Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Thirteen Candles
Thirteen fvckvps
Can I possibly think of thirteen horrendous errors? Sure — provided they’re not all my fvckvps. Take, for example, the opiate-addicted anesthesiologist who injected himself with sufentanyl rather than fentanyl, forgetting the tenfold higher potency of the former. It was the last dosage error he ever made.
If I get stumped, I could steal stuff from the Darwin Awards website. For example, I could pretend I once crawled into a huge helium-filled advertising balloon like this duo.
Their last words consisted of high-pitched, incoherent giggling as they slowly passed out and passed into the hereafter.
. . . But I’ll try to stick to fvckvps drawn from my personal experience. Follow me below the fold.
The Thanksgiving Thirteen
My sis suggested I do a Thanksgiving-themed Thirteen: Thirteen Ways to Mitigate the Suckitude of Thanksgiving. (My spin. I love the combination of ‘mitigate’ and ‘suckitude’ in one sentence.) I like the idea, but I’m going to up the ante.
Thirteen Paths to a Memorable Thanksgiving: a feast which will have your family and guests talking for decades to come.
Yes, it’s not quite Thursday, but some of these suggestions require a modicum of preparation. Get shopping, people.
In the spirit of Graham Greene’s Dr. Fischer of Geneva, follow me below the fold . . .
Thirteen Things I’d Like to Do in the Kitchen with Rachael Ray
Even now, she shines on me from the back of my box of Original Family Size! Wheat Thins, beckoning me with her girl-next-door smile — tomato-red lips, perfect, white teeth — daring me to join her in some Spinach, Garlic, and Vegetable Dip. Dunk your cracker, Walnut. I’ll lick it clean, and then we’ll nibble it together, just like those two mutts in 101 Dalmatians.
Oh, Rachael, how can I resist?
Games to Play
1. Let’s begin with an old favorite — hide the salami — which has certain flavor advantages over Conceal the Carrot or Carry the Cucumber. Rachael, in case you are fastidious about such things, let me reassure you: mine’s kosher.
2. Stuff the Manicotti. I prefer a creamy mixture of ricotta, parmesan, and assorted spices (salt, pepper, and nutmeg at the very least). I hope Rachael won’t mind bringing along an egg or two.
3. Knead the baguette. With proper technique, it can rise to four or five times its initial volume!
Hold that thought.
Cleanup Projects
4. Scrub out the oven. I prefer to do this work by hand; there’s no substitute for elbow grease. And you know, a properly cleaned oven? You should be able to eat off of it.
5. Revamp the freezer. Wonder what we can do with all those old ice cubes?
6. Varnish the back door. Other chefs would ignore your back door, Rachael, but not me. I’ll lavish so much attention on it, you’ll be able to see your face in it afterwards.
Main Courses
7. Snapper. Some guys might like those Cajun “blackened” recipes, but I prefer my fish raw.
8. Taco salad. I prefer the meat warm and tender, the lettuce finely shaved. Drizzle it with a bit of oil and vinegar and you’re ready to go.
9. Rachael needs beef. But what kind of beef? We’ve already hidden the salami; bologna is too darned similar, and besides, it’s a rather flaccid lunchmeat, don’t you think? Hmm. Tube steak? Too crude. Sausage? NO. We’re not making breakfast. Hot dogs? Maybe. But not just any hot dogs. Rachael deserves the best.
Rachel deserves Top Dog.
Palate cleanser
10. Ginger. After stuffing yourself silly (with food, you filthy swine), how do you wake up the palate? How do you make your mouth crackle with excitement and beg for more? Here’s what you do:
Peel a finger of ginger, as long and fat a finger as you can find. That stuff you read about soaking it in cold water? As O’Brien would say, eff that. Cold water is for wussies. Now insert that bad boy into the jaded, much abused orifice, and let it set there a spell, working its magic. About half an hour should suffice. Now let your partner run his tongue inside to get a good belt of spice.
Ginger is so refreshing.
Desserts
11. Whipped cream makes everything taste better. Everything.
12. Banana splits. But I’m out of bananas! What to do, what to do . . .
13. Creme brulee. Sorry, no double entendres; I just love creme brulee. Especially when consumed by the tablespoonful, as body shots off key anatomic areas. Got the picture?
Shaina (o blogless one!) probably regrets knowing me
SxKitten gives us 13 reasons to have sex. Like I needed more than one?
Pat’s 13 Basslines are still up for all to see
Suisan wants someone to hit her over the head. Really!
In a fit of pique (are there any other kinds of piques?) Kate saws off her wedding ring
D.
Thirteen abused drugs
My my my I’ve been quiet this week. Comes from spending all my time at Daily Kos.
It’s been a while since I did a medical thirteen. As always, going into this I wonder: can I think up thirteen interesting drugs? Sure I can. People put all kinds of narsty sheeit into their bodies.
1. Thyroid hormone. What can be wrong with increasing the rate with which you burn fat and carbs? Thyroid hormone would seem to be an ideal diet drug. Hey — it’s natural! Shame about the risk of dying.
This is an axolotl. Axolotls have something interesting in common with humans: we’re both products of neoteny, i.e., arrested development. We humans are baby chimps — hairless (some of us) and big-headed (some more than others), while axolotls are salamanders who haven’t made it through metamorphosis. But if you add thyroid hormone to an axolotl’s water, he’ll complete metamorphosis and turn into an adult form that has no business walking the earth.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a similar drug for humans, one which will allow us to complete our metamorphosis and become Neanderthals once again.
2. Banana peels, AKA Mellow Yellow, AKA bananadine: conclusive proof that kids will smoke or swallow anything. No, I never tried this, although I did eat some dried button mushrooms thinking I was eating shrooms. I guess they really were shrooms, too, of a sort. Anyway, Mellow Yellow is an urban legend. Wikipedia has the full scoop.
3. Pemoline. I love the trade name: Cylert. Makes my heart race just to hear it. Pemoline was used by British pilots during WWII to stay awake, and nowadays, folks sometimes still use it for ADD, narcolepsy, or fatigue syndromes. Case reports of liver damage serve as abuser buzz-kills, so watch out.
4. Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, has a long and fascinating connection with the history of religion. Here are some good bits from the Wikipedia article:
“Amanita muscaria is widely thought to be the Soma talked about in Rig Veda of India,[15] and is less often also thought to be the amrita talked about in Buddhist scriptures.[18]
“John Marco Allegro argues in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that the Christian religion is derived from a sex and psychedelic mushroom cult.[19]
“Ethnobotanist and ethnomycologist Giorgio Samorini suggests in his book “Animals and Psychedelics” a symbiotic relationship between toads, flies and fly agaric. Flies, after a lick of Amanita Muscaria become inebriated and delirious prey for hungry toads that may have learned this, therefore hanging out around toadstools.”
Dig the frog!
5. Nasal decongestant sprays like Afrin or Neosynephrine have addiction potential. How does your nose get hooked on sprays? If you use it for too many days in a row, you develop rebound swelling after the initial decongestion. This causes congestion, which prompts some people to use more of the spray. I’ve had patients who go through a bottle a day.
Here’s your public service message for the day: read the damned label and follow directions.
6. THC, the active ingredient of marijuana, for those of you who like the effects but hate the smoke (and are too lazy to bake brownies). Doctors prescribe THC for its painkilling and nausea-suppressing properties. Does anyone abuse this stuff? Hard to believe. All I know is, THC turned my sober Vulcan wife into a giggling Valley girl. I was very disturbed.
My favorite marijuana story (stop me if I’ve told this one):
In med school, I had a patient with Peutz-Jeghers syndrome who chainsmoked joints and was convinced the freckles on her lips were all throughout her GI tract and were showing up on her stools, too. She used to bring in a photo album of her stools to prove it to her doctors.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m just the med student. But thanks for sharing.”
7. Poppers. They sound fun, don’t they?
“Hey, Bob, what’s that you’re using?”
“Poppers, Dick.”
“Poppers? Can I have some, too?”
Amyl nitrite and related nitrites relax smooth muscle, thus making anal or vaginal penetration easier, and may decrease the gag reflex, too. The blood pressure drop can enhance the euphoria of orgasm.
8. Ying Yang Huo, another fun one, AKA horny goat weed. According to this questionable-looking site, horny goat weed contains an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor (like ant poison — sounds good so far!) Somehow, that’s supposed to prolong erections. Hmm.
By the way, while we’re on the topic of goat sex: if someone gives you a link that looks like “goatse.cx”, don’t click on it.
9. Diuretics. Diuretic abuse? You’re kidding me, right? No, apparently some folks with eating disorders use diuretics to peel off a few extra pounds.
I’ve heard of body builders doing this before a competition, and of course there’s a long history of diuretic abuse in horse racing (ever hear the expression, “he peed like a racehorse”?) But anorexics? Yikes.
10. Nutmeg. Another weird hallucinogen. Nutmeg derives its properties from Myristicin A, which “causes symptoms similar to atropine poisoning: flushing of skin, tachycardia, absence of salivation, and excitation of the central nervous system.” And if that’s not enough to get you interested, how about this firsthand account?
At first she felt no effect, but after four hours she felt cold and shivery. Six to eight hours later she was vomiting severely. She saw faces and the room appeared distorted, with flashing lights and loud music. She felt a different person and everything seemed unreal. Time appeared to stand still. She felt vibrations and twitches in her limbs. When she shut her eyes she saw lights, black creatures, red eyes and felt sucked into the ground.
Sounds like a blast! Not.
11. Morning Glory seeds. In case you haven’t guessed yet, hallucinogens fascinate me. Morning Glory seeds contain lysergic acid amides, thus making them about the closest thing in nature to LSD. According to this source, you would have to ingest 100 to 300 seeds to get the equivalent high of 200 to 300 micrograms of LSD. But don’t do it with store-bought seeds, since these are covered with poison to discourage abuse!
That really tickles me for some reason. What’s the message here, if not, We’re so anxious about you abusing this drug, we would rather kill you instead?
12. L’Absinthe. No, this wormwood liquour does not cause hallucinations nor madness, even if you are a Parisian poet or artist. But isn’t it pretty to think so?
13. Viagra, sometimes combined with Ecstasy (MDMA) to form Sextasy (no, I’m not making this up) is now so commonly abused that Viagra addicts have their own AA. Signs of viagraholism include Viagra-seeking behavior and escalating Viagra use. But more fascinating still is alprostadil abuse. Alprostadil is shoved into the urethra or injected directly into the corpora cavernosa. The incidence of penile fibrosis (Peyronie’s disease) with repeated use is around 8%, priapism (often requiring needle aspiration of trapped blood) around 4%. Proving, I think, that some guys will do anything for a boner.
Leave a rude comment and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Darla’s CFS is kicking her butt. Go give her some love.
Miranda: yet another Canadian visits my blog
SxKitten dreams of Christopher Walken with his clothes on (I think)
Noxcat puts the blame where it belongs
Dean gets all historical on us (with a grin)
Protected Static has teh good taste in tunes 😉
D.
Thirteen things I learned from Cosmo, part quatre
I’m in San Francisco today, sitting through lots of boring lectures about hospital administration or something. I don’t know. I guess I’ll know on Thursday. In any case, I’ve promised you a Cosmo Thirteen, and who am I to disappoint my readers? Here ya go, folks, thanks to the magic of pre-scheduled posting! But I won’t be commenting until late tomorrow evening. (That also means I won’t be able to give you any linky lurve. Sorry!)
The November 2006 issue of Cosmo decorates our supermarket shelves, and you know what that means: time for me to learn a few things about men, women, and the war between the sexes.
1. Paris Hilton has a new “fragrance” — Heiress — and it doesn’t smell like the hindquarters of a cat in heat!
But, you know, I’m just assuming here. They don’t call this stuff eau de toilette for nothin’.
Elsewhere on the odor front: not to be outdone by La Hilton, Britney Spears has her own fragrance — Curious. As in, What’s that smell, dear? Well . . . isn’t that curious.
2. This woman is clueless:
“I had plans to meet up with a guy I had just started seeing and went to a bar with girlfriends beforehand. We shared a seared tuna appetizer and drinks. Later, I headed to the guy’s house. I was a little tipsy, and as soon as he opened the door, I jumped his bones. I wasn’t planning on spending the night because we weren’t sleeping together yet, but we were both so exhausted, we just cuddled and fell asleep. A few hours later, I woke up feeling sick and couldn’t make it to the bathroom, so I vomited in his hamper. When I tried to crawl back in bed, he made an excuse about having to work early and offered to drive me home. I never heard from him again.”
This gal thinks her crime was throwing up in the hamper. My take is, this guy got the willies because he thinks she has a drinking problem. She concludes:
“The next day, my friends said they’d all been sick too. I guess it was the tuna.”
You go on telling yourself that, darling.
Eleven more below the cut!
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Thirteen incriminating statements
One of the problems with being shameless is that I have no chance whatsoever of (successfully) running for political office. My opponent would skewer me with my own words — as, for example, when I said yesterday, “I am no longer a sexual predator.” (So, Dr. Hoffman, when did you stop being a sexual predator?)
But I feel bad for my future opponent’s research team. I mean, on this blog I’ve written so much, it will take them days to dig up the necessary dirt. In kindness to them, I have assembled the following thirteen incriminating and/or embarrassing items (that ‘sexual predator’ one? That’s a freebie).
Hmm. Just thought of something.
Jake, you reading this? Stop.
Now we can get started.
Thirteen books
Launching into this, I have no idea whether I have thirteen books in me. If I come up short, y’all are going to have to suggest a few.
Here goes nothing.
Thirteen things I learned from Cosmo, Part Trois
Balls and Walnuts reads Cosmo so you don’t have to. In this issue:
- How not to get raped by that special guy!
- The secret to gorgeous skin!
- WTF is wrong with 68% of men?!
- Couple fights from hell: get a life, people — I outdid all of these in my first year of marriage!
And much more . . . below the cut.