Sunday, August 30, 2009

Extremely Disturbing Article

I'm doing research on escaping from elevators for my current project, which is a zombie/stalker story. I'm sure you'll agree that zombies and living people don't belong in elevators together.

I found this piece from USA Today. It's appalling. I don't have much else to say. It's horrible and heartbreaking. http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-09-04-elevator-usat_x.htm

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Force of habit?

I saw an article recently about a robber who made a little mistake while robbing Alaska USA Federal Credit Union. He gave the teller his account number and gave her his picture id before robbing the place.

I've got a couple of theories. Maybe he thought it would be efficient to have the stolen money deposited directly into his account, then realized that wasn't such a good idea and changed his mind a little too far into the transaction.

Or maybe it was just habit. Like getting your library card out while you're waiting in line. He always shows his id and account number so he just did it. Or she asked him and then he remembered why he was there.

Either way, he was arrested, no real surprise there.

Labels:

Friday, August 28, 2009

A depressing story

This article about a thirteen year old girl who wants to sail around the world by herself is depressing. It's unfortunate that someone who has literally been sailing her entire life and knows exactly what she wants from life has had her legal rights taken from her. And her poor parents. Unlike many parents they support their child's desire to be independent and explore and so they lose their rights also. Ugh.

Labels:

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Awesome Tweet


I love this tweet. It makes me imagine the dinosaur racing around the sheep flock, avoiding the sheep dog, scooping up sheep and carrying them around, one under each tiny arm.

Labels:

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Picking games

I was watching an older episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and was intrigued to hear a different ending for Eenie, Meenie, Miney Moe. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was surprised that the version my great grandfather taught me wasn't listed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe

Eenie, Meenie, Miney Moe
Catch a hobo by the toe
If he hollers make him pay
fifty dollars every day

Where a hobo was supposed to get fifty dollars a day is beyond me. There was something about make him stay also but I can't remember what it is. Oh memory, how fleeting thou art.

Labels:

Monday, August 24, 2009

Warriors

Great piece about Native American service in the US military. Some of it was quite startling to me, like how many served in World War one despite not having been granted US citizenship.

That's crazy to me. I could see being a native person and not wanting to be a citizen of the country that invaded, lied to me and killed so many of my people but for the US not to offer is incomprehensible.

http://www.californiaindianeducation.org/educational_news/roycook/indian_military_warriors.html

Labels:

Saturday, August 22, 2009

One Para Reviews

I run one paragraph reviews at the end of my Quality Time columns. Sometimes I think the author's got the wrong end of the stick but of course I don't have to agree with them to run them, they just have to be interesting.

I don't think I've seen any that are quite as wrong as these reviews found at Amazon by Johnny Dee of the Guardian.

These two are especially good:

This Is Spinal Tap
"If you're going to make such an excellent documentary, why make it about about a band that nobody has ever heard of?"

Moby Dick, Herman Melville
"Too nautical for me.


Enjoy.

Labels:

Friday, August 21, 2009

Overcompensating

I love this comic. Possibly I love it more than your average person because a patient brought some guns to my former office and held a bunch of people hostage. http://www.overcompensating.com/posts/20090821.html

(It's slightly hard to figure out how this guy fit into my life. I quit job a and went to work at job b and c simultaneously. He worked at job a, was a patient at job b and having an affair with a coworker at job c. He also borrowed the guns and ammo from my brother-in-law, who also worked at job a and was a patient at jobs b and c, muddying the waters even further. In the end he agreed to be committed and none of my coworkers were killed. My one friend spent half an hour on her knees, with a gun in the back of her head, begging for her life.)

This all happened a long time ago, well before I got my current job. But still, you don't soon forget it.

Labels:

Super Busy This Week

I've got way too many things going on this week with meetings running until nine or ten at night. I'm finally home and settling in and it's extremely late. I'm way behind in my word count, only racking up about three hundred words instead of a thousand, which is annoying but I'm trying not to let it get to me.

But I did just play some Wii Sport Resort and it was quite satisfying to beat some d00ds at swordplay, sending them plunging into the sea below. RAR.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Did you ever read James and the Giant Peach?

If so you may remember how poor James is orphaned - when his parents are eaten by a rhino that has escaped from the zoo. Just think, if they'd just seen this film they'd know they should have poked it with a stick or thrown their hands up and surrendered. Such a shame.

Labels:

Monday, August 17, 2009

From the department of wtf

These two are from @Glinner:

http://www.robertpopper.com/?p=1876

http://whythatsdelightful.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/tiny-voice-jesus/

These two are from Cam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4udUvxX8upE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc_TEFH28mo

Labels:

Sunday, August 16, 2009

A bunch of tabs to close

I have a boatload of tabs I'd like to close. Some of them are from research on my current project and some are things people have tweeted. You can try and figure out which are which if you haven't got anything else to do. :)

A Queensland site about how to slaughter animals with captive bolts properly. Weirdest thing about it - at the bottom are some links labeled Further Information. One of them is called help and animal smile. ??? Are these cows and such meant to be smiling as they die? What kind of person designed this site? Be sure to click through and look at the deranged smiling animals.

Here's an awesome article about an older couple who round up medical care fore people all over the globe, using basically one laptop and a lot of connections.

Gyasi Ross' latest blog post entitled Native Pride Sucks, which is intriguing. Some of what he writes about can also be seen as class issues, if you ask me. It can also apply to other cultures such as with drunken people wearing Kiss me I'm Irish shirts, throwing up on the street corners and generally showing their natural behinds as my friend Dennis says.

Fantastic piece about the Mongolian Death Worm and the hunt for it. This thing is fexcellent and the story makes me deeply happy.

An absolutely fucked in the head piece about violence that compares the wrong statistics to try to make an invalid point. I can see how someone who isn't paying attention or thinking critically might be taken in. The images are also appalling. It's not journalism - it's propaganda, pure and simple.

A piece on how facial surgery may cure migraines. This is quite intriguing. I'm curious as to whether any insurance company in the USA would cover it.

The phallic logo awards. Rather amusing.

And finally a bit of history about the grave of a man I detest, Oliver Cromwell.

Labels:

Friday, August 14, 2009

A few more words about healthcare

The last day I worked as an actress was in 2004. I was working on the Wire as an extra, my first day in a long time. The casting person had been very sweet and was trying to find something for me to do that would work within the limitations of the intractable intracranial hypertension I'd been diagnosed with a few months previously. I was going to be someone who was listening to a speech, sitting down. Good, yes? Except not so much because I now have photophobia and couldn't hack the lights and had to be moved. (This is all post meningitis, which apparently left a lot of scarring which causes a cascade of annoying things.)

I was sitting next to one of the leads but had to move as the light next to him was too intense. Still I got through most of the day, partly because I took some medication to prevent nausea. My symptoms are a lot like having a bad hangover all of the time.

Anyway, during lunch I was speaking with a friend and he told me about a dear friend of his who had had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of his body. The friend had insurance through the union, through the Screen Actors Guild and so needed to work a certain amount in order to have continuing coverage.

He couldn't do much acting as he was so severely impacted by the CVA. So what happened is that the casting company got him a lot of extra work and my friend and the ill gentleman's wife would walk on either side of him and hold him up and he managed to keep his insurance until he died.

At the time I thought it was a sweet story of solidarity, on the part of the acting community and the casting agency. But as time went on and I thought about it I totally changed my mind.

Here was a man who had to do work that was physically beyond him, helped on by not one but two people, just so he could afford insurance and get treatment for his stroke, which had already severely impacted him.

This isn't a touching story at all. It's demeaning. No one should be dragged from their sick bed and put to work when they don't want to or aren't fit. I hear a lot of talk about rights and what is a right and what isn't a right and I can tell you this isn't right. It's shameful and a disgrace.

We can and must do better for our citizens.

Labels:

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Wish me well (You can go to hell)

This is my all time favorite song with the word bicker in it. :)

Labels:

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

What is wrong with people

Disturbing article about more lunatics going crazy at the idea of everyone having health care. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/12/healthcare-town-halls-obama

Thankfully if you look at the actual numbers in poll responses they've stayed quite steady, dropping only one per cent, despite widespread outcries that everyone hates reform and the president. Let's try looking at facts and not hyperbole.

Someone sent me some gobbledegook today about the CARS program and how it gives the government permission to look at your computer from here until eternity. It took me less than two minutes to find the real truth behind that canard. People do your homework before you pass this kind of stuff on. Do you really want to be a pawn?

Still squicked by the stuff that went around yesterday saying Hawking would be dead if he had the misfortune to be born in the UK. How long would it have taken to Google and see that he is British through and through? Ten seconds? Yeesh.

If you've got Twitter take a look at the #welovethenhs hashtag.

Labels:

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Guardian on health care

An interesting article on health care in the UK from the Guardian. It looks at some of the ridiculous lies that are going around the internet and being spouted in town hall meetings and responds with facts. The comments are also interesting as some of them shed light on some of the cancer statistics.

Stupidest thing I've read all day, and it's been widely requoted, Steven Hawking would be dead if he had had the misfortune to be born in the UK. I could bang my head against my desk if it didn't already hurt.

Labels:

Monday, August 10, 2009

One of my favorite places to visit is hiring

Would you like to work for one of my favorite places to visit? You could work for La Brea, and have not just any job but actually work in one of the tar pits.

The job title is excavator and here's the link. http://www.nhm.org/jobs/excavator.html

Here are my two favorite duties:

Hand ladling asphalt seepage from Pit 91 weekly.

And:

Remove and appropriately dispose of live and dead animals trapped in the tar pits.

Do you think you could convince them you could convince them that a wooly mammoth counts as a dead animal trapped in the tar pits? I mean that's what it is, right? It's just been there a long time.

Labels:

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Memory is a funny thing


I was looking at something with my sons the other day and I got to thinking that I hadn't seen a particular type of marine life since we moved to Maryland. When I tried to describe this animal I said it was like a volcano and was some kind of mollusk.

Using Google images I figured out that it was in the limpet family and then today I finally figured out the thing is called a keyhole volcano limpet, which perhaps is why every time I see a volcano I'm reminded of it. I used to see loads of these on the beach when I was growing up but we don't seem to have them around here.

Labels:

Palin is a nutcase

That woman sounds crazier every time she opens her mouth. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/09/obama-healthcare-reform-defeat

She's a has been who couldn't even make it through two years on the job. Why does she have any more of a public voice than any other citizen?

Saturday, August 08, 2009

This is fun

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Jumble up the Meds

Here's an excellent article about things to watch out for when taking your medication. When I worked for Dr. Olson he said that every day enough people die from iatrogenic reactions in New York City alone to fill an airplane. That's pretty scary.

I've had some of these problems myself. A pharmacist gave me the wrong meds completely. Another one gave me 1oo mgs when I was supposed to have 10 mgs.

The article doesn't mention that cranberry juice can also make certain meds stay in your body longer, which can make them stronger. Also taking fiber or calcium within two hours of medication can really affect how it is absorbed. Some medication, like thyroid medicine, should not be taken with antacids.

Research is definitely your friend when taking anything, even Tylenol, which can seriously mess with your liver.

Labels:

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

The Turkish ET

What would you do if you found this thing in your kids' closet?


Labels:

Monday, August 03, 2009

Off the Railstone

I'm still looking for a copy of Off the Railstone by DJ Railstone. Her website is here: http://paigerailstone.com/ I've heard it is fantastic but the MP3s are always sold out, which is both frustrating and surreal.

I've been wanting to do a project about a teen who runs away in the wake of a catastrophic event for several years so am particularly interested in hearing DJ Railstone's art as she and her brother ran away to NYC together shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I wonder if any of the music that ran through my head as I walked those sad streets, bombarded by the images of the missing, is similar to any of hers.

Labels:

Sunday, August 02, 2009

The Raftman's Razor

I just watched this at tor.com and was really struck by it. Intriguing story and some beautiful shots.

Labels:

Saturday, August 01, 2009

New project

Trying to start a new project that doesn't want to start. I've tried three different beginnings so far and none of them are what I want. This is something that came to me while I was getting my CT scan the other day. Maybe it's not ready to start yet.

I wanted to start something today with the goal of finishing it by November first. It's good timing since I finished rewriting the vamp script about a week ago. Part of the problem might be that I have like FIVE ideas right now that are all sort of fermenting. And I still have a couple of rewrites to do.

Chris went back to New York and Cam comes home on Tuesday. It will be nice having him back. The rats will be delirious with joy. We fed them a quarter of a sugar baby watermelon today and they went nuts. Good old nutrition.

Labels: