Vlogging hairless (almost)
My head feels like a peach. A big, gray, bristly peach.
D.
PS: What’s with the poor image quality? Is it that crappy when I live-blog with you guys?
I need one of those cameras Dan was talking about.
Oh! Jake wants credit for the “peach” comment. Hat tip to Jake.
Ferrety goodness
Zappa was so happy to get out of his cage this evening, he started jumping in place. Of course, I didn’t have our camcorder handy, and even if I did, I still haven’t figured out how to adapt movies from the camcorder to my computer.
So what did I do? I searched YouTube. Didn’t find any good examples of the behavior in question, but I did find some viddies worth sharing.
The ferret clown car:
We really need to try this:
Not much of a ferret in this next one, but it’s still funny as hell.
G’night!
D.
As I wipe the spittle off my chin
Cue Deliverance music.
I can’t figure out Excel. I’ve never used a spreadsheet, but I figure, how tough can it be? (Answer: too tough for me, apparently.)
Here’s all I need to do: enter two columns of numbers (A and B) and automatically have each C = A*B. Thus, C1 = A1*B1, C2 = A2*B2, and so forth. I do NOT want to have to do this line by line, since I have a lot of data to enter.
At the very end, I’ll want to sum up all of my C values. I can’t figure out how to define my C column so that every row of C is the product of that row’s A and B.
The in-program help for “function” and “product” doesn’t give me my answer. Any ideas?
D.
See, live bloggers? I didn’t make this up.
Macrophile: an individual (typically a man) who fantasizes about making love to big women. REALLY big women.
From Salon (so it has to be real):
You never forget your first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. A towering monument to freedom, democracy and the big-girl aesthetic, she looms over New York Harbor, 225 tons of womanhood, 151 feet from toes to torch tip, her head high and huge, her massive bosom outthrust to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. For immigrants arriving on America’s shore, the statue is the earth mother of international acceptance. For macrophiles, she’s something else — the ultimate sex goddess.
With very little effort, you can find stories and photoshops of macrophilic fantasias. Here, this one is safe for work (provided you don’t have to explain to your boss why you’re looking at an image of a little man pretending to be toe jam). This one is not quite as safe for work. So that’s what happened to my missing Army Man!
Giantess stories abound (google ‘giantess’ or ‘gts’). I wonder if anyone has ever separated the good from the bad? This one caught my eye; it’s about Hillary Clinton (as First Lady — it was written in ’97) um . . . outgrowing the Lincoln Bedroom? Snip:
Hillary was extremely disappointed. She wanted no one to be as powerful as herself, especially a man. However, she still had grown to immense porportions, and possessed unreal strength. It was only natural that the inventor of this wonderful gene therapy would experiment on himself. For now. she’d have to settle for being second-best. For now anyway.
Can’t say I understand this particular fetish, but it is unique. And did you know there are men who fantasize about being eaten alive? Vorarephilia.
I’m beginning to think that if you can imagine something strange, anything strange, someone somewhere will find it arousing.
D.
We listed our house today
It’s easy, and I mean easy, to find something on the local market which is crappier and more expensive. Such places don’t move. They sit there for months, even years. Our house sat on the market for three or four years before the previous owner dropped the price into a reasonable range — and then she dropped it too much. Lucky us!
We should have left the place alone, not put any money into remodeling. Then we’d have made a killing. As it stands, we should do okay (assuming our agent is right about the list price), but no one’s talking about early retirement.
I would post a link to the listing, but (A) our agent isn’t THAT fast on her feet, and (B) that probably is a little bit too much information. I have enemies, after all:
The italicized bits are from a comment I left on Daily Kos the other day. The non-italicized bits come from some asshat who has nothing better to do but send hate mail.
obsession of some of my fellow American Jews with Israel.
I am hoping that you are just another Daily Kos Neo-Nazi parading as a Jew, because if you really are Jewish then your parents did a miserable job of educating you.
I don’t share it. But I suspect some of the older folks regard Israel as an insurance policy.
One can only hope that as this growing anti-Semitism takes place that when the latest generation of Brown Shirts comes knocking you will not be surprised when they haul you off to the gas chambers or just hang you. Clearly you are too much of a coward to stand up and fight.
the uncomfortable details of Israel’s politics.
Obviously you get all your information from this looney-tunes website and not from credible information sources.
One more thing. You should understand that by posting who you are and where you work you may offend someone so much who lives in that area that they will do what ever it takes to cost you your business. The only moron here is you.
My original comment wasn’t even inflammatory. I was speculating why some American Jews are so blinkered when it comes to the subject of America’s policies toward Israel. Really nothing in the comment (from MY point of view) to inspire such animosity. But there you have it . . . say anything which diverges from the party line, and you’re a target.
But I did learn a couple of things. (A) Ignore the Daily Kos diaries on Israel. Ain’t worth it. And, (B) Don’t let ’em know where you live. There are a lot of crazy-assed mofos in the world and this guy is one of them. It’s not the brown shirts coming to my door that scare me . . . it’s my coreligionists.
D.
Anne Bancroft
She died on this day in 2005. Beautiful . . .
. . . and funny. This is brilliant:
and equally brilliant (with Lee J. Cobb playing a terrific straight man to Anne’s monologue):
Enjoy.
D.
I should never have looked at my stat counter
Good thing I’m depressed. Otherwise, my seriously tanked stats would depress the hell out of me. As it is, my emotional reaction to a paltry 147 hits today is, “Oh. Look at that.”
Corn Dog and Erin O’Brien are doing it, so I thought I would, too. Here are the highlights from the last few hundred hits . . .
1. “pebbles and bam-bam tickling”
2. tight bikini lesbian
3. prairie muffin
4. keith olbermann gay?
5. lazy sex positions (HEY! Why are y’all looking at ME for that one?)
6. how to use tampons
7. horrible diseases (that one I can understand)
8. lorazepam holywater
9. headlice hotsauce
10. carrie underwood nude
11. penile botox injections (um . . . why? I think I’ll have to google that one myself)
12. hippocratic pelvic massage (upon my oath!)
and
13. this image (found by searching “dragon cleavage”):
See? I even snuck a Thirteen in on you.
D.
101 movies to AVOID watching before you die
Snarkaliciousness for a dreary Thursday morning — from Crooked Timber, with more contributions from Daily Kos. Excerpt from the comments, just for a taste:
For me the top contender for most morally reprehensible film of the last twenty years has to be Saving Private Ryan, a film that actually got people killed. I left the cinema snarling at its simple minded bellicosity and horrified that it had been so generously reviewed. I am utterly convinced that the film and its attendant TV series really laid the ground culturally for the Bush wars and the general conviction that invading abroad was just a perfect way to emulate the “greatest generationâ€. It amazed me that it was more racist and less humane then propaganda films made during the second world war. A completely unironic paean to killing, mercilessness and the evil of the other. Amazing.
On the other hand Van Helsing needs to be taken seriously as a bad film as it was so wilfully stupid, incoherent, visually messy and loud that it hurt to be in the cinema. The Saint and Snake Eye’s also deserve to be wiped from the page of history. Saving Private Ryan though, that film could convince benevolent aliens not to contact us, even if they were bored.
MY vote for a movie to avoid before you die? The Brown Bunny — something like ninety minutes of excruciatingly angsty pseudo-meaningful but ultimately pointless scenes followed by a sex scene that would garner a 2.00 rating or less on YouPorn.
What’s your vote?
D.
Focus
I love these staged operating room photos. You’ll find one in the brochure of every general surgery residency across the country. Know what’s funny about it? The only time general surgeons turn the lights out is for laparoscopic surgery. Yup, this photo is 2% truth, 98% dramatic effect.
Senseless digression: While I was a grad student, my thesis advisor co-founded a software company whose product analyzed DNA sequences. The company wanted to run ads in Nature and Science and all the rest of the journals, so they commissioned an advertisement company to do a photo shoot in our lab. Why shlep electrophoresis rigs and micropipettes to a studio when the studio can come to us?
My advisor wanted one of our post-docs to “star” in the ad. The ad man looked us over and deemed us all too unscientific. He brought in a model — a dumpy, balding, pasty-faced man who looked like he had been raised in a potato cellar. We all got a good laugh out of that.
Back to surgery . . . and to that photo in particular. I suspect folks like these shots because they capture the intense focus of the operative experience. That bright light? That’s your attention. Everything else drops away into the shadows. It’s what many of us love about operating.
And then there are those of us who stress out over each and every case. Of course, the two states — anxiety and keen focus — can and do coexist. You try to table the anxiety and let the case itself dominate your mind.
One of the reasons you hear stories about a surgeon throwing instruments, screaming abuse, or otherwise acting like a four-year-old deprived of his Power Rangers fix is that something has upset his concentration. The surgeon has to stop and rally his attention once again. It takes effort. It isn’t fun. Operating is fun. Waiting for your scrub, circulator, or anesthetist to fix a problem is not fun. It’s annoying. And if it happens often enough, it affects patient care.
Sometimes I wonder if I don’t scream enough or throw enough instruments. Today, I had a wobbly microscope. When you’re looking at things under magnification, even a slight harmonic motion looks like an earthquake, and this was far from a “slight” harmonic motion. I asked my circulator to fix it, she said she couldn’t do anything until after the case, so I shut up. Afterwards, when I complained about how irritating it was, she said, “You didn’t say anything else about it, so I assumed you were fine with it!”
Grrr. Maybe I should do like my son does. If he doesn’t get a question answered, he repeats it until it does get answered. It’s an effective technique.
For the most part, though, the focus was good today. It was a relief, too; it gave me several hours in which I didn’t need to wonder if I was being a total creep for making my friend in Santa Rosa wait ANOTHER month for my decision, didn’t obsess over the merits of this job opportunity over that one, wasn’t asking myself for the fiftieth time if I’ve done my family and myself a disservice sticking with this community for nearly ten years*.
I had better things to think about.
D.
*One of my friends in the hospital said, “People are wondering how you lasted this long.”