred Mann made it a hit, but Blinded by the Light was written by Bruce Springsteen and first appeared on Greetings from Asbury Park.

Lila (345): My first-year-college dorm floor had a Laurie, a Laura, a Lora, a Lori, and a Lorraine. (Note: those are all pronounced differently.) Also four Marks, two Pauls, at least two Daves, and two Andys (one male, one female) and a second Andrea. And multiple Johns, one of them a genuine John Smith.

Life sometimes got confusing.

Today I went for my MRI with contrast.

Oy.

After some upsetting bureaucratic stuff that nearly had me in tears (but all satisfactorily resolved, and please don't ask for the details), I went to the MRI place (after some difficulty finding it...that hospital/med school appears to have been designed with an eye more to defending against armed attack than letting patients find their way around), and they said they didn't have my blood test results.

Well...I didn't have the blood tests yet. I had no idea they were for the MRI; I just thought they were for, you know, the cancer. They sent me over to the main hospital (I almost got lost) and I waited to have blood drawn. I have to say I had the best phlebotomist ever; first time I've had blood drawn without ANY pain, not even the slightest pinch. It was amazing (and I hadn't taken any painkillers either). She had a sticker that said "STAT."

So I went back to the MRI place (almost got lost again, this time because there was a sign indicating the building I was supposed to go to, and, I swear, displaying an arrow pointing directly away from the building!), and sat and read my book until they were ready for me.

So finally they were ready for me. The tech was really nice, and...well, he was one of those people whose manner is so gentle that you feel calmer just from being in his presence. He told me that I needed to take off my t-shirt (one of these), but could leave my pants on.

"Really?" I asked. "Won't the magnetism affect this metal button at the waist?"

"No, it's no problem. We're just doing head and neck on you, so it doesn't matter." So I left them on.

So they have me lie down...and if you're like me and a little claustrophobic you may not want to read this next bit, so I'll ROT13 it: ur tnir zr rnecyhtf (n tbbq, tbbq guvat), chg zl urnq va guvf urnq penqyr guvatvr, chg ontf bs jngre ba rvgure fvqr bs zl urnq, naq fghssrq zber cnqqvat va hagvy zl urnq jnf pbzcyrgryl vzzbovyvmrq. Gura ur chg gur pbire ba zl urnq (V pbhyq frr bhg whfg n yvggyr, ohg vg jnf yvxr jrnevat n znfx), naq fyvq zr vagb gur znpuvar. Vg jnf yvxr orvat va n ubg jngre urngre. Zl fubhyqref ner npghnyyl gur jvqrfg cneg bs zr, juvpu vf abeznyyl n tbbq guvat, ohg evtug nobhg gura V jnf jvfuvat V'q qbar srjre yngreny envfrf.

It could have been worse—if the test chamber were filled with spiders or if there'd been a rat on my face or something.

So they do the test...or tests. They do them in 5-7-minute segments, and tell you "this next one will be about five and a half minutes" or whatever in between. They DON'T tell you how fucking MANY there will be. And by the way during some of the tests the metal button on my pants was punching into my gut with every pulse (not as bad as it sounds—didn't hurt or anything, just kinda uncomfortable) during some of the tests.

So, after a hundred years of struggling to hold perfectly still (trying even not to swallow, since my tongue was the primary target), and controlling my breathing and keeping my eyes shut and trying not to wince when the vibration from the machine actually hurts (mistook it for an electric shock at first), they have to inject me with the contrast stuff. So they slide me out, thank gods, and take the mask off, but tell me not to move my head. This is OK. They send for the nurse to do the injection.

Remember what I said about the phlebotomist up above? The nurse, not so much. She's one of those who fgvpxf lbh naq gura jvttyrf gur arrqyr nebhaq hagvy fur trgf vg vagb gur irva. Owwie.

While the gadolinium is sliding into me, I ask the tech how many more segments we have to do. "The contrast test is shorter," he says. "One that's like five and a half minutes, and one that's about seven."

"So," I ask to get it completely clear, "Two more of these and I'm done?"

"Right," he says.

So I go back in the enhanced interrogation device tube, and he does the two more segments (the second one seems to last forever), and I'm all ready for him to slide me out, and then he says "this next one will be about three minutes," and he does another one. THEN he lets me out.

He explains, after I ask, that a radiologist stuck his head in the door during the test and said "do a side plane" (another angle on my head), so he had to add one.

So after holding it together for the entire millennium I was in there, I start to hyperventilate when I'm finally out. My hands start to go numb. But I recover quickly, thank the tech, and get the hell out of there.

On the way home I buy a package of fresh wild-mushroom tortelloni, a container of pesto sauce, and a package of crescent rolls. I go home and eat all of it. I figure I deserve it.

We had three guys named Steve in a fraternity house of 40 people and only one incoming phone line. Whoever answered it would stand at the bottom of the stairs and yell "Steve! Phone!" and three doors would open.

Argh. An extra "during some of the tests" got in there somehow. I swear I proofread.

And I seem to have switched to historical present in the middle. I meant to do that.

*stalks away, tail held high*

Xopher, 354: Switching to historical present at a key point in the narrative is a perfectly good storytelling habit.

Xopher: I want to say congratulations on surviving, though somehow that seems wrong. But scans like that seem to unnerve everyone who has them, and there seems to be significant relief upon exiting/being done.

When my teenager was in the ER last fall, the _worst_ moment for both of us was when she had to go in the scan room all by herself.

Serenity to you.

Xopher #352: Remember what I said about the phlebotomist up above? The nurse, not so much. She's one of those who fgvpxf lbh naq gura jvttyrf gur arrqyr nebhaq hagvy fur trgf vg vagb gur irva. Owwie.

That's what we in the trade refer to as "going spearfishing."

James, I sincerely hope it's frowned upon as inferior technique!

Xopher, next time you take me with you, please.

Xopher, sounds like you deserved that container of tortelloni and more (gelato for afters?). Congratulations on making it through an intensely crappy experience; may the next such be very far in the future.

Name confusion subthread: I once taught a class of 16 students, 6 of them with Korean names that began with (variously spelled) "Yoo." It was a summer class, so we didn't meet for long; I may possibly have had them all straight by the final.

Go, Xopher! {{{HUGS}}}

I had a whole-body-in MRI scan a few years back, to check out a back problem.

To be honest, what I remember most was the relief from using a lumbar support pillow, provided to align my lower spine for the scan. I was in horrible pain at the time, barely able to drive to work or appointments. Not being in pain for a few minutes overwhelmed any claustrophobic feelings. (I'm sure I had them, it was just a matter of degree.)

It was a bulging disk, as the orthopedist suspected. Some physical therapy suggested by a chiropractor quickly relieved the pressure.

Xopher, you don't mention any special calming medication. I'm impressed. I've had two MRIs, about 7 years apart. I got drugs for both. I don't think I'm unusually claustrophobic, but I did not enjoy the tiny space. Sadly, the "open" MRI machines don't have very good image resolution.

On the second one, I'd refused the blindfold, and made the mistake of opening my eyes and seeing how tiny a space I was in. I hit the panic button that they'd put in my hand, and they immediately whisked me back out. They put the cloth over my eyes, I took some deep breaths, and back in I went. I'd asked them to give me a running commentary on how many were left, and between that, breathing to a gatha, and not being able to see the space, I coped.

They could play music, and that helped a bit. I'd have preferred a podcast, and the technician said that was a good idea and they'd look into it. The technician had a very calming vibe, just as you described your's. I suspect that's a job requirement.

I had an MRI back in February that went on for either a half-hour or an hour, can't remember which. I had it drug-free, but I think I had a blindfold or mask. The only other time I had one they offered me Bach or Beethoven; this time, no music.

The noise level is scary if you have any sort of imagination. I kept waiting for somebody to say "Down periscope. Dive! Dive! Dive!"

Open Thread 154 was headlined with "The last of them, but not the least of them." I wondered which one was in fact the least -- and got no answer. So, I have now read them all (at a pace of two or so a day), and my pick is #40:

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam'd, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites yet we must not be foes.

I've had several breast MRIs in the last few years. Loud, yes; claustrophobic, yes; not quite as bad as Xopher's experience because my head wasn't immobilized. Only two sessions, too, one with contrast, one without. I want to say they were eighteen minutes each, but that's probably the total. My big problem was uncooperative veins. They couldn't use the one in the back of the hand (where I usually have blood drawn), but finding a vein in my arm always gets...interesting.

The worst was the MRI-guided biopsy, because they slid me out and then I *couldn't* *move* for a couple of minutes while the doctor looked at the scans. (They told me that one lady who sneezed at that point had to start all over again.)

Modern medicine is miraculous, but a lot of it is No Fun At All.

Xopher @352: Sounds pretty awful. Here's hoping the results are worthwhile. And yes, you deserved the tortellini.

Names: We had four "Helen"s in a class of about 30 at school (middle/high); they generally got referred to by their surnames, or by nicknames based on those. There were another two in the parallel class. Then at uni in my third year I was in a department with Jo, Joe, Joan and Jean.

My mother carefully spelled my name such that, when I was learning to write, I would be spelling it how it sounded. Great idea. Result: I've spent most of my life saying "Debra - no, that's D-E-B-R-A. No "O", no "H". D-E-B-R-A." Gr.

What I really want to know is this: Why do people ask you what form of your name you want to be called by, if they're going to ignore you? I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me "do you prefer Debra or Debbie?" "Debra" I reply - only for them to then call me Debbie. Every time. Even if I remind them (which I've generally stopped bothering to do, since it usually results in the person making a comment wondering why I'm making such a fuss about it). I suppose I could try to just not respond if they call me "Debbie".

HLN: Hyperlocal man writes love poem while mostly asleep; form is double-dactyl. Man is scared to go back and see what it looks like.

Re: Killer trilobytes - this one has a sad.

Coming in late on the multiple names thing, my first-year geology class at university in the 70s had eight Petes. They were distinguished as Big Pete, Little Pete, Scots Pete, Geordie Pete, Ginger Pete, Big Scots Pete, Pete the Leg (he had his leg in a cast when the class started) and The Other Pete (who hardly ever turned up to classes). Oddly enough, none of them called himself Peter. It was a rather large class, as I recall.

My primary school class in the early 1960s had three Nigels, and there were only 17 kids in the class.

Linkmeister (353)
in re people in housing with the same names:

During The Interregnum between marriages I had young lass I kept company with who went to school at Brandies University.

One spring evening I was waiting in the quad for her and some (more than slightly) lit up individual was also there, yelling at the top of his lungs "David! Hey, David!" over, and over, and over, and...

Finally someone opened a window, looked out and yelled back "Can you be more specific?"

What really cracked me up was that I had already heard the same thing happening as a "No S***t, I was There" story. Which may have prompted the windowed response...

I'm pretty lucky - "Craig" has apparently never been a hugely popular name. The only other person I ever herd of with the same name whilst I was growing up was the actor Craig Stevens (in those days all I knew him for was the TV series "Peter Gunn")

I've only ever had one CAT scan and one MRI.

The CAT scan was When CAT scans were New & Groovy and I was prescribed them to verify that my recurring migraines were not lesion-related. (Actually had two - one "plain" and one contrast, where I was IV'd with radio-opaque iodine. (No lesions found, and contrary to one of my co-workers loudly-expressed supposition, they did find grey matter)

The MRI was about 3 or 4 years ago, to diagnose some knee pain -- it seems I have a Meniscus Tear. Luckily for me the tear appears to be on the leading (at the very front of the joint) edge, so unless my pain get more frequent and/or severe surgery is not indicated.

For the MRI I had to swap off all metal (including my wedding band ("lets just be safer than mistaken") and got to don scrubs. The range of piped-in music for the headphones (just plastic headphones with the music conducted along air channels) was *very* impressive, and ranged from "smooth jazz" to "muzak" to "new age" to "Celtic" to some variety of "classical". (I picked the "new age," which, thankfully, was *not* "muzak." Yeah, claustrophobia would be in full kick if I were so inclined. But, by the Great Ghod Ghu, was it noisy!

My third grade class had Brians A, B, C and D. It was amazingly cool, though I'm sure the guys in question must have found it frustrating. (I find it hard enough, when people close to my name are in the same group, as I've had to train myself to respond to a wide range of variations.)

For that matter, my babysis goes by Caity, my brother's girlfriend is Kate, and my initials... are what they are. Coincidence is fun...

Another late in on the multiple names subthread: I was once in a personal-growth seminar with three women named Joy, one named Lisa Joy, and one named Linda Joy. Given the topic of the seminar, "joy" came up fairly often even without referring to one of the five. Much fun ensued!

Keeping in the recurring theme here of medical testing, yesterday I had a nerve conduction test performed.

I have developed arthritis in the base of my thumb, and recently I've noticed tingling and numbness in a couple of fingers of that hand. The hand-extremity specialist was concerned about it being carpal tunnel, so he ordered the test.

Nobody explained what was going to happen until the doctor performing it actually began the test.

First she took a history, and she put surface electrodes on various parts of my hand, wrist and lower arm. (so far, I have no issues -- I thought it was to be a passive test, like an EEG or an EKG)

Then the test starts, and she tells me "now don't move, or I'll have to repeat the test."

Then I get electric shocks from this thing that looks like a truncated stun-gun!

I don't care what they say, it *is* painful! (I, meanwhile, am trying to suppress the learned response to jump away! - When my father was alive I apprenticed as an electrician -- and you learn to view shocks As A Bad Thing)

And she was also one if the High Priestess variety of doctor, when I asked for some insight what the test was supposed to show, her reaction was, essentially, "don't worry your head about it, Dr. xxxxx will explain what you need to know"

Now that I've read up on the procedure, I have an idea of what they were looking for, but, really, *why* do some medics insist that only they are gatekeepers of knowledge?

Open thready media comment:

I may have commented before that just about the only time I see TV news is when I'm at the gym. (Then, I'm usually trying to ignore it, since it's distracting.)

Today, at the gym, I had a sudden flash of insight, which made a mid-day CNN newscast make perfect sense. I watched for probably 20 minutes, and the model fit perfectly. It was entertaining enough to check that watching was actually worth forgoing the many interesting podcasts I have on my phone.

The insight was this: CNN news is basically the adult version of the Weekly Reader[1]. Watching the stories, at least for this 20 minute span, it was a perfect fit.

[1] A very short "newspaper" often provided to American children in grade school, with coverage of a few big stories in terms that might make sense to a bright six year old, without too much controversy or any gore or sexual suggestiveness at all.

It's 108F here. I don't know if there is really anything to say beyond that, though I typed and deleted several additional observations.

Xopher @ 352... I figure I deserve it

Definitely.

Re names: Our parish had a deacon and two curates in a row named respectively Madeleine, Melanie, and Meredith. Now that we're looking for another curate there are a bunch of us whose primary requirement is that whoever it is doesn't have a name beginning with M. OTOH, my son has the distinction of being named after his great aunt and his great uncle-- both named James. (She was named after her father.)

And re MRIs: I'm not claustrophobic but I can easily see how it can be stressful, having gone through the "what's in that head thing" myself. The noise bothered me more than anything else.

albatross @360: Your mention of it made me look to see if Weekly Reader was still in business.

_Of course_ it is--it's published by Scholastic!

But I haven't seen an issue in decades. My kid's elementary schools used Time For Kids, which served much the same purpose.

Hyperlocal news... This time, man's wife dreams of James Purefoy, in a story involving Ancient Rome, typewriters and Nazis.

albatross, all I can say about your Weekly Reader/CNN insight is: Of *course*! Why didn't I think of that?

(Geez, I haven't thought about Weekly Reader in probably 30+years.)

On names: My sister's name is Emily. Something like 10 years ago, our 2nd cousin (whose name is John) married a lovely woman also named Emily. To keep them straight, we started calling her "John's Emily" as opposed to "our Emily." In a few months, my sister is getting married-- to a man named John.

I call him "Emily's John," but for some reason I seem to be the only person in the family who finds it funny. Probably because I'm a Jennifer.

MRI machine neepery: (apologies for lack of paragraphs, ipod not easy to navigate text box with for editing.)
I got to go to a seminar at a research facility run by the U of MN where they have a 3Tesla MRI and a 5Tesla research coil. The research attendant, a cool guy, said he had figured out how to play music on the gradient coils of the magnet, turning it into a giant speaker, but without the moving cone bits. The sound comes from the large forces set up between the main static or "B" field and the magnetic fields caused by the current flowing through the gradient coils. There aren't any moving parts inside, so the loud banging isn't anything actually hitting anything else, it is the result of the coils inside setting up strong attraction and repulsion forces very quickly, and then shutting them off just as fast. Wikipedia has a good set of articles about all of it. The magnet technology is always getting better and the newest high-strength open type machines are about as good as older conventional 1.5T machines. Very expensive and physically larger than conventional types so not many of them get installed. The strong magnetic fields and the steep gradients in them have some interesting effects, too.

cajunfj40 @384: Re: Tesla coils and music . . . .

May I recommend Arc Attack?

http://www.arcattack.com/

I learned about these guys because of America's Got Talent last summer and then got to see them perform live at NYC's MakerFaire (they'll be back this year as well, yay!)

It's a thrilling experience!

I knew someone whose wife name was Mary. Let's call her Mary B. He also had a sister Mary, a mother Mary, and 2 sisters-in-law Mary--all Mary B.*

Sometimes I'm very glad for Plain naming conventions*: they were distinguishable as Ben-Mary, Johnny-Mary, Ben's-Mary, and etc.

*He and his father had the same name.

*With a possessive it's a daughter; without it's a wife.

Teresa 359: While I'd be delighted to have your company (at any time!), I'm not sure how much you could do. They wouldn't let you be in the room with the machine, and it's injuriously loud anyway (the earplugs are really essential).

JM 360: may the next such be very far in the future.

Yeah, I'm really hoping that isn't something I'll have to do on a regular basis...some of the people in my cancer group have scans every three months, though I think those are CT scans rather than MRIs.

janetl 363: Xopher, you don't mention any special calming medication.

I wasn't offered any, nor a blindfold. Not sure what I'd've done about the first, but I'm pretty sure I'd've refused the second. They didn't have music either.

Xopher @387 -- no blindfold? Did they skimp on offering you a last cigarette as well?

"Don't change your name to mine, dear / just change it to Rose ..."

--Dave, who has had times when there were other Davids around but it's been a while now

I once worked in a department with Jan, Jeanette, Jim, John, and Pam. We decided that in the name "Pam", the J is silent.

Jacque @ 320:

Growing up, in fact until I was 19 or 20, I didn't know anyone else named Bruce. Then I started meeting a few, and then ...

In 1977, I worked for a startup company that had fewer than 50 employees; I worked in the Engineering Department, which had 12 people, 4 of us named Bruce. One day, all four of us were working in the printer room when the Engineering Manager walked in a said, "Oh, Bruce ... I'm sorry I said that."

My parents attempted to name me Kathryn after my great aunt Kathryn Tracy, but she objected to "Kathryn" so they went with her last name. In those days, Tracy was considered a boy's name, and I did not have a feminine middle name*, so they changed the spelling so people would know it was a girl's name. Ha! The Naval Academy tried to recruit me. Selective Service hounded me to register, then finally apologized and requested a photo they could use in their annual "oops! We accidentally tried to draft these girls" story. (I declined, as did my unfortunate classmate Mitchell Ann.) I met my first Tracy -- a southern boy -- in college, which is when the name began to be popular for girls. Tracy, Tracey, Tracie, Traci, Tracee. Nobody ever knows how to spell your version.

*My middle name is usually assumed to be a family name, which it is, just not my family. It's the name of my mother's commanding general. In that venerable old southern tradition, I have three last names.

Tracie @ #392, "Nobody ever knows how to spell your version."

My problem isn't as severe as yours, but still. I have to say "It's with a 'ph," not a "v."

David Delaney @ 389 "Don't change your name to mine, dear / just change it to Rose ..."

Do I hafta? Looking in the mirror, I'm pretty sure that Rose doesn't fit me too well. I don't think a Rose would have to shave like I do.

I have been meaning to make a shorter name for use here, since ML is high profile enough that google might actually pick up my name. I'm kinda proud of my very low google profile. Since I've been online since '92

I settled on Debio, it's what my wife calls me.

Debio fits a bit better than Rose.

Oops, you know, I did preview that. I read it twice, really I did.

Then after I posted it, I realized that well, I didn't mention that I was the David who de-lurked himself in the google thread.

So, that's who I am. But, not Rose. Someone else can be Rose.

Oops, you know, I did preview that. I read it twice, really I did.

Then after I posted it, I realized that well, I didn't mention that I was the David who de-lurked himself in the Google thread.

So, that's who I am. But, not Rose. Someone else can be Rose.

Bruce @391

I suppose that in 1977 the Python reference might have been more obvious. "Mind if we call you 'Bruce' to keep it clear?"

janetl @390, We decided that in the name "Pam", the J is silent.

Well, of course. It's a short form of P'jamas.

Tracie #392: Well, there's always the (male) writer Evelyn Waugh, who took a wife also named Evelyn.

Xopher #387: I'm trying to imagine the techs' reaction if you had asked for a last cigarette... before undergoing your location scan for tongue cancer! I suppose it would depend on whether/how many times they'd heard it before.

Tracie #392: I arguably have three first names, as I've heard of people with given name Harmon.

Debio #394: I use my full name mostly because I'd been using my initials since college days, so I didn't have a real "handle" that I was attached to. But the initials had already been getting less and less unique as cyberspace got more settlers. PS: it looks like you've just been initiated by the Double-Posting Bug.

David Harmon @399

Well, thank you, now I can blame it on a bug. :) It may have been me. After hitting post, I had to go try and explain to our two year old that...

No, biting mommy is not a good thing. That if you bite mommy, she might not want to talk to you for a little while, so maybe you should go say sorry.

I'm another three-last-name person ("Sanford" having made the full move from last to middle to first over several generations.)

My family is rife with Elizabeths and Ann[e]s and Betsys [both shortened Elizabeths and birth-certificated] - at one point in a womens' doubles tournament Betsy and Ann were playing Betsy and Anne. 3/4 had the same last name. Apparently my mother, in the first year of marriage, introduced herself to someone at a party as "Betsy NewLastName" and was told "No you aren't. I know her." She cried again when her husband referred to the two women as "Sister Betsy" and "Wife Betsy" on christmas presents, so every present after that had a different to/from: To L.R. from the B.B.W. (Little Red from the Big Bad Wolf- a hoodie), To the Sleigh Pilot from the Ground Crew (something to do with flying), etc.

My parents taught me in word and deed that loving someone is work. (Rewarding work, to be sure. But you have to keep putting the work in.)

... Well, that was an unexpected segue. HLN: The double dactyl isn't as bad as I feared.

(rot13 for syrup)
uvttyrgl cvttyrgl
Jr'er vapbairavragyl
qbmraf bs gubhfnaqf bs
zvyrf ncneg

Vg'f n cbbe frpbaq gb
gryrpbzzhavpngr
Jura yvxr znq fpvrapr jr'er
wbvarq ng gur urneg.

Bruce Cohen way back @131 - The fireworks story from Ohio that sticks in my mind is the Scottown fireworks store fire. Brain-damaged young man (skateboarding accident in his teens, he was essentially an impulsive boy with little understanding of consequences in a man's body) dared by some extremely irresponsible other young men to toss a lit cigarette into a bin of fireworks. The ensuing fire killed 9 people. The sprinkler system may have been disabled by the store's owner. A lot of stupidity in a small space, with explosives. Dire consequences.

The only other thing I recall about Scottown is that its zip code is 45678.

CarrieS, sisuile, Gaukler @various - I'll be at Pennsic too this year. Should be able to locate and say hi to a couple of you, sounds like.

#58 thomas

The tobacco industry/lobby... why should the public have to pay for the expenses caused by smoking, and not the tobacco industry which is doing the poisoning?

On names: dcb makes a great point there. I have not used the execrable nickname associated with my given name since I was six. I hate it, and I have never written it on any form, anywhere. However, it's developed into a sum-check of sorts, rather like Van Halen's brown M&Ms. If someone who has my written name automatically uses the detested nick, this person is unreliable. If they continue after I've corrected them, this person will not listen to me in future. This has been especially key in dealing with medical professionals as a check on whether my concerns will be taken seriously.

There's a second check-sum, too -- Constance and Candace seem to share the same mental filing space for a significant fraction of the population. If, after having introduced myself, I am called Candace, I know my interlocutor is not paying attention. If that happens *while I'm wearing a name tag* I know I'm wasting my time.

#69 Brook
Kurzweil is the sort of fellow who started companies which made money for him to sell to other people, and cost the buyers a bundle to attempt to turn a profit on... the buyers got stuck each time, with Kurzweil Music, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, and I forget what the third company was....

#101 Jacques
When I went to the college dormfloor reunion three or four years ago, e-Patient Dave was very frail and in a motorized wheelchair. The're a evideo of him linked from his site giving a 20 talk standing up a few weeks ago, looking substantially studier.

He's a survivor of stage 4 cancer. The thought that he's turned into an Inspirational Speaker is amusing (I knew him in college, long long ago, and are both on the dormfloor alumn mailing list)

#314 & 315, Carrie and Elliott
And they obviously don;t care if their husbands are boinking other men....

#317 Lila
I -hate- Pixar's female character appearance, the sheeny rounds heads on pencil necks, hate, hate, HATE the visual appearance thereof (hate it in flat images two, hate, hate, hate the style, always have and always will)

#319 Sandy
I heard stories of what happened/happens "when the crew of an aircraft carrier hits the beach." ...

SamChevre @386: I knew someone whose wife name was Mary. Let's call her Mary B. He also had a sister Mary, a mother Mary, and 2 sisters-in-law Mary--all Mary B.* Sometimes I'm very glad for Plain naming conventions*: they were distinguishable as Ben-Mary, Johnny-Mary, Ben's-Mary, and etc.

My mother's father's family of origin (and its entire, copious cousinage -- my grandfather was the youngest of 8 kids, most of whom married and had children) has, in the main, four first names. Something like 80-90% of my East-coast cousins are firstnamed John, Don, Paul, or Pat. This includes some female Johnnies, Paulas/Paulines, Dawns, etc. We even tend to marry them -- my grandfather (a Paul) married a Pat without specifically choosing her for name-congruence, and I didn't realize the implications of me pairbonding with a John till I went back East for a family wedding and facepalmed.

We distinguish between them, for family storytelling/gossip purposes, in two ways: the heaven-sent diversity of last names (since all of my grandfather's generation who married and bred -- except him -- were female, they all married into new last names), and the creative use of a very limited number of nicknames.

E.g.: My uncle Don Marrandino's Donnie's uncle Paul (my grandfather)'s Pat's niece Patty is Don Marrandino's wife Patty Marrandino, and referrable-to either through kinship chain or as her full name. I could also talk about my Uncle Donny's (Don Marrandino) Paulie's (his son) Jackie's (Paulie's wife -- I told you) Dawn, meaning her sister. In this end of my family, such kinship-chain identifiers are very common and come out almost in one breath, which left he-who-is-now-my-husband kind of head-spinny at that wedding for the first hour or so until I sketched him a tree for orientation purposes.

I didn't find out until adulthood exactly how I was related to my 'Keyburn cousins,' for example -- they turn out to be the descendants of my grandfather Paul's mother ('Mom Beltz' for family story purposes)'s older brother. And yes, the East-coast family sees them regularly, especially for things like pool parties where you throw all the current-generation kids together to amuse each other and the grownups go inside where it's air conditioned to drink and kibitz. Obviously, a lot of them aren't Keyburns … but they're still all mostly Johns, Dons, Pauls, and Pats.

Anne @ 403 and others Pennsic-bound: I will be there too, as always. Never missed one yet. We should gather together.

Tom 388: no blindfold? Did they skimp on offering you a last cigarette as well?

They're cutting budgets everywhere.

Pennsic-goers: OK, what's a good day, and should we just default to "in the barn"?

Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla!!!

Re Pennsic gathering: I'll be there second week but probably leaving early (late Thursday or early Friday). My only firm commitments are the Knowne World Harp festivities (Wed noon) and Middle Kingdom Court (Thur 8pm).

re: Weekly Reader subthread

I remember an article on displaced persons (DPs). President Eisenhower was quoted, "We must help these people."

Did you know that Captain Kangaroo's Dancing Bear was a non-English-speaking DP? Another reason to like Bob Keeshan, who was the original Clarabell the Clown on "Howdy Doody".

"So when he wrecked the car he ended up with the steering wheel shoved up his uhm the gland let's see the something.."

"Prostate?"

"Prostate!? You surely didn't expect him to be standing up and defiant after something like that didja?"

Huh. My post didn't. Anyway, as long as we're talking cons, anyone else going to be at Mythcon in Albuquerque? (I'm hoping Serge will drop by.)

Re: pennsic

Gaukler and I are probably least-mobile, him for the shop and me for Performing Arts. I will be there the full two weeks, and will only be available to leave the Pavilion during the middle of the day...but I, too, would like a gathering of light. Over coffee and baklava, perhaps?

BTW, Tracie, did you want sekanjabin this year?

@Tracie 392

Sorry to be late, we went on a family hike over the Fourth, and the laundry fairy (not to be confused with the ever-elusive Colorado poop fairy) skipped my house last weekend. Well, I've rectified that omission and the laundry is done.

(But, as usual, I digress.)

I got to name my baby sister. I was searching through the naming book and found Tracy (no -e-) in the girl's section. It was listed as an Irish name. No mention that it's an Irish boy's name.

I swear I'd never heard of anyone firstnamed Tracy before, so I picked it out for my lil sis.

It was one of the most popular names for a girl in 1968. There were 5 Tracys in my sister's kindie class. The spelling varied, but in kindie that's not very helpful. There were even two Tracy Ms. So she was Blondie for most of elementary school. All my fault.

I'm not sure she's ever forgiven me.

re 407: I recall reading somewhere that at some point in the Middle Ages five names accounted for half the population of England-- and Mary was the only female name of the five.

I've written a memorial post for our cat Gremlin (and thanks, everyone who posted sypathies and support here) on my blog. Here, with photos.

Janet @ 415: yes. And thanks again for noting it here back in April. (Just wish I'd known about the costuming aspect a little earlier. Oops. My fault.)

Xopher and others, about medical testing: I also recently had an MRI with contrast, and they told me I couldn't have anything by mouth for 6 hours prior. I wonder why we got different instructions? I don't consider myself claustrophobic and I didn't need to have my head immobilized, but by the time I was properly arranged on the bed with a number of straps tightened around my legs, waist and pelvis I did begin to feel a bit anxious. They were looking at my pelvis and I was glad that my head remained just outside the machine. The extra airspace in front of my face made it easier to relax.

I knew that MRI machines were noisy, but I had been expecting something continuous like a jet engine, not loud, irregular bangings and clankings, accompanied by lots of vibration. The only real problem I had was during one segment during which I had to hold my breath--the tech told me it would last 30 seconds, but the banging and clanking went on and on... She later told me that she accidentally ran two breath-holding segments without a break between them.

It wasn't a horrible experience, but I still was relieved to be done and I rewarded myself by meeting a good friend for coffee afterwards.

Xopher, I think you absolutely earned the tortelloni and crescent rolls. I hope that your test results turn out well.

On the naming subthread: I didn't encounter many other Lauras when I was younger, but in college I took a class in which the only other student was another girl named Laura. The professor spent the first day figuring out what to call us. I do seem to run into lots of Laurens, Loris, Lauries, and even a few Laurels these days, and I always reflexively respond when any variant of my name is called. That could be because my grandpa calls me Laurie and my sister just calls me Laur. My parents call me Lou.

Laura 421: I also recently had an MRI with contrast, and they told me I couldn't have anything by mouth for 6 hours prior. I wonder why we got different instructions? ... They were looking at my pelvis

I think that's probably why. Mine was a head-and-neck, so my digestive tract wasn't really at issue.

Xopher, I think you absolutely earned the tortelloni and crescent rolls. I hope that your test results turn out well.

Thank you, and so do I.

MRIs aren't really about magnetic resonance, that's just the cover story. While you are being inched through the machine you are being thoroughly examined by poltergeists. They hammer, scour and scrape your inner being and listen for the echos.

Xopher: I'm very surprised that the operators were unconcerned about your metal button. The usual rule is no metal anywhere near the machine, and there are pictures of impressive failures to follow this rule.

I have learned to wear buttonless, snapless, zipperless t-shirt and sweats when I go for any imaging tests (X-ray, CT scan, MRI, bone scan, barium swallow). Much more comfortable and dignified.

Tracie #392: Not so curiously, my old political theory teacher, Tracy B. Strong, gets taken for female by unwary people from time to time. He's both amused and resigned to it.

dcb #367/CZEdwards #420: I've noticed that people who are attempting to achieve a superior argumentative position online will call me "Frag", a name no one in "the real world" has ever called me. I find this amusingly annoying.

On t'other hand, my nickname in high school was "Lopez".

17th Century England subset of akiciml:
Is there a fluorospherian in the house familiar with the literacy rates, theatre-goingness and reading habits of average inhabitants of 17th Century England?

For a workshop tomorrow I'm playing with a few often-quoted stats about "you get more information in one newspaper than an average person would get in their lifetime in the abc century."(1) I've got some ability to think about one newspaper, but much less knowledge for contemplating one average 17th century person.

(1) with various assumptions about definitions ('information,' 'average'), if only printed info counts, what about compression, etc.

jnh@423: There are two issues with metal and MRI. The first, that magnetic metals are pulled towards (and through) the core, which creates the safety hazards; the second, that metals can distort your image in the area of interest, which means no metal around your scan area. Buttons on clothing won't fly into the core (although they do move), so as long as Xopher had no extra metal around his face, the tech allowed it.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale #426:

No hard facts, but your answers are going vary wildly according to: living in London vs out in the provinces (theatergoing); religion (theatergoing, choice of reading matter). So check what sources you do find for those biases.

When I joined the PA at my synagogue's religious school, there were 4 women named Sue in the group and at least two others who were regular volunteers.

Everyone pretty much answered to "Sue" regardless of their actual names, because it was clear that when someone called for Sue, there was a PA or religious school issue to be handled.

We were all Sue for at least 4 years. Sometimes we still are, when the rabbi's mind is elsewhere.

(I've also been Marjorie, Melinda, and Martha, at various times and places.)

re: Pennsic Meet-up
I'll be there for the whole event. I'm not terribly mobile (running a booth) without prior notice. we do, however, usually have seating for four or five in my booth. My wife will also be there this time.
She posts here from time to time: Barbara Gordon (Mostly Unpublished Author and Viable Paradise survivor).

Melissa Singer @429 -- and all the men were Spartacus?

Not a gerbil.

Not a hamster.

It's unquestionably a rat.

Rattus norvegicus.

I know rats, and I love them.

I have not looked at the Weekly Reader the same way since I saw the equivalent distributed to elementary schools in the Philippines during a certain period: "We have a new government. It is called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", with a group photo of the military governors.

Considering that my intolerance for racial prejudice contains exemptions for a handful of cases (Irish Americans are not entitled to snub Britons, but actual Irish people are), and that excusing Filipinos for disliking Japanese is near the top of my list....

Throwmearope #413: Tracy is an Irish last name that was adopted in the US as a first name, like Kelly. Both were originally considered boys' names, but are now usually girls' names Like Tracy, Kelly suffers from variant spellings -- Kelley, Kellie, Kellee, Kelleigh... By now, both are also used as first names in Ireland, but not as often.

You named your sister at the beginning of the "Tracy" proliferation. While I was still getting mail addressed to Mister, I also began to have people who had no reason to know my age assume I would be a young girl. (Example: schoolmates of my younger brother, who expected me to be a younger sister. )

When I'm in Ireland I am assumed to be of Irish decent because all three of my names are familiar Irish surnames, though not exclusively Irish. The first and last are not spelled as they are in Ireland, but they're used to Americans altering the spelling. (I have minimal Irish ancestry, one set of great grandparents. )

Open Threadiness:

Y'all saw this Doctor Who dance, right? (via NeilG's blog).

I actually popped in to ask if anyone has a link to an idiot level explanation of why/how exceeding the speed of light implies time travel? It seems generally accepted that this is so, but I've never quite gotten it.

Tracie #434: Tracy is an Irish last name that was adopted in the US as a first name, like Kelly.

And Harmon, for that matter, though I'm not even close to Irish. Anyway, my family name was taken from "Harmon-on-the-Hudson" early in WW2, when a visibly German surname was Bad. But... I have other reasons to be glad for not growing up with a last name of "Hamburger"!

Tracie #434: Actually, the surname Tracy has been around for a while and isn't originally Irish (see here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_de_Tracy for a very non-Irish example). The reason I suspect you think it's Irish is because it is a Norman-French name and it went over to Ireland with Strongbow.

CZEdwards @ 420, yay! We can throw mysterious Making Light gang signs at each other. The costuming isn't generally a big deal -- we have a mini costume contest, but there aren't too many entries. (Not like in the good old days, I'm told.) But some people do like to dress for the opening procession and the banquet, even if they don't enter the contest.

Russ @ #435: I like the implied compliment: that "geeks and nerds" are people who wish to see "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism." I can support that.

Janet Brennan Croft @ 415... anyone else going to be at Mythcon in Albuquerque? (I'm hoping Serge will drop by.)

Certainly. Write to me and we'll figure something out.

Dr. Psycho @432: have you read Gunter Grass' The Rat? My vague memory of the book suggests that it was a lot of fun to read; and likely would be even moreso for a declared lover of rats.

David Harmon @436: Two of my husband's ancestor-lines are proving remarkably hard to trace across the Atlantic to their pre-1870s origins in Russia and Poland ... because the earliest family names we have for those lines are 'Harris' and 'Josey' (sometimes spelt 'Jasey').

I'm pretty sure those weren't their names when they lived in Vilnius and tiny-tiny-town-whose-name-I-can't-remember ... but we have no family remembrances of what they were before. Currently tracing down distant cousins to see if any OTHER descent lines remember.

Elliott Mason @442: Probably a total coincidence, but I also have "Harris" ancestors and I'm descended from Russian and Polish immigrants - ah, but I see (looking in the family history my aunt has pieced together) that my "Harris" (formerly Hirschcovitz) ancestors came from Lithuania, so probably not related. (But did your husband's ancestors go straight to the USA, or travel via the UK, as many did?) - Hold on a minute - Vilnius IS in Lithuania (the capital, in fact).

Do you want to discuss this further???

Russ @435: I actually popped in to ask if anyone has a link to an idiot level explanation of why/how exceeding the speed of light implies time travel?

An idiot theory I recall was that if time slowed down as you approached the speed of light (basic relativity) then of course it would reverse direction if you exceeded the speed of light.

I believe this is how Superman classically did time travel into the past, and I recall at least one other story (pitched somewhere below YA) that had specifically spelled it out that way.

Although I don't think it involves faster-than-light travel, I recall reading a description of falling into a black hole which suggested that, while normally we have freedom of movement in three dimensions of space and we move in time in a restricted fashion, falling into a black hole would lock you into a moving in space in a restricted fashion but may open more options for moving in time.

My Doctor Who theory is that Tardises are in some fashion anchored to the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and what moves is the projection of the doorway. Time Lord time and space travel would be restricted to this galaxy.

Snark. @406: See @405. Heh.

re: Pennsic - I'll be there the second week, most likely arriving Sunday. Shooting the archery war points is about the only fixed point on my schedule. Last time I was at Pennsic, that ate up the better part of a day, what with the remoteness of the range. If my ankle is giving me a lot of grief, I may blow that off, particularly if it would make me miss a fluorospheric gathering.

Russ #435: My brief version: As you approach the speed of light, with all the time dilation and Lorenz Contraction, you approach a point where space and time become interchangeable. If you could cross over that axis, your "timeline" would actually lead through space, and universal time would be an axis in space that you could pilot your craft along. You almost couldn't interact with normal matter until you go back to sublight speeds, and you can choose to make that return at various locations on the time axis. Certainly you can reach points before you went FTL, but depending on other constraints, you might be able to do so at any point in time.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much control you'd have over where you reemerged... remember that timeline pointing through space? There are other time-travel schemes that apparently handle this better, mostly because they don't have that miracle in step 2. Of course, those schemes require artifacts of cosmological size, made of neutronium or the moral equivalent..

AlyxL@ 370: Big Pete, Little Pete, Scots Pete, Geordie Pete, Ginger Pete, Big Scots Pete, Pete the Leg (he had his leg in a cast when the class started) and The Other Pete (who hardly ever turned up to classes)

Not-as-Big-as-Medium-Pete-but-Bigger-Than-Wee-Pete-Pete?

Throwmearope @417: Colorado poop fairy

Dare one ask?

Elliott Mason @442: those lines are 'Harris' and 'Josey' (sometimes spelt 'Jasey').

Try "Jerzey." I have a neighbor from Poland who goes by "Jerry," but is legally "Jerzey." He has a traditional Polish surname: eight letters, one vowel among them, two if you count the Y, and not one, but two Zs.

Caroline @448: I'm still chuckling over the Doctor Who ep with "Proper Dave" and "Other Dave."

Russ @435: I don't have a link, but I can give an explanation on a different basis...

Start with "Lorentz transforms". These are changes you can make that include rotations, translations (moving a certain distance), and changing your velocity, and they do it with Relativity math so they keep the speed of light constant.

Next, there's "light cones". Any point you can get TO from here-and-now, by travelling in some direction at some speed below light's, is in your "future light cone"; any point you could have gotten to where/when you are now FROM, in the same way, is in your "past light cone". (Light can get from you to a there/then in your f.l.c.; light from a there/then in your p.l.c. can have gotten to you.)

You can be causally connected to any point in either of your light cones - the past point can have affected the future point (though usually it won't have). Any spacetime point outside both light cones you can't see from here/now, and can't be affected by.

Now: Lorentz transforms leave the surfaces of the light cones invariant, and "proper" L.t.s (ones which don't flip time backwards) take the inside of each light cone to itself. For ANY point in your future light cone, you can find a L.t. that slides things around inside the f.l.c. so that point is straight forward, in time, from you - so that, having changed your velocity and rotated and maybe also moved, you can just sit there and wait and eventually you'll hit that point. Similarly for your past light cone - there's a L.t. that makes that point 'straight pastwards' from you. And, and this is the important part for the original question, there's a L.t. to take any point outside BOTH light cones into any other such point.

(Short pause for breath, and to settle the mental model in place... think of it as a cone-shaped hourglass if you want.)

Now: any jaunt that lets you go faster than light? Takes you from where/when you are here/now to some point OUTSIDE your light cones. (Slower than light lets you get to any point inside them. Lightspeed, exactly, lets you travel along their "surfaces".) It might be JUST outside, if it's not very much faster than light at all - but it'll be outside.

But once you're outside your previous light cones? There'll be some Lorentz transform - some combination of velocity-change-less-than-lightspeed and rotation - that'll slide things around until where/when you are here/now is now at any OTHER OutsideCones point (relative to where you started from). So you can get to a velocity/direction-facing where another FTL jump, even if it's really weakly FTL, can get you back in from OutsideCones ... into your original PAST light cone.

And presto. You're in your own causal past; things you do from there can affect the spacetime point you started from. There's some velocity change/rotation that'll let you sit still afterwards and get back where you started. Etc. This is Bad For Causality...

(I realize this may end up just as nonunderstandable as the "faster than light" explanations. But it has the advantage of pointing to HOW the FTL necessarily implies time travel...)

--Dave

dcb: The Harrises in question in our tree settled in Texas, if that helps any. The most diagnostic sibling triad (easy-peasy to track from census to census) were named Montefiore Moses Harris, Emerson Reinstein Harris, and George Sidney Harris, plus their sister Rosalind.

Montefiore is/was my husband's great-grandfather, and it's his grandfather Herman who immigrated. He was apparently (checking my docs instead of blowing it from the hip) born in Newenberg, Prussia; it was the Joseys/Jaseys who are from the muddy boundary area between the modern nations of Germany and Poland.

Now I'm trying to remember who the Vilnius ancestors were, 'cause I remember we had some. :-> Full-text searchability, ho!

Much easier than the side of the family that are all John-and-Mary Edmondsons (in a town in England with at least five separate lines of Edmondsons living there in those decades).

In re your Vilnian Harrises, I'd love to (offlist) collaborate with you on that. I'm pretty good at wrangling the newfound electronic so-much-easier-than-it-used-to-be documentation-finding end of geneological research, and do it as a kind of fannish side craft-that-pays-for-my-supplies (references available).

Me @450, para six: slight correction -

(Slower than light lets you get to any point inside the future cone. Lightspeed, exactly, lets you travel along the future cone's "surface".)

--Dave, oh the embarrassment

Elliott Mason @ 451: Oh, looks like no connection then (although we do have family history and present Texas connections) - I knew it was unlikely. If you want to e-mail me for more info on Harrises, contact dbourne (at) rvc-dot-ac-dot-uk.

http://www.damnlol.com/how-to-drive-harry-potter-star-wars-and-lotr-fans-insane-147.html

I'd like to hear comments from the vets on this one:

How to deactivate a cat.

Is this humane?

Regarding relationship-referential identifications ...

In medieval English tax records, such as the Lay Subsidy of 1334, although husbands and wives are taxed individually, the standard format for listing them in the record is (translated from the Latin):

* (husband's full name)
* (wife's given name), his wife

or even more succinctly:

* (husband's full name)
* his wife

The absurd tyranny of this template was pointed up by a highly unusual pair of entries I ran across which read:

* the husband of (wife's full name)
* his wife

Jacque @ 449--

The local Denver daily newspaper (which has a nasty habit of trying to sue anyone who links to it) had a report that the City of Lakewood wanted to make it very, very plain to the denizens of that lovely town: There is no Poop Fairy. Pick up after your own dog.

(By the way, another Jackie here, but not another Jacqueline.)

David Harmon @455 -- not a vet, but I'd bet this is a reflex left over from kittenhood, when Momcat carried kittens by that part. Probably very humane, if the clip isn't too strong or left on for very long. Fascinating!

re: Pennsic. I've never been :(
I'd like to someday, but not this year. It's a long way from northern An Tir, and I've zeroed out my travel budget for the next several months.

David Harmon @455: I suspect this is activating the cat's "mother cat is carrying you, go limp" pathways, in which case I'd think it would be okay if used for a non-painful procedure for a short time; the cat didn't appear too traumatised afterwards - I'd want to know what its heart rate was doing, etc. to be sure.

I'm totally against "trancing" rabbits (which makes use of their "Argh, I've been caught by a predator" reflex), with the exception of use for non-painful procedures if used when the only alternative would be to put the rabbit through the physiological stress of a sedation or anasthetic. It is NOT a "bonding experience" with your rabbit.

David Harmon @ 455: I agree with dcb. I wouldn't want to do this with clips that were the wrong size or too tight. Besides, cat bags are more humane and cats generally don't fight the bags (and, the bags work even better on rabbits!)

David 450: Well, that explanation went so far over my head that it didn't even whoosh. Outside the atmosphere, I guess.

I thought I understood it before. The explanation I heard went something like this:

• Time slows down as you approach c because otherwise you could go faster than light inside the frame. Example: train going at c minus 2 mph; someone runs up the aisle at more than 2 mph. That can't happen because of time dilation; the person is going at more than 2 mph inside the train, but in slowed-down time, so they don't wind up going FTL in reality.
• At c, time dilation is complete (also mass is infinite and length is zero, but ignore that); that is, time stops within the frame.
• Therefore FTL would require time to run backwards, or more accurately to be dilated to less than zero (and come to think of it mass would have to be more than infinite and length would have to be less than zero, which is even harder to understand).
• Therefore FTL implies time travel (back in time), and therefore is probably impossible.

I am not happy.

On the subject of cat restraints....

our household includes one member who very emphatically does not want to have his work clothes, skin, big comfy chair, bedding, etc shredded by another member, a big furry goof who very emphatically does not want to have her claws clipped (and who hasn't figured out how not to get them stuck on textile surfaces.)

I've considered getting a cat sack, but can't figure out how I would get Ms Uncooperative into the damn thing. How does that work?

Open-thready type question for the Fluorosphere:

Over the last few days I have found myself more and more convinced that at some point in the past I have read a poem that ended with (or at least included) the line "Wrote mene, tekel, peres: that was all"

Part of the reason I'm convinced it's something I've read rather than just made up is that I don't generally have random thoughts in iambic pentameter.

However, searching on that exact phrase returns no results, and every way I've thought of broadening it gets swamped in commentary on the Book of Daniel - understandable given that it's the source of the words, but irritating from my point of view.

My father had the vague idea that it might be Kipling, but adding his name into the search doesn't bring up anything useful either.

Does the line ring any bells with anyone else out there?

David Harmon @455: How to deactivate a cat.

Closely related to the all-important ferret off-switch.

Vets keep trying this on my guinea pigs, and the next time it happens, I'm going to rap their knuckles. Pigs aren't wired that way. Mummy doesn't carry them around by the scruff. The way you calm a guinea pig is to mush their face up under your chin. This gives them the feeling that they're hiding under Mummy's tummy.

Ginger @461: cat bags are more humane

And far more fashionable!

HLN: Cat report

The boyfriend came home from vacation, and, on getting out of his car, heard a cat crying across the street under a car. Boyfriend lured cat from underneath car, held firmly, and then leaned on the doorbell til I came and let them in.

So I have my boycat again.

I had not realized how upset I was until I stopped being so upset.

And Tommy now wears his collar all the time.

Thank you for the support and suggestions.

FTL/Time travel: Whilst I'm no closer to understanding the theory, at least now I feel less alone - it seems like while it's generally accepted that one implies the other, how you get there is envisaged very differently by different folks. Thanks for the company :D

Lila@439

Yes; exactly. I've watched Doctor Who for easily as much of my life as I can remember, but never heard the central theme described succinctly (and in song) as "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force" before. I don't know that it *has* always been that, but it bears consideration.

Rob Rusick@444

Oddly, the two elements of my post were not meant to be connected - thinking about it (which I hadn't, previously), I guess I'd assume that in order to understand how a TARDIS travels, you first have to be a timelord for a few hundred years. As an author once put it*, the concepts pass human understanding in the sense that in order to really understand them you'd have to make so many changes to your brain that it couldn't properly be described as human any more.

Your theory is interesting, but as someone else would probably say: if that explanation helps you, great, but of course it's actually nothing like that at all :D

David Harmon@447

The main thing I'm getting out these answers is that there are various schemas - I'd somehow got the impression that there was a consistent if complex approach that stemmed naturally from classical physics, which I had just missed or was not getting. I'm actually heartened that this does not seem to be the case.

David DeLaney@450

I'm going to keep re-reading that. It sure looks like an elegant exposition of one way to think about it, but I was looking for something maybe a little more Feynman-esque :D

Maybe there just is no simple way to explain this and the correct answer is "well, first you take a graduate physics course..."

Xopher@462

I'm sorry you're unhappy, but pleased to be in such excellent company with the whooshing. I really thought there was an intuitively satisfying explanation I just wasn't getting.

* I think I came across this in one of Charlie Stross's, but it may have been Alistair Reynolds. On reflection, it sounds more like Charlie. I'm afraid the concept stayed with me the attribution didn't - apologies.

Name thing: heh, there were four of me in my class of 17 in grade 5. It was good that students were known by last name in general...

Also, like Constance, I am "full first name", and have got used to people replying "hi <shortname>" to "hello, I'm <longname>". If they don't get it after being corrected, then I'm not important enough to them for them to care about what I want, and treat them accordingly.

Especial joy was the bartender that I'm pretty certain was hitting on me. While it wasn't going anywhere (sure I *pattern* gay, but I'm not; sorry to broadcast wrong), it *certainly* wasn't going anywhere when his first step was to imply "What you want to be called isn't important to me." I wonder what else isn't important to him, you see.

Open Thread ranting: as a unix/linux user from Way Back, I've got used to how a screen works, and how to set it up. I tried, I really did, Unity from Ubuntu, but I couldn't take it - and I've finally figured out what's been bothering me with UI changes across the personal computer spectrum for the last couple of years:

I don't do icons.

Seriously, I don't. I realize pictures are more intuitive than text for 90% of the population, but I'm not one of them. Having their launcher (and Windows 7's task bar, and...) be all icons and no text is just as much an impediment to my use as if they were labelled in Russian - I have to translate the image to the word, and then decide whether that's what I want.

And with all these dock styles, right back to the Mac OSX thing - THERE IS NO WAY TO PUT IN TEXT. You HAVE to have the icons, that's it.

And while everyone is commenting on whether this is the greatest thing, or whether it has problems (way over on the left on a dual monitor screen, whether you can tell which are launchers and which are icons for already launched programs, menu vs "I hope I can help you find what you want", whatever) - the fact that YOU CAN'T HAVE WORDS, JUST THESE UNDECIPHERABLE PICTURES, doesn't even come up.
Well, shpx gung fuvg¹. I'm now investigating "lighter weight" window managers that will actually do what I want, for Ghu's sake - for 4 months from now, when Ubuntu, in it's own great wisdom, decides that what I've used for 15 years and understand just isn't "now" enough to still install straight up. It sounds like Gnome3-shell is going to be just as "useful".

tl;dr: If I wanted a Mac, I'd buy one. Also, suggestions welcome, if there actually is a way to get text into these docks.

¹Bowser and Blue's "fecal dismissive". The only phrasing I feel appropriately fits my frustration, but ROTted for your protection.

@ 464

Chaucer, Monk's Tale

Dave Crisp @ 464: It's from the Monk's Tale (aka the Friar's Tale) in the Canterbury Tales; the specific wording is from Nevill Coghill's modern English translation.

In Middle English, it reads "Wroot 'Mane, techel, phares,' and na moore."

I found this out by searching in Google Books on the phrase "peres that was all". I figured that only searching on the last bit of the famous phrase and the next original bit would filter out the spurious Daniel commentaries; and that the poem was likely to have occurred in a book somewhere. That narrowed down the range of hits quite usefully.

Nancy #467: Yay!

Tom Whitmore #458, dcb #460, Ginger #461, Jacque #465:

Indeed, certainly the kitten reflex, but as one of the YouTube commenters noted, that cat had a definite "WTH?" look about it. (Indeed, humans are also bothered when their reflexes get yanked on!)

Others there noted that you really wouldn't want to leave that clip on for long periods of time. On the flip side, I wonder just how strong a grip is needed to trigger the effect.

Good points about not using it for a painful procedure -- I assume that would warrant the "cat bag", not so fraught with kittenhood associations?

Mycroft W @469: I realize pictures are more intuitive than text for 90% of the population,

I don't know that pictures are necessarily more intuitive (for me, they're certainly not), but I do find that, once I know what I'm looking for, they are faster. But until I know what I'm looking for, give me a text list, please. Preferably alphabetized.

Mycroft (469)/Jacque (473): give me a text list, please. Preferably alphabetized.

This. So few icons are really intuitive; the others I have to memorize individually. DO NOT WANT.

Isn't that why we have an alphabet and not hieroglyphs?

Russ #468: Relativity and quantum mechanics share this much: Their essence is in the mathematics. We humans like to understand things in metaphors, but here, metaphors lead us astray as soon as we try to go past the edge of their picture.

I will comment that the use of "infinity" for lightspeed mass/energy is misleading: What the mass says is that if you have an object with non-zero mass, you can pump as much energy as you want into its motion, but the speed will stay below lightspeed. The "infinity" is a poor interpretation of the mathematical singularity involved; the proper interpretation is simply "you can't do that", and the shape of the curve around it gives you a hint why. (The whole FTL/time-travel thing might even represent another hint....)

There is in fact room in relativity (and some quantum theories) for particles that do move faster than light... always. Even so, it would seem "tachyons" would have very limited interaction with normal matter (only by way of massless particles such as photons), and it's hard to imagine how they could be combined into an object.

If you have time dilation, does that mean you live longer because you die later?

Erik Nelson: Yes, to an outside observer, but you don't *experience* any more time subjectively.

David @475, Russ @468, Xopher @462: Yeah, it's easier to understand if you're actually thinking at least a little in the math.

The "time dilation is what gets you not to get there" part isn't quite right - rather, it's that velocities don't ADD the way you think they do intutitively. Even "down near normal" ones. It's just that the little bit less that the total is is so small down at low velocities that you never ever have to account for it.

(Math: v1 ++ v2 = ( v1 + v2 )/( 1 + v1v2/c^2 ), using ++ for "what you get when you combine these two velocities in the same direction". It's always a bit less at least than "v1+v2", unless one of them's zero. And up near c, it works out that the 'sum' is still less than c.)

And there's definitely mental pictures that go along with this. (And about half of my big long explanation was just getting NAMES for certain of the concepts or pictures in place; a Lorentz transform is "really" 'just a rotation' but involving speed as well as facing, and with hyperbolas instead of circles...) But some of them don't make sense until you've at least played with the math a bit.

Summary of a summary of the explanation: if you HAVE an FTL drive, it necessarily jumps you from where/when you are, to somewhere/when outside both your light cones. And given that, you can then always arrange ANOTHER FTL jump, after some changing of speed and direction without using the drive, that takes you "into your own past" - back into your past light cone. There isn't anything stopping you from doing it, once you have an FTL drive at all. No matter how "weak" your FTL drive is in that "oh, it only goes a hair faster than light, that's okay, right?"...

Using gates or wormholes for the FTL can prevent this, partially ... by giving fixed places you can go from and to. In which case if none of the fixed points are IN your past light cone, you can't get there from here/then from now. But this places rather severe limits on where and when the endpoints can be, if you want them anywhere close to each other...

--Dave

In regards to the naming—I am surrounded by a surfeit of Chris(es). I have two aunts Chris—on my mother's side*. The Honors class behind mine had five out of ten guys... well, Chris, Chris, Chris, Kristan, and Christian♠. I have a nephew Chris and undoubtedly many cousins Chris though I am not attempting to keep track of the various iterations. I knew a Kit (last name of Steen; can't blame him) and a Cricket in college. Lots of Chris. (One of the Honors guys acquired the subset-nickname "Skippy Cross-Boy." I'm not sure anyone ever informed him of this fact.)

Though I always seem to be working for Scott and Jim.

Incidentally, I am convinced that though there is a conspiracy of Daves, there is a continuum of Mikes. Just variants on a type (and a mighty strange type it is, too.)

*Through the wonders of informal intrafamilial adoption. One of the Christines is her sister and the other is some form of cousin through a marriage. She was raised with the latter, not the former.

♠Who died on Kilimanjaro. File under "weird categories to belong to."

Me @478: "intuitively". (Of course, sigh.)

--Dave, will spell foar fud

The scruff of the neck think was always good for the two-person-cat-medicating technique for particularly stubborn felines -- one person wraps their arms around the cat with one hand firmly grasping the scruff, while the other levers the jaws open and inserts the pill. Also works in modified form for giving shots or flea drops. We had damn stubborn cats.

David DeLaney @478 said: The "time dilation is what gets you not to get there" part isn't quite right - rather, it's that velocities don't ADD the way you think they do intutitively. Even "down near normal" ones. It's just that the little bit less that the total is is so small down at low velocities that you never ever have to account for it.

Except in certain cases, like the fact that Mercury orbits fast enough to just edge into the category of 'big enough you have to account for it' -- this led to something of a crisis among astromathematicians, leading them to propose a succession of as-yet-undiscovered planets that were causing it to orbit 'wrong' (hey, that explanation worked on Neptune! It could happen!) until Einstein offered a different explanation in 1915.

Also late to the name thread. My given name is John, which is unbelievably common in the English speaking world. I almost never respond to someone calling out "John!", unless I recognize the voice, having long since permanently filtered those sounds from my personal reality.

My last name, Peacock, is hardly common (and wasn't that much fun to grow up with, I assure you). But when I was an undergraduate in Nuclear Engineers (UW-Madison - 1984), I discovered that I had a doppleganger. There was another John Peacock on campus, also in the Nuclear Engineering program. Only he was a 20 year Navy submariner going back to school so he could get a job in the industry. Small world indeed.

456
That last one leads me to believe she was the one who actually showed up and paid the taxes.

Perhaps it would help if we gave an actual example of FTL leading to time travel. When I first wrote this up, it was in the Babylon 5 newsgroup, so I'm going to keep the B5 names.

This example uses some simplifying assumptions...not all of them are necessary.

Let's have Ivanova launch from B5 in a Starfury. The Starfury's engines are really really good, and in no time at all Ivanova is traveling at 87% of lightspeed, relative to B5. Aboard, Ivanova has an ansible; with it, she can send a message back to B5 that will be received at the very instant she sends it.

Now the relativistic trick question is: "at the very instant" -- in what reference frame? Simultaneity is relative; two events that take place at the very same instant in one reference frame, will not be simultaneous in another. (See for example the well-known "paradox" of the length-contracted barn and the length-contracted pole.) So, for our purposes, we are going to postulate that any given ansible message is instantaneous in the reference frame of that particular ansible terminal. That seems reasonable, doesn't it?

(Note that you could postulate a universal preferred reference frame, and have all ansibles work in that frame. In this way you can avoid time travel. But that's contrary to the principle of relativity, and all evidence that we have is that the principle of relativity is correct.)

Now: when Ivanova launched, she and Sheridan synchronized their watches, so they agree on a common time=0.

When Ivanova has been patrolling for two hours, she gets buzzed by a Shadow ship. Naturally she immediately wants to report this incident, so she fires up her ansible. For Ivanova, it's been two hours; but relative to her, B5 has been moving at 87% of lightspeed, so in Ivanova's frame of reference, B5 has only experienced one hour of time -- when her clock ticks 120 minutes, at that same time the synchronized clock on B5 ticks 60 minutes. (And, yes, that's why I chose that somewhat eccentric-looking figure of 87% of c, so that γ = .5)

Now let's cut to Sheridan, back in B5 C&C. He receives Ivanova's message when his clock has just ticked 60 minutes. Naturally he wants to reply...but the kicker here is that in Sheridan's reference frame, it's Ivanova who is traveling at 87% of c, and Ivanova who is experiencing time dilation. In Sheridan's frame, his clock ticking 60 minutes is simultaneous with Ivanova's ticking 30 minutes.

So Ivanova winds up getting the reply to her message, an hour and a half before she sends it. And if Sheridan quotes the original message, Usenet-style, then the message has just traveled in time.

Carrie 477: I think you missed one there. You use a time dilater so you die later, get it?

485
The clock-masher experiment, yes?

Xopher @#486: Oh. Shows where my sense of humor is. :)

Mystic Lantern video:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/5928978754/in/photostream

I'm ready to pack it up for shipping to the recipient, but I'm reluctant to let it go. I might just have to make another one.

SamChevre @470, John Mark Ockerbloom @471: Thanks. Clearly my google-fu needs improvement :)

Now that I know the source, I of course know where I read it - when I were a nipper we had a beautifully illustrated copy of Coghill's version of the Tales that was a popular read on an idle weekend - although why that particular line buried itself in my brain only to randomly resurface fifteen-odd years later remains a mystery for the ages.

David Harmon@475

I think I'm going to have to pull out Feynman again:

"I think it's safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics"*

David DeLaney@478

I actually find your summary of a summary really helpful, though I think I needed the previous posters to convince me that the maths is not really amenable to a simple metaphor first.

David Goldfarb@485

(Note that you could postulate a universal preferred reference frame, and have all ansibles work in that frame. In this way you can avoid time travel. But that's contrary to the principle of relativity, and all evidence that we have is that the principle of relativity is correct.)

Thanks! That made something go "ping" in my head (in a good way). I've read but never quite got the "if you travel faster than light, you can warn someone about the shot before it was fired" thing - I think I was unconsciously assuming the universal shared frame of reference, although consciously I know this is not compatible with how physics is currently understood.

And thank you again to all the responders - this has been very helpful.**

*I remembered it as "anyone who claims to understand quantum physics is lying or mistaken", but the above is properly sourced on Wikiquotes.

** Which is not to say I get it, but I think I understand more about what I'm failing to understand.

On "multiple people with the same name", at one point I was involved in a Boy Scout group that had a dozen or so people in a small two-room building doing registration for a camping event; nine of us were named Bill.

On English-speaking people having small numbers of first names at various times - various of my family members have done genealogical research, and things start to get really uncertain in Massachusetts in the 1600s-1700s, because we know that Tom son of John lived in some village, but everybody there were farmers with ten kids, and not many first names, and there could be three or four different possible ancestors there. If it's the one that somebody thought was most likely, they came from some village in Scotland that had the same situation there.

Some time, probably in my thirties, my wife commented "Do you realize we now have tech support people who are named Melissa?" - it hadn't felt like that many years since anybody with that name would have been a small child.

For those five English names, given that the female one was Mary, I'm thinking three of the four male ones almost HAVE to have been John, William, and Thomas, and the fourth probably some variation on Edward / Edwin / Edgar / Ned? Or else Richard.

--Dave, I know MY name's from the Hebrew so it wouldn't have been very widespread then and there

Russ #491: or there's that quote from Eddington, or Haldane, or maybe someone else☀: "The universe may not only be stranger than we imagine, it may be stranger than we can imagine."

☀ I get the impression that the sentiment was "widespread" in the early 20th century... with some reason, given what was happening in science then!

Another stray bit from Haldane:

"Cancer’s a Funny Thing:
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
This kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked..."
...

"...I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit."[8]

@494: There's a lot of similar quotations from Niels Bohr, as well. The one that gets thrown about most often is "Anyone who isn't shocked by quantum theory hasn't properly understood it", but my personal favourite is a remark he made to Pauli and Heisenberg: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

Jacque @ 465: With ferrets, for vets that's a useful way to get a look inside the mouth, check the teeth etc., because of the yawn.

Yes, what works is species-dependent!

For wallabies (and probably other marsupials), popping them in a sack works quite well - they equate it to being back in the pouch, I presume, and they tend to quieten down.

Actually, most smallish mammals are easier to work with once inside a bag/sack. You can then ID the toothsome end - if necessary poke the sac with a stick, gently, and note which end of the animal bites it - and immobilise that (pinning just behind the head), then work on the rest of the body, pulling a bit of it at a time out of the bag/sack as needed.

Nancy C. Mittens @ 467: Hooray for the safe return of the cat! Well done boyfriend!

David Harmon @ 472: Good points about not using it for a painful procedure -- I assume that would warrant the "cat bag", not so fraught with kittenhood associations? NO! Painful procedures warrant general anaesthetic or sedation plus local/regional analgesia, as appropriate. You do NOT simply restrain an animal to do something painful to it, unless the "pain" is very minor - lesser/shorter than the pain (from the needle etc.) required to administer the analgesia/anaesthesia.

On the "Own Your Identity" sidelight: If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service.

Oh FFS, dude, I can be TexAnne anywhere I have a net connection. I've been TexAnne (in various spellings) since before people realized that what's on the Internet never goes away. When people say, "oh no you MUST own your own email server," I hear, "oh no you are not a true geek, you do not count, you are not serious about your online life." I call bullshit. There's nothing magical about owning an email server. Not owning one doesn't give me a smaller stake in the Internet--it gives me more to lose, like a wage slave in a democracy. Just because the big guys have sold me out doesn't mean the tech-heads have the right to sneeringly abandon me to my fate.

TexAnne: While I agree it's not as straightforward as it could be, "owning your own domain" does not imply "running your own server". It sounds like the poster owns the marco.org domain, but his mail is handled by Fastmail on his behalf. (Because he owns the domain, he can switch to another service if he wants to without changing his email address, but doesn't have to run a mail server himself.)

Similarly, I blog on the wordpress.com platform, but I bought my own domain name to use with it (it's the one linked under my name in this comment). So if it ever seems necessary, I can move off WordPress and keep the same domain name. (Keeping all the *URLs* working is not so simple, but there are some ways to do it.)

Some folks get along fine without permanent domain names of their own; you may well be one of them. But for folks who need a permanent, uniquely-resolvable identity (and that's something that useful to a lot of businesses and self-employed people), buying your own domain and services that will work with it can be very helpful, and doesn't have to involve too much work or expense.

TexAnne... doesn't mean the tech-heads have the right to sneeringly abandon me to my fate

Oh, if only I could draw... The cartoon I'd make out of these words...
:-)