The meta post
Wear a shirt like this,
and it’s inevitable you’ll meet someone who has never heard of blogs or blogging*. “It’s like a diary,” I said, “except it’s out there for all the world to see.”
He wanted to know the URL. Who knows, he could be lurking here even now.
***
Note fly zapper in the background. I may be kinda sorta almost vegan these days, but that doesn’t prevent me from taking pleasure in the sudden death of flies. So unBuddhist of me.
***
We’re traveling tomorrow. Thank heavens we’ll be leaving this heatwave behind us —
Doh!
D.
*If you can’t read it, the shirt sez, “I’m blogging this.”
I never talked like that.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Hollywood has decided that scientists are, um . . . funny?
Science with a laugh track: The Big Bang Theory. More here.
D.
Covers redux: Mama Told Me Not to Come
The radio is blastin’
Someone’s knocking at the door
I’m lookin’ at my girlfriend
She’s passed out on the floorI seen so many things
I ain’t never seen before
Don’t know what it is
I don’t wanna see no more— from Mama Told Me Not to Come, by Randy Newman
My first reaction: Randy ‘Don’t Want No Short People’ Newman wrote this song? Are you kidding me? But it’s true. Newman was about 24 when he wrote it. According to Wikipedia, the song satirizes the late 1960s Los Angeles music scene. But then, Wikipedia also claims “(t)he song is loaded with the black humor, sarcasm, and double entendre that made Newman famous.”
Meh. I don’t see it.
YouTube has a number of the song’s covers. I can’t find the original by Eric Burdon & The Animals, but they have the Three Dog Night version, of course. Too white trashy for my taste. I prefer the funkier version cut by Wolfgang Press, but damn it, I can’t find that on YouTube, either. (You can hear a tiny bit of it here, at Amazon. Track 3.) Harmony’s cover doesn’t veer much from Three Dog Night’s, but dig those striped pants. The Slacker’s cover is just plain lame.
You know who has the best feel for the song? Don’t laugh. Please.
Tom Jones.
This dude keeps impressing me.
D.
Layers
Today was bloody hot here in south coastal Oregon: 86F, a high for the state. Of the three positions I’m evaluating, Wunderground sez:
Santa Rosa, CA: 89F
Olympia, WA: 63F
Seattle, WA: 63F
If we decide in favor of Washington, weather will be a huge consideration.
Next week, I’ll be going to my interviews in Olympia and Seattle. I was freaking out earlier today about clothing. What should I wear? My nurse anesthetist, whom I used as a reference, told me they asked him all the usual questions (does his head explode on a regular basis; have you ever seen him kill a man with his bare hands — you know, stuff) and they also asked, “Does he dress appropriately to work?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I only ever see him scrubs.”
Which is, if you think about it, the right answer from your nurse anesthetist. But it got me thinking: do they care about clothing that much? My God, what should I wear?!
I left a message with the recruiter. He called me back a little while ago and told me to err on the side of conservatism. If I were an orthopedic surgeon, I could show up in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and they would still want me; ENTs are in demand, but not so rare that I could get away with that sort of nonsense. Suit and tie, he recommended.
So I scrambled to find my suit. I recalled the coat being in good shape, the pants not-so-good, and I was right. These pants are so thirty pounds ago. When I put them on, I look like a balloon animal that’s been squeezed in the middle.
“You HAVE ANOTHER SUIT,” Karen said. I insisted I didn’t. She insisted I did.
She was right, of course.
By now, I had stripped down to my briefs. I pulled on the pants (which are tight, but not nearly as constricting as the other suit pants), put on the coat, and buttoned the top button, creating a plunging V which showed off my salt-and-pepper chest fur.
“Take a picture of me,” I said to Karen. “This looks good enough to blog.”
“I don’t get you. You’re freaking out over what to wear, but you’ll put an absolutely humiliating picture of yourself up on the blog.”
“I’m a man of many layers.” Which is true, but I suppose the CEOs of the hospitals who might hire me should find that out in small doses. “Anyway, what I really need is a white suit.”
“A white suit. Uh-huh.”
“And a pastel tee-shirt.”
“I see.”
“No. You don’t.”
They would have to hire me.
D.
Addicted to Cracked
Cracked.com, that is. Check it out.
It all began with this image,
which hails from this photoshopping contest (oh, yes, I am humbled). The squirrantula, reposted at Leet Geek, led me to this article on the coming zombie apocalypse, which in turn left me spiraling down the gravity well of the black hole that is cracked.com.
It was inevitable. I woke up at 5 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to the gym and tired myself out before my day even began. Then I saw all of Del Norte and Curry Counties in my office (weeeell . . . 26 people, total) came home & made dinner & here I am, vegging out, looking at creepy animal photoshops.
The Ten Most Sexually Unappealing Craigslist Postings, that killed a half an hour right there.
I’m hopeless. Someone put me out of my misery.
D.
O’Reilly’s meltdown
Before viewing Bill O’Reilly’s four-letter hissy fit on “Inside Edition” (from, what? fifteen, twenty years ago? And why did it surface only now? Not that I’m complaining), you might want to chase all toddlers from the room. Unless, of course, you’re like Karen and me, and you consider it your God-given duty as parents to make sure your kids learn to swear with accuracy, and not shame you with embarrassing diction errors, such as
Mommy, I’m sorry I slammed the oven door and shitted up your souffle.
Back to Bill-O. His meltdown seems to revolve around his ignorance of the phrase, “to play us out.” As in, “And now we’ll welcome Sting to play us out with his new hit, Roxanne.” (Whatever. I’m guessing here.) Since he didn’t understand the words, he refused to say them. He eventually figures it out and that seems to make him madder still; especially since his producer has made him play the guessing game, and didn’t cue him in when he first expressed his incomprehension.
I’m not in broadcasting, but to me, “play us out” sounds like straightforward broadcasting slang. I would guess (correctly) that it meant, “end this segment on a musical number.” Indeed, if you google “play us out” and ignore references to the O’Reilly itty bitty baby tantrum, you’ll find straightforward examples like this or this. From that last link,
:51 – John and Jeff play us out of this hour with Blue Minor.
My suspicion? O’Reilly soon figured out what the words meant, but by then he had already betrayed his ignorance. He knew he had shown himself up as a dummy, and worse, he knew his producer knew it, too, as well as all the stage hands. And he had compounded the problem by getting a little angry.
Any sane man would have used self-deprecating humor to limbo out of the situation with a few shreds of self-respect. But not Bill-O. He has to turn it into someone else’s fault — namely, his writer. There’s something gravely wrong with these words, something so foul about them his tongue snags on them in take after take until, finally, he has to do it his way, with his words. At that point the video goes silent, but it doesn’t take a lipreader to see that the profane hemorrhage doesn’t stop. He throws his pen with a force that would do any scalpel-throwing surgeon* proud, rips off his coat, and storms away.
I’ve said before that at the core of every over-achiever there’s a little boy (or girl) with serious self-esteem problems. This O’Reilly video provides good support for that hypothesis, don’t you think?
This is a man whose ego is paper thin.
D.
*Me? Never. Ever. Not cool, and if there’s one thing I aspire to be, it’s the Fonzie of Surgery.
Edited to add:
Here’s the REMIX.
No points for subtlety: Triumph of the Twit.
Radiofrequency uvulopalatoplasty for snoring
Yeah, you read that title right. Sometimes I feel motivated to make a public service announcement. Not often, but sometimes, and tonight’s the night. And since the chances are pretty good you (or your spouse) snores, I figure I won’t lose too many of you with a relatively serious post.
This first bit is for my malpractice insurance carrier:
I am NOT offering medical advice; I am merely providing information. Read the disclaimer. It has flashy things and animated buttons to keep you entertained.
Another note: my victim patient, Jeannie, has given me permission to use her images in these blog posts. Wasn’t that nice?
Look, she’s even smiling about it.
Follow me below the fold for a discussion of snoring, obstructive sleep apnea, and the use of radiofrequency uvulopalatoplasty to successfully treat snoring.
Junk, Part Deux
Last week, I cleaned out the outer third of our obscenely excessive RV garage in order to create room to clean up the rest of the RV garage. Here’s what I began with this morning:
And here’s where we are seven hours later (with Jake’s help):
Unfortunately, that “clean end” of the garage?
. . . now looks like this.
It’s not as bad as it looks. Everything is neatly sorted into “keep,” “sell,” and “rocket into the sun” piles. Getting this mess to disappear will be relatively easy.
No live-blogging tonight. I might hold myself in high regard, but even I realize that watching me yawn is about as much fun as watching horseshoes rust.
D.
He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.
Michelle Duggar is pregnant with number 18, which means it’s time for me to unleash more Duggary goodness. If you read that article, you’ll note that Michelle decided to break the news to her kids on the Today Show.
Guess she could have been more tactless. Guess she could have announced on Maury Povich.
Media junkies. Since the Duggars wanna be the rock stars of extreme fecundity, I thought I would give them a few glamour poses . . . a chance, perhaps, to catch Hollywood’s eye.
See you below the cut.
New arrival *updated*
I think I beat Kate to the punch: I’m the first kid on the block with my very own Stonebreaker.
I’ll scan in the cover art this evening. Here’s the front. The back has identical cover art.
Back copy:
SEX GAME
It began with “innocent” coffee-break couplings between overworked nurse and doctor—Velma Edwards and Surgeon Michael Gregg—both unhappily married. It burgeoned into a deadly triangle of ruined reputations when Dr. Alan Loerb wanted to make it a threesome.
It snowballed to tragedy when a drunken auto accident mutilated the beauty of Sylvia Benton, in whose arms Velma’s husband had sought solace.
But the real blast came when Irene, Dr. Gregg’s swinging wife, brought in her pistol and her young lover to blow the lid off!
Their passionate embrace—reflected in the bell of the good doctor’s stethoscope. How steamy is that?
D.