They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Jay Cutler (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, User: Mike Shadle)

You try that [screaming] with a pineapple down your windpipe. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ep. 4: Owl Stretching Time, “Self Defence”

I’m no big Jay Cutler fan.  He throws off of his back foot; he holds on to the ball too long and too often when the defense is about to smash his face into the turf; he doesn’t tuck the fucking ball when he rushes.

But Cutler is a pretty good quarterback.  In fact, about twenty teams in this league don’t have a quarterback of his caliber, and what Jay did this season is impressive in its own right because he did it all with a pineapple down his windpipe.  The guy was sacked 52 times and played 15 regular season games, missing only one due to a concussion.  He was absolutely leveled a number of times and got back … Read more

Peat hags between Geifas and Fagwyr Wen © Copyright Rudi Winter and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) License.

The following excerpts were originally supposed to be blog posts, but as usual, they either spiraled wildly out of control or simply fizzled like most of the dry rot that comes through my fingertips these days.  In truth, they function more like the journal entries I once scribbled down in those little Moleskines of mine, a practice I more or less abandoned three years ago.  I used to post little tidbits of them online, so consider this more of a brain dump than anything.  This is just a chance to drag these sick, little abominations out of the bog and put them to their final rest out in the Electronic Wastes.

I caution you against reading them too literally and, then again, too metaphorically, … Read more

Whether you have health insurance or not, lab work can get pretty expensive.  If you have insurance but still haven’t paid your deductible, the insured rates for blood tests are liable to cost hundreds of dollars depending on the work-up, and if you aren’t insured, you get screwed because you don’t even get the negotiated rate.  This CNN article outlines a new service that drastically decreases the cost of otherwise expensive lab tests.  I perused PrePaidLabs.com myself, and the claims aren’t exaggerated.  You can still rack up a bill if multiple tests are needed (again, depending on the tests), but the final price will be a fraction of what one would pay under normal circumstances.

From the article:

Here’s how it works: Patients needing lab work can go to the medical society’s website and click on the big yellow box in the middle of the page. From there they 

… Read more

Many people seem to have forgotten what a vampire is, so I’m going to provide a very brief primer that you can reference when in doubt.

Before I get an angry tsunami of vampire aficionados (unlikely, due to readership) admonishing me for my choices, let me stress that this is a short list of accessible examples and by no means definitive.  These aren’t necessarily my favorite vampires or vampire movies either, but I’ll go to the mat for the underrated Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Here it goes…

This is a vampire:

Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula

This is a vampire:

Max Schreck in Nosferatu

This is a vampire:

Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In

This is a vampire:

Dick Cheney in real life

Even these two are vampires:

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire

This is an understudy for an Acqua Di Gio … Read more

Last year's pumpkin carving, because I'm a schmuck contributing to the death of Halloween.

Halloween is dead.  Officially.

I’m not generally a fan of sweeping declarative statements like the one I just made, but I’ve been collecting evidence on the long, slow decline of the holiday, and as far as I’m concerned, there is sufficient reason to believe Halloween will never be what it once was.

I grew up in a decade that wasn’t favorable to the holiday, the 1990s.  October 31 almost ubiquitously presented a young Chicago suburbanite with a miserable night marked either by the beginning of an early cold snap or a late-autumn rainstorm that would have turned us all pneumatic if our parents hadn’t insisted upon wrapping us in large, puffy coats and hiding our costumes in the process amid fervent protestations and candy-fueled tantrums.  But we went out there, goddammit, and ran around all night, and … Read more

Bob Dylan is my favorite singer/songwriter.  Original, I know, and I’ll spare you the diatribe about his greatness as his standing among the 20^th century’s greatest performers and personas is well established.  He is immortal as far as the history of music is concerned and bears responsibility for some of the best musical and lyrical offerings ever produced.  That being said, Dylan’s undertakings became more mercurial as his career went on, and in addition to having written some of the most powerful and groundbreaking songs of his generation (or ever), he may also have lashed together some of the worst I’ve ever heard.  This ongoing series entitled Bob Dylan’s Bad Dreams seeks to bring those forgotten anti-classics into full view with naught but love and admiration.  The idea is to keep this list going on a semi-regular basis until I run out of things to say.

Album: Knocked Out … Read more

Bob Dylan is my favorite singer/songwriter.  Original, I know, and I’ll spare you the diatribe about his greatness as his standing among the 20^th century’s greatest performers and personas is well established.  He is immortal as far as the history of music is concerned and bears responsibility for some of the best musical and lyrical offerings ever produced.  That being said, Dylan’s undertakings became more mercurial as his career went on, and in addition to having written some of the most powerful and groundbreaking songs of his generation (or ever), he may also have lashed together some of the worst I’ve ever heard.  This ongoing series entitled Bob Dylan’s Bad Dreams seeks to bring those forgotten anti-classics into full view with naught but love and admiration.  The idea is to keep this list going on a semi-regular basis until I run out of things to say.

Album: Slow Train … Read more

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Forgive the bad pun in the headline.  I couldn’t resist.

I don’t know if anyone out there still actually believes in the notorious “Face on Mars” located in the Red Planet’s Cydonia region, but just in case, those of you with any lingering trepidation may put your fears to rest.  PhysOrg.com has just published an article outlining a new photograph of the area at a much higher resolution that confirms (again) the face is nothing more than your common, garden variety Martian mesa and reaffirms those who’ve been shouting the Face was simply a byproduct of optical illusion and pareidolia.  (Go figure that the originating citation from the PhysOrg.com article emanates from FOXNews.com, which has surprised me for the second time in a week with a well-reasoned article.  Murdoch must be losing his sensationalist touch, but take a quick skim through the comment boards, … Read more

Courtesy of goodrob13's photostream. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/3928208574/)

So the Obama administration is presently hemorrhaging classified information courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Bush administration is doing so posthumously, the earth’s crust is hemorrhaging oil, and Tom Vilsack is simply battling an embarrassing case of hemorrhoids after/during the stress of the Shirley Sherrod debacle.  Those are the big stories at the moment, but in true form for a real live Twenty-First Century Narcissist, I’m not really thinking about all that right now.

Something terrible happened on Sunday at Dave & Buster’s… I lost.

In and of itself, losing is not a rarity in my life though I am, in general, more accustomed to winning.  But on Sunday evening, I lost in a big way.  I lost at everything.  Even now, my ego hasn’t restored itself, nor will the chasm be sated or filled by gobbling up Scrabble wins and cheap, trivial victories. … Read more

http://www.flickr.com/photos/migrainechick/ / CC BY 2.0

So this article on the NewScientist website really chapped my ass.

It cites the publication of a new study that outlines successful use of acupuncture to treat spinal injuries induced in rats.  Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m unable to access the full-text of the study in question.  My suspicions are that some qualified party will cite methodological issues, or more likely, the study will remain a footnote  in light of the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of the interpretation that acupuncture possesses no therapeutic benefit beyond that of placebo. (Maybe not.  We’ll see, but I doubt it.)

From the article:

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries.

Well, not really.  For a great review of the current literature regarding acupuncture and an even greater deal of irate bitching … Read more

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy when I was a kid, and his show stands as probably the earliest discernible science-related influence I can remember.

Imagine my disappointment when I happened across Brian Dunning’s post over at Skepticblog that discusses Nye’s recent promotion of a cleaning product called Ionator from the company Activeion.  Essentially, the company has recruited Nye to endorse a line of water ionizers the cheapest of which is priced at $169 and the science behind which is unproven and dubious.

I’m not going to get into the debate over the science of their claims.  You can scroll through the comments on Skepticblog, which do a decent enough job of hashing out the quandaries, and you can read an article by Dr. Stephen Lower, a retired chemist from the Department of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, … Read more

Image Courtesy of DevilCrayon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035676122@N01) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(That title sounds like something I never hoped I’d write. The first part is admittedly stolen from the Round Table via this Monty Python sketch.)

If you’re an office worker like me, you probably spend quite a bit of time clicking a mouse and pounding on a keyboard.  The time you spend doing this also might lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury.  In my case, my right index finger is nearly perpetually swollen, stiff, and in pain because I learn my lessons slowly and rail in the face of common sense when it comes to my own well-being.

There are a number of ways to combat your office-wrought deterioration.  You could drop money on ergonomic products like gel pads to support your wrist or braces designed to prevent the common motions that bring on … Read more