This story about kids in New York being forced to take experimental AIDS treatments has made the rounds of a lot of people I know. I think these two follow-ups should too. I'm leaning toward saying the story was crap.
Rivka works with HIV patients and knows what she's talking about; she read the story with the same suspicions I did, but unlike me, she did her homework. Basically, while there may well be sinister things like that going on somewhere, that story relies on people with a history of awful bullshit; it leaves out information that there's no reason for an honest reporter to leave out; and the evidence it does give doesn't even come close to backing up the claims.
Right now I'm trying to cook the biggest meal I ever tried to cook. I took a break to gather food for thought.
- "We don't spend much time on the negative side": If denial and hypocrisy about foreign wars and war crimes are getting you down and you think it means the U.S. will be a fascist hellhole any minute now... well it might just mean we're going to be like France. (via Steve Gilliard)
- Green rice at the house of friendship: Hanzi Smatter, "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture", will help you find out if that cool tattoo you got is saying something you really didn't intend. (via Language Log)
- "There are some problems it might be fun to have": I really really liked The Incredibles [after the first 10 minutes] and it's been getting overanalyzed a little, so it's nice to see a smart guy like Kevin Moore overanalyzing right back.
- I'm not sure SF Gate's experimental animated 24-hour Bay Area fog forecast is a very useful piece of information technology, once you get past 10 AM, but it is funny. It needs a soundtrack, though—maybe a little voice coming from somewhere around Twin Peaks, going "nice day... la de da... oh there's some—OH MY GOD WHUFLP"
Sunday: Grandiose late-Thanksgiving dinner plan went damn well. Cooked for more than four people for the first time and the food was good. Made a pie for the first time and the pie was good. Had housemate, friend, parents, Lady of Consequence, and LOC's nearest&dearest all in one place for the first time, and the company was good.
Thanks.
Monday: Cooked up some broccoli and asparagus in lemon sauce and brought it to a potluck dinner with 6 other Quakers, and it was a good dinner. I was the youngest and shyest (and maybe freakiest, on a totally superficial level) person there, but no problem. And the conversation didn't turn into the standard Bay Area political lament where everyone tells everyone else about the same three things they read on the Internet until the last half-hour or so. And peach melba is... peachy. Thanks.
Because we had people there from a few different Meetings, and because we'd just had a ton of visitors show up that Sunday morning and thankfully not had any disasters, the conversation turned to worst experiences of people abusing the unusual patience and reticence of Quakers. If you've never been to a Quaker meeting: it's a silent worship service but anyone can get up and talk; ideally this is valuable "ministry", but sometimes, um...
Amy: "I'd seen this man on the street before and this was the first time he'd come in. He'd taken a lot of care to clean up and dress up, and he sat quietly in the back row. I thought, all right—good for you. A woman stood and started to speak... and after a minute I looked over at this guy in the back row, and... he had his pants all the way down, and he was just, uh... going at it! He had a long shirt that was sort of covering everything up, but still.
"I stood up and told him, I'm sorry, you'll have to leave. You can't do that here! And instantly I felt awful for interrupting the woman who was speaking and causing a stir, but ah... someone had to.
"He looked kind of puzzled, not really offended. He said: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought she said it would be okay."
Dan: "This new visitor showed up and on his first day, he stood and started delivering this Shakespearean monologue. I mean, literally—he was reciting from King Lear. The next week he came in again and recited some more Shakespeare, at great length. And the next week. It turned out he was a waiter at a restaurant nearby, who was also a frustrated actor, and he'd found out that this was a good captive audience for him to practice on.
"I felt that someone ought to complain, but no one knew what to say... and I even saw some people complimenting him later, especially the older ladies who were hard of hearing, because he had a nice loud voice and this was the first message they'd heard in years. But it was really inappropriate.
"Now I happened to be talking to a woman who'd been around a long time at another very old Meeting and I asked her how they handled these things. She said, Oh, this is nothing new. Back in the '30s, a man used to come in and yell at us about Communism all the time. We got through that all right.
"I said, What'd you do? How'd you get through it?
"Oh, eventually he died."
Not exactly news, but our governor is an asshole:
"Pay no attention to [nurses] ... They are the special interests ... I kick their butt."
More here.
Basically, Arnold thinks he can ignore the safe-staffing law because Gray Davis signed it, and because the hospital lobbyists are lining his pockets, and because he's a big strong butt-kicking machine.
In a just world, the governor would have ENRON tattooed on his face and would receive mandatory breast implants.
If you're in San Francisco: go see this. I'm working that day but might still get there a little late (I know that's what I say about everything these days; lame, isn't it?).
Booklyn at the San Francisco Center for the Book
At 7:00PM on Wednesday, January 5, 2005,
Booklyn presents
Crazy Knowledge
a presentation of Booklyn artists books
accompanied by poetry and spoken word readings
by NYC show-off Marshall Weber,
local Es Ef anti-hero Fred Rinne,
and revolutionary avatar Karen ("the only free press is your own press") Switzer.
Strange musical backup by the Iconoclasts is sure to make this event intriguing - at the least. It's all going down at the
The San Francisco Center for the Book
300 DeHaro St,
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.565.0545
Wow, some time when I'm feeling fearless, I have to go back and read a bunch of Robert Jay Lifton; I think I've only read The Nazi Doctors and part of his Hiroshima book. He's scary and wise.
Anyway, in looking up stuff for that encyclopedia article [my Wikipedia obsession continues, alas], I found this scary and wise lecture about Aum Shinrikyo. In it, kindly attempting to lighten things up, Lifton mentions the bizarre fact that he also does gag cartoons about birds, and quotes one that I now intensely desire a copy of:
In this particular cartoon, a small, enthusiastic, young, naive bird looks up and says, "All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling I am me," and an older, bigger, more jaundiced, more skeptical bird looks down and says, "You were wrong."
1.
I’m on the top floor of a spacious empty shiny white museum-type place, after hours. I’m some kind of undercover guy and I’ve just met with my mysterious contacts. On my way out, I see my partner, a tall middle-aged guy with a mournful expression—looks kind of like Jimmy Stewart. I inform him that although we’ve managed to infiltrate Ansar el-Islam, our plans to set up and then bust a terrorist operation on January 2nd have had to be postponed, because “that wasn’t a good day”. He responds with an even sadder and incredulous look, as if I’ve just totally fucked him over but he won’t complain.
2.
I’m playing with some teenagers in a field of trash and rubble on the outskirts of a Middle Eastern city. Suddenly a huge explosive cloud covers a small empty building near us. Was it demolished or did it just fall down? No—now we see mortar shells flying over the city, and machine guns are going off down by the docks. There’s an escape plan for this which involves meeting up with some people in a basement, climbing out a window and then hiking into the suburban hills. Families are camping out and trying to find out what’s going on from a recent newspaper... it seems kind of mellow, but I know the adults are probably more scared than I am.
I have a new E-mail(*) and PO box(**) address.
You can get them both here.
If you have my phone number or home address, those are still the same.
(*) Because I was starting to lose real mail in the flood of spam. I know this doesn't solve the problem of my incredibly-hard-to-spell web address. I'll come up with something else some day but I still really like that word.
(**) Because a half-hour trip to the Tenderloin to pick up a few catalogs is no longer the thrill it used to be. I got that old box number when I hadn't moved from New York yet and wasn't sure where I'd be living.
About half of what we do in the hospital is fix problems caused by fixing problems. The new patient I got today had the weirdest problem-to-problem chain I've seen so far:
Problem: Ex-military diver attacked by jellyfish while scuba diving.
Solution: Escape to the surface.
Problem: Surfacing too fast causes decompression sickness with damage to joints and nerves.
Solution: Emergency hyperbaric oxygen treatment. When stable, fly home for follow-up.
Problem: Flying on a plane too soon causes a slight reoccurrence of decompression sickness with damage to ears and kidneys.
Solution: Rush to the county hospital, get a lot of tests, and start administering a lot of IV fluid.
Problem: Horrible pain around one kidney when lots of fluids are given; there might be a kidney stone.
Solution: Insert a urinary catheter, monitor output, wait for a CT scan, meanwhile give lots of Dilaudid for pain.
Problem: Massive doses of pain medication cause miserable vomiting.
Solution: Give Compazine for nausea.
Problem: A fortunately very very rare side effect of Compazine manifests as a huge very painful erection that will not subside. (This is no joke; after a couple of hours you can end up with permanent vascular problems.)
Solution: Stop the Compazine, remove the urinary catheter(!!), and—the last order the doctor wrote before I left—
"Leave lubricant at bedside."
I spent much of today hiding from the rain in a trance of fannishness...
First the post office finally delivered my birthday present to myself: the boxed set of the complete Flanders and Swann. Will I be able to avoid foisting this on all my friends who aren't silly Anglophiles and driving them nuts? Hoolimakittilucacheecheechee.
Then I spent some time updating my Wally Shawn reference, and found out that the movie adaptation of The Fever, starring Vanessa Redgrave (also, weirdly, the acting debut of Michael Moore), is done and may actually be seen by more than a dozen people since it's coming from HBO Films. This might be good, though I can't help being a little worried since it's a real hard play to do well.