Taoists are Laozi Lovers

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse

2009-03-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

I had hardly watched television at all in the last decade.

Nothing on TV interested me, except the occasional episode of SNL with Christopher Walken. Or, maybe, I would tune in for Headlines on Leno's show, especially if he was doing weddings ("The Hardin/Johnson nuptials", etc.)

A few years ago, some internet chatter about the movie SERENITY got me out to a nearby multiplex, and I really liked the movie.

So I followed up by bit-torrenting the 4-CD set of the Fox television series Firefly, and, without going into fawning detail appropriate to some fanboy site, let's just say that I became such a fan that I acquired a sanctioned copy of the afore alluded boxed set, just because I thought the packaging was so cool! I became such a 'browncoat" that I sought out several of the comic books that fill in gaps in the Firefly chronology.

I idly thought about maybe someday getting Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer or Angel on DVD.

But then, someone posted in Salon about a new Wheedon series, Dollhouse, and I thought about tuning in.

Well, last Friday, I did.

It was episode 4, "Gray Hour", and I found myself sucked in!

The last time this had happened, it was "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman". Yep, that was more than thirty years ago!

And it isn't just Eliza Dushku, although she is, obviously, the star of the show.

It's because of what the show is: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Mission Impossible, then forms a wicked menage a quatre with the Matrix and Memento!

Check it out! It's on Fox, Friday nights at 9 Eastern, 8 Central. Set your DVR or TiVo!

(You can catch up, like I did, on missed episodes, at hulu!)

Latin America News Review: The New York Times screwed up (and I took their bait)

2006-11-22T17:56:00.000-08:00

Latin America News Review: The New York Times screwed up (and I took their bait)

You remember what a laugh we had when Hugo Chavez held up Chomsky's book at the UN and said he wished he could have met him before he died?!? Well, it wasn't true!

Do we still need to be reminded NOT to believe everything we read?

Sixteen Tons!

2006-11-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

"You load sixteen tons, and waddaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt! St. Peter dontcha call me 'cos I can't go: I owe my soul to the company Sto'!"

So, gee, it's been nearly a year since I last posted here.

I was going to title it "Yet another shoe dropping", but, I dunno, I guess I got tired of that brand.

Oh, yeah, why the title? Thanks for asking! Well, after all this time, I am on the verge of GETTING OUT OF DEBT! I have been on a program for the last six years or so to pay off my credit card balances - at one time up to $33K! - I have already paid off two of them, with three to go. Two of them will be done end of December, and the last one in January! HAPPY NEW YEAR! :cheesygrin:

Turns out Peter DOES have epilepsy all along, as a COMPETENT medical observer could have told two years ago. What looked to me like a grand mal seizure the morning of the Malaysian Tsunami was just that!

Oh, the clonazepam did actually dampen out the electrical activity, but it's not a drug one can use long-term.

The turning point in this saga came one morning as I was saving, running late getting to work, and the phone rang. It was Peter's friend Liz telling me that she had called 911 because she found Peter had fallen in their bathtub. I wish that she had called me FIRST, because there was no point in ANOTHER expensive visit to the emergency room, but the die was cast, so to speak.

Anyway, what made this a turning point was that, later, Peter told me that he REMEMBERED fallling! Ergo, he was NOT sleepwalking when the attack occurred!

Ah, yes, the steeltrap mind snaps shut!

So, now that we have insurance, I go and look for a nearby Neurologist that is in my PPO.

Long story short, after her tests, the diagnosis is crystal clear: Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy.

The "Sleep Doctor", with his M.D. and Ph.D. I now regard as a "quack".

Still, my being misled was partly my own damn fault - I didn't want to THINK he had epilepsy, so I found a way NOT to for a while.

Anyway, the rather expensive non-generic medication seems to work just fine, with no noticeable side effects, and MOST of the time Peter takes them as directed, although not without some urging on my part.

Who knows. Maybe it's a good thing: If they reinstitute the draft, they might not take him becasue of this lifelong chronic incurable condition!

Can you wait for the dust to settle?

2005-11-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

Yeah, well, neither can I!

I wanted this post to be titled "The other shoe dropping", but as a general theme here, it just doesn't work very well.

Yeah, I did find out why the yellow lead was dead: blown fuse! More than likely, I was the author of my own misfortune, charging in to rewire the circuit and casually grounding the yellow wire.

The other stuff: well, I have mixed results!

One bright spot: I found, strangely enough, that my old AOL homepage is still there!

I don't know how much bandwidth it supports, but IT STILL HAS THE EMBEDDED AUDIO OF MARK FISHER READING THE PUB!

Here's the link: Taoists are Lao-Tse Lovers

As soon as it loads, if your sound card is on, you should hear Mark reading the poem.

This is some kind of positive outcome, if not exactly a resolution.

In other news, there's a more mixed outcome.

I had thought I was going to write here that we had solved the problem of Peter's sleepwalking, and particularly, his falling down in the bathroom, but alas it is more "nuanced" than that. For two whole months, he had had not episodes, and he had been taking the medicine the sleep specialist had prescribed, Clonazepam (first cousin to Diazepam, aka "Valium"), but I had not been sure that it was the pill, or if there was some "placebo" effect going on. Well, he had an episode, and it came out that he had stopped taking the pill for four days. "Well", I thought. "That settle it!", and I encouraged him to go back on the pill.

Sounded pretty good, but then, not long after, he had an episode even WHILE taking the pill! Even worse, it had happened much earlier in the night than it had ever happened before!

Well, back we went to the sleep specialist.

Long story short, he is now taking ANOTHER pill in addition. This one is called "Requip" - indicated for "Restless Leg Syndrome" and for Parkinson's!

Possibly the brightest news is that the doctor has assured me that the thrashing I had observed to occur always after he had fallen was NOT epilepsy, but merely a "parasomnia", sometimes called "head-banging".

Well, I'll take good news anywhere I can get it.

*Sigh*

"Why Me?"

2005-10-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

Is it just me? Or does everyone ask this question when things go wrong.

My ex-wife, Alexis, used to combat feeling sorry for herself with a kind of faux-bravado. She was slowly wasting away from Multiple Sclerosis, and she liked to say that instead of asking "Why Me" she would instead ask "Why NOT me?" Saying this seemed to satisfy her Leonine pride (early August birthday, dontcha know), but she never saw that she contradicted herself when she would confidently declare that she would NEVER end up, like her brother, in a nursing home. (Google +"William DeFotis" +music). He had been diagnosed with MS about the same time she had, but had progressed quite rapidly despite his efforts to stay active. He had been working hard from a manual wheelchair at his full-time job as a music professor at William and Mary, and just collapsed one day into a coma from which he miraculously recovered, but just barely. He was never able to work after that. "Why NOT me" didn't apply to her in that case.

As it worked out, she bypassed the long stay in the nursing home and went to her grave a full year and five days before he did. I *think* she chose dying over wasting away.

One of Robert Heinlein's characters, Max Jones said of the epitaph he had devised for his friend Sergeant Sam Anderson:

He had considered, "He played the cards he was dealt" but that didn't fit Sam either; if Sam didn't like the cards, he sometimes slipped in a whole new deck.

But I digress.

Today, I finally found time to install my spiffy new in-dash CD/MP3 player, and when I connected all the wires and tried to fire her up, nothing happened! Playing detective, I discovered that the yellow wire that was supposed to bring +12V 24/7 was dead. Curious, because it had always worked before for the CD player I was replacing. With some trepidation, I wired the yellow lead to the red one and, Voila! She works! Except now she forgets all her settings every time you turn off the ignition!

Peculiar!

Why would the yellow lead break just then?!?

Well, maybe it was a weak connection to begin with, and my moving the wiring around made it finally give up the ghost!

But still, I ask myself, is it FAIR? Now, every time I get out of the car, the player forgets which of the 100 MP3 tracks it was playing and starts over from track one. So I am going to have to punch the Track plus key (or the Track minus key) up to fifty times to get back where I was.

On the other hand, when I think of all the poor schlubs in the world that DON'T have Radio Paradise on MP3's in their car, I think I'm pretty darn lucky!

You know, I was orignally going to make this post a long discourse on feeling "Stuck", but Robert Pirsig did so much better at it with his book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" so I should just insert a link to that book in Amazon.com!

Or, in the words of the immortal Deteriorata:

"Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese; and reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be worse in Milwaukee".

PS - you think the RED lead is thinking "Why not me"?!?

Photobucket

2005-01-17T14:46:00.000-08:00

This is a test post from Photobucket.com

New to blogging

2005-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

I have been around the web now for about ten years. I had a personal web page for years, but I didn't maintain it. It just sat there. When I dumped AOL, I lost it. Now I have no place to broadcast the mp3 of Mark Fisher's poem, "The Pub". Maybe I can do it here - not sure.

Most of what I post is on Radio Paradise on the comments board, and in various forums. I started the PEAK OIL forum there. Serious stuff. I can't always take it myself.

The "avatar" above is my usual identifying mark on RP, although, like most RPers, I usually don the apropriate avatar of the day (Monday is "Mugshot Monday", Wednesday is "Hump Day", Friday is "Make Out Friday".

Sleepwalking

2004-12-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago, the day after Christmas, I stayed up late, going to bed after midnight, about 1 am. I am usually a pretty solid sleeper, and I had taken a Tylenol PM to help, but I was awakened at about 2:30 by a disturbing sound. I thought a neighbor was banging on the wall repeatedly. Investigating, I quickly found that my sixteen year old son was making the noise. He was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor and flailing against the door. I was frightened when I tried to waken him and found I could not. Panicked, I called 911 and followed their instructions. Did he throw up? Could I get him on his back? Would I unlock the front door? In about fifteen minutes, the paramedics arrived and asked a lot of annoying questions. Could he have sneaked out and gotten high or gotten drunk? What drugs do you take? On and on. Nothing very reassuring, all very accusing, I thought. I was elated when, as they were out in the cold, loading him into the ambulance, he sat up, seemed to recognize me, and we had a brief conversation. Later, I was to find out that he was still asleep, and did not remember any of it. The way he remembered it, he went to bed, went to sleep, and woke up in the ambulance.

The emergency room was like I've seen it before. A beehive of inactivity. Hurry up and wait. We spent more than four hours there, accomplishing blood and urine tests, and a CAT SCAN, the need for which I questioned. The doctor had fast answers, and, despite our not having insurance, I felt forced to agree. It was still unclear if he had fallen because he was unconscious or if he had become unconscious because he bonked his head. He might have a brain tumor, or bleeding on the brain, and the scan would clear up such questions. I said "okay" reluctantly.

Talking it over later, I was reminded that he had a history of sleepwalking, which I had forgotten. There had been one incident when he was nine, where he had fallen, and had just lay down and slept there until his mother had picked him up.

I remembered when I was young that there were times my parents would tell me "Michael, you walked in your sleep again last night", and I was always put out that they didn't waken me, because I never remembered anything about it. They said it was "bad" to waken a sleepwalker.

Studying it online, yesterday, I found that it isn't actually bad, just very difficult. No kidding.

Anyway, the scan showed he was alright, which I was pretty sure was the case, since, once he had awakened, he was normally lucid. Today, the bump on his head hurt, but he's fine.

I have been, however, a wreck. I kept getting up every hour last night to check on him, despite my telling him not to worry: "After all, the last time you fell was nine years ago" I told him, but it didn't reassure me!

*sigh*

The joys of parentood!

Empty but Marvelous

2004-11-28T07:31:00.000-08:00

I started to write my first post with the title "What the internet needs: ANOTHER BLOG!!!" but that's not exactly how I feel about it.
Actually, I am kind of following a white rabbit - I started by viewing another individual's blog and then posting a comment. I saw that I had the choice to post anonymously, or to apply for a blogger account and post with an user ID.
If my blog is "about" anything, if I am true to myself, it will be about the joy of life. About recognizing each moment as as a precious jewel.
And about SHARING that joy with others.