Unbecoming Levity

Election: Proposition 48 in Colorado -- Religiously Espoused Gov't Interference

Abacquer — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:38:33 -0500

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has a penetrating and thoughtful article about proposition 48 in Colorado. This proposition would declare a fertilized human egg "a human", thus elevating nonpersons such as zygotes and blastocysts to full human status. This is an obvious ploy to outlaw abortion and embryonic stem cell research without challenging them directly. Read the article, and if you are a Colorado voter, please, come down on the side of reason, not religion:

When is a human human? (Bad Astronomy):
…There are other vital issues, like how granting civil rights to a collection of cells takes away many civil rights of women, and the huge increase in governmental involvement this would mean in people’s lives. These are important to be sure, but not the point I want to make here. Also, these are age-old arguments, and in fact I can see where intelligent people can come down on opposite sides of them.

The real point is, Prop 48 isn’t about science, and it’s not even about legal issues. It’s about religion. This proposition is obviously based solely on religious beliefs; there is little reason outside of that to even bring the argument up that a fertilized egg is entitled to rights as a human being. It is only the belief that the human soul enters the cell at that moment that this is an issue at all.

Proposition 48 is religion trying to create legislation, pure and simple.…

Products of the Morning Toil

Abacquer — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:13:29 -0400

Today I went in for my "final impressions" which is what you see in this image (crappy quality because I used a cellphone to shoot it.)

The blue thing at lower left is the final upper impression. It will be used to mold the fit of the upper denture.
The blue thing at lower right is the final lower impression that will be used to mold the fit of the lower denture. Eventually I will probably need one more lower impression to reline the lower denture once my gums have healed and receded.
The white thing in the center is an amalgum impression of my temporary upper denture. This will be used to shape the teeth in the new denture so they will look and feel consistent with what I have right now.
That pink and yellow monstrosity at the top is a wax model. The pink part is wax, I don't know what the yellow part is made from. The whole wax part of this model had to be in my mouth at once! Not pleasant. The dentist has carved out some teeth on the upper part for reference. He will use this to make sure the bite of the new dentures matches my current bite, and to make sure everything fits.

The dentures will be ready in about 4 weeks, and then I will have the surgery to remove the teeth.

And then I will be officially toothless.

Seven More To Go

Abacquer — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:54:16 -0400

As you know I had extensive oral surgery last year to remove all but seven of my teeth for health reasons. Over the intervening year I have watched those remaining teeth degrade over time. Before long they were staining, losing chips, and otherwise falling apart... as I had feared they might.

The other day my lower partial denture broke in half so I visited my dentist this morning and asked him to look at the teeth. He was surprised at their state. He could tell I have been taking care of them, but nonetheless they are deteriorating rapidly. There was nothing else for it really, except to remove these teeth as well.

So he took an impression today for a new (full) lower plate and an updated impression for the upper denture, plus x-rays for the oral surgeon. In two weeks time I go to see him again for some final impressions and then they will set up my surgery. After that I'll be back for adjustments and then the long sorry tale of my teeth will finally be over.

I'm blue about it of course, but I am trying to take it in stride. These things happen. Better it be handled now before these teeth start making me sick again.

It turned out that the temporary lower partial was indeed not made to last, the final lower partial would have had a metal or otherwise far more permanent construction. At least I got a year+ wear out of it. No sense in repairing it now since the rest of the teeth have to go.

Soil Bacteria of Antibiotics: "Delicious!"

Abacquer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:17:03 -0400

I was listening to NPR Science Friday on podcast a few nights ago and caught an interesting segment detailing a recent discovery regarding bacteria found in soil. It has been demonstrated (for example, by the discovery of the nylon bug) that bacteria in the presence of an abundance of one substance or another may evolve to be able to metabolize that substance... even if the substance is synthetic. It's also been shown that bacteria in the constant presence of antibiotics will evolve immunity.

These newly discovered soil bacteria have done both. That is, not are they only immune to a disturbingly long list of known antibiotics, they have evolved to the point where they can actually eat antibiotics. The Royal Society of Chemisty has an article on this recent discovery:

[...] The soil samples were taken from many different places [in the USA] including public parks and farms, pristine forest, and land treated with wastewater.

'The increase of multiple-antibiotic resistance in human pathogens is continuingly weakening our ability to fight infectious disease, and any accessible reservoir of resistance mechanisms that could transfer to pathogens could exacerbate the problem,' say Dantas and Sommer.

So far, the researchers haven't found any known human pathogens among their antibiotic-consuming organisms, but they say that some are closely related species. This might make it rather easy for pathogens to acquire antibiotic-resistance and antibiotic-metabolising genes from innocuous bacteria. [...]

Scary stuff! But rather unsurprising since antibiotics get into the environment every day through their continued use.

The segment on the antibiotic-munching bacteria was followed by another segment on an alternative form of antibacterial treatment called phage therapy. Phage therapy, instead of using chemical substances to combat bacteria, uses viruses, specifically bacteriophages--viruses that only infect bacteria. This sort of therapy was predicted shortly after the discovery of bacteriophages in 1917. Once antibiotics were discovered (in 1941) phage therapy wasn't pursued further in the west, but continued to be studied in Russia.

The advantage of phage therapy is that the anti-bacterial agent is also a living organism, so as bacteria evolve to become immune to it, the phage species also evolves to continue to prey on the bacteria. Antibiotics, being chemical compounds, do not evolve, hence eventually bacterial evolution will defeat an antibiotic unless you can rapidly deplete the bacterial population to the point where your own immune system can fight off the infection successfully. As bacteria with antibiotic resistance can be found in the environment, and people have been infected with resistant strains, there is apparently renewed interest in phage therapy.

No human phage treatments are presently approved in the USA, though the use of phages to prevent bacteria from growing in food have been approved here. Phage therapy on humans is used in some states of the former USSR, especially Georgia. In the NPR podcast linked above the scientists interviewed spoke of a patient with a resistant bone infection that was successfully treated using bacteriophages after being told here in the USA that amputation was his only recourse. Interesting!

Neutralizing Free Radicals

Abacquer — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:57:32 -0500

That's what I'm doing. No I have no idea what that means either. As I slide downslope having gotten over the peak of this gout attack (it was not pretty) I have been drinking 100% blueberry juice. Blueberries and blueberry juice is apparently nature's #1 antioxidant. I know this because it says on the bottle. The back of the bottle helpfully explains that antioxidants are good for me because they neutralize free radicals. Ooookay.

Wikipedia to the rescue...

...a "free radical" is any molecule that has a single unpaired electron in an outer shell.

I guess free radicals readily combine with other compounds in your body and thereby oxidize them. Apparently this can have some damaging effects, but an antioxidant combines with the free radicals so they can't oxidize other compounds in your body. Okay. If you say so. I'm just drinking it because it is recommended for gout sufferers.

I have to tell you it's pretty acidic and has a sharp taste. I don't think I could drink a lot of this stuff. It's also a little thicker than other fruit juices... has a little more body to it. Not like syrup but noticeably heavier. Can't say I like it very much but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Return of the Gout!!

Abacquer — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:14:14 -0500

Crap! My daughter was sick all last week, but thankfully she is feeling better now. Unfortunately now it is my turn with her cold... which is bad enough in and of itself. Except that I was stuck at home all weekend and there was a shortage of beverages in the house. And generally when I have a choice of water or nothing, I choose nothing unless I am direly thirsty. (I'm sure this will provoke a "typical man" comment from somebody.)

Anyway most of the food I ate was salty. On Sunday I snacked on Ritz crackers with easy cheese spread, quite a few crackers actually. Okay a LOT of crackers. As you know those are quite salty as is the cheese spread. I barely drank anything except one cup of tea. It should have occurred to me that this would dehydrate me, but it didn't.

That is until late last nite when I woke up with a sharp pain in the knuckle where my big toe ends and my right foot begins. Then it occurred to me that what I ate just before bed was a big bowl of salty lipton cup-a-soup. Greeaat. So I staggered downstairs and got a glass of filtered water and then hobbled back to bed. It's probably too late now. Once the gout starts it really needs to run its course. I had managed to eat well enough to avoid it for a few years, but here it is again.

Ouch.

Oral Update

Abacquer — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:00:18 -0400

Well I was back at the Longview Corporate Center yesterday for a followup visit. They wanted to check me out after last week's oral surgery. The doctor confirmed that it was normal for me to still have swelling and soreness a week later. He said it would take awhile to recover.

But on the upside, he said that it looked like I was healing up nicely. I thought he was going to remove the stitches today, but he said that they were dissolving stitches and we would just let them fall out on their own. For the past week I've had to keep the dentures in all the time (even when sleeping), the doctor said it was necessary to stretch out the tissue. But now he has reversed those instructions and told me to take them out as often as possible. Confusing business this.

Personally? I'd really like to get through this so I can have my permanent set of dentures made. I was hoping to get that done before my birthday in October. Oh well, at least it doesn't hurt as bad as it did last week, and I'm starting to chew a little bit again. Hopefully in another week or two I'll be back to full strength.

No Photos Today...

Abacquer — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:19:26 -0400

I couldn't go to work today... nor could I shoot any pictures or do much of anything because I had oral surgery yesterday.

This shot was taken with my 1.3 megapixel VerizonLG camera phone yesterday after the surgery which took about 90 minutes. I felt as awful as I look here... doped out of my skull and with bloody spatter on my cheeks and chin. Yechhh.

I'm on percosets right now and feeling pretty crappy. My face is very sore.

You may or may not know that I had 19 teeth removed back in May and was fitted with dentures. Unfortunately as a result of that surgery I ended up with a fistula in my right upper jaw that went up into my sinus cavity. As a result unless I was careful, there would be communication between my mouth and sinuses of food or fluids. I discovered this one morning when Listerine came out my nose while I was washing my mouth. (Ow!)

We had hoped the fistula would close itself over time, but it didn't happen. So yesterday once they knocked me out, they sliced open a flap of gum tissue, laid it across the opening of the fistula and stitched it down.

I haven't taken the dentures out since, it's just too sore, but they are discolored so I know they are full of blood and need to be cleaned soon. I'm nervous about removing them because I am so sore and the surgeon said I am only allowed to take them out for short periods--I can't take them out when I sleep for a week.

I also can't bend down low for any reason or my gums start to throb. So this has been fairly rough and it has been impossible for me to do any shooting today. I might try to do some still life later if I can, but I wouldn't expect anything today.

Spaghetti-blows

Abacquer — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:36:45 -0400

That's it. I've had it.

Spaghettio's taste like shit and I am not eating them anymore. I am never going to choke down one more wretched spoonful of these pustulent tori.

Yea and verily, Spaghettios are the work of the devil.

This You May Not Do

Abacquer — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:50:36 -0400

So today I had a followup with my oral surgeon. He said my gums are healing and looking better, but I still have a long way to go with the gums at the back because of the amount of work done.

After that I went to work, and I was feeling pretty strong. Unfortunately there was no work for me today. So I sat in my cube and ate my jello, then had my vanilla yogurt. Later I ate a can of beefaroni (swallowing only, no chewing), and drank one of my ensure shakes. Finally around 1:00 I said to my boss, "If there's no work for me right now, I'm going to go take a little walk." I haven't walked in a few weeks and really wanted to.

At first it was very nice. I spotted my first Baltimore Oriole of the year, and some other interesting sights. I was about a half mile from the office when I heard a Scarlet Tanager singing. Didn't manage to catch a glimpse of him because all of the sudden, I began to feel extremely weak, dizzy, and tired. I didn't understand what the problem was. I figured I'd better turn around and head back.

With each step it got worse, my lips became numb, I became extremely lightheaded, and started getting unsteady on my legs. I was going to faint if I didn't sit down. After about a quarter mile I did just that--sitting on a rotten log by the side of the road and feeling extremely close to the fuzzy edge of consciousness. I waited about 15 minutes but it didn't seem to be getting better... I wasn't going to be able to walk the last quarter mile back. So I called my friend John at the office who agreed to drive out and pick me up.

While I waited for John I gave my wife a call to let her know what was going on and also to warn her I might need a ride home.

As it turned out I did. After getting back to the office I ate my little tub of applesauce and drank a half bottle of apple juice but could barely move. My arms and legs felt like lead weights and my head felt heavy and weird.

It was at this time that it occurred to me that extensive oral surgery followed by two weeks of a liquid diet, and 3 days fighting off a sinus cold, probably didn't put one in the best condition for talking a long walk. Especially someone who has been mostly sedentary. (Although, in truth, a week before the surgery I had done the same walk with no problems.)

Once Patty got to my office and got me into the car I drank the rest of the applejuice and rested. After about 20 minutes or so I began to feel a little better but still completely exhausted... utterly drained. When I got home I went right up to bed with an ensure shake in one hand and a cup of chicken rice soup in the other. I drank the shake, ate some of the soup and then zonked out and slept for a little over an hour. When I woke up I felt better but EVERYTHING was sore... like I had been working out for hours.

Came downstairs to sit on the couch with Pat and watch some baseball, but I'm going back up to bed soon, newly aware of my limitations.

Someday I'll be able to eat real food again. But until I am further along in the healing and my weight stops dropping, no more walks.

Well maybe next week. A little one.

Various

Abacquer — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:34:24 -0400

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about. None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway. I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least. So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing. Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth. Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it. Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed. I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset. But I'll get through. (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player. I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep. But eventually I get tired of the same stuff. The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts. (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.) You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.) NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations. Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception". Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic. You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos. You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos. Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out. He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive." I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl. I'm going to remember this challenge. It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately. I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away. It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it. Things haven't changed much. Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat. So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive. I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap. Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon. Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum. So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book. It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins. Check it out, if you dare. This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself. Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns. They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth. (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them. You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music. I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.

Oral Update

Abacquer — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:35:46 -0400

Breakfast today was baked beans and scrambled eggs pureed into a gloppy soup that I spooned into my mouth a little at a time. It tasted fine but the eggs made it grainy so I had trouble eating it. I'm still picking at it now. I took two percosets at 10 AM because my mouth was really getting sore and I am still feeling pretty loopy right now.

But I am missing chewing. I tried to bite a grape a few minutes ago, I was able to dent the skin of the grape slightly but it was too painful for me to actually bite into. So I think I'm gonna have pureed grapes sometime today.

My dentures were biting into my front upper gums something fierce yesterday so I made an unscheduled trip to the dentist for a minor adjustment. I will be briefly visiting him again today for more adjustments. After looking at my gums yesterday, he said there was no point in doing a full adjustment because everything was going to change overnight, so he just touched up the part that was really hurting.

Oh and if you are curious as to what the surgery was like, here's an excerpt from a letter I sent my Mom about it:

...I was very scared about this visit... and yours and Donna's phone calls on Sunday were very reassuring to me. I was still scared though. When I finally ended up in the surgeon's chair he asked me how I was and I said "terrified to the point of zero defecation". He paused a moment and then said "you mean 'scared shitless'?" I love joking with doctors, because they are so learned you can come up with complex jokes and they get them right away.

They used a peculiar device on my arm that prevented me from feeling the needle at all. I was amazed at that. Then one of the nurses switched on the heart monitor and I could hear it going beep-beep-beep-beep rapidly because I was so nervous. She said to me, "Don't worry Charles, we're going to give you a series of medications now, and the first will make you relax, and then we'll switch to another one which will sedate you." I nodded and listened to the beeping. After only few seconds the beeping began to slow down. Then it weirdly began dropping in pitch (from beep-beep-beep to borp ... borp ... borp). I suddenly noticed that I felt like I had just spent six hours working in the yard--all my limbs felt very heavy, but I didn't feel sleepy yet. I looked at the nurse who was standing at my side and said "I feel very heavy." She said "That's normal, Charles" and stepped away from my side for a second.

Then she came back and looked into my eyes and said, "Mr. Seggelin, are you awake?" I nodded, drunkenly. She said "Can you walk? It's time to go to the recovery room."

That was a real "what the?" moment for me. In the "second" when she stepped away from my side, I had fallen asleep for 2 hours and they had removed all teeth, sewed up the injuries, put in the dentures and stuffed my mouth with gauze. I couldn't remember falling asleep. It was literally over before I knew it, exactly as you and Donna had assured me. I was *SO* relieved. And that was that.

Now if I can just get the dentures adjusted tomorrow so that they aren't falling out of my head, things should be great. Then it is just dealing with the soreness which, in all honesty, isn't as bad as I thought it would be, so far. I am very sore, but getting 19 teeth pulled isn't 19 times as painful as getting one pulled. More like getting 3-4 pulled, because you have that same "tooth pulled" pain in four locations (upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right). The other thing is I feel exhausted (sort of like when I had pneumonia, but not as bad) because my body is trying to repair 19 separate injuries to my gums and that takes a lot of energy. Going on car rides is no fun because I am very weary and whenever the car goes over a bump, the dentures clack together and I get a pain there. But these things will pass. I suspect by Monday next I'll be much better...

Audio Message From... Chuck?

Abacquer — Wed, 09 May 2007 05:18:49 -0400

Chuck's Audio Message On Drugs (MP3, 483 Kb, 41s)

I'm sure you will get a laugh out of that. Apparently I tried to record a voice message shortly after returning to consciousness in the recovery room. At the time I was still whacked out on the meds, and my mouth was stuffed with gauze.

Here's the best translation I could manage:

Okay, I am in the recovery room... and I am out of my head on medication. Can't really talk all that well... but so far, so good.

Mumble mumble mumble right now. Mumble mumble mumble.

Don't worry, things will be a little better tomorrow. Love ya. Bye bye.

As for how I am doing now--as time progresses the fit of the dentures changes, sometimes very slack, sometimes very tight (probably from gums swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking), so the worst pain seems to shift from place to place, but my mouth aches all over. The imporant thing is I am on the mend.

I can't eat much at all. Applesauce and yogurt and jello is it so far. Yesterday I made myself a thick shake out of yogurt, a cut up banana, and a cup of fruit juice which I ate with a spoon. Would love to eat something more substantial, but I just can't manage it right now. I tried lipton soup with teeny noodles in it... couldn't manage it. Drinking is hard, and taking pills is harder. Anything which works my upper cheeks and tongue like laughing, talking, and especially swallowing makes the upper dentures dislodge.

Anyway hope you got a laugh out of my "audio message".

Tooth Album

Abacquer — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:05:29 -0400

Before

After

I put together an album of photos regarding my transition to dentures. Feel free to peruse them but be warned some of them are nasty. One is of me in the recovery room, and my teeth look pretty bloody. There are 3 of my old teeth, and while I felt it was important to document what was causing me such pain, you may find them very hard to look at. So feel free to just skip over those if you want.

Thanks everyone for your well wishes. I'm really hurting right now but I am already glad to be rid of those awful teeth of mine.

Back Home

Abacquer — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:47:55 -0400

Mouth is a bloody mess right now but the dentures are in. I'm in a lot of pain. Gonna take a percoset as soon as I can manage to eat something.

Audio Message From Chuck

Abacquer — Tue, 08 May 2007 10:00:00 -0400

Chuck's Audio Message (MP3, 2.18 Mb, 3m 11s)

Let's Get Nuts

Abacquer — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:27:03 -0400

Okay, don't have time to write a long article. Just wanted to pass along this tidbit I found about a recent study that determined that eating pistachios can significantly lower your cholesterol. So next time you want a snack, have some pistachios... not only do they taste good, apparently they're good for you as well.

Regulations are There for a Reason

Abacquer — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:48:17 -0400

I often hear people decrying government regulations, all this oversight intruding into business and keeping things from running smoothly, thereby upping the time/cost to produce goods, resulting in higher retail prices, which result in higher sales tax so we can pay for all the oversight...

Regulations do not exist in a vacuum, there isn't a room full of guys going "how can we stick it to businesses this week?" Regulations exist for (generally) very good reasons. For example, regulations that prevent people from dumping toxic waste in a river exist because duh, somebody dumped toxic waste in a river to the detriment of the health and well being of others.

Why am I on this particular toxic stream of consciousness? Perhaps you recall the news stories recently about people who's pets died suddenly (or became very ill) after eating certain brands of pet food? The trail has led to concentrated rice protein for animal consumption imported from China, which is contaminated with melamine. Melamine is high in nitrogen, which makes it a useful component of fertilizer, but which also causes it to resemble protein when animal food contaminated with it is analyzed for protein content. By powderizing melamine and mixing it with pet food, you get food that seems to be very rich in protein and which in turn means you can use lower-grade products that cost less to make the feed.

There are no regulations in China regarding melamine in pet food, and so, surprise surprise, most Chinese animal feed contains melamine. Is it safe? Or rather, how much is safe? Don't know. You'd have to pay for a study to determine that, and suppose the study found out that small amounts had deleterious effects over time? Then you'd need to make regulations, and enforce them, and that would cost money (and impact your economy.) Without any studies, people have been adding it to feed for the economic benefits, without any guidelines as to how much is too much.

From Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China (New York Times):
..."Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."...

When ingested, melamine (which is manufactured from coal) is apparently metabolized into various chemicals, one of which is ammonia. It turns out that the symptoms of the American pets that became sick or died resemble ammonia poisoning. If the person or persons responsible for the tainted rice protein had been a little less greedy and had used less melamine, maybe several pet owners wouldn't have lost their pets.

Melamine is NOT FOOD. Therefore there is no nutritional reason for it to be there. Your cat's renal system doesn't benefit from a feed manufacturer's bottom line. But corporations are not motivated by civil responsibility, they are motivated by money. Remember the infamous "Ford Pinto Memo"? When Ford Motors decided that it would be cheaper to pay off lawsuits from families who's loved ones would die in exploding Pintos, than it would be to effect an eleven dollar repair to each Pinto? Human or animal life is worth dick to some people (c.f. ULev article Human Wrongs from September of 2005, which also involved China).

This is why we need government oversight. China has less food-safety oversight than we do, and the result is apparent:

From Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China (New York Times):
...The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim...

Good Grape, Bad Grape

Abacquer — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:25:43 -0400

As my teeth have declined recently, I've been switching to softer and softer foods (no more apples and ginger snaps... boo hoo). Grapes on the other hand can be reduced to mush with relatively little pressure so I can still consume them, and while not the healthiest of the fruity snacks, are still marginally better for you than say, spice drops. At least that's what I tell myself. I try to eat a banana every day too... lots of potassium and stuff.

Anyway, the thing with grapes is some of them come off the bunch looking pretty nasty, and sometimes I end up throwing away grapes that might still be good. The sorts of defects I've noticed are:

Raised whitish puffy areas, usually at the stem-end of the grape (overripe?)
Brownish bark-like scabs (healed injuries?)
Brownish discoloration under the surface in regions (bruises?)
Cracks in the skin that seem to have separated and pulled back (overripe?)
Bore holes in the surface, usually round and extending a few millimeters inside (eaten by an insect?)
Shriveling (grape is dead and drying out?)
Slime/fungus (yechhh!)
Portions have turned to brown mush (rotten)

For pretty much any of these defects I tend to toss a grape away. Although for the first three, if the affected area is very small or effected in only a slight manner, I may still eat the grape, possibly avoiding the affected area. But I don't know what really causes any of these things and possibly all of them are safe to eat (except maybe the slimey, fungus-covered variety). Does anyone else know?

It occurred to me I may be worrying too much. After all I eat raisins, and it's a fair bet that a grape with any but the last two defects probably shrivels up into a decent raisin where the defect would be much harder to detect. Therefore, I probably have in fact consumed many a raisin which came from a grape I would have discarded.

How do YOU tell a good grape from a bad grape?

Wallet Say "Urk!"

Abacquer — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:17:28 -0400

One of the nice things about new cars is that it takes a long time before you need to shell out big bucks to fix them. For the first couple years or so, there are generally no major problems. Well Vanessa is about 4 years old now, and that time is gone. She's been running hot lately, the engine fan is always on, she has a check-engine light coming on, and she is overdue for a manual transmission fluid change. The dealership where I purchased her is no longer in business, so I took her to a different dealership yesterday to get these issues looked at.

The check-engine light is on because there's a certain emissions-related component which has failed. Replacing that component will cost $250.

The car has been running hot because the water pump is going, the water pump is covered by the extended powertrain warranty with a $100 deductible, so that will cost another $100.

The manual transmission fluid change will run another $150. (That is a lot, but apparently the job is difficult to do on this model. I had previously taken it to Jiffy Lube and they tried but could not do the work.)

The techinician who took the car for a ride said that the engine fan is much louder than normal, which he takes as an indication that the fan is going and will ultimately bind up. When that happens the car will overheat. The problem is that the component is extremely expensive ($500+) and installation isn't cheap either. To replace the fan will run me another $820.

It took 66,000 miles to get to this point, but yeesh, that's a whole lot of damage, and financially speaking, life sucks for me and mine right now. So, I told them to take care of the first 3 issues but leave the fan for another day. With the waterpump functioning properly, the fan won't need to be on as much, and hopefully I can get by without having to replace it for awhile.

I hope they finish fixing the car soon. I miss it already.

Bush's Court

Abacquer — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:59:29 -0400

Today the Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on "intact dilation and extraction" abortion procedures, termed "partial birth abortions" by those given to inflammatory speech. Yet another backward step to thank our President for. From the New York Times article Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Abortion Procedure:

...Today's decision gave the anti-abortion forces what they had hoped for with the more conservative makeup of the high court since Justice Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Abortion opponents are sure to be pleased by some of the language in Justice Kennedy's opinion, including his observation that "the government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman."...

..."I applaud the court for its ruling today," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, told The Associated Press. "My hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation's laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life."

But Eve Gartner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America said the ruling "flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women's health and safety." The ruling sends the signal that "politicians, not doctors," will make health-care decisions for women...

...Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America, said: "With today's Supreme Court decision, it is just a matter of time before the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 will also be struck down by the court."

Y'know I dismiss slippery slope arguments nearly all the time, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that these folks come flat out and say they want to end all abortion by taking away a woman's right to choose what happens inside her body.

It's also hard to ignore that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, after 34 years of upholding a woman's right to choose as more important than the right to life of an unborn fetus/embryo/zygote, has now done an about-face and approved a ban on certain types of abortion procedures, procedures that are considered necessary by many in the medical professions.

Late term abortions are pretty controversial in my book, and I have a lot of trouble accepting the practice, which is to say, I don't like it at all. But I still feel the ultimate decision lies with the pregnant person herself, not the government, and certainly not a religious fanatic who is trying to enforce his or her morals on the pregnant person via the government.

I view today's court decision as a profoundly disturbing mistake. I hope it does not become a wedge used to erode women's reproductive rights further in the future, as the anti-abortionists seem to hope it will.

I'm also fed up with the inflammatory anti-abortion/anti-stem cell research rhetoric. I'm sick of hearing abortion opponents decry that young pregnant women are "lining up to kill their children" and other such bullshit. If you sat down in a restaurant and ordered fried chicken, anti-abortionist or not, you'd complain if you received a plate of fried eggs because you know damn well that eggs aren't chickens. Scrambling an egg is not the equivalent of killing a chicken, anymore than cracking open a chestnut is the equivalent of felling a tree.

Zygotes and embryos are not human beings. They are a form of human life, yes, but they are not humans. Through the fetal stage they become human beings, but it isn't clear exactly when. This is why I have moral issues with late-term abortions. If at the conclusion of a normal pregnancy, what emerges from the mother's birth canal is a person, then surely it was a person sixty minutes earlier. The question of exactly when does a fetus become a person plagues me.

It would be great if ultimately there were no abortions (which is why birth control should be readily available in this country, and taught in school), but at some point a medical professional may decide that a woman's life is in serious danger unless she receives an abortion. I don't think that the law should be tying his hands or hers, no matter when during the pregnancy that conclusion is reached.

Ron of Ron's Blog notes that we are going to be paying for the Bush court for a generation. No lie, say I.

Some Warning Would Have Been Nice

Abacquer — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:27:23 -0400

This is the second time today I found myself wishing my dentist had given me some advance warning. The process of taking the impressions is actually more unpleasant than you might think. What the dentist said was it would only take a few minutes and I would have to sit with some gunk in my mouth which would harden to a rubber-like substance so that they would have a good mold of my teeth.

The goop went into a tray that fit over the teeth, and the tray was enormous... it didn't really fit very well in my mouth, plus the goop was extremely cold, and my teeth are sensitive to cold. The only thing the dentist told me ahead of time was "breathe through your nose", but he didn't say why. The lower tray wasn't too bad, but the upper tray plain didn't fit. The dentist tested both trays on me with no goop in them to verify the fit. He had to keep taking the upper one out and grinding portions of the tray plastic away with his drill, after which he would smooth it over with wax. It was painful each time he tried to fit it over my teeth before it was shaped properly. He explained it was the largest sized tray there is... I just happen to have a very large upper jaw.

The worst thing was when he took the impression of the upper teeth. As soon as he pressed the tray into place a huge glob of the goop squirted out the back forming a fat clump directly in the opening at the back of my mouth. This of course triggers the gag reflex, and also makes it nigh impossible to breathe through your mouth. This is why I was supposed to breathe through my nose. I think I would have appreciated some advance warning. Why? Because the normal reaction when you unexpectedly find a large foreign object close to your windpipe is to attempt to spit it out. Which is exactly what I wanted to do, but I could not. Needless to say it was a very unpleasant couple of minutes.

I tried to tell the dentist that there was stuff coming out the back of the impression tray, but of course I couldn't communicate anything intelligible. He kept assuming I was asking him to remove the whole tray, which he couldn't do or we would just have to do the whole process over again. The tray had to stay in my mouth for 2 minutes while the material set. It seemed to me that the dentist should have been able to reach in and remove that clump, but I guess he couldn't. He did suction some portion of it away, but not enough to be comfortable. He just kept saying to me "concentrate on your breathing and breathe through your nose." Afterward he explained that if I tried to breathe through my mouth I would be more aware of the clump at the back, whereas if I breathed through my nose it wouldn't be so bad. This explanation would have been more useful before the procedure.

Had I been sitting up instead of laying nearly horizontal in his chair, it might not have been as bad as it was. That's something I'm going to need to ask him about because when it comes time for the permanent denture, I have to go through this again. They'll need to take new impressions to figure out how to shape the permanent denture.

Don'tcha wanna haggle?

Abacquer — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:42:10 -0400

So I spent the last hour plus on the phone with my new dentist. I was trying to figure out exactly what I needed to pay today. I know the cost of the temporary upper denture was $1575, and I might possibly want a temporary lower denture, which the dentist offered to discount to $800. (With no lower denture, I have nothing to chew on.) The 7 little incisors in the front won't cut it, or rather they will cut it, but they won't chew or grind it. The oral surgeon offered us pamphlets on companies that pay medical bills and offer you a payment plan, so we needed to know if the dentist would work with these companies.

Phone call number one to the dentist made clear that they would not. They don't work with any such companies and would be unwilling to do so. Adding a middle man complicates the payment process. Oh well, at least the oral surgeon will work with these companies, and the oral surgery has been estimated at $4700, so we're going to need the help. Too bad the dentist won't go that route, but I understand their reasons.

So the initial bill with the dentist is either $1575 or $2375 (if I get the lower temporary), no argument there. The question is, how much am I supposed to bring to the office with me? The lady at the office said, at first, you will need to bring your co-pay. Okay, so I'm thinking like, $25 or something, and then they bill me for whatever the insurance doesn't cover. Well no, the lady explained, the co-pay is whatever the insurance won't cover. She said insurance would probably pay half the bill. So I said, "so then I need to be able to pay the other half of the bill... today?" (somewhere between like $800 and $1400.) And she said, "yes." But then she said, "well when the co-pay is that high, we usually only charge half the co-pay at the time of the visit, and then bill you for the other half." So I would need either $400 or $700 today? She said, "yes." But then she said, "let me look at your chart and check with your dentist and then call you back just to make sure."

Several minutes pass.

Finally she calls back. It turns out that for temporary dentures, they don't submit bills to insurance companies at all. They only bill the insurance for the permanent denture. So today's bill falls entirely on my shoulders, and is not a co-pay... it's just a "pay." So I will need to cover the entire payment for the temporary dentures today, which is either $1575 or $2375, and I am thinking $2375 because I can't imagine going 2-4 months with no lower back teeth. As it is I have only one usable lower back tooth (broken, but usable), but I use it to chew everything I eat.

Needless to say that's a large chunk of change to come up with, and I would have appreciated it if someone could have explained to me in advance that I was going to have to be able to pay the total amount today. I was expecting insurance to kick in $1000 today. I'll just have to make it work, and I can swing it but it isn't going to be a cakewalk.

Teeth are expensive. The temporary dentures will be $2375, the surgery will be $4700 (assuming no unexpected work), and the final dentures will be about $3150. That's 10 grand folks. Insurance? They'll pay $1000. Period. So I get to come up with $9 grand. Can I get a "yikes" anyone?

What's Goin' On, What's Goin On

Abacquer — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:26:11 -0400

Life has been a little hectic for me, and while I've had time to take part in interesting discussions on articles I posted over a year ago (weird) I haven't had much time to post any new articles. So here's what's goin' on, reduced to a bullet list, just so I can get the shite out there:

Went to see the oral surgeon on Tuesday, no real surprises there, it was just a consult, they wanted me to know what to expect and to talk to me. Had to read some scary consent forms where they tell you everything that could possibly go wrong during your procedure... we might break your jaw, we might puncture your sinuses, we might damage teeth you were planning on keeping, you might have a heart attack from the anaesthesia, you might die, the world might end. Great stuff to read if you are a person with an anxiety disorder triggered by medical situations. Thanks guys.
I go in for my impressions at the dentist this afternoon. Probably have to have the surgery in about 3 weeks.
Celebrated Easter with Patty's family on Saturday, and with my family on Sunday. Plus we had a little egg hunt for Lynnea at our house Sunday morning. Total of 3 egg hunts, and I hid somewhere between 85 and 145 eggs over the weekend (I had help on the last hunt.)
Atheist's don't believe in jinxes, but lately it's hard to shake the idea of misfortune following me around. During Saturday's get together, I noticed that the dog of one of my sisters-in-law, who had been brought to the gathering, was acting funny--labored breathing, strange movements. I told my sister-in-law about it, and she took the dog to a vet during the celebration and was informed that the animal needed to be put to sleep. Happy Easter kids, the dog is dying. They had the dog put down that same day and a lot of the kids were crying about it.
Continuing the jinx thread, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday afternoon and we were discussing all the things that had been going on in my life when suddenly I heard a loud bang on my cellphone. My friend had been rear ended by another driver and terminated the conversation with "my back is hurting, I can't talk now". Later in the evening I heard back that after a trip to the hospital my friend was okay, but he didn't yet know how bad the damage to his car is. We joked that I should try to capitalize on this Hurleyesque bad luck of mine, have people pay me to stay away from them, or pay me to hang around with folks they don't like until the meteorite hits them.
I've been seeing my Mom each weekend and helping her to get things taken care of now that Dad is gone. Mom runs a small business out of her house and depends entirely on an ancient Windows-98 box to do her work, and the box is acting pretty spotty lately. A few weeks before Dad passed away he had purchased a new computer, and so now I am trying to repurpose that box so that when my Mom is ready, she can switch to the new box and run her business on that. Unfortunately the new box comes with Vista which my Dad hated, and after spending a couple of hours trying to use the box I can see why. Microsoft completely changed the standard windows interface, all the control keys are different, and no functions are where they used to be. They also decided (apparently) that menus are overrated, so the standard office suite doesn't have menus anymore... yeah you heard that right. Everything is now reorganized on a new fat toolbar with tabs on it so that you can switch between toolbars. Microsoft calls it "the ribbon", I call it "thumbing your nose at everybody who already learned how to use your shitty applications". Vista does not come with a "classic mode" option like XP did... they really expect you to relearn where everything is. I refuse to subject my 68-year-old mother to this nonsense. So I backed up Dad's files, packed up his computer and all his peripherals and disks, brought it to a computer shop and told them to wipe it, and then install XP home edition and Office 2000, and get all the drivers to make sure the peripherals work. In the end, my Mom will be happier for it. And having a chance to check out Vista I am now quite certain that I won't be upgrading to it.
Had a little birthday party for Pat at home last week, a little cake and song, and a couple gifts (taking our economic situation into consideration of course). Pat got the movie "Eragon" which was -eh-. It's basically Star Wars... AGAIN, and progresses far too quickly. I kept saying "these guys forgot the montages" while watching it. But the dragon was pretty, and it was still fun to watch.
Oh, and I am saddened to report that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. Thanks for the stories Kurt, we'll miss you.

Guess that's about it. Gotta get to work! See ya later.

One Out of One Dentists Agree

Abacquer — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:35:59 -0400

Dentistry has changed in the last 20 years (basically since the last time I sat in the chair of death). I had my consult with the dentist today. He looked in my mouth for precisely 30 to 40 seconds and agreed that all my upper teeth need to go. To fix them would cost around $50K, to remove them and wear a full upper denture and partial lower denture would be an order of magnitude lower.

So right now the plan is to remove all 15 of my remaining uppers, and 4 of my lowers, leaving 7 of my original lower teeth in the front (they need some teeth left in that I can attach the partial lower denture to.) The front teeth on the bottom have never caused me any woes, and my Dad who had teeth just like mine, kept his lower teeth his whole life.

The process of healing and acclimating and getting to the point where I have my final dentures in and I am used to them will take several months (4 to 6, maybe less). So for awhile I will probably talk funny and have some difficulty. But after that I should be dentist-free for at least 10 years.

So what's next is to consult with the oral surgeon so they can look me over, and understand what needs to be done. Then I go back to the dentist so he can take an impression and get to work sculpting the temporary denture. When that denture is ready I go in for surgery. They knock me out, put me under, and remove the teeth. Then they put the temporary denture in for me. After that I'll need a few days off from work to recover. Then shortly thereafter I go back to the dentist to have the temporary denture adjusted. Then a few months later, I go to the dentist for the final dentures and one more followup to adjust those. And then I'm done.

Wish me luck. They take the first impressions in about 10 days.

Good News

Abacquer — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:11:35 -0400

It's nice to have some good news for a change. You guys are pretty smart so I'll let you figure it out yourself.

Cool Guy

Abacquer — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:41:49 -0400

So I've been taking my body temperature every half hour or so since Sunday, monitoring myself for any signs of fever, and I'll tell you something, if I show a temperature of 98.6? I'm running hot. I say this because my body temperature seems to be low all the time, usually between 97.4 and 97.9 but much lower when I first wake up. Yesterday my waking temperature was 96.4, today it was 96.6. If I have to move around a lot and exert myself, then my temperature slides up into the 98's, but that's the only time. All the more evidence that when I show a fever of 99.9 using the same thermometers I've been using to measure all these 96's and 97's, it's probably a more serious than it might be for an average person.

No fevers yet by the way, just my normal low temperatures.

I guess I'm a cool guy after all.

Here We Go Again

Abacquer — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:21:45 -0400

Well today is the day we repeat the "no antibiotics" test. I didn't take any avelox this morning. Hope I don't get any fevers! My side still hurts so there is still something going on in my lung, but maybe this time I'll be able to fight it off myself.

UPDATE 3/22/2007: I haven't had a pill since Sunday, and so far, no fevers! I know it's still a little early, the doctor said it would normally take about 4 days for the fevers to return, but I am starting to hope they won't. And then maybe I won't need surgery. But my lung still hurts so something is going on in there. I have another CAT scan this afternoon. Hopefully that will show improvement.

Too Much To Talk About

Abacquer — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:36:39 -0400

I'm sorry I haven't been able to blog in awhile... there's just been so much going on my life. I've got a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but any one of them would be a full blog article I don't have time to write. So here's the "Cliff Notes"...

My Health
I visited the doctor about 2 weeks ago. My TB test came back negative, as expected. I woke up with the area around the injection on my arm completely flat and showing no reaction other than a slight redness. I could tell it was a negative result, but still I had to get to the doctor and have a nurse stare at my arm for two seconds and say "yep, negative." Did I mention it was snowing? A lot? The doc informed me that the plan at that point was to let the antibiotics run out, and then monitor myself very carefully, watching for fevers. I was to take it easy and not exert myself once off the antibiotics. I took my last pill the day my Dad had his aneurism. So I was getting almost no sleep, no regular intake of food, a high amount of exertion and stress, exactly at the time we were hoping my body would be able to cope with the remaining infection. By March 7th I was having fevers and my doctor extended the antibiotic. By March 8th the fevers had reached 102, and I was having painful chills in the night. On March 9th the fevers subsided and I haven't had any since. I had another visit with the doc today and she began to speak very frankly about having a surgeon go in and "break up" the scar tissue, or using a needle to drain out the infected area so it could heal. I spoke very frankly about how disturbing those prospects were to me, and if sixty days of antibiotics would solve the problem, I'd rather go that route. For now, we are on a middle ground. The doc has given me a script for 10 more days of the antibiotic, but I am to repeat the "wait and see" experiment when the current batch runs out (Sunday). If the fevers return I can start the next script. Next week I will have another CAT Scan, and then based on the results we will make a decision. The doctor said I could come in and speak with the pulmonologist at that time if I liked. At this point I'm beginning to feel resigned that a surgical solution is going to be necessary.

Mr. Deity
If you haven't seen the "Mr. Deity" videos yet, check them out, they are hilarious. A warning to my theist readers, these movies are created by humanists, and are therefore pretty irreverent. Don't check them out if that is going to bug you.

RSS & YouTube
Why doesn't YouTube support RSS in any obvious fashion that I can detect? Why do I have to go to my subscription page on YouTube to see what is new. If they are tracking what is new, then they have the information necessary to provide an RSS feed. Bloglines tries to "fake it" for you, building an RSS feed out of a YouTube search, but that doesn't work well. Partly because old videos keep popping up on it, and because jerks post movies on YouTube with the usernames of popular YouTubers in their keywords simply to bring in viewers. The only YouTubers I subscribe to are ImpyTheRap (i.e. Nobody's Watching) and SuttSteve. Yet my Bloglines is constantly telling me they have new videos when they don't, simply because the RSS feed is built from a keyword search, and some people are not capable of getting viewers on their own talent. Does anyone have a good way to get a YouTube subscription as an RSS feed? It's really bugging me. I had to discontinue my YouTube "feeds" in Bloglines because it was a waste of time.

Texas and the HPV Vaccine
The Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has mandated that all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas schools must receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil, produced by Merck. HPV, or Human papillomavirus, is a virus that can be carried by both men and women, but some strains of which are shown to cause cervical cancer in some women. It is primarily transmitted sexually, but can be contracted in other ways (skin on skin contact, or being born from an infected mother). Under Perry's plan, parents could choose to refuse the vaccine for their child, but it is not clear if the child would then be allowed to enter the public school system (any more than they would be allowed to refuse, say, Mumps and Rubella vaccines and still put their kids in school.) The Texas legislature voted 118-23 to basically overturn this order. The primary complaints were that (a) there are questionable connections between Perry and Merck, (b) parents should have the right to choose whether their daughters will be vaccinated, (c) the drug is new and needs to be further tested, and (d) Perry circumvented the legislative process. On (a) and (d) I can't really comment, on (c)... well the FDA has approved it, so it has to have undergone some testing at this point, and on (b) I'm just mystified. The mandate clearly has an opt-out clause... so what's the diff? The thing I can't shake is that the early complaints about the possibility of making this drug mandatory that came out of Fundie USA was that it would encourage young women to have sex. Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I can't help feeling that because those who said it are realizing how stupid that sounds, we are now getting other excuses like a through d above. I find myself wondering if HPV was transmitted in a nonsexual manner, would there be any outcry at all?

These are the Same People Who Said...
Tell me you haven't heard this one before: confronted with the latest news from climate scientists about global warming, a politically motivated skeptic will claim "These are the same people who said the world was headed for another ice age back in the 1970's... why should we believe them now?" Like so much politically motivated rhetoric, there's little merit in it. Between the 40's and the 70's a cooling trend was noted in the data available at that time. Scientific journals noted that although such a trend could be the precursor of the cyclic ice ages that our planet goes through, there was not enough data or understanding of the climate to accurately predict when the next ice age would come. The popular press on the other hand (i.e. those journals which are not peer reviewed) took the story and made a sensation out of it. The scientific community never said another ice age was imminent, period. Needless to say I hate hearing this stupid argument, especially when it is delivered by people who unfortunately are accorded undue credibility... like Michael Crichton for instance. But if you want details refuting this particular bit of rhetoric, check "The Global Cooling Myth" on Real Climate.

Guess that's all I have for now. Hope everyone else is well and happy...

CAT Scan Results

Abacquer — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:48:16 -0500

Well my doctor just called with the results of my CAT Scan. There is a lot of scar tissue on my lung now, and what appears to be a 3 cm abcess at the base of it. The doc says the abcess shows signs of "infiltrate" meaning that it appears to contain or be surrounded by infection. The radiologist has suggested as a saftey precaution that I be given a test for tuberculosis. My doctor thinks it is extremely unlikely that I have tuberculosis but we're going to do a test anyway just to make sure. So I'm going to run in to the doctor's office now to have that done. It will take two days to determine the results of that.

A matter of concern is the fact that I still have some infection in my lung, and what to do about it. After 24 days on the antibiotic, if it was going to wipe out the infection, I would think that would already have done so. My doctor says she is going to share my CAT Scan results and information with a pulmonologist and see if he recommends any change in my treatment, like perhaps a different sort of medicine. My doctor is glad to hear that I haven't had a fever in almost two weeks, and says that if I weren't feeling better, she would generally hospitalize someone with this sort of injury.

So far nobody has repeated the idea of sticking giant needles in my side to drain out infected fluid, and I hope nobody does. That prospect still terrifies me. I sincerely hope that if that has to happen, I can be sedated for it.

Getting nervy over here. Jesus will this thing ever just go away?