Tag: Health

Your Weekend Bullets For Super Bowl Sunday

Friday was a bit of a write off. I couldn’t get bullety. I was over in northern NY to see Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner at a charity dinner. A fun night of watching and talking ball and watching and talking about NNY. Then Saturday came and went. I was busy with errands, baking bread… and then not busy laying around. I watched 7 episodes of Doctor who from the early 70s and late 80s. I am not sure what this sort of weekend leads to. The Super Bowl of course. And seed catalogs. February is the New Brunswick of months, a stretch to get through.

♦ I think I find it more odd that most ancient writings passed down to us are not more like this.

♦ Hockey boycott? I never heard of a hockey boycott over the game being too rough.

♦ I remember the Spicer Commission because I was there.

♦ While I am not one of those who believes there is an anti-booze conspiracy, it does seem like this sort of article depends much on magical thinking, great pains being taking to make a rational point where benefit is harmoniously maximized.

♦ Big talk comes easy with low levels of responsibility. Like Ottawa leads the attack on the Iranian tyrant. But it would be kinda weird if we did.

There you go. Another week and another February. Think I will go for a walk. Feels like March out there.

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Your Weekend Links Of Note For A Day At The Hospital

Efficient. Kind. Relaxed. Excellent. It was a good day at the hospital helping the lad get through what turned out to be a far less onerous than feared experience of an eyeball straightening. More nip than tuck, I have spent longer stretches at the dentist. Shades of my two days long medical stays of my youth disappeared. Validated Kate’s observations, too. Realized that I have sat in small city hospital waiting rooms in Canada, the US and Poland and each time thought pretty good people go into this work. Today, a small “hooray” went up among the post-op nurses at one point. I gave the “what was that face” to one of them and was told “the babies are through.” Hooray for the babies, indeed.

♦ Good to see the students of Syracuse can tell pedophilia from hate crime.

♦ I really hope many of these citizenship investigations are linked to the PEI passport selling scandal. Good to know, by comparison, that some Spuds have some sense.

♦ Boys need this last line of defends. It’s like Cold War MAD – mutually assured destruction. I recall when the bag tag war of 1982 broke out at undergrad. We needed, after only two days, a formal truce.

♦ Seventeen century science is absolutely neato: this and this, too

There. Weekend is here. Tomorrow? A Montreal Gazette weekend edition and maybe an obscure mammal in form of sausage.

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Friday Bullets For Getting Up At 6:43 AM

I don’t set the alarm as the house lives on the rhythm of pre-schoolers. If I am up at 5:15 am, that is life and if the stars align like last week and there is quiet well past a sensible hour, that is life, too. Like last week. When I get a string of good sleeps I start to ask why there isn’t more activism for early to bed, early to rise. Government programs. That sort of thing. I mean of we can get tax breaks for kids activities, why not for jammies if both are key to good health? What else? I am not against taxing soda pop like cigarettes but I would rather see it extend to the prepared food aisle. If you can’t cut a carrot and put it is a pot as part of making something, you should pay the same premium for health that a ciggie toker pays.

  1. • Wed Design History Update: Where have all the .gif files gone… long time ago…
  2. • I would not exactly use the words royal newlyweds parasites but a do see a glimmer of the point. I pay for my own holidays. And I do appreciate that the young couple facing a life of nationals service does try live a relatively “go to worky” life. But I pay for my own holidays.
  3. • Holy Division of Powers Action, Batman! I want a Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the Senate as well as the role of the provinces in defining the Constitution.
  4. • It’s not that I don’t care about a postal strike so much as I am surprised by the extent of my not needing to care. No one sends me cheques I have to have by mail. No one sends me chatty letters. I wonder if there is a twitter hashtag to follow the strike.
  5. • Dear Ratko. Rot in hell.
  6. • 2,197 calories for nachos? I went to a US somewhat fast foodie place that had calories listed the other week and found that I paid more attention to that than the prices. I was stunned that equally priced and relatively equally interesting alternatives ranged from 400 to 1,000 a sandwich. But 2,197 calories for a plate of nachos?

There. Posted early. Before I was awake last week. No rushing. Why don’t I do this all the time?

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Sign of The Endtimes #2658: Helpful Clothes

Again with the failing cause of the right to idleness illustrated by the lengths that scientists will go to keep us from the benefits of idleness:

Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life. The prototype garments monitor physiological states including temperature and heart rate. The clothes are connected to a database that analyses the data to work out a person’s emotional state. Media, including songs, words and images, are then piped to the display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer support.

Will the cause of the stress be analyzed, too? Maybe there is a very good, even pleasurable reason for being hot and bothered? Maybe the person needs to handle such tensions by themselves? By sitting in a chair or having tea. In fact, isn’t tea – cold or hot, sweet or not – the entire low-fi answer to the problem… if there is a problem at all. Are the stresses of modern life beyond coping? Coping at least without an intervention by one’s socks offering support? Have a tea. Have a nap.

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The Trouble With Science Is In The Evidence

We are generally clever, we humans. We figure things out by what we see about us. But there are two problems – what we haven’t seen yet and what that we make decisions without considering what we haven’t seen yet. Consider this:

…in recent months at a clinic in Liège, Belgium, the patient, now 29, showed traces of brain activity in response to commands from doctors. Now, according to a new report, he has begun to communicate: in response to simple questions, like “Do you have any brothers?,” he showed distinct traces of activity on a brain imaging machine that represented either “yes” or “no.” Experts said Wednesday that the finding could alter the way some severe head injuries were diagnosed — and could raise troubling ethical questions about whether to consult severely disabled patients on their care.

One hopes that way down in there the person experiences a pleasant dream-like state. After all, we are not told whether he answered the question about brothers correctly. But it is more likely that it is more like being stuck in a shopping mall at night with no access to any of the stores, roaming the grey hallways, just missing running into the night cleaners over and over. We suspect it yet until we have a device that gives indications, a glowing toggle switch attached to a tiny flicking light bulb on a panel, we presume there is nothing to be indicated. It’s too bad William Blake did not live in the era of amber glowing toggle switches of panels filled with tiny flicking light bulb. He’d have something to say about them in addition to those senses five.

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Friday Bullets Without The Pain…Except For The Pain

I need a new back today. Despite the sit up and other exertions of unbelievable dedication, the back still goes. And it is quite prepared to go before just before the summer holiday begins. Such is life. Good thing I plan to do nothing.

  • Nevermind those who 3% of folk who think George W. Bush will be well remembered by history. He’s going to be considered a goofball if his final words to the G8 are anything to go by: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.” He has to plan that sort of thing. That can’t be what he’s coming up with off the cuff.
  • I wish Google had reviewed the whole fewer and better ads thing with me. See that over there down to the right? Who am I to complain about who give me that big $350 bucks a year?
  • The Mets: 10 for their last 10.
  • I have never liked Paul McCartney that much so I guess I am with that 0.3% of Quebecers who are unhappy. Surely he is not the biggest act in the world, surely they could have gotten Plastic Bertrand.
  • Kottke noted a great illustration of the disutility of information technology this week. Because the information was not sortable by the critical factor, availability of restaurant seats, the application is practically useless.
  • No other politician generated more dancable tunes, though no ska that I know of. Happy birthday, Nelson!

My got to explore the home pharmacy some more. I understand one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small. But which is which?

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Hooked On Salmon Oil?

I noticed I was somewhere less than bummed out and slightly to the right of bubbly the other day and I tried to think of all the things I have been doing or not been doing and I came to a very weird thought – I’d run out of salmon pills. So I look it up and…:

The brain is remarkably fatty: In fact, this organ is 60% fat and needs Omega-3s to function properly. Now researchers have discovered a link between mood disorders and the presence of low concentrations of Omega-3 fatty acids in the body. Apparently, Omega-3s help regulate mental health problems because they enhance the ability of brain-cell receptors to comprehend mood-related signals from other neurons in the brain. In other words, the Omega-3s are believed to help keep the brain’s entire traffic pattern of thoughts, reactions, and reflexes running smoothly and efficiently.

Am I addicted to a fish? If you are going to be addicted to something, is a fish so bad? I remember hearing that much of Germany was mildly stoned on St. Johns wort.

And what if they stopped making salmon oil pills – would I have to take up fishing to deal with my dirty little secret? Will it all come tumbling down one day when I am found on the job site with a couple of cans of sardines hidden in my desk as an emergency back up, thrown upon the trash heap of life, just another fiddiction statistic?

We Am Doooooomed!!!

Who knew?

The humble office printer can damage lungs in much the same way as smoke particles from cigarettes, according to a team of Australian scientists. An investigation of a range of models showed that almost a third emit potentially dangerous levels of toner into the air.

Quick – who wants to start a think tank and fund raising group dedicated to stamping out computer printers. While there are many in, say, the global warming anti-Suzuki set who will say this is nonsense, I am convinced that this is both a real threat and quite funny.

Friday Bullets For Shane

When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.

Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:

Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.

Right?

You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.

  • US College baseball season has begun.
  • Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.
     

Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.

Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.

  • A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
  • Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
  • Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
  • I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?

That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.