With a hat tip to Julie :)

And to think: when Jake asked where babies come from — at age 5 or 6, mind you — I just told him. He said, “Oh,” and we were quite done with the topic. Ms. Sweeney would have done well to take such a direct approach.

D.

No Country for Old Liberals

As many have pointed out, Ronald Reagan, patron saint of today’s Republican party, would be too liberal to survive in the current political climate. America seems to be swinging far to the right, even in the midst of a Democratic administration. If you’ll grant me that each Republican administration’s excesses have been greater than the ones preceding it, what will the next one bring?

We toyed with the idea of moving to Canada during the dark, dark Bush years. Now, well into Obama’s first term, we still have Guantanamo, rendition, and two (soon to be three) wars in the Middle East. But I suspect we’ll stick it out here, at least until it comes time for me to retire. My current job is just too great to consider making the change.

My son, on the other hand — now, there’s a different story. His whole life is ahead of him. So here’s the question: if you were a teenager and could do anything or go anywhere, what would you do?

We were trying to think of what sort of career (A) paid well and (B) provided the individual with a great deal of mobility. The best I could come up with was international law. Or Jake could become CEO of a multinational corporation, but I think I may be guilty of a little over-reach on that one. Medicine provides a certain amount of mobility, too, but he doesn’t have any obvious interest in medicine. (But you never know. Children of doctors tend to stay in the biz.)

What do you think?

D.

Puddinhead

I hate Daylight Savings Time, hate it with a deep and abiding nasty dagger-tossing loathing hate. As many times as I read the explanations for why it was created or why it continues to be a good thing, to me it feels like a really, really bad thing. It ain’t natural. Meaning, it jacks up my biorhythms and I feel like crap all day for several days after that awful “Spring ahead.” And the “Fall behind” bit doesn’t feel too good, either. And so my brain feels mushier than usual for a few days until I somehow get used to the new thing, and I yawn a lot during the daytime, and I feel cheated, like being stuck with the jet lag without a vacation to show for it.

D.

Back home

We’ve been gone nearly three years, but it’s still hard not to think of Crescent City and Brookings as home. With the recent tsunami, both harbors took heavy damage. This is especially devastating for Crescent City, a town with few remaining industries — logging, fishing, and a maximum security prison. That’s about it. And now the fishing industry has just taken a nasty, nasty hit.

From NBC Bay Area:

View more videos at: http://www.nbcbayarea.com.

Is it too much to ask for Federal disaster funds, I wonder?

D.

More fun with Gimp.

From one of our trips to Seattle . . .

The force is strong with this one!

D.

Not your parents’ Camelot

The cable channel Encore did a bright thing: they followed the season ender of their blockbuster Spartacus (all sex and violence all the time, with very little plot to clutter our heads!) with the first episode of Camelot, the latest reworking of Arthurian legend.

We decided to give it a chance, especially when Eva Green showed up right from the get-go.

She plays Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister, and in that riveting opening sequence she is the prodigal daughter come home to castle to show daddy (Uther Pendragon) that she has learned a thing or two at the nunnery. Soon daddy is dead at her hand, she’s installed in the castle and shagging daddy’s top nemesis, King Lot (James Purefoy, last seen — by me, anyway — as Rome’s Marc Antony). It’s a good shagging.

Then Arthur shows up looking like, I don’t know, the newest teen heartthrob grabbed at random from Teen Heartthrob Camp, redeemed only by his association with a blonde with an awesome body, but she soon disappears and we’re left with the simpering Arthur. Who we’re supposed to believe is born to be king, has king written all over him, is already dreaming of the Lady in the Lake, yatta yatta yatta, and we’re already wishing for John Cleese et al. to deliver us, but it’s not to be. Thankfully, Eva Green keeps showing up at regular intervals.

Joseph Fiennes (Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love) plays a credible Merlin, who somehow uses his Merlinosity to convince Arthur to follow his lead back to an ivy-infested Camelot. And that’s when things really go to hell, because an agent of Merlin’s has announced Arthur’s heirdom to Morgan and King Lot, who promptly arrive in force at Camelot (as invited) and proceed to not kill Arthur and Merlin and their paltry forces.

That’s when Karen and I start yelling at the TV, because it really really sucks when the only watchable character in the show proves NOT to be as smart as you had hoped she would be. And now everyone is dumb, everyone who isn’t Merlin, and Merlin mostly just thinks he’s brilliant, when really he’s reduxing Wes Studi’s character The Sphinx from Mystery Men.

And I must say, Wes Studi does a much better job of it.

Will we watch more of this shlock? I’m guessing yes.

D.

Not that you asked, but . . .

My master plan to turn myself into a web comic mogul (AKA Midlife Crisis v2.0) proceeds apace. First thing I did was find a way to pick up Manga Studios Debut 4.0 for free. This is a relatively inexpensive (especially if you get it FREE) program optimized for black and white comics, but also color compatible. But the Debut package is pretty limited graphics-wise; gradients, for example, are severely restricted. So I downloaded GIMP 2.6, a powerful (and FREE) graphics manipulation/creation program which works on my Vista computer, unlike my old friend Paint Shop Pro, which crashed me big time.

Thus far total expenditure about forty dollars to Cafe Press for a birthday present to Karen (that’s how I got Manga Studios Debut for free). To establish a basic vocabulary, I went back to Scott McCloud‘s excellent Understanding Comics, a book I’ve owned for years but have never read cover to cover. Oh, it’s good. I also popped for an Idiot’s Guide to Manga Studios for Dummies, or some such, and DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. These have not yet arrived.

But it’s not a true midlife crisis until you’ve spent a bit of money, and I must interrupt myself by saying that my midlife crises are far cheaper than the average male’s midlife crises, which typically involve Harley Davidsons and Porsche Targas and seven-figure divorce settlements. Nope, none of that for me. Not even the Porsche. So I didn’t feel too bad dropping a couple hundred on the Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet. And I am proud to report that all of my programs are talking to one another, I haven’t crashed my computer, and I’m dutifully working through all the online manuals, and soon I will be producing ART! Or at least comics.

Okay, I’m off to buy a few tarantulas for Karen’s birthday! (Online, that is.)

D.

The latest catch phrase

In the past, I’ve bemoaned the fact that administrators have their own argot, an English made blithering by its narrow vocabulary and restrictive metaphors. Last decade’s catch phrase was drilling down, an Oedipal image that could mean “analyze the data,” “study the problem,” “talk to the relevant parties to find out what the hell happened,” and probably half a dozen other concepts. In a phenomenon well known to anyone familiar with corporate board meetings, The Boss would use “drilling down” in a sentence, and then everyone else in the room would have to drill down on something or another. It got tedious.

Today, I found out this decade’s catch phrase. I was down in Pasadena for our big chief’s meeting and our regional business meeting, quite literally an all-day affair involving lots of talking, some not-very-good food, and a medley of egos. (To be fair, the egos were calm today. The bull elephants saw no need to slam chests.) And in the midst of this, everyone was leveraging.

Leveraging, I gather, can mean “use our collective might to force the powers that be to do our will,” “use our numbers and organizational status to do some pretty awesome research,” or “cajole, wheedle, and bully.” Our regional chief said “leveraging” and suddenly all the chiefs had to “leverage” something. God forbid any chief’s car got a flat and he had to leverage his car to put on the spare. He would have been tossed out of the meeting for the sin of literalism.

Leverage this.

That said, it was a productive meeting. Minimum of bullshit, a good solid working meeting, which is what we surgeons are good at when we’re at our best. I learned a few things, which is always nice. And I got to have dinner with my sis tonight, which is nice, too.

By the way, I am about 3/5 of the way through Mieville’s Kraken, and I have to say that this is the book American Gods wanted to be, and then some. Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I think not. (More like, I’m comparing British fantasist with British fantasist.) Kraken is consistently funny, innovative, exciting, engaging. So good, in fact, that I’m starting to think that just maybe I should give Mieville’s earlier work a second chance.

D.

Sundry, various

Was listening to public radio a short time after noon, and they were talking about a “Nun Study,” wherein a number of nuns aged 75 and up received cognitive tests annually until their deaths. At death, they each donated a portion of their brain to the study. The most interesting facet of this work arrived fortuitously, in that the researchers happened upon the entrance essays these nuns had written as teenagers. When they analyzed the essays for “idea density” and other aspects of linguistic complexity, they found a striking correlation between the simpler essays and later development of dementia. It’s almost as if brains, like livers, lungs, or just about any other organ, have reserve. “Reserve” refers to the excess function of an organ, more than is needed for survival. Redundancy. With regard to brains, perhaps that excess reserve varies directly with intelligence, such that folks with lower reserve have a shorter ways to drop before they’re driving around the block six times looking for their garage.

This was part of a larger story, one that dealt also with Agatha Christie, who was never diagnosed with dementia, but whose biographers had suspected as much. Apparently, one of her last novels (Elephants Can Remember) has been shown to have a significantly restricted vocabulary relative to her earlier novels, as well as more repeated phrases and the use of more indefinite pronouns. The authors of this particular study used this data to suggest that Christie was suffering from Alzheimer’s in her later years.

What worries me is that I fear my blog posts have become similarly restricted. My edge just isn’t there. How I long for the days when my muse provided me with great ideas like camel toe show-downs! When I could actually write a Thursday Thirteen and not have to strain for the last seven or eight items! More to the point, in my first paragraph above, I used the word “fortuitously” out of desperation. “Serendipitously” was the word I wanted, yet it took me 14 minutes to remember it.

The crud is leaving. The crud is not gone, but the crud is lingering on the porch, not quite getting the hint that he has overstayed his welcome. Ooh, bad metaphor: rather, the crud is like the door-to-door missionary who’s got his foot wedged in the jamb. The headache is gone, thankfully, and my coughs are few, far between, and less chesty. I can breathe through my nose, and it’s a nose and not a nobe. All in all, a fast virus, for which I’m grateful. And since Karen’s got it now too, hopefully hers will exit just as speedily.

I dreamed we were moving back to LA, and the only two places I would live were Pasadena or Monterey Park. In the waking world, you can restrict that to Pasadena (although certain areas of LA and Hollywood are cool enough to pass muster). Not sure why the subconscious had to include Monterey Park — the suppressed desire to be walking distance from midnight dim sum, perhaps? But in the dream, I walked the hilly streets of Monterey Park. It was a Sunday and every last family was out on their front lawn, barbecuing, yakking it up with their neighbors. Like a great big Hong Kong flea market, it was, and I have to say that if it were like that in real life, Monterey Park would be the place to live.

But no one does front yard barbecue/block parties anymore, at least not in any neighborhood I’ve occupied. I wonder if there are such areas, or if there ever were.

Am reading China Mieville’s Kraken and thoroughly enjoying it. Refreshing that the worshipers of the Old Ones are apparently the good guys — but then, you should expect that from me. I’m the guy with the “Cthulhu is My Co-Pilot” bumper sticker.

D.