This sucks.  Man will I ever get better?  I'm doing a little work from bed these days, but only a few hours a day.  Nights are still the worst... coughing fits and so forth.  At least twice now the coughing fits have been so severe they've led to puking fits... or whatever you call it...  you cough hard a few times and then you ralph up a little lunch.  And then you do it again. Cough-cough-cough-wretch.  Cough-cough-cough-wretch.  Loads of fun.  Doc has recommended Mucinex DM for that, and it seems to be helping.

I stopped taking the Vicodin and the flavors of things seem to be coming back.  Now I take Tylenol when I start feeling discomfort.

Here's a snapshot of my little world.

Daytime television is awful.  There's very little worth watching and on some channels they have perhaps 10 commercials (or less) which they will rotate through multiple times every hour.  The Science Channel is one of the worst offenders.  The first time I saw their ad for their upcoming show about an expedition to Borneo, I thought it looked interesting.  Upon seeing this same damn commercial repeated 2000 times, I realized I have no interest in watching the Expedition to Borneo.  Know why?  Because all the way through it I will have to watch some other endlessly repeated commercial that will make me nuts. Eff that.

Oh and GEICO?  All your commercials make me want to do is stomp that stupid lizard to death.

So I've mostly been rotating through the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Science Channel, and occasionally G4TV.  Heavy use of the MUTE button on my TV remote to shut out the annoying commercials.  I saw an interesting show about the Cassini orbiter, and another about gamma ray bursts.  Most of it hasn't stayed with me.

G4TV... what the heck happened?  Didn't this use to be the video game channel?  What's all this other crap?  The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? WTF has that got to do with hot games?

In its defence the best show I've seen this week was on G4TV and it wasn't about videogames.  It was an English subtitled Japanese show called "Ninja Warrior" (in Japan the show is called "Sasuke").  Hundreds of contestants from around the world compete to be a "ninja warrior".  How?  By attempting to cross an extremely challenging obstacle course in four stages.  The obstacles are nightmarish and I really felt for the contestants.  The courses were so difficult, it was typical to have no winner at all.

G4TV ran about 8 episodes of Ninja Warrior back to back on Sunday.  Apparently some time passed (like several months) between each new round of attempts on the course.  During those intervals the courses would also change somewhat, obstacles would be added and removed, as if it wasn't challenging enough for some of these guys who were building their own copies of the courses and training at home.  Oh did I mention that most of the stages had time limits?

On the last episode, the guy I had been rooting for (it really pulled me in) finally won, being only the second person to ever complete the course.  It was pretty intense.

In some ways it reminded me of American Idol, because some of the people who showed up to compete were actors, or comedians, or beauty queens, or whatever--clearly untrained and only looking to get their few minutes on camera.  One guy who showed up every time was a sculptor who built miniature models of the ninja warrior course.  The models were exquisite and delicate.  And their creator was also obviously delicate... he was clearly a very frail little man who had no chance of completing the course, and yet he would attempt to run it anyway, failing spectacularly at the very first obstacle every time and falling in the drink.

I enjoyed the show a lot.  If you get a chance to catch it sometime, check it out.

Well I'm getting tired.   Hope everyone out there is happy and healthier than I.