The incalculable megrims of the οἱ πολλοί

What’s the flavour of the month, paparazzi & panditi?  Or rather, considering the current attention span, the day (if that long).

Trying to pay attention to everything means not paying much attention to anything.  Learning, in some psychological models, is a matter of filtration. To get anything real done is going to require changing from a no. 2 mesh to a number 14 considering the volume of data that are out there.

Damn I hope that better metadata & indexing is coming soon, the semantic web is proving quite elusive in practice.

There was a donkey exactly half-way between two exactly equal piles of hay: poor thing died of hunger in between since he couldn’t decide which one to go to… the perfect being the enemy of the good.

“Ancora imparo…” —Michelangelo  {di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni {1475 – 1564  (“I am still learning”)  & only about 87 at the time.  One of the Supremes said something of the same ilk in his eighties, to the effect that he was still improving his mind.

Maslow’s hierarchy probably a good starting point for the info-triage©…  What’s just about to bite me on the ass, then what’s going to ruin my day tomorrow, by next year same time …  &c, &c, &c.

What kind of turd are thee?

Ah, fæces: in matters scatological nothing beats the Bristol Stool Form Scale (BSFS) {Stool form scale as a useful guide to intestinal transit time. Scand J Gastroenterol. 1997;32(9):920-924. PMID: 9299672}

Figure 2 in the May 2009 Supplement to The Journal of Family Practice {Vol.58,No.5,p.56} breaks it down for us, viz

Type 1 — Separate hard lumps, like nuts (difficult to pass)

Type 2 — Sausage-shaped but lumpy

Type 3 — Like a sausage but with cracks in its surface

Type 4 — Like a sausage or snake, smooth & soft

Type 5 — Soft blobs with clear-cut edges (passed easily)

Type 6 — Fluffy pieces with ragged edges; a mushy stool

Type 7 — Watery, no solid pieces, entirely liquid

———

You’ll need to go to the full-text article for the amusing small turd drawings…

The 1.5 CME/CE credits activity is in benefit of Irritable Bowel Syndrome w/Constipation (IBS-C), improving primary care assessment & management thereof: overcoming barriers, EB DX, EB TX.

As I recall, Donovan had a song related to the issue, “The Intergalactic Laxative”, well worth the 99¢ visit to the toon store {©1973 Donovan Leitch “Cosmic Wheels”}.

On the more allegorical usage, there’s the U.S. Senate at Type 1; Rush Limbaugh at Type 2-3; James van Praagh at Type 7 & the ALA Type 5.

Rather drink muddy water & sleep in a hollow log…

…than to live in samsara & get beat like a dirty dog…

Oh, my cat done dissed me, she said I done her wrong
I been a bad cat daddy, left her alone to howl & moan
Was the best I could do for her, barely gave her a home
Now she’s off with two girlfriends, three cats & a dog
She’s free now & partying as long as the day’s long
She come out of her shell now, near three years been put down
Tho she hisses & growls me, got to let it go by
She’s in a better place now, pussy needed to get free

living v. suicide

The great philosophical question – practical, too: why bother, indeed.  But that cuts both ways.  Why bother to commit suicide when death is going to happen anyway, inevitably.  Of course if you know there’s a horrible end imminent, e.g., neoplasm of some ilk, you might want to avoid those most unpleasant aspects.  Likewise if dementia is just around the corner you’d think about detouring whilst there was still the option.

Geshe went over some of the points during the long-life initiation: essentially, you want as much incarnation time as possible so that you can do the most good stuff possible in this lifetime.  Man’s got a point; logical, too [once you stipulate the usual non-rational components] (even they’re logical).

Yes, in a bummer state of mind: wondering if AF is going to make it to her 91st, guess I’ll have to amend the ‘Dead I Know’ page soon.  Cat’s gone to a better place but I find that I miss her.  Love life’s in the crapper, house & yard work about five years behind.

abandon hope, all ye that enter facebook

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M & M: mourning report

The hind-third flattened & dragging, the cat pumped its front legs, moving at a surprisingly fast pace left-to-right across the highway – three more lanes to the shoulder & perhaps respite.  I was already past the horror, in the left-most lane, before it truly registered.

First thing to mind was doing OMPH.  No vet I, but surely that was a mortal injury.  Hope the cat made it to the side of the road & was able to die in the grass instead of on concrete.  Might’ve been me in the past, might be me in future.  Birth, life, death, bardo…

Pray the little critter ended this lifetime with some peace & calm, & gets into a better reincarnation for the next go around the wheel.

—

Hwy. 146 northbound, just off Harman Bridge, 07:00

Rainy Day Headache

Storm rampant since quitting time Friday & probably into/thru Sunday.  Coming on four weeks of pharygolaryngyal torment, ever since the post-paddy’s party.  Of course ignored it for a week [damned Y-chromosome] before Dr Iz decided I was making too much noise & scaring the patients.  Bronchitis & maybe pneumonia so we’ll treat as if the latter.

Tho ameliorated, not actually over it after another week or so, so hie me to ENT: two-foot black straw up the nose & hello – leukoplakia(LP), bilateral, vocal cords.  Because of Smiler I. we already knew about the condition & so was rather nonplused for a bit, probably will be until Monday & followup endoscopy.  If necessary, hope he can biopsy in the same trip; tho not as bad as I’d expected, it’s not something most people would do for fun.

Ignorance is the basic condition, blissful or not, & my folly is to dispel it bit by bit – as I’d mentioned before, ignorance can be corrected but stupid is forever.  As somewhere between 3% — 30%  of LPs advance into cancer ignore-ance would be really stupid.

The old library had a book sale, now have a great condition Bullfinch plus one on the Weimar Republic; went by Good Friday, seems my buddy from circ had died the day before.  A great person who’ll be greatly missed.

Damned Politicians

Ha! don’t get me started, you know how I am…

The ALA of all people has hired a carnie sideshow for their annual conference.  We’re definitely post-literate, post-thought; the library association of the U.S. is going to feature a medium (actually looks like an extra-large).

Politicians are of the same ilk, one held forth this morning on NPR about how the AIG mucky-mucks should do a Mitsubishi BOD thing: where they humbly bow & apologize to the stockholders, then commit hari-kiri.  Strange stance for a person in the first-class compartment of the gravy train — but stance: politicians can kiss their own ass, five others & give fellatio plus two hand jobs whilst getting a blow job themselves.

I say give the congress an immediate 50% pay cut & cancel their benefits.  Let the scum pay for their own medical bills & fund their own IRAs.  Performance bonus?  Let senators & representatives decrease the number of folks living below poverty level (one person <$10,590, four people <$21,203, per annum) & then we’ll talk.  Fuck it: let’s pay congress $1.00 over poverty level wage equivalent.  No golden parachutes for anyone.

“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.“  kill ‘em all, god’ll sort ‘em out…

Roar of the greasepaint; smell of the crowd

That aulde huckster & reprobate, James van Praagh, is on as primary speaker for the American Library Association 2009 Conference.  More on that, later.

Guess it’s official, the society is both post-literate and post-intelligence.  Thankfully there won’t be much archæological evidence, the tapes & optical or digital media will have gracefully decayed into a thin layer of plastics & ferric oxides when they dig into the tell a millenium or so on.

There was a comment on a LJ blog about Jr Bush’s legacy: $1TN± war costs (NTM over 4,257 U.S. dead in Iraq, >662 in Afghanistan); using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper.  And I used to think that the punishment for treason during wartime was hanging…

But stupid is as stupid does: being old-fashioned I think that bribery should be illegal, even when it’s called ‘lobbying’.  Beneficium accipere libertatem est vendere – To accept a favour is to sell freedom. (Publilius Syrus) Hang them both: panderer & whore, i.e, lobbyist & politician.  That the populous has not reacted to the status quo…

cribbed from wikiwiki:

O tempora o mores! Cicero in his First Oration against Catiline “Oh the times! Oh the customs!”  Cicero deplores the viciousness and corruption of his age.  Cicero is frustrated that, despite all of the evidence that has been compiled against Catiline, who has been conspiring to overthrow the Roman government (NTM trying to kill Cicero), and the fact that the senate has given final approval Catiline has not yet been executed, while other conspirators were executed for less.

Medical Exorcises

Patient care is a broad topic, but ’round these here parts it can get quite sucky. Six docs in two weeks provides lots of opportunity for phuqaghe. Take that CT, please. Saw one doc in his home lair on Friday, 20 minutes of data entry then a couple hours before they could scrape up an ultrasound tech; which left no time for the CT, but at least no clots found.

Next week they repeated the same data entry again, must’ve gone bad over the weekend. Wait some more, then get told they want a $450 co-pay.  WTF? the u/s was covered… but not CT, no co-pay at all if done at a different facility tho… not something the feckless pinheads thought to mention up front.

Of course that was the orthopædicus secundus, o. primus wanted to spread the wealth with a specialized specialist after he’d gotten me in his clutches from the g.p. who with o.p. both mis-diagnosed a fracture.  At least o.p. got me on a cephalosporin.

CT at second site got done, o. secundus said he’d be able to read it over weekend – four days post irradiation, how expeditious.  Another symptom arose which none of the above could handle, so hello ER.  ER Dr Quaternus took a culture & an EWAG, changed ABX to clindamycin.

Too bad the s. aureus was resistant to it but sensitive to cephalosporin (not being MRSA).  When there’d been no results returned before weekend Dr Quitus rattled some cages, got the microbiology report, restarted cephalosporin & added a sulfamethoxazole w/trimethoprim.

Turns out o. secundus couldn’t read the CT after all, intra-hospital SNAFU – crap IT.  Hey, burn a CD-ROM and drive it over in your copious free time.  Anyway, it’s not a fracture from the trauma, tho there is some damage on the opposite side from a while back; the cellulitis is the major issue.  So hello, Dr Sextus, my trusty long-term PCP/GP, there’s so much to be said for the family physician.

Four-plus weeks of assorted ABX, to be continued anon…