LOL

I'll just pass this along without any further comment.
Well, maybe just a little tease.

The workers said they became suspicious when the caller then told them to urinate on each other.

It's Wrong

WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense and congressional officials say news organizations will be allowed to photograph the homecomings of America's war dead under a new Pentagon policy.
The officials say Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to allow photos of flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, if the families of casualties agree.
(emphasis added)

I don't know what the hell they mean by "if the families agree", or how they intend to enforce such a thing when the photographers have already been invited.

That said, I disagree with allowing any photographers present at all. The return of our war dead should be dealt with solemnly and with utmost respect, and not be treated as a photo-op or a spectacle.

Score One For Justice

A car hit and killed a man piece-of-shit Beaner as he ran across Interstate 5 after spray-painting a sign just north of downtown Los Angeles early Wednesday morning.

See? Not all news out of Los Angeles is bad. Usually, by a stroke of odd luck, something positive happens on a rare occasion.

Don't mourn. These pathetic bastards will stop at nothing to deface what isn't theirs, and go so far as to climb freeway signs to fuck them up with their gangland scrawl. Even barbed-wire barriers around the sign itself won't deter them.

The only downside is that his buddy survived, and the deceased likely left a grease smear on the road for Haz-Mat to clean up.

Fuck you, Jaime. You got yours, and probably not soon enough.

Another Day In The Life

Gamma Knife Radiosurgery uses many low-level beams of radiation (in my case, about 192 beams) pinpointed on a specific location to kill cancer/tumor cells.
Since the individual beams are low-level,and coming each from a different direction, the possibility of doing damage to surrounding tissue is negligible, while the over all, overlapping affect on the target area can be achieved in one day's sitting.

I guess this stuff has been around a while, though I've never heard of it before, nor known of anybody else who's had it done. It's primary use is for brain tumors, or other tumors of the head (like mine), where traditional knife and fork surgery is too risky.
I was told the only discomforting aspect of Friday's (tomorrow's) procedure will be the fastening, with screws, of the head frame to my skull. This is to keep my head, and the target, fixed in place. They really try to avoid the scatter gun effect.
For the rest, they say, I will be so drugged up I will not really care.

Gonna be a long day. First the head framework. Then a CT scan. Followed by an MRI. And then the Gamma Knife. Seems I'm gonna see the inside of a lot of tubes in one day. Did I mention that I was claustrophobic?
Don't worry, they said. "We got drugs".

On the Good News side: my voice has returned over the last couple of days. It's about 50% of what is was two weeks ago, but at least I've got it.

Some Offenses Deserve No Mercy

Animal protection officers have seized "gothic kittens" with piercings which were being advertised for sale on the internet.

This is sacrilege.
Almost as terrible as those who would de-claw.
If you want to practice your sick fetishes on a living creature,get a dog.

I'll say it again: For anybody who would maim a cat, for any reason, God has a personal reservation for you, in a special kind of Hell, created just for ignoramuses like yourself.

Riddling

Drew Peterson fiancee hopes for summer wedding

Yeah, that Drew Peterson, the former cop and most eligible bachelor of Bollingbrook, Illinois.

A woman who previously called her engagement to a former Illinois police sergeant suspected in his wife's disappearance a publicity "stunt" says their engagement is real and she hopes to marry him this summer.

Christina Raines told NBC's "Today" in an interview broadcast Friday that her father has made it clear he won't attend her wedding to Drew Peterson. The 24-year-old woman's family is scared for her safety.

But he will be at the funeral, so I've heard.

She didn't directly address her claim earlier this month their engagement was a publicity stunt.

Peterson has been named a suspect in the 2007 disappearance of his fourth wife. His third wife died in 2004, and the death was later ruled a homicide.

The 55-year-old Peterson has denied any wrongdoing.

This guy keeps shagging and marrying these girls 20-30 yrs younger than he. And, if suspicions are correct, killing them, as well.

What's this guy got that the young women can't seem resist?
Is he really all that attractive?
Come on, ladies.
Let's hear it.

"Sorry, he can't talk right now"

"Call back later. Much later."

Following surgery, the damage to my Vagus Nerve was such that I had lost the use of one vocal cord.
It takes two cords to produce a voice(imagine the sound of one hand clapping), so a few days later I was wheeled back to OR for another procedure. This procedure consisted of injecting collagen into the paralyzed cord, thereby swelling it to make contact with the working cord, giving the working cord something to vibrate against, in turn providing me with a weak, but usable, voice.

Sunday, I had noticed my voice was getting weaker, and by Monday morning I couldn't feel a vibration in my throat at all.
Nothing.
Just nothing.
It's a weird feeling when you try to talk and,no matter how hard you try, just can't get a word out.

Made a call to the doctor. He thinks the collagen may have worn out, and he may need to inject again, as he suspected he would, but was hoping to avoid.

I already had a follow-up scheduled for this week, anyway. Wednesday, actually. So it looks like he'll be scheduling another day in OR for me. Whoopee! Just what I wanted.

Right now, my voice is limited to a very faint whisper.
Beyond that, it's silence.
They may have found a way to shut me up, but I still have my hand gestures.

************
Update: Got back from seeing Mr. Doctor. Yeah, the one that hurt me three months ago. It'll be about four weeks before I can have another injection scheduled, and with it some semblance of a voice.
It'll be a quiet month around here. How boring is that?

You Knew It Had To Come To This

Yeah,Whatever...

After much prodding, a cousin convinced me to get on Facebook.
I still lack excitment towards the whole idea, and I think it's kinda lame.
That said, if you find me there, I might be your friend.

The Past Is Past, Moving Forward

I've mentioned the weight loss, and I'm now down to 170lbs. That's 38lbs shed in three months, and was enough to alarm the nutritionist to the point of changing my prescription to a higher calorie formula.

Supposedly, this new formula is also supposed to taste better. That would be a welcome improvement, and it should be delivered today sometime.
These decisions were actually finalized over a week ago, but the insurance always drags it feet on everything because, well, because that what stubborn bastards do.

They haven't figured it out yet that if my nutritional needs continue to fall short, the repercussions will cost them a whole lot more in further medical treatments.

Some more changes:
There's not much 'recovery' going on anymore. I'm about as recuperated from the whole ordeal as I'm going get.
Now, I've declared myself to be in the Restoration Phase. I've got to get my body back into physical condition again.
All this recuperating and too fast weight loss have left me skinny thin, and I've lost whatever muscle tone I used to have. When my throat heals up (not for several more months,or much longer) I need to be able to do the physical work my job expects of me. With this in mind, I've begun a not very strict exercise regimen. Eventually, I'll get myself back to normal, but even better than that because I'll be many pounds lighter.

Yesterday, I had my first visit with a speech therapist. For the next several months, she'll be helping me to restore my voice to it's former glory. Right now, my speech is still soft, raspy, and difficult to comprehend.

In two weeks, I get to spend another exciting day with my neurosurgeon. Unlike last time, I'll be awake for this one as I go through the Gamma Knife treatment. More on that later.

Taken

Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills,a recently retired CIA agent who's seen and done a lot throughout his career and now seeks to spend time with his teenage daughter, whom he barely really knows.

The girl gets kidnapped by slave traders while vacationing in Europe, and the already over-protective Mills flies head first into a personal crusade to recover her, and making a mess out a few Parisian locations in the process.

Taken is largely a one-man show, with Neeson's character pretty much using up all the face time. Nobody else of any strength is required in the supporting roles. This one character is enough to carry the whole story line, and Neeson pulls it off easily.

All in all, a good satisfying film, where the action is reasonably believable, fast paced, and fairly consistent. Think of that Schwarzenegger crap pile from twenty-plus years ago, and add a real story, director, script and lead actor.
Written and produced by Luc Besson, the same french film making genius that gave us "Nikita" and "Leon:The Professional". So, yeah, it really is a decent flick.

Indulge Me

I can't remember exactly where, nor exactly who, as it's been a couple of weeks (I think) since that post. (Brian, was it you?), but somebody brought up,as a tangent, the topic of breeding levels in the not-so-developed world in comparison to the more-developed world, with the suggestion being that it may be the higher breeding levels that keep the poorer nations the way they are.

I want to discuss this a little bit, but I think we need to determine what has come first in the developed nations: increased wealth/technology/modernisation, or decreased breeding,in order to identify a proper cause and effect.

I going to go with the idea that wealth is the cause behind lower breeding rates. There seems to be a pattern of larger families throughout history when these families were beneficial to the breeders (like agricultural families).
But the industrial revolution didn't put and end to 4-8 child families. The cities were full of them. As was my own family.

Breeding patterns didn't change in the developed world until after the end of World War Two, and the rise of socialistic governments as the accepted standard.
Though I cannot speak for others, I know what prevented me from having more than the two kids I did have: economics. So much of my labor goes to taxes, coupled with the 'unseen' regulations that dictate safe housing standards, city codes as to how many may live in a room,etc... the combination of factors made every additional child twice as expensive as the previous.
By contrast: in prior times, every additional child was only a fraction as costly as the one who came before it. And in agricultural societies, an extra mouth came with two hands that paid their own way.
(Try to rent an honest apartment when you have six kids.)

Also, wealth creates the expectation of greater expectation. In today's advanced society, if every child isn't furnished with his own bedroom,cell phone, stereo, computer,and cable television then something is wrong with his life. He'll end up on Oprah in twenty years bemoaning his childhood of poverty. (While both his parents worked full time jobs to provide those luxuries that have now become necessities.)

What I'm saying, I guess, is that the leisure modern life provides, along with the governmental/social structure does something to us as a civilization. Where families were once seen as the center and purpose of our lives, they are now practiced as optional phases of a life.

I'd like to have your input on this.

It's Not Right, I Tell Ya

So Tom Daschle has just withdrawn his nomination due to his income tax issues.

Doesn't seem fair to me that the Treasury Secretary, who is guilty of far more blatant tax cheating, gets confirmed to be the nation's number one tax law enforcer, while poor Tom Daschle has to return to selling his former Senate experience as a lobbyist earning far more money than a cabinet position would pay him anyway.

Getting the feeling this game is rigged?

“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter. ” Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.

That is, unless they become part of the Obama administration.




(taken from Nat'l Review Online)