Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: April 2011
To some degree, where it all started
Karen trashing Jon Scalzi’s first novel drove a great deal of traffic to my site — something like 1000 hits per day for a while? I don’t remember precisely. But it was hit and run stuff that generated no enduring readers.
What really got me rolling was another Karen-inspired blog, this one about tarantula sex. Somehow the Smart Bitches got wind of it, gave me a shout out, and that’s how many of my long-time readers found me.
You know the saddest thing about this story? Karen has never had a successful mating. Intercourse (such as it is) but no conception. No pitter patter of several hundred hairy legs. But it wasn’t for want of trying.
From 2005, hot tarantula sex . . . below the fold.
Sad blogiversary
Tomorrow, April 11, Balls and Walnuts turns six. I’ve stuck with this longer than many of my blogging friends, for what that’s worth; that blog roll on the left is full of sites that haven’t been updated in over a year. I miss them. Jona was one of my first readers. Ishbadiddle was great at finding off-beat stories. Invisible Lizard (who writes great movie reviews) posts infrequently. On the upside, I had somehow convinced myself that Jim Donahue had closed up shop, but no, he’s posting regularly and he’s still on point with his sharp, quirky sense of humor. How the hell does he do it?
I keep wondering when I’ll get my mojo back. But as I’ve speculated in the past, I suspect my early drive, what kept this place hopping for years, was fueled by dissatisfaction with the life I’d built for myself and my family up north. I’m in a better place now (with regard to work — Bako is most definitely NOT a better place than the North Coast) and I can’t seem to generate enough angst to want to create.
No, that’s not quite right. I want to create, but the paint on my palette has all dried up.
The only silver lining: since I’m not writing, I have had a lot more time to read some great fiction.
D.
What leadership is all about
I’ll have more on our leadership conference, I promise. But for now, please enjoy two of the YouTube videos we watched today. (I thought about suggesting we all watch the baby scared by his mommy’s sneezes, but I had already made too much of a spectacle of myself.)
This one is a treat:
And this one, which our speaker claimed really happened (with the USS Enterprise):
enjoy!
D.
If I can fix it, anyone can
Far be it from me to call myself computer savvy, but I weathered a malware attack yesterday, resisted the urge to reinstall Windows XP, and managed to rid my computer of its nasty disease.
It all began during a search for Ipswich clams. These are the delicious little bastards that are damned near impossible to find on the west coast. One of the top links on a Google search is Digger’s Choice Seafood; the moment I clicked on the link, a Flash Player video kicked off, and even though I exed out pronto, the damage was done. Half of my desktop icons disappeared along with most of my C drive files, and I began getting error messages warning me of a “Critical Error, RAM memory usage is critically high, RAM memory failure,” and, “The system has detected a problem with one or more installed IDE / SATA hard disks.”
Odd thing was, I could still surf the net and even kinda sorta play games, except the computer kept booting me out of the games with every pop-up error message. The computer also claimed that McAfee had detected and eradicated a Trojan, and when I ran the McAfee scan, it didn’t find any threats. This was after updating McAfee, btw.
Which says something about McAfee, methinks.
The odd thing is, this particular malware is supposed to insist that I need to buy some software NOW NOW NOW! to eradicate the virus from my hard drive, and it’s all a scam to get my credit card information. But no such scam materialized. So I think McAfee must have partially disabled the malware, though not well enough to fix the system. Fortunately, I recalled that I had done good things in the past by searching for my error message word for word, and that’s what saved me this time.
I found my particular problem discussed and solved on bleepingcomputer.com, a site dedicated to just such issues (and they have a nice write-up on Wikipedia, so I figure they have to be legit). I had been infected with something called System Defragmenter. Bleeping Computer gave me step by step instructions that successfully kicked System Defragmenter’s ass in no time.
And soon enough I was back playing Dragon Age 2, in one night managing to bed my pirate wench and a possessed mage (who told me he loved me, isn’t that sweet?), and freeing my zombified mother from her mortal coil.
Don’t say I never done nothing for ya, Ma.
D.
The foreign body blog
It’s been over five years since I wrote a blog about foreign bodies. That’s remarkable enough (considering how fun* and interesting** and sometimes outright terrifying*** foreign bodies can be), but what I find really surprising is that no one has ever dedicated a blog to foreign bodies. Think of it: doctors around the world could submit photos and stories to the blog’s manager, who would after a year or two write a large format / coffee table book on foreign bodies, make oodles of money, then get his medical license revoked for violating patient confidentiality, and then lose oodles of money when he is sued by umpteen patients whose clinical photos showed up in the book (Damn you, I just know that was MY colonic can of Budweiser you included on page 135!), and then recoup all of his lost wealth and respectability when Quentin Tarantino directs a movie about his travails featuring Johnny Depp as the doctor-turned-coffee-table-book-author.
The pause that refreshes!
In med school, a well worn photocopy of an article from the Journal of Gastroenterology made the rounds among us budding surgeons. The article detailed a number of case histories of colonic foreign bodies, but the most memorable one concerned a gay couple who were celebrating the New York Yankees’ victory in the 1978 World Series by putting to good use a baseball signed by Catfish Hunter****. If I remember correctly, the non-incapacitated half of this couple was insistent that the baseball be removed unscathed. (Which brings to mind the apocryphal story of the ER patient with an electric vibrator located just past the reach of his fingers. The surgeon, so the story goes, asked him whether he wanted the vibrator removed, “or do you want me to change the batteries.”)
Most foreign body stories are not as much fun as these, particularly at my end of the body. It’s hard to laugh at a toddler’s misfortune, after all. And betting on the date of a swallowed penny has limited entertainment value.
Not many blogs on foreign body extraction, I’m afraid. Here’s one from rural Nepal, and here’s another from a blog oddly entitled, “Dr Ko Ko Gyi’s Blog /
Autobiography of Dr Abdul Rahman Zafrudin.” Dr. Gyi/Zafrudin has a number of disturbing images on that site, but here’s the money quote:
Rectal foreign bodies are typically inserted and the majority of cases are the result of erotic activity. Typically found objects are vibrators, dildoes, light bulbs, candles, shot glasses, and bottles. Patients may be very embarrassed to disclose the circumstances regarding the foreign body insertion and there may have been multiple attempts at removal. The image shown demonstrates a vibrator in the rectum along with a pair of salad tongs that became lodged after attempts at self-removal.
He also includes a nasal foreign body story from House, and it’s anyone’s guess why he included a fictional story amongst a number of true ones.
The author of the Sermo Blog solicited “most interesting foreign body” stories from a number of physicians. My favorite quote:
Response from a Urologist: “At our hospital recently the general surgeons removed from the stomach a bound and gagged barbie doll that the patient had swallowed.”
All this talk of rectal foreign bodies has made me hungry. Time to make dinner.
D.
* My favorite: beads. The trick is to hook the hole. Close runner-up: any nasal foreign body that can be extracted by tricking the patient into sneezing it out (I have my ways!)
** Most interesting: the piedrito, which I blogged back in 2005.
*** Most terrifying: half of a pigeon skull wedged between the vocal cords of a two-year-old. Terrifying because this easily could have turned into a lethal situation.
**** Details made up by yours truly. Except I’m pretty sure the cause of celebration was, indeed, the Yankees’ victory.