Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bee Jays
[Bee Jays – click to embiggen]

Eric Alterman notes that the corporate media hasn’t changed much since 1999. Even then, facts were less important than sensationalism.

Back in 1999, I noticed what I thought was an epidemic of stupid reporting about teenage blowjobs. Much to the chagrin of my editors at The Nation, I wrote a column called “Blowjobs and Snow Jobs,” in which I argued that some of the worst reporting you’d find anywhere could be found on this topic, much of it in The Washington Post (for reasons about which I declined, and continue to decline, to speculate). I had no position of the topic, save the desire to point out that per usual, many of the people in the MSM and all of the pundits spouting, ahem, off on it, had no idea whatever they were talking about. Read the column and enjoy the hysteria now that the data are in. According to a study written up in Newsweek of 15-to-19-year-olds by the Guttmacher Institute, “teen sexual behavior in general hasn’t changed much since 1991. Just a little more than half the teens studied had engaged in oral sex, only 5 percent more than had engaged in vaginal sex. Most teens who had had oral sex had also had intercourse, and only one in four teen virgins had had oral sex — not exactly the makings of a teen oral sex epidemic.” … According to the study’s author, Laura Lindberg, ‘There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners.’ ” And remember this: ” According to a study published in the 2005 Journal of Adolescent Health, teens who had taken abstinence pledges were six times as likely to have engaged in oral sex as teen virgins who hadn’t taken the pledge.”

Of course, the moral of my story is only partially about blowjobs. Reporting this crappy is, alas, the norm, not the exception. It’s just as evident when the topic is Bush, McCain or Obama, when one takes the trouble to look carefully.

[From Media Matters – Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited: Teenage (journalistic) wasteland ]

I’d posit that matters have only gotten worse since 1999. Though maybe not much. From the original article:


The Washington Post has twice succumbed to fellatio fever in recent months. One of its best columnists noted that Gore adviser Naomi Wolf “brags in her book


Promiscuities

[that] she was rather adroit” in the oral arts as a teenager. This is slander–Wolf “brags” about no such thing. She does say that as a young teenager she listened to her girlfriends’ older sisters brag about their abilities, but she makes no claims for her own prowess. When I contacted the columnist in question, he admitted that he had never seen the book and was quoting someone who made this claim on Imus, who in turn had not read the book but had seen it “in a wire story.” When the subject is blowjobs (or Naomi Wolf), that’s good enough.

(Washington Post article behind pay wall, but abstract is here, I think.)

Sex Life of the Giant Squid

Seth Anderson1 Comment

A recently caught giant squid in Australia [click to embiggen, if you dare!]

As a sort of addendum to a previous post, the odd sex life of a giant squid is titillating scientists.

Group sex
He says the reproductive habits of giant squids are particularly interesting and will be the focus of much study.

“[We will look at] whether it has been mated or not. Whether it is a male or female.

“Giants have very strange sexual behaviour where the male has a metre-long muscular penis that he uses a bit like a nail gun and shoots cords of sperm under the skin of the female’s arms and she carries the sperm around with her until she is ready to lay her big jelly mass of a million eggs.

“[We want to find out[ whether they gather somewhere together to mass-breed.

“If we get some sperm out of the arms of this animal then we can do paternity studies and see if was multiple males that are mating with her or single males.

[From Scientists probe giant squid sex secrets – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)]

Everyone gets excited about different things, glad someone can drool over discovering a massive muscular penis.

Operation Crooked Code

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EveryBlock is making a very cool news-related mapping project:

In May 2008, 15 people — including developers, contractors and city inspectors — were arrested on bribery charges as part of a federal probe called “Operation Crooked Code.” These people were involved with exchanging cash and other benefits in return for various Chicago permits and city services, acccording to U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Following our philosophy of identifying news near your block, we at EveryBlock have identified the specific addresses mentioned in Fitzgerald’s complaints and mapped them here, for your exploration. Included are the locations of the buildings in question and where alleged bribes occurred.

[From Special report: Operation Crooked Code | EveryBlock Chicago]

Side note: I strongly suspect our building also involved crooked City of Chicago Building Inspectors – too many non-compliant code items have been discovered (electrical conduit wrong size, unmarked electric boxes, non-compliant plumbing, air-conditioning not installed, roof installed sans insulation, yadda yadda) – unfortunately, our building was rehabbed in 1996, and I don’t know how to track down those kinds of historic city records.

Individual entries read like a bad movie

On the morning of June 6, 2007, CW1 met with agents at the briefing location. Agents gave $500 cash to CW1 to pay a bribe to VALENTINO for the Garfield project.5 The money was photocopied and placed in an envelope in the presence of agents. An audio recording device was placed on CW1. At approximately 9:30 am, CW1 was driven by agents to the Dunkin Donuts located at Washington and Wells to meet with VALENTINO. At approximately 9:35 am, surveillance agents videotaped VALENTINO entering the Dunkin Donuts. Due to the location of VALENTINO and CW1 inside of the store, surveillance agents were unable to observe CW1 and VALENTINO during the meeting. Surveillance agents were not able to videotape VALENTINO leaving the Dunkin Donuts following the meeting due to their position but did videotape VALENTINO walking down the street away from the Dunkin Donuts a short time after the meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting, CW1 was picked up by agents and taken to the briefing location. CW1 informed agents at the debriefing that CW1 had delivered the envelope containing $500 cash to VALENTINO for the favorable zoning inspection for the Garfield property. The meeting was audiorecorded, and I have reviewed the recording. The conversation was brief and primarily personal in nature.

My Pie to Close

Seth Anderson0 comment

or My ∏ as it says on the sign. When I lived on Belden, I ate at My Pie quite frequently. Not spectacular food, but good and cheap enough, with a decent salad bar, another vestige of a previous time. I probably have a photo somewhere, I’ll have to look.

My Pie, which has been a fixture in the Lincoln Park area (and a crucial part of my collegiate dining options) for 31 years, closed its Clark Street location over the weekend. Rich Aronson, part of the family that started the My Pie pizzeria mini-chain a generation ago, says the unavailability of an affordable lease led to the restaurant’s demise. “We knew it was coming,” he said. “They [the landlords] had different plans for the place, and the rent was skyrocketing by four, five times. We want to do something else in the neighborhood, but it’s just difficult to find anything.”

[From My Pie closes its Lincoln Park location, hopes to reopen]

Lincoln Park continues to transform into yuppie heaven. I’m sure the building owners want to sell to a condo developer – that’s where one gets enough money to retire to Florida.

Infighting Among the Dems

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Bob Herbert is irritated with the fractious Democratic Party, their goofy nomination process, and their self-centered campaigning.

Talk about self-inflicted wounds.

The Democrats may finally be stepping away from their circular firing squad. It took them long enough.

There are so many things that the Democrats need to do to have any chance of winning the White House in November, and it’s awfully late in the game to begin doing them.

Only now is the party starting to rally around Senator Barack Obama, who has been the likely nominee for the longest time. No one knows how long it will take to move beyond the fratricidal conflict that was made unnecessarily bitter by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton.

It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”

He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government.

[Click to read more Bob Herbert – Infighting Among the Democratcs – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

If McCain wins the election, I wouldn’t be surprised to see rioting in the streets.

links for 2008-06-03

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Floating prison ships!!

Seth Anderson0 comment

Impeachment is too good a solution for these war crimes – George Bush needs to be arrested and tried at The Hague. Floating torture vessels? Horrible.

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

[From US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships | World news | The Guardian]

What part of “Rule of Law” don’t these thugs understand? Misleading Congress is an impeachable offense, lest we forget.

Continue reading “Floating prison ships!!”

Bucky Fuller: Dymaxion Man

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“Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (Whitney Museum of American Art)” (K. Michael Hays, Dana A. Miller)

I’d really like to go to this exhibit at the Whitney – Bucky Fuller was a wild cat.

One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

Fuller called his invention the Dymaxion Vehicle. He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life. Soon, Fuller thought, people would be living in standardized, prefabricated dwellings, and this, in turn, would allow them to occupy regions previously considered uninhabitable—the Arctic, the Sahara, the tops of mountains. The Dymaxion Vehicle would carry them to their new homes; it would be capable of travelling on the roughest roads and—once the technology for the requisite engines had been worked out—it would also (somehow) be able to fly. Fuller envisioned the Dymaxion taking off almost vertically, like a duck.

Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”—a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”

Fuller’s career is the subject of a new exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition traces the long, loopy arc of his career from early doodlings to plans he drew up shortly before his death, twenty-five years ago this summer. It will feature studies for several of his geodesic domes and the only surviving Dymaxion Vehicle. By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?

[Click to read three more pages of Annals of Innovation: Dymaxion Man: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker]

Don’t think I’m traveling to NYC anytime soon however. There is a slide-show up at the moment.


“Critical Path” (R. Buckminster Fuller)

Global Dimming and Vitamin D

Seth Anderson0 comment

Stroll

Our polluting ways have other effects beyond climate change. We now frequently have a vitamin D deficiency because of world-wide smog blocking the sun our bodies have evolved into needing. Nova broadcasted a documentary about Global Dimming fairly recently, I’ll have to see if any of the video is available.


How To Live Longer: Take Vitamin D:

A simple course of vitamin D could help you live longer, say researchers.

Trials involving 57,000 people found that those who took supplements regularly were less likely to die over the six-year period.

Scientists have already shown that a deficiency of vitamin D may be to blame for 600,000 cancer cases each year. Other studies have linked low levels of the vitamin with heart disease and diabetes.


“Solgar – Vitamin D Softgels 1000 IU (Cholecalciferol) – 250” (Solgar)

Fidgeter In Chief

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*reposted for our amusement.

White House Briefing News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration
Let’s start with President Bush himself. How is he holding up?

“He can barely stand, he’s about to drop on the spot,” Bush said, with several of his trademark chuckles, when Matt Lauer asked on the “Today Show” yesterday morning.“He’s doing great. He’s got big, broad shoulders,” insisted the first lady.

But maybe Bush was closer to the truth than his wife. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s close inspection of Bush’s body language in the video of the interview exposed any number of signs of strain — including blinking and twitching.

“Only the president’s closest friends and family know (if anybody does) what he’s really thinking these days, during Katrina woes, Iraq violence, conservative anger over Harriet Miers, and legal trouble for Bush’s top political aide and two congressional GOP leaders. Bush has not been viewed up close; as he took his eighth post-Katrina trip to the Gulf Coast yesterday, the press corps has accompanied him only once, because the White House says logistics won’t permit it. Even the interview on the ‘Today’ show was labeled ‘closed press.’

”But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC’s broadcast during Bush’s 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.

“The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was ‘trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,’ Bush blinked 24 times in his answer.

When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

”When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer — along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling.“

Milbank also touches on Bush’s habit of making inappropriate facial expressions. At one point, he writes, Bush ”seemed to lose control of the timing. He smiled after observing that Iraqis are ‘paying a serious price’ because of terrorism.“

And Milbank doesn’t even mention the tic that has been the subject of intense speculation in the blogosphere for several months: Bush’s bizarre, shifting lower jaw movement that increasingly punctuates the ends of his sentences.

Ah, yes, the famous GWB cocaine jaw. The Huffington Post has a (quicktime) compilation of the jaw movements, taken from the Miers press conference, and from the Roberts nomination. I mean, maybe there are other causes of his grinding (tooth decay, mental illness, side effects from other drugs), but it is certainly an odd affectation. I wonder if it has anything to do with the weird device on Bush’s back during the 2004 Presidential debates with John Kerry?

Sometimes Numbers Aren’t Numbers

Seth Anderson0 comment

Simply outrageous. Outrageous is an overused word, here, and elsewhere, but the callousness of our government, and the majority of our media, is despicable. If an invader killed 7.5 million Americans in three years of occupation, would we be throwing rose petals or bombs at their feet?

Eric Alterman: 655,000 Dead: Reporting the Reporting | The Huffington Post

According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, George Bush’s lies have killed not 30,000 innocent Iraqis, as the president not long ago estimated, but nearly 22 times that amount, or 655,000. Neither the Pentagon, nor much of the mainstream media have made much attempt to make their own counts — it’s just not that important to anyone.

So how has the U.S. media reported on these shocking-albeit-necessarily-imprecise findings, based on door-to-door surveys in 18 provinces, by the experts trained in this kind of thing? The actual methods included obtaining data by eight Iraqi physicians during a survey of 1,849 Iraqi families — 12,801 people — in 47 neighborhoods of 18 regions across the country. The researchers based the selection of geographical areas on population size, not on the level of violence. How strict were their standards? They asked for death certificates to prove claims — and got them in 92 percent of the cases. Even so, the authors say that the number could be anywhere from 426,000 to 800,000.

Dr. Alterman continues…

Blogging for Free

Seth Anderson1 Comment

(repost*)
Daily News

Simon Dumenco is not impressed by the Huffington Post’s business model.


Last week, the Huffington Post, the liberal news/political blog co-founded by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, successfully lured [Betsy ]Morgan away from CBSNews.com. The inevitable headlines and analysis — about how the scrappy blog was edging ever closer to mainstreamness by luring a respected news veteran to be its CEO — was helpful not only in underscoring Huffington’s status as a national media power broker.

It also helped everyone forget Lerer’s astonishing statement in USA Today, just days earlier, that HuffPo has no plans to ever pay its bloggers. “That’s not our financial model,” he told the paper. “We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.”

Coming right out and saying that — and saying it that way, with those particular words — takes cojones. Not our financial model. Geez, wow. Not since the Pets.com sock puppet scored a deal to write his memoir (published in 2000 as “Me by Me: The Pets.com Sock Puppet Book”) has there been a more tellingly, creepily poetic new-media moment. In fact, if it weren’t for Betsy Morgan’s vote of confidence in the Huffington Post — if Morgan weren’t willing to put her career on the line to endorse the blog’s place in the media firmament — Lerer’s pronouncement could have been HuffPo’s jump-the-shark moment.
[From Advertising Age]

Gawker’s media empire doesn’t pay its writers much either, but both Gawker and HuffPost bloggers get paid more than B12’s stable of bloggers (who make about a dime a day, after expenses are paid. Those Google ads on our sidebar bring in less and less.) Dumenco continues:


First of all, arguably, it’s the other way around: Despite Arianna’s cable-news omnipresence, it’s the excellent work of such regular bloggers as Harry Shearer, Nora Ephron and Bill Maher that gave HuffPo visibility, promotion and distribution. They lent their credibility and influence — and their built-in audiences (Shearer with his radio show, Maher with his “Real Time” on HBO, Ephron with the fans of her books and movies) — to Arianna and Ken. And for what? Bupkis now — and bupkis forever! (Suckas!)

Second, the vast majority of the Huffington Post’s bloggers get virtually no significant visibility, promotion or distribution simply because there are so damn many of them — 1,800 at last count, which means that unless you’re one of Arianna’s favorites (and/or a scoop-slinging insider), you’re probably rarely going to get on the home page — and if you do, only fleetingly.

Third, the Huffington Post actually does pay some of its bloggers — the ones it has on staff, such as “Eat the Press” media editor/blogger Rachel Sklar — so the financial model is, well, what then? Pay some of the bloggers some of the time? Don’t pay the bloggers who are wealthy enough from their real gigs not to care? That, to me, is not only not a real “financial model,” it’s a wacky, ad hoc, college-newspaper-esque compensation scheme unworthy of a self-proclaimed “great company.”

Mind you, Lerer has also claimed that the Huffington Post will be profitable in 2008 — after burning through at least $10 million in venture capital. If HuffPo ever gets a lofty valuation — through an IPO or through the sale of a publicly valued stake — the serfs will surely revolt as they watch Lady Arianna and Lord Ken and their backers get rich(er).

I’ll admit I was skeptical when the Huffington Post launched, but I do glance over there from time to time, and do find stories of interest to me occasionally. There are so many bloggers though, that I’d guess 80-100 entries are posted a day, and who has time to read them all?

* From time to time, I’m reposting articles from my old blog to my new. No reason, really, other than the best way to test something new is to use it, use it, use, you gotta work it, work it. I’ll try to remember to try [sic ]to append *reposted. Please don’t be irritated if I forget.

Healing Herbs

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Since I am lucky enough to have an in-house herbalist, I’ve been dosing myself with vitamins and herbs to help my injuries heal. I found this page which echoes most of the same treatment advice. Even if the science is unclear, or incomplete, I’d still take the supplements. At worst, I excrete the excess, without harm. More likely, the herbs/vitamins will reduce my recovery time as they seem to be doing.

This pill is expensive (well, unless you break it down by pill), but surprisingly tasty.


“Naturally Vitamins – Wobenzym N 800 Tablets” (Naturally Vitamins (Marlyn Nutraceuticals))

 


“Solaray – Vitamin C, 90 Capsules, 800 mg” (Solaray)

I prefer non-acidic C so there are no repercussions with digestion.

 


“Solaray – Optizinc, 30 mg, 60 capsules” (Solaray)

 

Proteolytic enzymes, including bromelain, papain, trypsin, and chymotrypsin, may be helpful in healing minor injuries such as sprains and strains because they have anti-inflammatory activity and appear to promote tissue healing.

Several preliminary trials have reported reduced pain and swelling, and/or faster healing in people with a variety of conditions using either bromelain,5 papain from papaya, or a combination of trypsin and chymotrypsin. Double-blind trials have reported faster recovery from athletic injuries, including sprains and strains, and earlier return to activity using eight tablets daily of trypsin/chymotrypsin, four to eight tablets daily of papain, eight tablets of bromelain (single-blind only), or a combination of these enzymes.…

Bromelain is measured in MCUs (milk clotting units) or GDUs (gelatin dissolving units). One GDU equals 1.5 MCU. Strong products contain at least 2,000 MCU (1,333 GDU) per gram (1,000 mg). A supplement containing 500 mg labeled “2,000 MCU per gram” would have 1,000 MCU of activity, because 500 mg is half a gram. Some doctors recommend 3,000 MCU taken three times per day for several days, followed by 2,000 MCU three times per day. Some of the research, however, uses smaller amounts, such as 2,000 MCU taken in divided amounts in the course of a day (500 MCU taken four times per day). Other enzyme preparations, such as trypsin/chymotrypsin, have different measuring units. Recommended use is typically two tablets four times per day on an empty stomach, but as with bromelain, the strength of trypsin/chymotrypsin tablets can vary significantly from product to product.

One controlled trial showed that people who supplement with 3 grams per day L-carnitine for three weeks before engaging in an exercise regimen are less likely to experience muscle soreness.

Antioxidant supplements, including vitamin C and vitamin E, may help prevent exercise-related muscle injuries by neutralizing free radicals produced during strenuous activities. Controlled research, some of it double-blind, has shown that 400-3,000 mg per day of vitamin C may reduce pain and speed up muscle strength recovery after intense exercise. Reductions in blood indicators of muscle damage and free radical activity have also been reported for supplementation with 400-1,200 IU per day of vitamin E in most studies, but no measurable benefits in exercise recovery have been reported. …

Vitamin C is needed to make collagen, the “glue” that strengthens connective tissue. Injury, at least when severe, appears to increase vitamin C requirements, and vitamin C deficiency causes delayed healing from injury. Preliminary human studies have suggested that vitamin C supplementation in non-deficient people can speed healing of various types of trauma, including musculoskeletal injuries, but double-blind research has not confirmed these effects for athletic injuries, which included sprains and strains.

Zinc is a component of many enzymes, including some that are needed to repair wounds. Even a mild deficiency of zinc can interfere with optimal recovery from everyday tissue damage as well as from more serious trauma. Trace minerals, such as manganese, copper, and silicon are also known to be important in the biochemistry of tissue healing.

[From Sprains and Strains – [Alternative Medicine]]

(click for the cited research).
Reminds me, I should pick up a pineapple or two, those suckers are high in proteolytic enzymes.

Natural Mug

Elbow Recovering Nicely

Seth Anderson0 comment

Celebratory Curves

I am able to move my elbow more fluidly than yesterday (still has less than 48 hours since I became intimate with asphalt in the West Loop), can nearly fully extend my arm, and can bend it toward my body almost enough to reach my mouth. Strange how the temporary loss of a body part gives one pause: how do returning Iraq War vets manage with the permanent loss of a limb? Simple things, like using shampoo, become more complicated when you only have use of one hand. Shampoo bottle needs to be opened, and shampoo poured out – but what do you pour it into? Directly upon your scalp, I guess, but I used to always pour it in my other hand. Pant zippers, shoelaces, chopping vegetables, reading a book, even blowing one’s nose – all become new experiences, tasks that have to be relearned.

In a just world, George Bush and his minions of death would have to suffer eternal hellfire for the their nonchalance as they sent hundreds of thousands (or more) of human beings to a premature death, or to a life maimed.