Friday, May 09, 2008
Tidbits from a lost weekend...
I came down with a sore throat on Friday. A bit of a dry cough, but mostly a tickling sort of sensation I couldn't seem to scratch. (Thoughts of a bottle brush entered my head, it was so itchy.) In seeming response to this, my nose started dripping down the back of my throat, so I constantly felt like I had to clear it, to no avail. I slept uncomfortably all Friday night; felt like I was drowning, and when I woke up Saturday I had to admit I was actually sick. Hadn't been sick for some time; not since I moved into this apt early last year, at least, but there it was.
Sunday I felt worse, dry cough, head all stuffy, and no energy. Constant napping all weekend, and it was odd to be just so happy to lie in bed. Usually I'm very restless when lying down, and if I'm not asleep, or reading, or making out, I can't remain there. I gotta get up and do something. Yet this weekend, just lying there and doing nothing more than petting the Jinxers was the best thing ever. Jinx certainly agreed; she's happiest when I'm in bed, since she loves to lie there, usually using one of my legs or hips for a backrest. She almost never sleeps in the bed otherwise, but if I'm in there, she's beside me before I know it. Pity that trick doesn't work as well on the IG.
As a result of my illness, Jinx had about the best weekend of her life, since I was in bed for most of it, and was still dragging and napping a lot on Monday. Tuesday I felt a bit better, but still had a cough that felt like a fish bone in my throat, and it wasn't until Wednesday that I felt back to normal. In fact, I had that post-sickness burst of energy and felt great. The best feelings in life are not so much about how good you feel then; they're more about how you were previously. It's easy to feel great after you've been laid low, since you notice the change, even if you just went from "awful" to "non-suicidal." To take your normal state up enough that you really notice it, you generally need a lottery win or a beautiful new boy/girlfriend in your bed, but to feel great after a cold it takes nothing more than the surcease of your hacking. Keep that eventual silver lining in mind next time you're on death's door.
As a result of feeling good (better) and eating too much (I hadn't had much of an appetite since Friday), I had a ton of energy and stayed awake all day Thursday, and then all night too. When I finally got to bed early Thursday morning, I'd been up for nearly a full day, when sleep descended upon me, it wasn't fooling around. I woke up after 6 hours, peed and drank some water, and laid back down to get a bit more sleep. Next thing I knew it was after 5 hours later, I spent a minute in confused, closed-eye calculations, trying to add up the hours and figure out if I'd really slept for 11 straight hours.
Far as I can tell, I did. I've not felt all that rested today despite that head start, but I am not feeling sick, so I guess that was the price I had to pay. It was a bit inconvenient for my work schedule, since last week I was behind on the hours I'm indebted to put in, and planned to catch up on the weekend. Then I got sick and wasn't up to working, so I entered this week about 10 hours in the hole, and got very little done Mon-Wed, what with my busy schedule of coughing, blowing my nose, napping, and informing the purring apostrophe on my bed how like shit I felt. I'd planned to get several hours in Thursday afternoon, reward myself (for working and for remaining alive) with a bike ride, and then getting another 6-8 hours in Thursday evening.
Instead I slept all day, had to run errands since I'd not been shopping in a week, and got distracted catching up on surfing and email when I got home. My reward for that was a nice hour-long chat with the IG, and then dinner, and first thing I knew it was (technically) Friday, and I hadn't done a damn bit of work all day. A state of affairs I quickly set to righting by typing out a typically-overlong and pointless blog post.
In other news, I saw this ad today on one of those ubiquitous funny video sites, and found it funnier than the actual videos I was wasting my life by watching. It's one of those "get laid tonight" ads that are just fronts for porn sites. They have a bunch of photos of hot young girls they found somewhere, random names and ages get applied to them, and by coupling that with a simple ap that customizes them to your area by tracing your IP# to find your location, it's almost like a one click singles site. Except that by clicking them you'll never, ever, meet any of the girls pictured, and greatly lower your odds of meeting any girls at all.
I didn't click it, but I did laugh at the one photo appearing twice, with different ages. You'd think they would put something into their random image/name/age generator to prevent duplicate photos. I doubt anyone actually believes those girls are those ages and available through the service running the ads, but it's a lot easier to pretend if you don't need to believe your date for the evening was cloned. Twice. Or perhaps more times than that, at bi-yearly intervals.
I've long lamented my inability to check off very many literary classics on those "100 books you must read" lists, but rather than simply ignoring the pangs of guilt, I've decided to do something about it. That's what libraries are for, after all. In preparation for this long term wrong reading rectification project, I've been looking at various top 100 classics/modern book lists, and assembling an essential list of books from them. It's all weighty stuff, Brothers Karamazov, War and Piece, In the Name of the Rose, Ulysses, etc. I'll write reviews as I go, so you can either wish me luck or delete this bookmark now, depending on your taste for such literature.
One such list I found worthy of comment was on the Random House site. Their
top 100 novels seem a fairly representative selection, though I'd assume they only list ones they publish in their Classics line. Perhaps some authors or titles are exclusively affiliated with other publishers, and are thusly, unjustly, ignored? It matters little, since there are plenty of other lists to compare and contrast with, and I haven't even looked over the RH one that closely.
What I found interesting there was not their official list, but the one compiled from reader votes. It's an odd selection, with quality classics here and there, but the top of the list dominated by trash by Ann Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. Those two have 7 out of the top 10, and I feel fairly confident in saying you will never find a book by either of them in any top 100 list of books ranked by anyone other than acolytes of the religion-esque ideologies those authors created and promulgated.
The very top of the list of the readers' choices for
100 Best Non-Fiction is similarly blighted, and by the same two "authors." In fact, the top of the non-fiction list is pretty revealing of the mindset of the people who voted. It's not a healthy one either, since their book choices reveal them as gun-nut, anarchist, survivalist, libertarian sorts. Makes me wonder how
The Turner Diaries didn't make the best 100 novels, and if there's an overlap between the non-fiction voters and Scientologists?
It's also odd how the Hubbard and Rand books are only in the top 10, or not at all. Hubbard wrote dozens of trashy sci-fi novels, but he's got #3, #9, and #10, and no others. If there had been some general swell of Scientologist voters, you'd expect a bunch of Hubbard's books to be scattered all up and down the top 100. Instead it's just those 3, and no others, so the voting had to have been very targeted. Some site popular with the Xenuvians must have promoted vote flooding, and picked just 3 of the master's books to flog. They got the job done, though their efforts pale beside the work of the Randroids. Better keep leaping on those couches, Tommy boy.
Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I'm not sure how I'll present my classic reviews. I read a number of so-called literary classics during my recent, breakneck, degree-finishing dash through a university of higher learning, but I didn't take many English classes, and didn't have much time to reflect on the works I read, since I had so many other classes and so much else to read and write about. I didn't exactly read them for pleasure or completeness either; more like 150 pages of Plato here and an act of Shakespeare there, with a paper due on each Monday evening.
When I read some classic novels though, I'll be reading the whole books, and reviewing them... but by what criteria? It seems silly to review Faulker or Hemingway on the same point scale I've used for oh...
Christopher Piolini. And yet... books are books, and it's not fair to hold them to different standards, or to be too forgiving, just because something slow, boring, and overwritten is venerable? I also have some measure of pride in my judgments, and try to limit the idiotic comments in reviews to my abandoned Band Names section, where most of the mistakes are intentional. I'm happy to admit that I can not appreciate or tolerate Anne Rice's floridly cheesy prose and soap opera plots/characters, but will I be able to make the same admission after slogging through 500 pages of something taught in every Great Books seminar course in the Western World? I guess we'll find out.
I'll probably have to do some extra, critical reading along with the books. Classics of world literature aren't known for being easily-digested or discussed. The whole point is that such books are deep and weighty; that's why they've been studied for decades. Reviewing them based on one quick read is almost guaranteed to be a superficial exercise. Furthermore, the anointed classics haven't become classics because they're fun reads, or full of suspenseful twisting plots. Books become classics because they make brilliant societal analysis via metaphor, or express deeper truths about the human condition. That sort of thing is invaluable, and can be uplifting and enlightening, but it doesn't fit neatly into my starkly-delineating review categories.
So yeah, reviewing them will be a challenge. I'm almost more eager to write the reviews than I am to read the books, now.
Labels: medical, misc, writing
Friday, July 27, 2007
Furry Grim Reaper
I've seen a lot of recent mentions of the
angel of death feline from a Rhode Island nursing home, and couldn't resist posting about it myself. A quote should sum things up nicely.
Like any feline, Oscar gives a hefty portion of his day to sleep. He likes to doze on stacks of patient reports. Or on the desk at the nurses' station. Or in the linen closet.
When awake, however, the mixed-breed cat shows a solemn dedication to duty, making regular "inspection" rounds of the unit, sauntering in and out of patient rooms -- as if checking on the condition of the occupants.
When death is near, Oscar nearly always appears at the last hour or so. Yet he shows no special interest in patients who are simply in poor shape, or even patients who may be dying but who still have a few days. Authorities in animal behaviour have no explanation for Oscar's ability to sense imminent death. They theorise that he might detect some subtle change in metabolism -- felines are as acutely sensitive to smells as dogs -- but are stumped as to why he would show interest.
In any event, when Oscar settles on a patient's bed, caregivers take it as a sign that family members should be summoned immediately.
"We've come to recognise him hopping on the bed as one indicator the end is very near," said Mary Miranda, charge nurse on the surprisingly cheery floor that is home to 41 patients in the final stages of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, a stroke, and other mentally debilitating diseases. "Oscar's been consistently right."
The cat's been written up in an article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, and while none of the media coverage touches on it, I hope there are some actual stats and figures in the journal article. Total patients who died, Oscar's attendance %, false positives, etc.
Another issue is the established medical fact
that cats have an
affinity for the human soul. They're notorious for asphyxiating babies, (and who can blame them?) but I've long believed that's largely related to opportunity. Healthy adults can fight off the worming tentacles of a cat's nocturnal predations, but babies are weak and easy prey. The sensation is kind of enjoyable for adults, really. I've awakened many a time to find Jinx and/or Dusty crouching upon me, their sickle pupils gleaming in the ethereal light shed by the soul dust they are eagerly lapping up. It tickles and makes me dream in watercolors.
Oscar here is no maternity ward cat; he's stuck with old people, but that's not entirely unlucky, since the dying old people provide a lovely crop of defenseless, senile delicacies. Granted, their withered souls are leathery and taste faintly of camphor and other astringents, but perhaps Oscar has learned to like it? Besides, no human can ever hope to fully understand the vagaries of the feline palate.
Labels: cats, death, medical
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Video Games Improve Eye Sight
Some news you'll probably read about on every tech and gaming site on Earth over the next few days (if you haven't already), there's
good news for gamers:
A study by the University of Rochester showed that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved their vision by about 20 percent.
"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, said in the study published on the university's Web site, www.rochester.edu, on Tuesday.
"These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."
It's not all good news though, when you get to the details.
Bavelier and a graduate student tested college students who had played very few, if any, video games in the last year.
Test subjects were given an eye test similar to the one used at regular eye clinics and then divided into two groups -- one played shoot-em-up action games for an hour a day while the control group played a less visually complex game.
Their vision was tested after the study, with those who played the action game scoring better in the eye test.
So it's only intense action games, ones that obviously require your eyes to move a lot and refocus and such, and it's only confirmed to help if you don't play a lot of games already. I don't now, though I hope to if the HGL beta ever gets going, but it's not clear if people who have played such games for most of their lives get any continuing or ongoing benefit, or if 8 hours a day burns your retina out, etc. More study would be nice. How does this compare to a real life activity that requires the same kind of eye motion? Playing ping pong or skeet shooting, for instance?
I've long wondered about my eyes, and their continued function. I'm 29 (again) and still have good vision. It's not as sharp as it once was, and I haven't been offically tested in many years, but I'm still 20/20 or better, judging by the eye charts I see on the wall at Costco or when I drive Malaya to her optometrist. Eyes aren't all genetic, but both my parents needed heavy prescriptions before their teens, so I've clearly beaten that curve. Is it (partially) thanks to the hours of video games I played virtually every day as a child and teen? Could the slight blurring of small print at a distance I've been noticing over the last few years be reversed if I started playing a theraputic hour a day of a game both fast-moving and action-packed?
I guess I have no choice... doctor's orders.
Labels: gaming, medical
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Wednesday Night.
No, I couldn't think of anything catchy for a post title.
So, scuba back. It fades, eventually, but damn it lingers like dog farts. I'm still a bit sore from nearly 10 days ago, and as recently as last night I was hobbled by the soreness. Initially I had a huge knot on my left side, right between the shoulder blade and my spine. Hurt when I breathed, even. Malaya had one in just about the same place on her right side, and her neck was super tight too. We traded more massage the week after scuba than we had all year, and finally the aches began to subside.
As my sore spot began to fade up high though, I got a new one on the lower right, just about over my lowest rib. You know, the one God removed to make woman. Anyway, that was really bothering me for the past few days, to the point that I had to take a really hot shower and stretch a lot just to get out of bed. It loosened up during the day; I've been going to the gym every day and doing Kali and such, but it was sort of a constant ache, and I couldn't bend over; I had to tie my shoes standing, with one foot up on a chair or something.
It was really bad yesterday, for unknown reasons, and after about an hour of Kali class I was really hurting. Kept having to stop and bend over to loosen up, and finally I just sort of sat down and stretched for the last 15 minutes of class, since it was hurting too much to keep standing and doing the stick fighting we were working on. Happily, that might have overstressed and stretched it enough that it got better, since I woke up Wednesday and felt the best I have since last Friday, before the scuba weekend.
In other news, Malaya got a new camera and has been happily snapping away. Hers is an SLR model, Single Lens Reflex, and it's one of the better digital types, in that you can control the focal length yourself if you like, and you can make it take a damn picture as soon as you hit the button. That's what drives most people insane about digital cameras (mine included), when you've got a good shot and click it... and the camera thinks things over for 5 seconds before taking the photo, by which time whatever you were aiming at is long gone. She's even taking a photo class at the local community center, and hoping to learn about film speeds and apature settings and all that other technical stuff that real photographers know about and that most digital cameras now automate so the vast unwashed horde can take pictures that are actually in focus.
At any rate, I'll likely be posting more photos of our uninspiring pets and condo in the immediate future, and I'm sure the difference in image quality will be almost noticeable, in my inexpert hands. I doubt anyone has noticed, but I've not posted any photos on here in forever. I hadn't really noticed, until I tried to offload some from my camera today, and couldn't put them in the main photos folder (since there were others with the same automatically-generated "P1010001.JPG" name already there). So I went to put them in the emergency backup folder... and it was full too. I had to create a 3rd level temporary folder just to get to the photo of my driver's license I had to send to Rush so he could send it to the E3 press people so I could get a media pass for this year's show, and wouldn't you know it; there were 18 more pointless feline/redwood stump photos already on the camera, from god knows when. And now they're on my computer, just as unsorted and willfully forgotten as their predecessors. Let's overlook the fact that Malaya's new camera is currently holding about 200 more just like them.
Firefly! Malaya and I both really enjoyed Serenity, both on the big screen and then again a couple of weeks ago when we bought the DVD (3 for $25 at Blockbuster, you know). So she up and bought crap! (I got 5%.) and now we've got the DVD box set of the original TV series, seen by several hundred fans during its initial airing on UPN. Or possibly FOX. And don't act like you know; you'd never heard of it until the movie came out either, or if you had it was entirely through the magic of illicit file sharing.
Anyway, we watched first first 100 minute episode, and I've gotta admit that it was damn good. Just like the movie in tone and look, and while having seen the film too some of the surprises out of the series (we know all the crew is going to survive for a few years, at least), it was fun to see how the characters were introduced, and how they interacted in less-stressful situations than they faced in the more action-packed film. I also much preferred the movie version of how the doc stole his sister away from the evil military dudes, and I liked her character in the film better; she was just completely cringing and sleeping and useless in the first episode of the TV show. She was that way at the start of the movie too, but there were nice hints that she was more than just a wispy victim psychic, and of course the hints became reality quite soon in the film.
I've got no idea if she'll become the same sort of unbalanced psycho weapon in the TV series, but I'm certainly hoping so, since that was the best thing about the film. Logically she shouldn't, since they had no inkling of her combat prowess in the film until she freaked out, and the film is chronologically after the TV series. However, the movie wasn't just a condensed season two of the show; it rewrote and tweaked the original events to suit a new purpose, such as changing how the doc rescued his sister in the first place, so it's entirely possible that she starts to come unglued in the series long before she did in the film, chronologically speaking.
And if you've seen the series already and know the answer to this question, please keep it to yourself.
Speaking of reviews, as I was looking over the chop socky one I posted tonight, I found myself thinking about Charlie's Angels 2. I watched it this week (literally, in about 4 blocks of 20 minutes each, since that's as much as I could take of it at one time and that's how long I needed visual entertainment while eating breakfast or lunch), thanks to the free library-based DVD rental, and while it wasn't any good, ir wasn't awful. I didn't expect to watch it, after all, I
concluded my coverage of the first film by saying I wouldn't see the second one because, "that's still 90 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back." I was wrong about that, though. It was more like 100 minutes.
On the chop socky angle though, how was CA2 really any better? Compared to a good chop socky film, CA2 had better visuals and music, equivalent acting, and worse figght scenes. I'd even give the edge in plot quality to most chop socky films, since at least things more or less make sense in those old kung fu theater efforts. CA2 feels like a movie made by an ADD 8y/o boy on a six pack of Red Bull. Every scene is in a totally different place, the actresses are always in different costumes, and the scenes have only the slightest connection to each other or to the movie as a whole.
Even with that said, I think CA2 was better than the first one. Perhaps I'm just misremembering it, since I watched and reviewed the first one nearly 2 years ago, but this one seemed a little more grounded in physical reality. Every fight scene didn't feature triple spinning flips and video game style fatality moves (none of which actually injured anyone), and while the efforts at comedy and drama fell pancake-flat, at least they were quickly dispensed with.
Like CA1, CA2 wasn't so much a movie as a long series of music video vignettes, and while I'm glad that style of not-really-a-movie didn't catch on, it was sort of interesting to see as a learning experience. I didn't keep count, but there had to be 40 or 50 different sets in the film, many of which were onscreen for no more than half a minute. I have never seen so much work by a movie crew for so little return. Several times the varous Angels had flashbacks to their earlier lives, and each time the full sequence would run hardly long enough to blink, yet you could see they had built entire gynastic competition sets, rented arenas to stage wrestling matches in, etc. They probably did as much work on all of those mini-movies as most films do on 30 minute sequences, and there was a new one onscreen every 2 or 3 minutes. I have no idea what CA2 cost, but damn they had to spend a lot of money and time setting all those sketches up, for so minimal a reward.
I'll write a review of the film in the next few days, though I suspect my scores won't be much different than the ones I gave the first movie.
Lastly, if you ever get a free sample of flonase, a nasal spray/decongestant, I recommend that you toss it out and resign yourself to continuing to sniffle. Malaya got a sample bottle of the stuff at the doctor's the other day, when she went in to get her swimmer's ear checked out, and while she hasn't had any cause to use it, I have. I don't know why, but I woke up Monday morning with a leaky faucet, and could not get rid of it. I hate to take chemicals/medicines of any type, but when my dripping stopped at the gym, then started up again once I returned home and showered off, my resistance began to weaken. I'd been awake like 6 hours, and the sides of my nose were already going red and raw from all the sniffing and blowing and wiping. So I tried the stuff.
It's prescription medicine, and I'd never sprayed anything up my nose before, so I followed the directions. Not that they were complicated; I just had to squirt the bottle a few times to prime the pump, blow my nose, and then give each side a couple of squirts, while inhaling steadily. There was one benefit; the stuff smelled good. Very synthetic flower, but not displeasing. Unfortunately, it didn't work to stop my nose running and it gave me a splitting headache.
Maybe five minutes after I took it I started to feel like someone had bolted a clamp onto the top of my nose, like up between my eyes, almost. It got tighter and tighter, and while my nose kept dripping it also began to itch. The sinus passages were swelling and shutting, and when I blew my nose it felt like squeezing a packet of relish through a pinhole. Felt about that good too, not that your average packet of sandwich condiments possesses a central nervous system.
An hour after taking the nasal spray I was sailing. Light-headed, congested but still drippy, and woozy; I had to brace myself against the walls to walk down the hall. Thankfully it began to wear off around that point, and after about four hours the headache was pretty much gone, though my nose was back to dripping as it had that morning. I almost welcomed it though, after the stoned feeling the drug had given me. Ironically, it wasn't until a couple of hours later that I realized my nose was no longer running, and by the time I went to bed I felt fine and pretty much normal. So maybe the stuff did work; it just needed eight hours to sink in, and it came at the price of making me feel like shit for the first four? Better than nothing, but I don't think that's quite the claim they'll be including in their promotional literature.
Labels: firefly, fitness, medical, photography, scuba
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