Tag Archives: current-events
Another view of one’s colon viewed by a scope
Colonoscopies under the microscope of the journalism “newspaper test”.
BTW, here’s my colonoscopy cost breakdown from the Huntsville Endoscopy Center:
Colonoscopy Flex, w/REMV: $1087
==> Insurance payment: $736.40
==> Insurance non-allowed: $0.60
Patient balance: $350.00
An economy in transition
So, while I was contemplating the pleasures of making rat/raccoon/mice stew (we woodsmen eat whatever meat we trap), I got to thinking.
Now, I ain’t much of a thinker, to be honest.
I flunked out of 13th grade and had to start over at another one of them institutes of higher learning.
Not like I can’t solve world hunger if’n I put my mind to it, though.
Of course, I ain’t got no mind but I got a mind to tell you what I was thinking.
See here, it’s like this.
We got this global employment imbalance, that’s what I’m saying.
It don’t take no rocket scientist to see why.
Why, I ask, why?
Well, if them experts is right, we have just about as many female breadwinners as men.
And, on top of that, many of them is single mothers trying to feed their babies.
I’m all for women’s librarians, what they like to call themselves “Women’s Lib.” We should’ve taught them lady friends how to read a long time ago. The more they can read, the more they can follow instructions and become real good at their jobs — don’t matter to me none if they’s a baggin’ groceries or rocketin’ toward the Moon.
What I want to know, though, is if a family run by a woman is spending as much of her money in the consumer economy as a family run by a man.
That there might explain why we have such a global employment imbalance and might even explain the income inequality problems we’s a facing in these here troubled economic times.
I’m just an old country boy trying to survive.
I scrape ticks off my body every day. I swat at mosquitoes without knowing they’re there. I scratch at my poison ivy boils like clockwork. Red ants think my ankles is a biting post.
I shake my fist at varmints eating my figs and mulberries. They done broke my persimmon tree in half.
I ain’t much but I’m something.
My house is so chewed-up and broken down, you can’t tell it from the rusted truck and old jalopy with flat tires hiding in the weeds.
You women-folk has got to do your part, if’n you’s gonna claim you’re just as good as us men were when we ruled the roost and had the economy running full steam under the moonshine still — you better get them rich folks and their corporationalisms to open their rainy-day piggy banks and help you out of this pickle.
Otherwise, there’s a world of hurting about to hit us, if the creek don’t rise and the tornadoes don’t blow over the outhouse ’cause them foxes has done got into the henhouse and fertilized some eggs.
Cash is as good as cash these days!
Would you rather pay a discounted rate to see your physician, pay concierge pricing to have an MD on retainer, or pay using your health insurance and play Russian roulette with your medical bills?
Dr. Michael Ciampi may have the right diagnosis to answer the question.
Joie de vivre interrupted
How do we award, reward, reinforce and otherwise encourage our behaviour?
There is beauty and there is the beautiful.
A scar across one’s face may lend one an air of distinction but we see in the mirror only an ugly scrape across our once unblemished visage.
Perception vs. reality.
At mid-life, I see my skin and its many changes due to sun/UV damage, knife cuts, wrinkles, blood donation needle entry points, and cat scratches.
None of these external marks on my body have affected my ability to drive a motorcar.
With age, however, my reaction times have slowed.
Therefore, my driving capabilities are diminished from the time, a year or so after getting my driver’s licence over 30 years ago, when I was best able to speed dangerously fast on backcountry, twisty roads, racing other kids in their late teens and early twenties.
There is, in other words, a time and place where our health, both mental and physical, is and isn’t detrimental to our sharing highways with other drivers of multitonne killing machines.
Yesterday, while dining with my wife at Nick’s Restaurant, a young man of 18 years crashed through vehicles at a traffic light and then proceeded 1.5 miles to the next intersection where he crashed into several more vehicles, killing a ten-year old child in one of them.
According to comments by readers on a local news company’s website, the driver is “Very sweet kid, good student and athlete!” and “an amazing kid and a close friend of mine he is diabetic”.
Yet, here we are looking at a dead child and many injured people because of one driver.
Should people with known medical conditions, which could endanger others — epilepsy, diabetes, old age related reaction times, etc. — be kept from driving, much the way aeroplane pilots lose their licences due to findings in medical examinations?
What is the threshold we’re willing to set that puts the best qualified people behind the wheel of a vehicle?
We already set age cutoffs.
Another reader commented, “How do you pass out from low blood sugar and keep driving? I know the family of the little girl who died. I am absolutely heartbroken for them. Praying for all involved.”
We could look at statistics which point out the benefits of a road system that sets a relatively low qualification threshold for driving a vehicle has increased our economic output higher than the detrimental effect of death/injury by many magnitudes much like we can say that the economic costs (gains?) of our “war on terror” is magnitudinally higher than the economic loss of dead/maimed military.
A ten-year old girl didn’t wake up to see the sunrise this morning or eat breakfast with her family.
Why?
Because an 18-year old boy drove when he shouldn’t’ve.
Perhaps cars and trucks of the future, before they’re all autonomously-controlled, will use technology that could have prevented yesterday’s tragedy.
Perhaps…
Let’s hope so.
The life of your ten-year young child may depend on it.
A boy’s life, revisited
For those who are interested, here are the original pictures from the May 1962 copy of Boys’ Life:
For me, the latest news is still an uneasy thought to accept. Knowing now what I didn’t know then, that there were gay boys in my school, one who knew he was gay at 12…he used to tickle me and giggle because tickling caused me to get an erection. He never touched my erection but he did admit getting a thrill tickling me, which I avoided getting tickled by him even more after his admission.
He was in Boy Scouts with me. We earned more than one merit badge together, both of us interested in nature, studying birds and wildlife habitats, taking notes and sharing with other Boy Scouts.
I admit I was attracted to his intellect but I was not sexually attracted to him.
He went on to earn academic honours at CalTech as well as achieved business accolades.
I sit here and look at my Boy Scout achievements, including the milestone of Eagle Scout:
I guess the Boy Scouts of America have adjusted to a changing United States of America.
What will the troop leaders face now that openly-gay Scouts are officially accepted?
Will they have to worry not only about boys getting knife cuts while whittling and third-degree burns from roasting marshmallows but also listen carefully at night to make sure a curious gay boy will not make a pass at a fellow tentmate?
Will a tickler of the 1970s attempt a kiss, instead, in the 2010s?
My wife and I have briefly discussed this issue — when we did, my scalp felt on fire, which told me this is important for me to consider further.
How do I separate the code of honour I upheld as a Boy Scout — reconciling that the fact that homosexuality is a physical/mental wiring issue rather than a[n] [im]moral act against the fact that boys become sexually active in their early teens, some more active than others — from the genetic code that children are born with?
It is not a simple matter that I can easily and simply dismiss.
Are all openly-gay boys effeminate?
If so, will they and their parents push for sewing/fashion and home decorating Boy Scout merit badges?
Regardless of gender preference/attraction, Boy Scouts is about learning new skills, including wilderness survival but also skills in the civilised world, such as computers and citizenship.
I have always been willing to hold discordant views in my thoughts and these definitely clash: I accept gays and lesbians as friends even though a part of me sees anything but a heterosexual relationship as unnatural, a sign that nature has a way of putting the brakes on overpopulation.
However, building rockets and exploring the cosmos is an unnatural act of sorts in my thoughts yet I want our species to create networks of beings/technology that branch out from the solar system and into the neighbouring sections of our galaxy.
Unnatural is a word to describe a condition of one or more sets of states of energy in flux.
I will think more about this and hope to record here my thoughts on the matter.
Until next time, my wife and I will continue to share our lives together, including a tour of Air Force One a couple of years ago.
Au revoir!
OMG! I don’t know what to say…
For some, a shock heard ’round the world. For others, what they’ve waited for.
Either way, here’s an alternative history lesson — what if the Boy Scouts integrated homosexual boys back in 1962? Let’s take a look…bringing the innocence of 1962 into this new controversy…
This issue also sponsored by the following:
Hail to the chief
To paraphrase: “if we can’t assimilate ’em, we assassinate ’em.”
Message received loud and clear, boss — our exterminators have been deployed, our mission clean and pure as water.
Texas Ranger style
The FBI announced today they have hired Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan to train their “field” (torture) agents to protect themselves against “knife” (i.e, banana) attacks using simple martial arts techniques.
Bureaucracy, Foolery, Inc.?
In buffoonery news, a national agency admitted it was a banana, not a knife, which the victim launched at an agent.
The agent is at hospital, recovering from wounds directly attributable to slipping on a banana peel, and is expected to recover.
The banana fruit, unfortunately, died on the scene.
Following in their commander-in-chief’s footsteps, no one will take responsibility for murdering the banana thrower.
treetrunkdings 