This time five years ago I was sitting in LAX international terminal, looking at the complete lack of security and thinking "sooner or later someone's going to walk onto one of these planes with a knife and hijacking in mind, and I hope it's not the one I'm on." I didn't actually expect to be proved right before my return flight.
In a couple of days' time, I'm going to be sitting in LAX international terminal, thinking about the many ways in which it is still far less secure than Aldergrove Airport was in the 70s, and sitting as far away from the groundside windows as I can get...
Teresa: not just Christmas puddings. One of my more entertaining encounters with airport security was the Great Cheddar Hunt...
Lucy: The book ban is for any flight originating in the UK (including people in transit via the UK), and there are reports that they are allowing people to buy books from the bookshops after the security searches. US *to* UK flights seem to be fine on books, at the moment they're only banning liquids.
Just got off the phone to the parental units. I needed to inform them that yes, I am still flying out to see them next week, but there may of course be delays.
No, I'm not going to stop flying. I'm going to keep on remembering the actual statistics, just like I did for all of those years travelling to Belfast. And just like then, I'm at higher risk of being in a fatal car/train crash on the way to the airport. Especially with the way they drive in the Bay area...
When I heard about Absolute Write going down earlier this year, the thing that really gutted me was the thought of losing Jim's writing course. The one he does for free. Jim afraid of competition? I don't think so...
Ah. I see from Particles that Teresa has discovered nicecupofteaandasitdown.com. I would note that there is a book as well as a website, and I have been meaning to write a review for ages...
Speaking of food poisoning...
It only adds insult to injury when you are perfectly fine on the way to the dentist, and you think that the slight queasiness halfway through your six-monthly cleaning is because the water jet has gone astray, you sit up to clear your throat - and have to bolt for the toilet to throw up.
They were very nice about it, and said that it was going around and two of their staff were off with it. At least I seem to have had a mild dose, because I'm feeling a lot less miserable than I did a couple of hours ago.
I would also note that it is possible to get a very mild case of food poisoning where it's not entirely clear whether the symptoms are indeed food poisoning; that it may make you throw up before much of the toxin has been absorbed, so that you feel better once you have thrown up; and if you have IBS it is possible for the wretched stuff to transit your system so fast that it never gets a chance to do much more than speed up the already speedy natural process. If you *really* want anecdotal evidence of the last, I could regale you with the story of the chicken mayo sandwich I had for lunch at Conjose which made a reappearance by dinner time...
If you have a hot water bottle - they can be filled with cold water as well as hot. Or crushed ice with water, which is what I had in the one that was keeping my neck cool on Saturday night, when it was still in the high 30s Celcius in the house in the middle of the night.
I'm waiting for the increase in food poisoning cases.
I had to go out to buy more milk this morning, because the bottle bought on Tuesday night had already gone off. I'm fairly sure it's because the chiller cabinet in the corner shop couldn't cope with the heat over the weekend. Some of the grocery stores in Silicon Valley were reporting that they were having to clear their chiller cabinets because the food was starting to go off.
It's pretty obvious when milk's gone off, and it usually isn't a serious hazard. But there are other things out there that might be more of an issue. Don't think I want to eat chicken this week unless it's still piping hot from being *thoroughly* cooked...
Xopher: NIH page on Hodgkin's is here
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000580.htm
It says that even with widespread disease the five year survival rate is better than 60%. Catch it early and the rate's much higher.
I know more than I want to about lymphoma, but only NHL - but IIRC HL, especially in young people, has a very high remission rate and the five-year survival rate is better than NHL, which itself has a fairly high remission rate. (I say remission rate, because some forms of NHL are treatable but not curable - on current treatment regimes the remission rate is over 95% first time round for people who can stay the full course of treatment, but it always comes back eventually.)
Madeline F: WaMu? Free checking, long hours, no direct deposit requirement - I occasionally wonder whether they've decided that they can make a nice living by catering to the "respectable poor".
Tim Powers: I don't think anybody believes that sex is immoral except for purposes of procreation. At that rate couples past menopause would have to be celibate!
They exist. I've known some of them (fortunately of the variety of Roman Catholic who felt that it was not their right to impose that view on other people). And I've mentioned before friends of mine who went to a fmaily wedding and were subjected to thoroughly unpleasant remarks by the priest during the sermon about the purpose of marriage is procreation, and adopting children because you're infertile doesn't count.
[gigglegigglegiggle] Looking forward to the filk session at Redemption and/or Orbital...
Marilee - if I need prescription strength, it's for dental surgery, and my dentist won't do codeine-only. He said that in theory he could prescribe it, but the amount of hassle it would cause him isn't worth it, and I can't blame him. I know with them it's not just unwillingess to prescribe narcotics at all, because both dentists I see at that practice prescribe co-codeine without hesitation where it's clinically justified, and have given me "just in case" scrips a couple of times where an abscess was forming but they couldn't find it to treat it.
Jules: At least in the UK you can get co-codeine with aspirin or ibuprofen rather than paracetamol. The last time I checked, in California it was almost impossible to get codeine either alone or in combination with aspirin rather than paracetamol (at least on a dental prescription).
I just bring a couple of packs of Codis and Nurefen Plus back with me every time I visit the UK. Perfectly legal as long it's declared to customs, and I prefer to have the OTC dose level anyway. I'm one of those peculiar people who is both sensitive enough to get the pain-killing effect even in OTC strength, and unable to comprehend what the appeal is in being high.
eric: the legal circus is already happening in the UK, although being the UK it's more along the lines of imposing much tighter controls on the sale of potentially toxic quantities of paracetamol. If I recall correctly, it started some years ago after several well-publicised cases of accidental overdose brought it to public attention just how easy it is to kill yourself by accident just by taking a painkiller *and* a "cold cure" *and* something else without reading the labels.
I am extremely unhappy about the US insistence on packaging mild opiates with paracetamol/acetaminophen. It's done very deliberately, but given the toxicity of paracetamol it's very easy to take a lethal overdose through accidentally taking too much rather than deliberately taking extra to get high. Aspirin has its own problems, but as someone who is depressive and isn't aspirin sensitive I prefer to have the choice of aspirin as the combination drug, a choice one has in the UK.
Just to balance out the MS combos... Lotus Word Pro on a Windows machine. I've just upgraded from WinMe to WinXP.
Reasons why your tooth might still hurt after root canal work, apart from referred pain from your sinuses...
Unusually long roots, and the dentist didn't go quite deep enough, resulting in redoing the filling. More than the usual number of canals, especially if you have very narrow canals anyway and they're difficult to spot. An impacted wisdom tooth pressing against the tooth, slowing down or preventing healing of the post-operative tenderness. Nerve damage from removing the wisdom tooth, leading to referred pain and/or phantom limb pain in the treated tooth. A cracked tooth, leading to stress in the ligaments that hold the tooth in the socket.
Go on. Ask me how I know. :-( The extra canal was ruled out during the refill, and the crack was confirmed by the fact that the acute pain rapidly reduced within a few hours of the crown going on (the standard treatment). The rest was never confirmed or eliminated. But yes, if a filling is touching the nerve, you need a root canal filling. Because it can get *much* more exciting than all of the above if you don't have one.
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