Ken Lee
Posted by ben on 19th August
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Things I wasn’t expecting to do when I woke up today
Posted by ben on 7th August
Katya died at 3:45. Dr. Yaxley showed me the radiographs indicating that her kidneys were abnormal and had visible stones. After that, the only option was a surgery that she was not likely to come out of, given how far she had deteriorated even with supportive care, and an infection in her one remaining kidney. She was calm but clearly in pain. The clinic offered to send me a clay cast of her paw print, which was nice and not something I had expected. I signed her over for the clinic for research and instruction, so maybe she can help someone else’s cat. That’s all.
Katya
Posted by ben on 7th August
So this morning I came downstairs to head off to work and Katya was lying under the weight bench. I didn’t notice her at first, and I went into the kitchen to fill water bottles. On the way out, I noticed that she hadn’t moved and when I touched her, she didn’t respond. I picked her up and she was stiff, but made a little grunt. I knew she was dead, and that was just gas escaping when I moved her. I waved my hand in front of her face she didn’t respond; her eyes were half-open. As I was waving my hand one of her whiskers twitched, so I put her in the carrier and borrowed Carter’s car to take her to the MSU Small Animal Clinic. She made a few more little grunting sighs on the way, so I knew she was still alive but clearly struggling.
They determined that she was dehydrated, cold, and her blood sugar wasn’t high enough to read. They put her on a saline/dextrose IV under an electric blanket with an O2 hood while I arranged a line of credit for treatment. Right now they’re trying to stabilize her and see if they can diagnose anything. They’re pretty sure she’s in renal failure, but they don’t know if it’s the cause or a symptom, with everything else going on. They will update me with her condition, but they said that “no news is good news”, I suppose because anything that happens immediately will likely be a crash. So, I’m waiting here to see what they call back with. I got to see her before I left and she was conscious and moving, so she’s reacting to the treatment. Something similar happened with Boris about 8 years ago, shallow breathing, not moving, and they couldn’t figure out what it was. Three days and $1.4k later, he was acting fine and he’s still living with Daniel and Anne. So, I guess there’s no way to know how it’ll turn out quite yet.
Update 14:41
The doctor just got back to me, and it doesn’t look good. Her blood volume and pressure are still low despite the fluid therapy and her blood sugar levels are still low despite the sugar IV. X-rays showed stones in both kidneys, which are not the right sizes (one large and probably failed, one small and working overtime). Even after surgery, a cat that produces kidney stones will continue to do so, and this one on one functional kidney. She apparently has not become any more responsive, either. I will be heading over there shortly to discuss the situation and options with the doctor. Sorry I don’t have better news, but I suspect she might not be coming home 
I see racist people
Posted by ben on 6th August
Keith Olbermann is a big, stupid dumbshit.
No really, I can prove it.
Watch this video (McCain campaign advertisement). Count the penises. If you said “three”, then congratulations - you’re Keith Olbermann! Keith saw the Siegessäule victory column in Berlin, the Washington Monument, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and saw through the B.S. to the truth: they’re phallic symbols. On the other hand, if you only saw the Siegessäule, then you actually watched the video, because it is the only tower of any description in the video (no word on how John McCain managed to sneak the Siegessäule into Berlin to sabotage Obama’s appearance. In Berlin. In front of the Siegessäule.). Taking it further, John Alter fills in the other side of the equals sign: white wimmin.
Yes. And that‘s the oldest and deepest, you know, racist canard in American history, really, is that, you know, the slave is going to come after the wife of the plantation owner. I can‘t sort of dissect and decode these ads that way. I just, somehow maybe my media literacy is lacking. I didn‘t read that out of those ads. But I can see how some people would, and the larger issue, I think, is clear—which is they‘re trying to portray him as being uppity. Now, is that racist? I‘m not sure.
Or, in mathematical terms,
penis3 x 2(vapid white chicks) = scary Barack Obama = racism
I was wondering what that tickly feeling in my brain was when I watched McCain’s ad. Now I know. Back in the reptilian reaches of the hindmost part of my Polish/German New England immigrant heritage, I saw the ad, recognized the column, the (nonexistent) monument and the (invisible) tower, realized that it meant penis, saw the white chicks, and remembered a previous life when I was sitting on the verandah of my plantation in a white three-piece linen suit and a straw hat, sipping mint juleps and being terrified that Barack Obama was going to rape my wife.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh my fuck, Keith and Jon, you simian chucklefucks. Oh, you twisted muppetcunted shitwranglers. Don’t ever change, you dumb bastards. I need you guys around to think about every time I want to die a little inside. Do you see the world through penis-colored glasses or something? Holy living merciful fuck. Truly, we are living in amazing times. To think that two people could see one monument, turn it into three phallic symbols, and then leap to “the oldest and deepest, you know, racist canard in American history”, without the aid of heavy drugs and get paid to do so… stunning.
Q. Do some people think that the ‘liberal media’ is a conservative fabrication?
A. It’s true! Some people are all HURF DURF RUSH FAUX NEWS HURRR while two grown-up commentators are actively fellating Barack Obama live on MSNBC and they believe that this is “moderate”.
Ah, but it’s not just a campaign ad. Turns out, you literally cannot say word one about Our Lady of Hope and Change. No, really. As race-obsessed columnist Timothy Noah points out,
To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there’s anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy,” an “unnamed Clinton supporter” wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama’s “skinniness” and its impact on the typical American voter can’t avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.
Congratulations, Democratic Party. You now have a candidate who is completely Teflon untouchable. Even remarking that he has what could be called an ectomorphic physique can be turned around on you as a vile attack on this honorable Afro-American post-racial man’s skin color, as though you’d spent twenty years listening to a bitter, paranoid, racist conspiracy theorist every week. What can we say about him? If I call him a very liberal Democrat, is ‘liberal Democrat’ really my super-secret code word for “black dudetransformative candidate”? The party anointed their candidate as “post-racial” and “unifying” and “transformative”, that he could cross racial lines - and now they literally Can Not Shut The Fuck Up About Race. Hypocrisy we can believe in.
Stay classy, Chris
Posted by ben on 17th June
When we went to war with Iraq, he and I had a little discussion about that. And this is where he is Everyman, this is where Tim is Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. America; he is us, as a country. I said, “Why - how can you believe that this war is justified?” and he said, “The nuclear thing. If they have a bomb that they can use, we gotta deal with it. We can’t walk away from that.” And that, to me, was the essence of the - what was wrong with the whole case for the war, that they used - they knew the argument would sell with Mr. America, the regular guy, with the true American patriot. They used the argument that would sell, that would get us into that war. Tim was right on the nail, he was us, the American people.
What can we pull from this disjointed and aimless damnation-with-faint-praise eulogy of Tim Russert from Chris Matthews?
- Tim Russert was a patriotic American
- “patriotic American” is actually a synonym for “simple and gullible moron”
- not that I’m saying that Tim Russert was actually an idiot, wink wink
- he actually represented all of us
- and by all of us I mean not me and the other smart people, but the degenerate knuckle-draggers in the flyover states who fell for Chimpy McStupidpresident and his RepubliKKKan lies
- I am a sad, worthless hack with no sense of tact or decency disrespecting the memory of a man whose shoes I am not qualified to shine
- you’ll notice that I didn’t even wait until the body was cold before using the death of Tim Russert - a man universally acknowledged and respected by people on both sides of the political spectrum as decent and honest - as a platform to whine about Iraq, like I don’t get enough opportunities to do that
Hey kids, find out when you should die
Posted by ben on 3rd June
The Australian Broadcasting Company has an awesome компютри втора употребаFlash game for kids that lets you calculate when, based on your lifestyle factors, you should die because you have used your share of the Earth’s resources. As the little ones click through the questionnaire about their habits, their pig gets progressively fatter. A car user will have a fatter pig than a taxi rider, for example. The more money you spend, the fatter your pig, given the incontrovertible direct correlation between material wealth and being a horrible gluttonous earth-raping monsterAn einem privaten Tisch internet casinos Sie allein oder mit bis zu drei Spielern Ihrer Auswahl . who deserves nothing less than a bullet between the eyes in the basement of the Peoples’ Environmental Responsibility Ministry. If you don’t spend much money, your pig is much skinnier because poor people are more environmentally pure. Anyhow, once the kids have confessed all of their eco-sins, they push the button and their porcine avatar explodes in a shower of blood, and the calculator tells them at which age they should die (because they have used their share of the Earth’s resources). It’s purely optional, of course, for the children to do the responsible thing and actually end their lives in an environmentally-responsible way after they’ve used up their ration, but how much of an asshole would a kid have to be not to kill himself or herself, and go on consuming resources that belong to other people?
Oh, also, I am not exaggerating or fabricating any of this.
Everything north of the headset
Posted by ben on 30th May
So lately my left wrist started hurting, between the wrist and the heel of the palm. I traced it to my bike geometry, a high saddle with a forward pitch combined with low handlebars with no sweep. This led to leaning too far forward and hooking my thumb around the bar end, which put pressure in the wrong place (follow a line from your middle finger down and stop just short of your wrist - that un-padded bit full of bones and tendons and nerves), or gripping a nearly straight bar (hold your fists straight out and note that they’re more comfortable at around 10 degrees from horizontal). I knew I needed a new handlebar, but the stem is a somewhat unusual 1 1/8″, and since I had to take the levers and shifters and stuff off to replace the bar, I might as well replace them &c, and now it’s starting to get spendy…
Then I realized that holding off on this was false economy. I used to spend almost $300/month for a car I never used, plus insurance, and here I am quibbling about investing quality parts into a 1984 Mongoose Hilltopper - which is my only transportation? So, I just ordered the stuff:
Holy crap, lookit that thing. It’s got like six hand positions. I could spend days on that without getting fatigued. And I’ll be able to adjust the height and pitch with the…
Zoom Quick Comfort adjustible 1-1/8″ Quill Stem
Height and pitch adjusts over a 70 degree arc. Of course, I’m taking all of the hardware off the old bar, so I might as well get…
Tektro 857 AL Linear Pull Brakes (with Tektro MT2.1 Eclipse Linear Pull levers)
And new shifters and cables. Grand total of $162.09, still half a car payment. When all of the kit comes in I’ll post some pics of the assembly AND YOU WILL LOOK AT THEM.
durrr?
Posted by ben on 20th May
- “We can’t drive our SUVs…”
- “…and eat as much as we want…”
- “…and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…”
- “…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK”
Well, they’re ugly and stupid and wasteful, but on the other hand, they make it a lot easier to detect self-important douchewhistles.
Waaaait a second…
What if I have a geothermal heat pump? or live in the Pacific Northwest? What temperature am I allowed to keep my house at? Shit… is 72 too warm for the winter or too cool for the summer?
‘k, full fucking stop. I keep my house at 64 in the winter because I don’t want to waste energy and I don’t want to waste money, not because Sweden is shaking its head at me. I don’t own a car because it’s not really necessary. I didn’t sell it because I was guilty about those accusatory looks I was getting from Peru. And if, hypothetically, I had lost my senses and decided to drive around eating McDolphin burgers in an Escalade, and Spain got all butthurt about it?
Spain can jump up my dick.
I make the ecologically responsible choice when I can because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s usually the economically responsible choice as well. I have not, do not, and will never make a choice because it will make a foreign country happy. If there’s a progressive and evolved citizen of the international community out there who’s moved beyond neanderthal policies like national sovereignty, could you please explain this to me?
