Does John Ashcroft know this is going on?

Apparently, discount retailer Target has branched out into personal services.

(h/t Jeff Clark.)

Word up

My new Gangsta Name is Da Dung Beetle, yo.

Thanksgiving

For faith, family, friends, health, fufilling work, interesting hobbies and life in a country so great that the greatest efforts of human beings to date haven’t ruined it completely, Lord, we give Thee thanks.

Thanksgiving Eve conversation over Granny’s London broil

VICTORIA: Daddy, what’s this?

DADDY: It’s Granny’s London broil.

VICTORIA: I mean where did it come from?

DADDY: Granny made it.

VICTORIA: I mean, did it come from an animal?

DADDY: Mm-hmm.

VICTORIA: Which animal?

DADDY: A cow.

VICTORIA: A cow??

DADDY: Mm-hmm.

VICTORIA: We’re eating dead cow?

DADDY: Mm-hmm. Problem with that?

VICTORIA: Hooper!

HOOPER: What?

VICTORIA: You’re eating dead cow!

HOOPER: Mm-hmm. Granny, would you like a biscuit?

The origins of Thanksgiving, according to Hooper

” … they got on a boat called the Speedwell, but the Speedwell got a hole in it and water came in and so they had to go home. What was that all about?”

Voting news

Locally, my friend David Allen, owner of Plan 9 Publishing in High Point, publisher and co-author of “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century” and editor of the ThoughtCrimes blog, has been named to a legislative study commission that will be looking at voting-machine problems in North Carolina. Before starting his publishing business, David did network security for banks for a lot of years. He’s sharp, he’s skeptical and, although quite a partisan liberal, he’s reality-based and sees this issue as utterly nonpartisan. The commission is lucky to have him.

Nationally, the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office), the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, said today it will be looking into voting irregularities in this year’s elections, including more than 57,000 complaints received by the House Judiciary Committee, according to this news release. GAO investigations are almost alone among government investigations for their high degrees of fairness and thoroughness. I don’t expect the findings of this investigation to change history — nor should you — but I hope and expect that it will shed detailed light on the (still far too many) problems remaining in our vote-counting systems.

Well, that was interesting …

Every nine years, it seems, I have to make an after-hours trip to the emergency room. This time around, it was pre-dawn Saturday: I went to bed Friday night with a bad sore throat and woke up early Saturday with an even worse one, plus what felt like an obstructed airway. Ann called my doctor, whose on-call partner listened to my symptoms and then said, in about so many words, “Dude, I’d go to the emergency room.”

So we did. Long story short: I had a bad case of strep and was severely dehydrated (from not having had anything to drink for most of the previous 36 hours because my throat hurt so badly). They gave me antibiotics and steroids and painkillers, along with about a liter and a half of IV fluid, and sent me on my way. Mad props to admitting nurse Janie, RN Aleshia, who did all the heavy lifting, and Brian Cook, M.D., who was as free with the Vicodin as a man who can’t swallow because of the pain would want. One tip, though, Bri, that they might not have given you in med school: When a patient CAN’T EVEN SWALLOW WATER because his tonsils, uvula and pharynx have swollen to form a near-impenetrable barrier visible to anyone who looks into his open mouth, saying that the notion that the patient can’t breathe is “all in his head” is correct only in the literal, physical sense.

One odd thing to come out of this: I have previously used throat sprays with topical anesthetics in them (Lidocaine or something, IIRC), but apparently you can’t get those anymore. The only sprays Ann could find in the store had as their active ingredient acetaminophen, which isn’t especially well known for its topical-anesthetic qualities. Word to the medical establishment: Whatever the dangers of topicals, if banning them forces you to use addict-bait like Vicodin in their place, you might want to rethink that position …

Anyway. Time for a big glass of water and a long nap.

Fighting cancer

David Hoggard’s wife, Jinni, has breast cancer and is preparing to fight it. If you’ve the sense God gave granite, your prayers are with ‘em.

How things happen, cont.

From this comic strip, a Holiday Inn Express advertising campaign was born.

Take it from an ex-religion writer who has spent his life around churches …

… to generate blasphemy any funnier than this, you’re going to have to resurrect the dead members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The perils of medical research

A friend passes along the following IM conversation from her office:

Person1: anyone have cold medicine? I’ve got a stuffy head and sore throat. Free handful of candy for the first person who coughs up (ha, ha) some medication!Person2: Here ya go.

Person1: Thanks for all the drug offers. [Co-worker] came to the rescue with a new product, apparently still in the human trial stage, from [recognized brand name]. I’ll let you know if it works.

Person3: Let us know, also, if you grow horns or a third eye or something.

Person1: That’s supposing that I can still speak, of course. You never know with these human drug trials.

Person3: Good point. When I took part in one, they told me I might experience cramps or tremors in my extremities, but I think they were just bbbbbbbbbbulllllllssssssssss*******************g me.

I wonder if I could turn this into a paper for the Journal of the American Medical Association …

Nah, probably not. Too reality-based.

Finally, Ralph Nader is good for something. Oh. Wait.

Ohio gets a statewide recount after all because the Ralph Nader campaign the Libertarian and Green candidates for president raised the money to pay for one. (At $10 per precinct, it’s about $113,000 for a statewide recount.)

They say they don’t expect the outcome to change. They just want to make sure all the ballots were counted accurately.

Good for them.

Volusia County, Florida, on the other hand, has some ’splainin’ to do for the second presidential election in a row. Information here (scroll down to “Volusia County on Lockdown”).

The tip-off was that the flower beds were moving.

The small town of Rennes-le-Chateau in southeastern France has been swamped with relic-seekers inspired by both ancient legend and the modern-day best-selling novel — that’s novel, as in fiction, folks — the legend inspired, Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.”

In fact, so many people tried to get to the buried body of a mysterious 19th-century priest after whom one of the book’s characters is named that at the family’s request, the body was dug up and reburied in a 3.5-ton sarcophagus surrounded by five cubic meters of concrete.

“It’s a Philistine minority but they come here and stomp all over the place with no respect for anything or anyone,” [said village Mayor Jean-Franois L'Huilier]. “Last year they even tried to tunnel into the church. It was like something out of a prison escape film. They began digging in the night, put the soil in bags and put the bags in the hole which they covered with a layer of earth so nobody would see during the day. It was only when someone noticed the flower beds moving that we discovered what they were up to.”

People, yes, it was a great read, but it’s only a novel. Dan Brown made. It. Up. Now leave M. L’Huilier and his town alone.

Fresh meat

I had never heard of New Jersey’s new acting governor, Dick Codey, until a couple of minutes ago, but here are two things from a WNYC radio interview with him that make me think voters might like him:

[REPORTER:] Several years ago, as a state senator, he learned that almost a third of the employees at the state’s psychiatric hospitals had criminal records. Some for murder. Codey, armed with a forgettable face, decided to assume the name of a dead felon to see if he could get hired.

CODEY: So I decided to go undercover. I got a job at Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital as an orderly working the midnight shift. My first day at work I was told ‘You’re lucky — the midnight shift is the easiest way to have sex with the patients.’ I saw things I did not see in the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. As a result of what I uncovered the President of the hospital and about thirty five to forty other employees were let go. We now require in our state psychiatric hospitals criminal background checks on every employee before they can go to work.”

* * *

[REPORTER:] … Despite the fact that he will serve as Governor for 14 months he and his wife and two sons will not move to the Governor’s mansion in Princeton. He says for his family, working class Irish Catholics, a key goal was to get out of public housing.

Initiative. Creativity. Compassion. A sense of humor. Honestly, I have no idea what kind of person this guy is, let alone what kind of (acting) governor he’ll make. I certainly have no idea whether, given the chance, I’d ever vote for him. But in an era of bland, cookie-cutter politicians, this kind of backstory stands out.

Geekspeak/Administrivia

If the merits of different Web browsers don’t interest you, feel free to skip this one …

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox to give it a try and compare it with IE, which is what I normally use at home. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on this yet, but here’s what I’ve found so far:

Advantages: Firefox’s “Find” capability is much faster and cooler than IE’s. This factor comes into play when I’m jumping from my RSS reader to the oldest unread post on a blog I’m subscribed to.

Disadvantages: Firefox seems to have a limited range of fonts to render. This concerns me primarily because the title and subtitle of this blog are set in a cool font, Haettenschweiler bold italic (I also just like saying “Haettenschweiler,” which sounds like it ought to be the name of a big, rusty old land boat with a killer sound system), which FF renders as the much less interesting (to me) Arial bold italic.

Anyone have any real preference for one over the other? Please share your thoughts. Thanks!