soapbox

I feel the need to complain about the last few weeks…

Let me count the suck…
1) Kirsten ended up in the hospital for 5 days. It was a kidney stone, but I was very worried at first that it was far-too-early labor. Kidney stones are easy to deal with… if you can do the diagnostic work with a CT scan. You can’t do that with a pregnant woman though, so it was a lot of morphine and waiting. (Morphine on the other hand is apparently perfectly safe.)
2) I had to cancel classes for a week since I was spending my time at the hospital. I was already going to be short a few days when comparing the length of the semester to the things I wanted to say and now I have to cut out interesting and important material.
3) The day we got out of the hospital, Sarah developed a terrible cold including just a touch of pneumonia. It was probably viral, but the standard treatment is to give some antibiotics. However, when a 20-month-old has a horrible sore throat, getting them to swallow anything is a huge battle.
4) After a week of that, things had settled down and I drove back to work. Unfortunately, half way back to Walla Walla, I got a telephone call from Kirsten asking “How big does a cut need to be to need stitches?” Sarah had apparently climbed the toilet to try to get a toothbrush and then fallen on the toilet brush gashing open her eyebrow. Five hours in the ER later, Sarah has a nice little set of four stitches, and I’m stuck driving in the dark not sure what’s actually going on.

Now though, a week later, it seems like things are somewhat back to normal. Finally!

Oh, and some good news, I made the final three for a tenure-track job. Interview on the 9th.

Friday was an interesting day. I stop popping Motrin for a little while (It’s really impressive though how ibuprofen and acetaminophen can have such different actions. Acetaminophen does wonders for me on the rare occasions that I get headaches and ibuprofen does an amazing job on bone/muscle pain. However, the other combination doesn’t seem to be nearly as effective.) and head to the oral surgeon. He does a panoramic x-ray and looks in my mouth. “Yup, I can see why that tooth is hurting.” Shows me the x-ray, “If you had just a couple more millimeters to your jaw, those bottom wisdom teeth would fit. But see how they tilt forward? Because of that, you can’t clean behind them and you’re going to run into decay problems. It’s not a big problem, but we don’t want the decay to spread to the teeth you need to keep.”

That gets followed by “When do you want to take them all out?”

My answer was “not today” and we compromised on doing the bottom ones in the spring and the hurty one now. Tooth extraction is actually kind of impressive, at least in cases where the tooth has successfully erupted. It’s just two shots of novocaine, open wide, a little bit of torquing and prying with pliers, and you’re done. I got a prescription for some serious painkillers, but ended up only taking more Motrin. Actually, a smaller dose of Motrin than I was taking for the hurting tooth.

I got a chance to check out my tooth too. By the time your teeth actually start hurting, they’re seriously fucked up. It was actually kind of impressive, I was having trouble with food getting stuck between my teeth and it’s because the wisdom tooth had a huge fucking hole in it.

So yeah, spring break fun getting out the bottom two. They want to do sedation for that though, and I’m frankly more worried about the anesthetic than I am the extraction. I should look back a year in the blog, I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before.

A British saying identifies the difference between two popular sports thus: “Football (soccer) is a gentleman’s sport played by hooligans, while rugby is a hooligan’s sport played by gentlemen.”

Certainly there are exceptions, but if you haven’t been watching Sportscenter the past week, then check this out.

What’s really impressive (and slightly disturbing) is that none of the major offenses even drew a card – she ended up with just one yellow for a “minor” trip.

I don’t know that there’s much more to say about it than that.. The 1918 flu was also also a H1N1 strain and predominantly killed people our age by making our immune systems overwork themselves. Young kids, old people, and people with weak immune systems all made it through. The healthy young adults were the ones who died.

The good news though is that this isn’t a H5N1 avian flu. Only a few people have ever been infected with it but the fatality rate is between 60 and 100%.

Two sports predictions:

First, that in the next 10-20 years, the NFL will be dramatically different from the game/institution that we know today, due to (long-overdue) attention to brain trauma. Concussions will be viewed the way we now view asbestos, where the blithe and dangerous attitude of times gone by will be unfathomable.

Secondly, that Tim Donaghy will eventually be viewed in the same light as Jose Canseco, and that’s meant very complimentarily. Canseco was once a ‘roided-up crackpot who spouted off random and crazy accusations but in the intervening decade or two has been proving correct on pretty much all counts. As for Donaghy, I present you this:

I worked a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden with him on February 26, 2007. New York shot an astounding 39 free throws that night to Miami’s paltry eight. It seemed like Stafford was working for the Knicks, calling fouls on Miami like crazy. Isiah Thomas was coaching the Knicks, and after New York’s four-point victory, a guy from the Knicks came to our locker room looking for Stafford, who was in the shower. He told us that Thomas sent him to retrieve Stafford’s home address; apparently, Stafford had asked the coach before the game for some autographed sneakers and jerseys for his kids. Suddenly, it all made sense.

Okay, no big deal, a ref gave away one game in exchange for some stuff from a Hall-of-Famer, right? Check this out:

In the pregame meeting prior to Game 6, the league office sent down word that certain calls-calls that would have benefitted the Lakers — were being missed by the referees. This was the type of not-so-subtle information that I and other referees were left to interpret. After receiving the dispatch, Bavetta openly talked about the fact that the league wanted a Game 7.

“If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that’s down in the series, nobody’s going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7,” Bavetta stated.

I mean, wow. Not even the Godfather himself (NBA Commish David Stern) will be able to cover this up, even if he sues both Amazon.com and Random House.

P.S. I have spent the last couple hours trying to figure out whether this is an april fools prank or not, given deadspin’s spotty history. But I think this is legit, it just makes too much sense.

A couple older relatives and friends of mine recently got burned by a spam/malware/phishing issue that traces back to desktopdate d0t net. Does anybody have any experience/knowledge of this?

I’ve found this but at least one of the people involved claims to have not clicked on the email, but still had many invites issued on their behalf to the contents of their address book.

I got this message in an email today:

Somehow in one of the recent re-builds I’ve lostmy copyof “Graphic Converter”. Can anyone remind mehow to get another copy for my Mac? Thanks, XXX

I’m having a really hard time not sending an email back saying “try googling GraphicCoverter”.

Sadly though, the answer (which I knew instantly) is www.lemkesoft.com