Of the 56 geeks pictured here, I think I can lay claim to having elements of at least seven of them (obviously some are more overt than others):
All cartoons by ExtraLife, from the 56 Geeks Poster.
Life
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
Six Billion Gallons
That’s approximately how much water has fallen over the Seattle area in the past few days, according to the Seattle PI. Flooding all over the place, bridges and roads washed out, I-5 is closed between Seattle and Portland forcing a detour through Yakima…crazy stuff.
Outside of leaks taking out a few ceiling tiles at my store in the mall, neither Prairie nor I have personally seen any of the more dramatic effects of the storm. Apparently we got off fairly lucky — the PI mentions a few people in our area of town that didn’t fare so well.
“It felt like we were on the Titanic,” said Randy Carter, who awoke at 4 a.m. Monday to lights from utility trucks and the realization that his apartment in the Jackson Greens complex in North Seattle was flooded to evacuation levels with 3 feet of water.
[…]
In Seattle, where rescue crews were forced to carry people from hard-hit homes in the Northgate area and then shelter them on Metro buses, Mayor Greg Nickels said flatly that the city’s infrastructure had been unable to cope with the deluge.
“The systems that this city was built around — the draining systems, the transportation systems — simply were not built to handle this kind of rainfall,” he said.
By late afternoon Monday, nearly 6 billion gallons of rain — the rough equivalent of six Green Lakes — had fallen.
Four apartment buildings, housing some 50 people and their pets near Midvale Avenue North and North 107th Street were evacuated and another four were similarly affected, Seattle Fire Department spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick said.
“The flooding is up to 10 feet deep in some areas,” she said.
In one building, the parking garage was almost completely under water, cars were nearly floating with rain up to their windshields and firefighters were carrying residents out.
The PI has a photo gallery of some of the effects around town.
(photo by Liembo)
EstroBlaster!
Apparently, I’m a 50-something gun-toting impotent Republican.
At least, that’s sure what it seems like judging by the junk mail I get. For some reason, I’ve ended up on some hilariously odd mailing lists. I get occasional mailings from the AARP welcoming me to my retirement years, the NRA asking if I want to join or contribute money to one thing or another, and so on. Today brought the best mailing yet, though.
Prairie picked up the mail and started flipping through the envelopes. Handing one to me with a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What mailing list are you on?” The envelope she handed me had a somewhat softcore porn-ish shot of a man and woman in bed, with the text “THE FIRST TRUE REVOLUTION IN MALE SEXUAL POWER IS HERE…NOW!” emblazoned across it.
“I’m really not sure,” I said and popped it open. Pulling the folded newsletter style paper out of the envelope, my eyebrows shot up, and I started to laugh at the headline that greeted me: “THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE – The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don’t Even Know It.”
Feminized? Oh, no — what’s happening? Am I losing my manhood? Is my manliness being sucked away, turning me into some swishy girly-man? This can’t be true!
Reading on, I chose bits and pieces to read to Prairie aloud, until both of us had stitches in our sides and tears in our eyes. The advertised product, EstroBlaster, is yet another in a long line of herbal supplements aimed at men who have (or are being convinced that they have) a little less fuel in their rocket than they did in earlier times. I haven’t seen too many of these ads, so I don’t really have a basis for comparison, but this one’s marketed using an absolutely hilarious mix of misogyny, homophobia, and scare tactics.
A few choice quotes…
…more and more research is coming out. There is a terrible secret that you should know about.
The Secret Problem of Estrogen Dominance
You are being deluged with female hormones. That, on top of naturally falling male hormone levels, can cause a condition called estrogen dominance.
You are being turned into a woman, and you don’t even know it.
What’s happening is that large amounts of female hormones are slipping through the water treatment plants of most major cities. Even in the country the water is filled with them.
Estrogen is passing right through women and into the water supply — where it can’t be removed.
In fact, there is enough estrogen in the water right now to change male fish into females.
Recent statistics even show that more young men are getting plastic surgery to remove their “male boobs” than there are young women getting breast augmentation.
Not only that, but the rate of young boys turning into girls is frightening. One group that monitors this problem said:
No one compiles official statistics on transgender youths, but everyone agrees that their numbers are rising quickly.
…it took months to narrow down a powerful formula at a good price. We named it Estro-Blaster — after what it’s designed to do…blast the estrogen out of your system.
**Get Back the Sexual Drive and Ability You Had as a Teenager… Wanting Sex Every Day – The Ability to Get Hard Every Time – And Even Spontaneous Erections! (The Kind You Used to Have to Hid in School When You Got Up to Change Classes…You’d Have to Carry Your Books Down in Front of Your Pants)
After years of falling sexual ability, I was amazed one day, when out and about, that I was getting a “spontaneous” erection.
I didn’t even have to touch my penis. It just began swelling to an erect state.
You can imagine my surprise — and pleasure. This hadn’t happened to me since I was in my twenties. Many years ago.
I felt like a man again — a real man.
As if all this wasn’t funny enough, there were two sources listed in the flyer. At first I was surprised that there were any sources listed — this didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be worrying about sourcing its information. Then I noticed that one of the sources was a forum post on Free Republic, one of the most notorious far-right rabid conservative spaces on the ‘net today, and far from being anything that I’d even remotely consider a ‘trusted source.’ The second was a small excerpt from an article titled “Treatment of Young MTF Transsexuals” on a site called “Second Type Woman,” which (at least on first glance) doesn’t exactly strike me as the kind of source most people should be basing their pharmaceutical decisions on.
All in all, it made for a very entertaining evening.
And, apparently, I’m a fifty-something gun-toting impotent Republican.
Good to know!
Turkey Day
Happy Thanksgiving, all.
Prairie’s dad Lon and her sister Hope came over this morning for breakfast (sausage and eggs and cinnamon rolls), then Lon and I did some “boy puttering” (fixing the passenger side view mirror on the car, which a vandal knocked all askew a couple winters back) while Prairie and Hope did some “girl puttering” (making lemon tartlets).
Presently, all are relaxing with warm drinks as Prairie prepares a snack plate before Hope heads off to a Thanksgiving dinner celebration for her job. Lon, Prairie and I are planning a relaxing afternoon and evening here at the apartment, watching something silly and having Thanksgiving dinner.
We hope your day is going as well as ours!
Meh
Happy Night Before Thanksgiving.
I’m sure it’s a holiday somewhere.
Oscar the Adults-Only Grouch
The original Sesame Street episodes are being released to DVD (Vol. 1, Vol. 2)…just don’t show ’em to your kids.
According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
What?
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
I’ll freely admit to leaning to the left politically and socially, but this level of über-sensitive, overwrought ‘Political Correctness’ is absolutely ridiculous.
Were I ever to have kids (or spend some time babysitting any nieces or nephews — consider yourselves warned, Kev and Emily, Noah’s in trouble with me!), I’d be more than happy to give ’em a full dose of Sesame Street and the Muppets both (that is, during one of the few times we plopped ’em down in front of the TV instead of with a book or a game or outside play or other such things).
This world just gets weirder and weirder some days.
(via /.)
Missed One…
Well, that’s a mild bummer — I missed posting yesterday. Took a test in the morning before school (it was posted online at 6:30am), went to school, came home, had lunch with the girl, went to work, came home, had dinner with the girl, and went to bed. Somehow managed to completely forget about posting…and there goes the one-a-day streak.
Well, I’d already missed Nov. 1st, since I didn’t start this project ’til the 2nd. Guess I’ll go for 28 out of 30 days.
Turtle Butt
In lieu of actually posting anything truly interesting, I give you one of my favorite shots from our trip to Hawaii this summer (no, I’m still not done working my way through all of them). Prairie and I were snorkeling early in the morning at Carlsmith Beach Park in Hilo, and had brought along a little disposable film waterproof camera. As we floated along, we were joined by a couple of sea turtles, cruising their way through the coral reef and finding their breakfast.
Ask Your Doctor For A Reason to Take It
Prairie and I have been alternately amused and appalled at the never ending onslaught of prescription drug commercials. Actually, it would be more accurate to characterize us as appalled and amused: appalled when yet another one pops up (as we find the whole idea more than a little sleazy — medicines should be prescribed by doctors, not self-prescribed on the basis of a thirty-second overgeneralized list of symptoms), and amused at the seemingly endless list of ever more disturbing sounding side effects. With most of these, it doesn’t take long at all before we decide that we’d prefer to just live with whatever issue the drug is supposed to alleviate rather than risk the side effects.
Apparently (and thankfully), we’re not the only ones watching these ads with more than a little distaste. Consumer Reports is starting what’s intended to be a series of video/weblog posts analyzing these DTC (“direct-to-consumer”) ads.
The problem with such “direct-to-consumer,” or DTC, advertisements is that they may generate excessive demand because people go straight to their doctors asking for this or that specific medication. In a 2006 survey by our National Survey Research Center, 78 percent of doctors said that patients asked them at least occasionally to prescribe drugs they had seen advertised on television, and 67 percent said they sometimes did so. And don’t expect the ad barrage to let up. While Congress recently gave the FDA more authority to regulate ads, it rejected a measure that would have allowed the agency to place a moratorium on ads for new drugs that raise safety concerns. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world (the other is New Zealand) where such ads are legal.
The first entry of the series looks at an ad for a drug intended to treat RLS, or “restless leg syndrome.”
That condition may sound fanciful, but it’s a real problem. Something like 3 percent of Americans suffer from RLS, which is characterized by an uncontrollable impulse to keep moving your legs even when you are trying to go to sleep—which obviously could make sleep difficult.
Several years ago, doctors discovered that drugs that were originally developed to treat Parkinson’s disease could provide meaningful help to people who suffered from moderate to severe forms of this condition. But the drugs have serious side effects – one of the more bizarre involves a propensity for uncontrolled sexual or gambling impulses, as our video mentions. And while these medications may provide welcome relief to some RLS patients, the ads could leave anyone who ever suffered fidgetiness when trying to go to sleep to wonder whether he or she has RLS and should seek treatment.
Now, while Prairie and I are reasonably sure (though without any actual medical diagnosis) that there’s a chance that I have a mild case of RLS, in my case, it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with via a few relatively simple measures (a king-size bed, separate sets of sheets so I don’t yank hers off when I kick, and a guest bed for the really bad nights). Besides, the list of potential side effects in the ads themselves were enough to scare me away from even remotely considering the drugs to ‘treat’ RLS…and that was before I watched the Consumer Reports entry.
Kudos to Consumer Reports for starting this series. Hopefully it reaches beyond simply preaching to the choir.
I do have to admit to a little curiosity about what they might say about Panexa (acidachrome promanganate), though…. ;)
PANEXA is a prescription drug that should only be taken by patients experiencing one of the following disorders: metabolism, binocular vision, digestion (solid and liquid), circulation, menstruation, cognition, osculation, extremes of emotion. For patients with coronary heart condition (CHC) or two separate feet (2SF), the dosage of PANEXA should be doubled to ensure that twice the number of pills are being consumed. PANEXA can also be utilized to decrease the risk of death caused by not taking PANEXA, being beaten to death by oscelots, or death relating from complications arising from seeing too much of the color lavender. Epileptic patients should take care to ensure tight, careful grips on containers of PANEXA, in order to secure their contents in the event of a seizure, caused by PANEXA or otherwise.