Opining Online

Margaret Shepherd, artist, calligrapher, author, is trying to bring civilization back with the stroke of a pen.

Being essentially uncivilized myself, is anyone surprised that I hadn’t heard of her before now? Writing thank you notes fills me with dread and anxiety. I can count the number of personal letters I’ve written in my life on one hand easily. Complaint letters are my forte, but I’ve stopped writing them too.

I have been on the receiving end of notes and letters that thrill me when I picked them out of the mailbox, so that makes my not returning that joy even more egregious. I’m a bit ashamed of myself right now. Blogging and short emails make up for this not one bit.

Margaret Shepherd’s Amazon Page. You can view more of her calligraphy art (bigger images) at Neatorama. I’m especially fond of what I think of as the “childbirth series” at the bottom of that page. I found this artist thanks to a civilized man who writes The Fire Ant Gazette.

Call the Nestle Hot line at 1-800-295-0051.

I was complaining over at Amba’s place a few days ago how some videos/visuals distract and subtract from the songs they are trying to illustrate rather than add value.

Well… since then, Jim at My Bossier opened my eyes to how it could be worse. But much funnier. Literally.

My Momma used to say that all the music I listened to sounded like just noise. Now I say to my kids that the music they listen to all sounds alike… which makes it similar to just noise.

What will my grandchildren hear? Chances are it will pretty close to the same thing I heard and their parents heard. Both the complaints and the music will likely have this sameness in common.

Though the video below is fairly constrained on an historical time scale, there’s bait in there for several decades. I have to admit, I’m not familiar with a lot of the artists… but doesn’t all the music sound familiar and familial?

Via Megan McArdle, here’s Slate’s In Search of Lost Sounds: Why you’ve never really heard the “Moonlight” Sonata.

Because a lot of people my age grew up hearing more of the old, out of tune upright pianos prominently featuring chipped ivories and a funky smell… than we did well-made, well-cared for, and thus rare, older pianos, it’s easy to understand why we preferred the new.

The story is about the Frederick Historic Piano Collection – 24 pianos made from 1790 to 1928. They are housed in a small Victorian library building in Ashburnham MA and they are featured in a yearly concert series. Hearing one of those concerts and seeing the pianos is one of the most appealing reasons I can think of to visit Massachusetts.

There are several clips in the article comparing compositions by Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy played on a Steinway to them played on pianos the composers might have actually used. I checked YouTube for more recordings by the pianists playing the old instruments, but didn’t find any. That’s a void begging to be filled.

Fascinating… and somewhat of an indictment of standardization. Heed this, autotune.

I saw the headline “Is nature out of control?” earlier today and read the story which now bears the headline, Big quake question: Are they getting worse?

I thought the following was seriously stupid, considering the age of the earth:

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so. 

Even if that “one scientist” is a YEC, that’s some extrapolation extraordinaire.

Even though I’m not a geologist, my BS detector pegged on that one. At least one geologist, Erik Klemetti, apparently agrees – calling this type of headline “irresponsible, reprehensible “journalism” that the worst hacks should be ashamed to print.”

And I certainly agree with Mr. Klemetti’s final point:

The point here is that the Earth is an active place – and we have very short experience with seeing events on a global scale. Reckless speculation the likes of which MSNBC (and LiveScience) partook in should be a warning of how the media still has a long way to come when it comes to reporting the facts rather than the hysteria of the natural world.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is the first time I’ve ever watched an entire Olbermann segment. I am left disgusted and angry. Oh yes, I feel sorry for his father, but I can’t quite summon up much sympathy for someone who would use an ill family member in such a self-aggrandizing and self-serving way.

Were this not on national TV, the “it’s all about me and what I want” attitude displayed would still be disgusting.

It’s been said that Sarah Palin uses Trig gain publicity and make political points. And I agree that she may. It’s a fine line she must walk where Trig’s dignity is concerned and sometimes she stumbles. I generally disagree with using ill and disabled people as symbols when they are not capable of giving their consent to be so used.

There are some real tear-jerker medical stories in my family. I’m sure I could increase traffic here by magnitudes if I wrote about them, especially in an overtly emotional way. Most of them could easily be tied to political and policy viewpoints.

Why do I not do that? First, I consider it an invasion of privacy. One of those subjects has given me explicit permission to write about his/her case in any way I see fit. Someday I may tell the story. But I will NOT tell it in order to support a political viewpoint.

If my political viewpoints cannot stand without being propped up by personal and emotional displays of illness and misfortune, are they truly worthy of support at all?

Where legislation that affects the lives of every person in the U.S., one individual’s misfortune cannot be allowed to sway the legislation one way or another. At best, it will only result in a different misfortune befalling another individual. At its worst, it results in the range of choices being narrowed for the entire nation.

There are many aspects of health care delivery in the U.S. that need reform. But, if we are to do it in a way that does not result in additional reform next year… and the year after that, we need to first look at how we got where we are now, as well as insure the possibility of future progress.

I don’t see that happening anywhere in the “debate” or “conversation” about healthcare.

It is the vitality of Henrietta Lacks and her descendants that captured my imagination while reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

It’s just a darned good story and it pushes all my “I want to read that” buttons – lively characters, science, mystery, public policy and politics, genealogy, plus a few I’ve probably not yet identified.

When you finish a book with a feeling you know some of the characters, and wishing you could visit further with them, you know it’s been worth your time. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s just that good.

Why… does blogger just refuse to publish comments on some blogs lately? Not all… just some. And not when using IE, but Chrome!!

What’s up Google? Maybe I should just uninstall Chrome. I have trouble with YouTube with it sometimes too.

I really like the sentiments expressed in this post at Casaubon’s Book:

Father and Mother and Uncle John…: Tribalism and a Place at the Table

Thanks to C.G., I’ve just finished our 2009 taxes, federal and state. Unlike him, I was not inclined to do it by hand. Been there, done that, and no matter how simple our returns are now compared to previous years, I like the software approach.

The most complex year involved 4 non-resident state returns, including California which required several more pages and ‘forms” than the federal return. I’d have never figured it out without the software.

My husband got around to replacing the toilet that had been just pretending to flush. I had no idea that toilets could wear out. I knew that the innards in the tanks might need replacing periodically, but not that other parts could wear out.

Anyway, it’s an older house and the bolts holding the toilet to the floor had disintegrated. I’m sure there might have been an easier way, or more elegant way, of removing such a toilet, but my darling chose the sledgehammer method. That was Day 1.

Day 2 involved chiseling out the bolts and cleaning up shards of vitreous china.

Day 3 should have been the easiest — set the new toilet in position and bolt it down — a job that should have taken less than an hour.

Not so, as standards have changed. Something on our toilet was 6 1/2 inches and the corresponding part on the new toilet was 6 inches. Nothing lined up. After 5 hours of chipping away 50 years of I don’t want to know what, a new something (a flange?) was installed and the new toilet was set.

All’s well that ends well. But our plans to replace the toilet in the other bathroom have been put on hold. I’m sure those plans will be revised to include paying for a professional installation. And they will include my absence during the procedure!

My granddaughter, Issie, just had the perfect birthday celebration for a princess-obsessed 3 year old.

First, getting to spend three days at an amusement park with the undivided attention of both parents is pretty awesome. What child wouldn’t be having fun? Add to that the attentiveness and playfulness of the Disney character actors.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the adventure:

I thought it was pretty awesome that she wore her Halloween Cinderella dress on one day. I wish I could have done that! I plan to ask her to wear it and tell me Cinderella’s story when I visit next month.

Her favorite rides were the Tea Cups and the Ferris Wheel. I never liked the Ferris Wheel because I didn’t like getting stopped on top during the loading and unloading. This one had a cage, not like the old (ancient?) ones I remember, so maybe it would be better. But I always loved Tea Cup rides.

And it’s such fun to see how much she’s grown On her first birthday, wearing the cake was more fun than eating it!

While I didn’t know until recently the origin of the phrase “Elvis has left the building“, I never thought it originated in the military. Yet, someone got to this blog with this search phrase:

military expressions like “elvis has left the building”

Has the military co-opted the phrase without telling me?

Massive Homeopathic Overdose Leaves Hundreds of Scientists… well, just read it. It’s far to sad to post here.

There’s not much that’s more exciting than spending six or more hours in an ER when you’re pretty sure you don’t need to be there. This is especially true when the ER staff discerns that you don’t need to be there either, but they can’t let you go until they get permission/instructions from a doctor.

Thanks to the internet and my knowledge of my past medical history*, I was 94% sure the radiating chest pain I’d been experiencing was not due to any cardiac problem.

Six percent lingering doubt is enough for a primary care physician to send one to the ER to rule out an emergent condition.

Blood tests, EKG, and chest x-ray ruled out the heart as the cause of my pain as I was almost sure it would do. I knew the pain was more than ordinary acid reflux and, after much reading, decided esophageal spasm was the best fit to my symptoms.

Yet… the chest pain I was experiencing didn’t involve difficulty swallowing, correlate to eating, position, or exercise, or involve regurgitation or a ”sour taste” in my mouth. Then again, I didn’t have any nausea, vomiting, or shortness of breath that might be associated with a cardiac problem. 

Thus the doubt and the need to rule out a problem requiring some action more proactive than taking a pill.

All I had was a recurring, intermittent, and sometimes severe chest pain that radiated to both arms and almost into my jaw.  Yep, that’s “all”. It is scary to hurt that bad in that part of your body and I don’t blame my PCP for sending me to the ER. As she stated on the phone, “We can’t do an EKG and our lab can’t do cardiac enzymes.”

What annoyed me the most about my ER visit is that a cardiac problem was ruled out within an hour of my arrival. The tests had been run and all returned normal. The next five hours was waiting for someone with the title and authority to tell the ER to dismiss me.

When that guy finally showed up (and I realize I was not high on his priority list because he also knew I wasn’t in danger of having a heart attack) he assured me that my heart was almost positively A-OK. 

I’d had a cardiac cath in mid 2006 which showed zero blockage and he told me that a blockage developing in 3 1/2 years severe enough to cause symptoms was highly unlikely.

(I am overweight and have high blood pressure, so was required to take a stress test to join a fitness center… and I failed. The docs said that it was probably boob size that caused the failing reading, but the only way to make sure was cardiac cath.)

He was more than happy to write me a 3 month prescription for Nexium — which is what I intended to ask my PCP for when I was lucky enough to get an appointment with her.  So…

Is all well that ends well? This time, for me, certainly.  

*my past medical history includes banded gastroplasty, which always creates gastro problems while not even close to always resulting in weight loss… but that’s an entire blog’s worth of rants that I don’t really feel like going into right now, especially on this blog.

The Lancet has retracted Andrew Wakefield’s study that linked autism to the MMR vaccine. Not only subsequent research been unable to replicate Wakefield’s findings, but now the General Medical Council of the UK has said that Wakefield’s conduct during the study was “unethical, contrary to the clinical interests of some of the children included in the research“.

This is good news, but in the general atmosphere of woo-acceptance, I’m afraid it’s too late. By about 12 years.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism in otherwise healthy children. None. Zero.

Orac, author of Respectful Insolence, has been faithfully battling autism and anti-vaccine quackery and other forms of unscientific, frankly silly, woo for several years now.

Tonight I battled woo on a personal level. I love my husband, but he’s so susceptible to believing “medical” advice… EXCEPT what his doctors tell him.  

If I stop eating tomatoes and potatoes, my arthritis won’t go away. If my husband starts taking alpha lipoic acid, his type II diabetes won’t be cured. Homeopathic remedies and the people who sell them are worthless.

If it were just my husband, I wouldn’t worry much. But it’s not. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn recently. And so much of the misinformation calls itself science, that one really has to be careful not to be misled.

arrggghh… I know this post doesn’t entirely make sense, but I’m not entirely free to explain all the run-ins I’ve had over the past several months with fads of woo.

Yesterday evening, around 8pm, I decided to clean the stove. And the vent over the stove. And the side of the stove and the side of the cabinet it stands against. And behind the stove. And under the stove.

And now… it’s early this morning, my back hurts, my hands hurt, and I’ve noticed that the walls and cabinets also look a bit dingy and greasy.

Why, oh why didn’t I just turn out the lights and go to bed early?

How dare they interfere with our politics? Why… there oughta be a law!

Of course there is a law saying foreign nationals do not have all the rights of political free speech granted to natives, both corporeal and corporate. And despite what some (our President, for example) are saying, the recent Supreme Court ruling doesn’t say that restriction is unconstitutional.

But… I have long had misgivings about interference of simple speech, ie speech not directly tied to a cash contribution, in our political shenanigans. For example, I thought the Guardian’s Operation Clark County was astoundingly arrogant, but not illegal.

In this same light, I felt it both legal and “OK” to express my desire that Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race. I did not feel that it was right for me to donate money to him. I’m not a Massachusetts resident — I am a foreigner to Massachusetts. (on several levels!)

While I am completely comfortable with the idea that cash — however generated — enables free speech, I’m not comfortable with cash from outside the boundaries of the election. I would be highly irritated if Bossier City residents poured money into the campaigns of Shreveport mayoral candidates, for example.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Lech Walesa openly campaigning within this country in a governor’s race also. He’s definitely a foreign national and he’s raising money for a candidate in a U.S. race? That does not set well with me.

But, more importantly… is it legal?

Isn’t it odd that I’m having trouble posting comments on blogspot blogs with Chrome, but none using IE?