Catullus 5's Journal

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Gray Friday
Always Go To Snopes.

Claim: The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S.

Status: False.
...
[In dollars spent,] Black Friday nearly always ends up ranking below the last Saturday before Christmas (or December 23, if Christmas Day falls on a weekend), and in recent years [this article is from 2003] it has ranked between fourth and eighth on charts of the year's busiest shopping days.

Twi-blight
Harry Potter never had this kind of giant popular backlash. Nobody ever called him a fag or shouted "Harry Potter Fans Ruined Comic-Con." So what gives?

I wonder if it's because young men see Edward Cullen as a threat and a competitor. It can be irritating if the girls you're trying to attract keep swooning over a sparkly 108-year-old who doesn't exist. Whereas Harry Potter's appeal is almost entirely nonsexual.

Yet I know plenty of women who are sick of Twilight mania as well.

Perhaps it's because Twilight represents both an unfortunate neutering of the vampire mythos and also the mainstreaming of a rebel/outsider vibe that folks worked hard to cultivate. Once upon a time, vampires may have been glamorous and sexy, but they were also dark and sinister, and moreover, they were lonesome outsiders. And if you were into that vibe, you probably were yourself a goth or a punk or something, with your own scene, standing apart from the mainstream. A lot of the Twilight haters I know fit this description somewhat. (Sampling bias - a lot of the people I know come from Rocky Horror.) But then here come these books and movies, and suddenly all the Socs from here to Ridgemont High think vampires are so cool and so dreamy and so romantic and so... nice. Thus Twilight has not only ruined the popular concept of vampires - Anne Rice would never have let sparkles come out of her vampires, dammit! - but also ruined the scene. Everyone knows that your favorite bar, band, or neighborhood is liable to be ruined once it's discovered by the dull uninteresting hordes of normals. Scenes are the same way - and it's even more personal, since we often derive from our scenes part of our very identity.

This would also explain why Comic-Con geeks had the same outraged reaction. Replace "goth" with "geek" and it's the same story: Mainstream Twilight fans invading a beloved palace of outsider sci-fi geekdom. Physically, in fact.

Am I close?

By the way, I'm told the new movie really sucks.

The thing that defines the badness of New Moon is an extended circular tracking (or Steadicam) sequence that Weitz shot of Stewart (i.e., Bella Swan) sitting in her room, immobile and depressed after her vampire lover Edward Cullen (Pattinson) has broken things off and moved away. Weitz moves the camera around her three times, which gives the audience three views of her front lawn as it changes with the seasons -- greenish brown during October, totally brown with leaves being raked in November, and finally snow-covered in December.

Except someone in the Summit high command decided that this visual information wasn't explicit enough for some in the audience, and so little white titles have been inserted, appearing each time the camera moves around and behind Bella's back, that say "October," "November and "December." Just stunning. Unbelievable! Truly one of the most embarassing passage-of-time sequences ever included in a major motion picture.

Someone must have spiked my fifteenth Smirnoff ice, because after that one I don't remember a thing.
I'm not the only one who always suspected something like this.

A study of more than 200 students revealed many wrongly blamed the effects of a "bad night out" on date-rape drugs, when they had just drunk excessively.
...
More than half said they knew someone whose drink had been spiked.

But despite popular beliefs, police have found no evidence that rape victims are commonly drugged with such substances, the researchers said.
...
Among young people, drink spiking stories have attractive features that could "help explain" their disproportionate loss of control after drinking alcohol, the study found.

Co-researcher Dr Sarah Moore said: "We would be very interested in finding out whether the urban myth of spiking is also the result of parents feeling unable to discuss with their adult daughters how to manage drinking and sex and representing their anxieties about this through discussion of drink spiking risks."

Nick Ross, chair of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, commented: "There is no evidence of widespread use of hypnotics in sexual assault, let alone Rohypnol, despite many attempts to prove the contrary.
...
"As Dr Burgess observes, it is not scientific evidence which keeps the drug rape myth alive but the fact that it serves so many useful functions."
...
Earlier this year, Australian researchers found that not one of 97 young men and women admitted to hospital over 19 months to two Perth hospital claiming to have had their drinks spiked, had in fact been drugged.

This wouldn't bother me - how many stupid urban legends are there, after all? - except it conditions society to expect some very troubling things. It teaches women to eye every guy at a party as a probable rapist lurking among them. It teaches them that date rape is commonplace and routine. And so we get far more false accusations than PC women's activists would ever admit. Both the mistaken kind and the willfully false kind. If you can't believe you agreed to what you did last night, or if you can't even remember, then you've been conditioned to suspect a drug, and report a suspected crime. Or if you're lacking in human decency and want to avoid criticism, by any means necessary, for something you know was consensual, society has been conditioned to accept at face value whatever accusation you care to throw. The myth of the ubiquitous would-be date-rapist lurking everywhere you look helps perpetuate this. That's why this urban legend is especially pernicious. It's all fun and games until the bogus felony accusations come down on someone you know.

EDIT: You know what? Someone will misunderstand and think I'm boorishly claiming there's no such thing as date rape. So let me preemptively say, Nonsense. I'm not even talking about most date rape claims, just the ones involving allegedly spiked drinks. I'm just linking to an article arguing that the scary stories about sinister guys with vials in bars are clearly just boogeyman tales. They serve a purpose (like a lot of urban legends, actually): If the story makes your daughter or friend act more responsibly, then she's better off, and what's the big deal if it isn't actually based in fact? Except I argue that it can be a big deal. This particlar urban legend has the unfortunate side effect of fostering more false rape charges than there probably would be otherwise.

Why yes, I'll be glad to advertise your company on the back of my car for free... not.
People who know me from high school: My car says "JACK MADDEN FORD / NORWOOD" on the back in nice peelable letters. Is there any funny sayings I can create with the existing letters? I was planning to peel off the J and the last three words (get it?), but I hope I'm not overlooking anything obvious that would be funnier.

<Seinfeld voice> What's the deal with vampires? </Seinfeld voice>
Interesting food for thought. Do you agree or disagree with the following? Explain your answer.

Why are vampires so popular?
By keithold is going for the 100 Asked Sep 21 2009 10:06PM

Top Answer out of 6
by Purple47 on Sep 21, 2009 at 10:08 pm
They are a sex substitute for pre-sexual girls, like unicorns. They imagine themselves bitten on the neck involuntarily, pierced... entered... and giving nourishment in return.

Cards for sorrow, cards for pain
Another XKCD that rings true.

Actually, restlessly producing has recently saved me. Damned Chapman got me thinking about Magic The Gathering, which I haven't played or thought about in fifteen years. What an obnoxious but addictive (to geeks) game. The whole thing is based on two principles: First, you have to spend dozens or hundreds of dollars on cards to be good, and they print brand new cards four times a year, and standard competition prohibits cards that are more than two years old, so serious players basically have to spend hundreds of dollars a year to keep playing. What a bloody racket. Second, the ever-expanding rules are an Asperger's paradise. Every card has a unique behavior, every quarterly expansion adds brand new rules without removing old ones, and there is a giant PDF document explaining the heaping pile of technical minutia for every conceivable combination of cards. When you play cards they go on an imaginary "stack" in "priority" order and "resolve" in another order "just like a computer procedure stack." How do I know? Because after Chapman mentioned his Magic game night, I dug out my old cards from fifteen years ago, then started researching the current state of the game, read a whole bunch of material, and seriously started thinking about buying a big library of cards. Even though I was fully aware of the obnoxiousness. It's fun to a certain type, and addictive to a certain subtype, and I'm afraid that's me. At one point last week, I couldn't stop thinking about sneaking out of work to hit Newbury Comics for some booster packs. Augh! get it out of my head. What a loser this makes me!

But I saved myself. I'm going to start learning Python at work soon, so one night I opened up a Python shell on my Mac and started tooling around. By the end of the evening I had come upon an idea for a program to write. And ever since then, I haven't given a crap about Magic. My old cards are sitting right where I left them and I have no more desire to read through them, build a deck, or play. The urge to create cool code somehow just moved in and entirely replaced the urge to play a systematic card game. Funny how that works, and fortunate.

Yeah, sorry Magic, you almost had me, but this geek is going back to restlessly producing.

Perverse incentives - now in pictures
Touching on something I wrote about earlier, here's a graph that shows what trying harder will get you, if you're in the bottom 40% of income earners. Answer: Just about zilch.

Flat is bad. Why work full-time to earn $40k, when you can stay at home all year and end up with nearly the same amount, courtesy of Uncle Sam? Sounds like a deal to me. I don't make a very high multiple of that, and I'm working my ass off here.

The long-run consequence of undermining the positive incentive to work is, of course, the creation of an underclass acclimated to not working; the supplement of cash and noncash benefits with income from crime and the underground economy; and the government resorting to negative incentives such as mandatory work programs.

Every year, politicians point bullseyes at the rich because it's always a sure vote-getter. But all their allegedly altruistic programs designed to help the poor have only ensured that their marginal tax rate is far higher than a millionaire's - often over 100% in fact.

Why January should be National Rob Schneider Movie Month
Cool information from data-mining Metacritic.

The best and worst reviewed actors. Some are surprising (Viggo Mortensen), some are anything but (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Freddie Prinze Jr.).

"If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average. If you are interested in an alternative perspective, Mick LaSalle's high standard deviation places him further from the critical pack than any of these peers." Also, to my complete lack of surprise, Roger Ebert loves everything these days.

News flash: The best movies come out in December and the worst ones come out in January.

Cue U2 song
The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago today. When you consider that communism slaughtered up to a hundred million people by some estimates, and enslaved about a billion people at its height, it could be that November 9, 1989 was the greatest day in world history during my lifetime.

Figured I'd mention it.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was cool.

I know a bit about coin collecting, and the consensus among enthusiasts is that the golden $20 Double Eagle designed by Saint-Gaudens and minted from 1907 to 1933 is the most beautiful American coin ever minted. And I agree.

But this man sculpted a lot more than coins. Click the link for a brief article and slideshow of some of his work. It's really fantastic. One of his reliefs, a memorial to Civil War colonel Robert Gould Shaw, stands at the edge of Boston Common; I've seen it.

It turns out the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has had a special exhibit on Saint-Gaudens. It's been open since summer, but it closes next weekend... and I didn't find out about it until yesterday. Doesn't that suck.

So, I think I'll have to take a trip next Saturday, because I really would like to check this out. I can return in time to perform at FBC. I can either drive straight from my Friday night football game, arriving in the wee hours, or I can book a $50 room near Foxwoods, play a little poker on Friday night, and leave myself just a two-hour drive Saturday morning. (The ideal option would be to arrive earlier Friday and go out drinking with JD, or my brother, but football rules that out.)

Yeah... this will be neat.

Backlights and blacklights
The moment when the first notes of "This Is Halloween" struck, and Kyle slowly emerged in a bath of fog and white backlighting to a sold out audience erupting in cheers of delight, is something I don't think I'll ever forget.

All our months of preparation, hundreds of dollars, dozens of members all working in concert, culminated in this dramatic opening, and I was struck giddy by how grand and galvanizing it was.

I love doing this. I love being a part of something so great.

I thank everyone who gave their time to become a cog in this incredible kickass machine. Everyone who soldered a bank of floor lights, fired a fog machine, choreographed a swordfight, sweet-talked a theater manager, fastened a corset, seized booze, pitched a song idea, donned a motion capture suit, painted a clown car, tossed a glow stick, coaxed the fans to dance, edited a video, bought sexy boots, painted a clown car, cycled a rainbow gel, painted a face, pitched a preshow, reserved a room, rigged a velcro dress, or learned a puppet dance.

Thank you for your part in a sublimely gratifying accomplishment, and I hope you enjoyed the experience just as well.

A smart person agrees with me. Yay.
Brookings Institute scholar Gregg Easterbrook comments on health care, and to my delight, makes nearly the same argument I did, with nearly the same analogies. I find that pretty cool. It suggests I'm not the far-out libertarian lunatic you think I am. On this issue, at least. Especially since Gregg Easterbrook is usually substantially more liberal than me.

Think about a radically different way to attain health care -- in which most people carry only catastrophic-cost insurance, then pay other health costs themselves. No one can budget for a severe illness or injury; every family will always need insurance against catastrophic medical expense. Suppose insurance covered only catastrophes, and you paid the rest. You might think, "No way I am paying some doctor hundreds of dollars to set a broken arm." But today a typical family's health care policy that appears to cost the family $5,000 a year actually costs $15,000, it's just that much of the money is hidden as employer's costs -- and thus, as higher wages the employer can't pay. If you spent $5,000 a year for catastrophic coverage but earned an additional $10,000 a year, you could cover those strep-throat and broken-arm bills yourself, and probably come out ahead. Plus you'd have a keen incentive to comparison shop. Doctors could no longer loftily say, "We don't discuss prices."

Homeowner's insurance is catastrophe insurance. It pays if the house burns down -- the kind of thing no one can budget for. It doesn't cover all costs of maintaining a home; you pay most ownership costs and you comparison shop. If homeowner's insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!

Gradually transitioning to a system in which most people carry catastrophic-cost medical insurance but pay the rest themselves could rationalize health care economics while restraining costs, because the wasteful paperwork aspect of the system would decline. The first step would be a standard-price rule -- specifying that providers must offer the same price to all comers, whether insured patients, self-pay or Medicare. And the standard price must be published to allow comparison shopping. Good physicians and hospitals could still distinguish themselves through quality of care; in most of the free market, prices are similar, and quality is the basis of sales appeal. Stipulating that health care providers offer standard, published prices would lay the groundwork for an informed free market in health care delivery -- and free markets control costs. They do it on their own, without layers of agencies and regulations. We've got to control health care costs or the future doesn't work. Yet the current health-care reform plan is to add more agencies and regulations.

I love it. That's exactly what I was saying, only he's probably a better writer and his column probably reaches a hundred thousand more people than my LiveJournal does. I'm pleased as punch that my line of argument follows his so closely.

On the other hand, if you go read a few paragraphs earlier, the similarities end. He calls it "nonsensical" that insurance companies are allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. On the contrary, I think it would be nonsensical if they didn't. That would be like Caesars Palace accepting even-money bets on the Patriots when the game is already 59-0 in the fourth quarter. Caesars Palace is not in the business of accepting sure-winner wagers and neither are insurance companies. Unfair? That's such a nebulous word... but unexpected? Anything but! Your spouse can't buy life insurance for you after you're already dead, and you can't buy health insurance for yourself after you're already sick. That just seems so patently obvious, I don't understand why people can't just shrug and accept it as a crystal clear fact of life, regardless of how badly we may wish it weren't.

0x1F
Oh! think not my spirits are always as light,
And as free from a pang as they seem to you now,
Nor expect that the heart-beaming smile of to-night
Will return with to-morrow to brighten my brow.
No: -- life is a waste of wearisome hours,
Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,
Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
But send round the bowl, and be happy awhile --
May we never meet worse, in our pilgrimage here,
Than the tear that enjoyment may gild with a smile,
And the smile that compassion can turn to a tear.

The thread of our life would be dark, Heaven knows
If it were not with friendship and love intertwined;
And I care not how soon I may sink to repose,
When these blessing shall cease to be dear to my mind.
But they who have loved the fondest, the purest,
Too often have wept o'er the dream they believed;
And the heart that has slumber'd in friendship securest
Is happy indeed if 'twas never deceived.
But send round the bowl; while a relic of truth
Is in man or in woman, this prayer shall be mine, --
That the sunshine of love may illumine our youth,
And the moonlight of friendship console our decline.

Thomas Moore

Perverse incentives
There's a sobering illustration of an inconvenient truth in just about every paragraph of this piece. It illustrates, many times over, how strongly our system punishes work and effort. This isn't some theoretical thought experiment, either - it is happening to millions of Americans at all times. Marginal tax rates matter more than overall tax rates. If you have the chance to work harder and earn $10,000 more, how much of that extra amount will you keep? In many cases, not much at all. Even though the "advertised" income tax rate is constant up through much of the middle class, there are a host of credits, subsidies, financial aid programs, debt forgiveness programs, et cetera, which stop applying when your income goes above certain levels. Thus, Americans often are confronted with a strong disincentive to work harder. Which is too bad for the economy. Every time these perverse incentives convince an American not to take a job, or to take an eaiser, lower-paying job, the economy suffers. This article makes the case that, gradually over the last few decades, and often with good intentions, we moved too far from "give the less fortunate a break" and veered into the "why bother to work" zone.

For decades there has been debate about how to help the poor without discouraging work, saving or marriage. Yet with almost no notice just such disincentives have crept up the income ladder, observes economist C. Eugene Steuerle.... At first blush it would be hard to argue with anything that might help Lederman get back on her feet. Mortgage relief? The voters clamored for it. Scholarships for less-prosperous students? Everyone wants poor kids to get the same chances in life as rich ones. Add up all these good intentions, though, and you get some perverse incentives.

Work isn't the only middle-class virtue that is getting punished. The system penalizes savings, too--not just through taxes, but also through programs that reward debtors, the profligate and college families that show up at the financial aid office with empty pockets. Yet another series of tax and benefit rules penalizes marriage.

"This is a big social experiment. We really don't know what the long-term effect of all these incentives is going to be," Steuerle says.

A small example, one of several:

A single taxpayer has more of his Social Security benefits taxed when his income (calculated a special way, just for this provision) reaches $34,000; a couple when their combined income hits $44,000. Harry, a widower with $30,000 of income, and Louise, a widow with $30,000, live in sin. They would be saps to get a marriage license.

An even bigger example, from real life. This is a real person with valuable skills which the system is strongly discouraging her from applying:

With their older son in his freshman year at Colgate and their middle son a high school senior... Valerie [Lewis], 46, is applying for local teaching jobs paying $35,000. If she lands one, taxes will eat up $15,000 and the need-based aid they'd be eligible for will decline by $10,000, figures college finance consultant Troy Onink, who runs Stratagee.com.

That leaves the Lewises $10,000 ahead if she works.
...
[Her husband] Randy, 45, is a former commercial real estate broker who is in the process of launching a real estate investment fund. He's frustrated that the money he socked away in custodial accounts for his kids wiped out any chance of aid for their eldest son's first year. "We got totally skunked," he says.

And get a load of this one.

The Obama Administration's $75 billion Making Home Affordable loan modification program aims to stave off foreclosures by pushing down the interest rate on mortgages owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that monthly housing costs don't exceed 31% of a family's gross. Relief is for five years, and interest savings don't have to be repaid. Applicants have a big incentive to fall a little bit behind on their payments to wangle a refi. (Honor your promises? That's so out of date.) The process can take months, and while it's under way it is imperative for homeowners to keep their income within a certain range. Once the new rate is locked in, they are free to earn more.

It just goes on and on...

"I almost understand why some people stay on welfare," says Karen, a 59-year-old Bellevue, Wash. self-employed house cleaner. As a matter of "personal pride" she's been applying for better paying, hotel head-housekeeper jobs, even though that could endanger her pending bid to have the interest rate on her condo reduced.

And here, in our own back yard, it gets absolutely ridiculous. Remember, we're not talking about billion-dollar incomes triggering rare and obscure tax quirks here. These are the incomes of most people you and I know.

In Massachusetts, which adopted a universal [health] care scheme in 2006, a 50-year-old childless Boston couple with an income of $43,700 and no employer-provided health insurance can pick from four Commonwealth Care plans costing them $232 to $299 a month. The same couple earning $44,000 would have to turn to Commonwealth Choice, where the cheapest plan, with a high deductible, runs $732 a month.
...
Some phaseouts, particularly on the benefit side, are unavoidable given Americans' divisions over the size of the social welfare state.... Still, much of what's going on here--particularly in the tax code--is a blatant shell game. Congress gives with one hand and takes with the other.

In summary:

"Don't think the American public is stupid," says Cheryl Morse, a tax practitioner in eastern Massachusetts with both middle-income and affluent clients.

But it was so recent....
Fight Club came out ten years ago today. MY GOD WE ARE OLD.

By the way, I swear I was the (okay, maybe "an") original inventor of the "His name is Robert Paulson" callback at FBC, as an audience member. I remember I first used it in theater 1 because it was Halloween season.

All cylinders
It was another marathon October weekend for me. Rocky and football converge in a perfect storm in this month, and on top of that, it was my week to "hare" the running club, which entails marking the trail, buying all the food and booze, and arranging deals at the destination bar.

At various points last weekend, my car contained two different referee uniforms, a suit and tie, an extra set of street clothes, a Bruins jersey, a zombie costume, a Rocky Horror costume, a dozen homebrews, running clothes, a box of chalk, ten pounds of lunch meat, full bottles of vodka, Kahlua, milk, and water, and 120 more beers.

Most of these items I had to pack at the same time, because I couldn't plan on the opportunity to go home at any point. In the end, I did get two hours of sleep, after 24 hours up. Then the next day my running club duties covered about five miles. New rule: Never run more miles than hours you've slept for. That was some punishment.

12 days of World Peace
Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his years-long work for world peace. As a legislator in the state government of Illinois, he was naturally instrumental in fostering peace across the world's many peoples. Now consider his years upon years of service in the US Senate, and his months upon months of tireless dedication as President. We can all agree the world is dramatically more peaceful now than it was on January 19 of this year. Barack Obama deserves much of the credit for that incredible turnaround.

Oh, and by the way, the deadline for submitting nominees was February 1. So Obama must have been nominated on the merits of his first 12 days in office.

Surely you don't have to be a gun-hoarding birther to recognize this as the abject farce that it is.

But this isn't new - the Nobel Peace Prize has been a joke for a long time, a joke played for politics. Especially when compared to the other, legitimate Nobel Prizes. Almost every one is decided by a panel of experts in the field. The Physics Prize is judged by some of the world's best physicists, and so on. The only exception is the Peace Prize, whose judging panel is nominated by Norwegian politicians. So what we get is the European political hacks using it to make cheap partisan statements. Jimmy Carter's Prize in 2002 was a clear rebuke to Bush's invasion of Iraq that year, which Carter had criticized in the press. Al Gore won in 2007 as an endorsement of global warming, because evidently "Peace" and "Carbon Footprints" are the same word in Norwegian. Now we have Barack Obama, who hasn't done squat besides making Europeans happy that he isn't Bush. Even if you want to play devil's advocate and gullibly give them the benefit of the doubt, you can't make a case. We're still in Iraq, we're still in Afghanistan, we're still striking in Pakistan, we're still in Guantanamo.

On a related note, the Peace Prize nomination process is just as farcical as its judging. Nominations for the other Prizes, like their judging committees' membership, are few in number and must come from experts in the field, whereas for the Peace Prize, nominations are open to thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, and humanities professors at colleges across the world. This means any retired-radical prof who gets a letter from the committee can nominate whomever he chooses. This is how we end up with cop killers, gang leaders, militants, and terrorists all billing themselves as "Nobel Peace Prize nominees." It's not like the Oscars. There were 205 nominations this year. You can be a vile piece of human garbage, but if your calls for the destruction of Israel/Taiwan/America/Kurds/capitalism/whatever by any means necessary are appealing to some lefty academic who got a letter from Norway this year, congratulations, now you're a vile piece of Nobel Peace Prize nominated garbage.

Epistaxis
Last Friday, while working a high school football game, I ran over to the sideline to grab a game ball for the team that was about to go on offense. An assistant coach lobbed me the ball, I caught it, and as I spun to bring it onto the field, a player running off the field crashed helmet-first into my nose. The impact knocked me to the ground and a steady stream of blood started pouring out of me. My first thought was "I'm not where I'm supposed to be, I need to get to the middle of the field and count eleven defenders," but I couldn't move because blood would have gone everywhere. Then I thought "I need to stop the game, I need to get off the field, I need to inform my crew," but I couldn't locate my whistle. It didn't matter, as my crewmates were already well aware that their partner was on all fours over a glistening red puddle. I just stayed down, thinking "This is a problem, this is an emergency," over and over, until the home team's trainer came out and pressed enough gauze on my face to get me off the field without ruining my shirt.

In the end I managed to get only three tiny specks of blood on my shirt, and a dozen or two on my white pants. I had actually been careful to lean forward and keep the spigot away from my clothes, or else I could have had a Frisbee-sized stain. Later I successfully got the blood out with cold water and a bar of hand soap.

The trainer daubed my nostrils with three styptic vials to stop the bleeding, but it didn't really stop. So she packed my nose with cotton sticks and just had me wait it out. Blood started entering my throat and for a few scary seconds I had to swallow blood as rapidly as possible to keep my throat clear. Eventually it slowed to an ooze from the bottom of the cotton sticks in my nose. At halftime - this had happened about ten plays into the friggin' game - I told my crew I wouldn't be joining them for the second half. I was okay to drive as long as I kept holding a napkin to my nose, so I drove to the ER closest to my home. After a few hours and a few more napkins, the ER doctor finally pulled the plugs out, but said she couldn't do anything and I'd need an appointment with an otolaryngologist.

In the waiting room, by the way, was a kid in football pads with an injured ankle. Must have happened that night in another football game. I recognized the logo on the pants - Lincoln-Sudbury. I'd worked this kid's game two weeks prior. He didn't recognize me or anything, and I was in street clothes, but it was a funny coincidence.

I was terribly afraid of ending up like a disfigured boxer, or Owen Wilson. I am fortunate that my nose actually looks perfectly normal from the outside.

But it's actually not.

I saw the specialist this morning (Thursday) and the bone isn't fractured. That's actually bad news. He said if the bone were out of place, he could have whacked it back into place right then and there. Instead, it's the cartilage that's been rearranged. I thought my breathing problems in my right nostril were only due to mucus and dried blood that I can't clear because Q-tips and blowing my nose both still hurt. But my septum is actually blocking most of the nostril. Surprisingly, this can't just be readjusted in five excruciating seconds. This actually calls for a CAT scan, a follow-up visit, and then surgery with general anesthesia. Jesus.

Nose disfigurement and Propofol - just call me Michael Jackson!

He also found a polyp, which he'll be happy to remove at the same time. That's probably totally unnecessary, but I don't care, because I'll never confront the costs directly! For that matter, I didn't even bother asking if there was a cheaper way to fix my septum almost as well. Why should I? It's free no matter what, so who cares about weighing the costs and benefits? And with socialized medicine, I'm sure it will only get freer. Today's medical insurance has tiny deductibles, so it's essentially a shopping spree. But somehow if we keep the same tiny deductible, and pay doctors with taxes (deducted from paychecks) instead of bills (deducted from paychecks), that'll be way different.

So anyway, that's the latest "breaking" news. I'm back on the field tomorrow. I'll breathe through one and a quarter nostrils until probably December, and then go under the knife.

The thought of general anesthesia is deeply terrifying to me, though. One reason I didn't drink alcohol until age 25 is that I was revulsed by the notion of turning off my brain and going without part of my mind. I finally bit the (silver) bullet when I decided I couldn't do without the social benefits, dialing down the bashfulness and introversion. Now it doesn't bother me. But when it comes to general anesthesia, I'm back at square one. Getting absolutely knocked out, intravenously, like an execution, is an order of magnitude more horrifying than what has come before. But my need for a nose in working order is stronger than my fear, so under I'll go.

The only sports column I read religiously
This pro football column has something for everyone!

Me and perhaps

asmodai:

Consider the short timing of traffic lights. The federal guideline is a minimum of three seconds at yellow for lights in a 25 mph zone, and four seconds at yellow in a 35 mph zone. If the yellow is short-timed, the cameras will spit out more fines, including some to responsible drivers. Last winter the late, lamented Rocky Mountain News -- a 149-year-old newspaper that failed at the peak of its quality -- found, in one of its final exposes, that in the Colorado locations where automated red light cameras were being installed, yellows were being reset to two seconds, to increase revenue. To top it off, accidents rose at short-timed lights, because they caused drivers to suddenly slam on the brakes.
...
I've gotten one ticket, for doing 36 mph in a school zone. Shame on me? The ticket was time-stamped 1:08 a.m. on a Sunday -- I was coming home from picking up my youngest and his friends from a bar mitzvah party. Obviously the camera software knew it was the middle of a weekend night, yet had been set to issue school-hours fines 24/7. The purpose was to reach into drivers' pockets.

myselftheliar:

Inside the mega-enormous Romulan battlecruiser are open areas with thousand-foot drops. Cavernous spaces seem improbable aboard starships; in vessel design, space is always at a premium. At any rate, the open areas with thousand-foot drops are crossed by narrow footbridges that lack guardrails. If for some reason your mega-enormous starship really needed internal areas with places where you could fall to your death, why would you span them with footbridges that lack guardrails?
...
Kirk is ordered thrown off the ship, which is racing along at warp speed, in an escape pod. The pod automatically locates the nearest habitable world, where it lands within walking distance of Old Original Spock, who just happens to be marooned not only on exactly the same planet but on exactly the same spot on exactly the same planet. Movies rely on preposterous coincidences, but this one goes off the scale.

girlingreen23:

I noted someone wrote an English-language computer program that generates gibberish science-sounding research papers which technical journals cannot, ahem, distinguish from actual research. Rick Chlopan of Lexington, Ky., pointed out a Russian news story about someone planting Russian-language gibberish scientific studies on government Web sites: "For example, the Russian Federation Pension Fund site offered users articles under such wild titles as 'Elliptic Stalagmites: Hypothesis and Theory' or 'Differential Epithet: Requirements and Development.' One paper includes the following: 'The flickering of thoughts resolves the perigee -- it is more an indicator than a characteristic feature. The lava flow reflects the denudation-accumulative polyphonic.'"

There is actual football-related content in the column, too, just so you know.

EmptyJournal
I feel the same way

jwz feels:

I imagine the lack of reliability that seems to be Livejournal's new way of doing things -- plus the fact that the site feels like a ghost town now -- will eventually cause me to move this blog to somewhere else. I'm not sure where, though. All the options are bad. Run it on your own site: get no comments but lots of spam. Just use Facebook: effectively limited to friends-only posts. Bleh. (emphasis added)

And I would add - Run it on Twitter, get no comments that aren't shouted to everyone's every friend, and never express any idea that needs more than 140 characters.

Maybe someday when Twitter drops the 140-character limit, I'll join. But I will never reduce myself to writing shallow abbreviated tripe. I will not degrade, for instance, the preceding paragraph into "140 chars not enough. Holla! RT @jwz LJ down again, WTF. Can't run my own blog cuz of spam. FB sux 2." It's the year 2009 and yet we're back to writing telegrams.