mcgees.org

I made a $60 eBay error. I listed an item as “immediate payment required when Buy It Now is used,” not realizing that that forces the item to be “ship to U.S. only.” Be warned of this.

Well, now it’s official.  A whale cannot sue a person.

“Are they thy punters’ keepers?” If we excuse the lousy grammar, we can answer “yes, in California”. Bartenders absolutely have culpability when serving drinks to inebriated customers. But everyone who has been in the situation will understand the difficulty when it’s your friend who gets behind the wheel after having too many. What do you do, physically restrain him? Call the cops? Or just decide never to drink with the person again?

France just decided that the Fraisses were not culpable.  I wonder what California would say.

Missed prognostication, as promised: No earthquake occurred.

If you install the Audible DownloadManager for iPod & iTunes, don’t spend a long time debugging why it doesn’t seem to do anything. Simply download a program from Audible, and it will automatically be added to your iTunes library. No documentation I’ve been able to find, but there you go.

A Briton’s guide to crashing the U.S. presidential elections.

Actress Francie Swift, although I loathe the name, left an impression on me nine years ago on an episode of Law & Order in which she played a supposed victim of multiple personality disorder. I couldn’t tell watching the episode whether she was not quite successful in her portrayal, or whether she was perfectly successful in portraying someone who was faking multiple personality disorder. I actually don’t remember what the answer ended up being, but I clearly remember her ability to smile with vacant, soulless eyes. I’ve seen her in one or two other roles since then, but was just re-impressed with her on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Semi-Detached” that aired recently. Still those haunting eyes, and a lot of neat facial tricks that while not exactly subtle are quite compelling, especially when they are framed together with D’Onofrio’s still-stuck-in-an-Edgar-suit mannerisms which I also enjoy watching. There are more pages of unwritten dialogue in that episode than written dialogue.

The nine years have also done her well physically, and I think she’s even prettier now, in a not off-the-shelf manner.

What a mess for Billy Connolly. I’m reserving judgment on his Ken Bigley comments until someone produces an audio recording. But it cannot be fun to be him right now.

(OK, I know I’m posting a lot, but it’s because my ear is feeling better.)

The local 99¢ Only store has a range of Ajax-brand liquid dishsoap in different citrus aromas.  Bizarrely one of them is Ruby Red Grapefruit.  Even more bizarrely, it smells great.  Updates to follow on its grease-cutting ability.

I heard Ralph Nader on the CBC yesterday. Man, I hate when that happens. I end up wanting to cry myself to sleep because he doesn’t get to be president. He’s not even in the ballot in California.

His comments on the presidential debates included the sentiment that not enough of the foreign policy discussion was on the topic of global infectious diseases and environmental regulations, and not enough of the domestic discussion was on universal health care, and altogether too much time was spent on terror and Iraq.

I saw Bowling for Columbine for the first time today. It’s in my top ten or twenty favorite films of all time. Michael Moore is a big guy, but his balls are outsized even for his frame. The portion where he stands up to Charlton Heston was really uncomfortable. I have no idea how he did it.

Tom Mauser is my new personal hero.

Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we tuurned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

A week ago this past Wednesday, September 29th, I went to my doctor for a routine visit. While he was writing a prescription, I asked him if he’d look in my ear when he was done, “because I’ll forget if I don’t ask you now.” That sentiment would grow to be fairly amusing, the fact that there was a point where I could forget my ear pain. That looks pretty melodramatic on preview, but trust me, it gets better.

He looked in my ear, and told me I had both a middle and external ear infection. He complimented me, remarking that it was quite a feat to pull off both at the same time. He prescribed Amoxicillin for the middle ear infection and Floxin drops for the external ear infection.

By Friday it had gotten pretty uncomfortable. By Saturday it was really bad. I called my doctor’s switchboard, but he was not on call, and I got connected to a really stuffy and dismissive doctor who assured me that Amox was strong enough and to give it a few more days. The next day, Sunday, it was unbearable. I was popping Percocet all day (that was Niall’s birthday.) Immediately after the cake I had to go in the other room and sleep. I called my doctor’s switchboard back, hoping he’d be back on call. He wasn’t, but a third doctor was — for the next twenty minutes, then the dismissive doc would be back. This third doctor was great. When I described the infection she was very concerned and called in Cipro, which I picked up.

I missed work on Monday, loaded up on Percocet. I was out of sick days, so I took a vacation day now that my workplace has become fairly, let’s say, particular about handing out sick days. On Tuesday it was still bad, but I had to go back to work. I called my doctor to ask for a referral to an ENT specialist, and was told that I could self-refer with my insurance. On Wednesday, I saw the specialist. He took one look at my ear and said, and I quote, “You have a terrible ear infection.” He told me to stay on the Cipro but that I could discontinue the Floxin, as the external ear infection had cleared up. He told me that there was lots of infected pus behind my eardrum, and that when the infection had cleared up, I would be left with lots of uninfected pus behind my eardrum, and that my hearing attenuation (about 60% loss of hearing) would last for weeks. He said that the only thing I could do to speed that up would be to “drain” it.

Now, when I was a kid in Japan I used to get terrible ear infections. On one doctor’s visit, they lanced both of my eardrums. It was one of the three most painful times in my life, joining the time I had a stent in my ureter after kidney stone surgery and the time I plunged my hand through hot coals at a barbecue. I was not interested. He told me I could come in to see him as a “courtesy” on Friday, even though he normally did not see patients then.

Wednesday night I started getting a lot of drainage from the ear. Clear, slightly yellow watery discharge, and the most unbelievably foul-looking greenish-gray discharge the consistency of Dijon mustard. I told Jenn I though my eardrum had broken. Bless her heart, she didn’t believe me.

Today, Friday, I saw the ENT again.  And he told me that my eardrum had ruptured in two places. Apparently a dual rupture happens less than 1% of the time that the eardrum ruptures. One hole was half a millimeter in size, the other was small enough that he could only see it with the microscope that I believe he really enjoyed sticking down my ear. He explained that he never really got to see these ruptures, as they normally happened in children and they wouldn’t let him stick a microscope in their ears. He noted that my ear infection is “as bad as they get in an adult,” and was convinced I had contracted it from my infant son, even though my son hasn’t been sick and is almost never around other children.

He then proceeded to suck the foul stuff through the hole in my eardrum with a long vacuum. That was really loud and rather uncomfortable. He then prescribed Ciprodex drops, which consists of Cipro and a steroid. When I put the drops in, they go through the hole in my eardrum, which is the entire point — but I can taste them as they pour down my eustachian tube, which is a mind-blowing experience.

I’ve been given a “less than 10%” chance that I’ll have permanent hearing damage as a result. That’s still a pretty high threshold, as my boss noted, but my hearing’s already much, much better after having the stuff sucked out. As long as the hearing doesn’t get any worse, I could probably learn to live with this maybe 10% loss of hearing. But I hope it gets better; my hearing is very important to me.

I think I’m going to take it easy this weekend.

I received a junk fax today advertising an undervalued stock. The disclaimer at the bottom of the fax informed me that the company sending out the faxes had received $219,965 to produce and distribute the “newsletter”. Good grief. If it’s not making the spammers rich, it’s making the telcos and the USPS some nice money.

My wife and baby are back from twelve days’ vacation and they both remember me!

Mount St. Helens clears throat with steam eruption

Mount St. Helens belched a roiling plume of gray-white steam and ash Friday, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes warned the volcano was reawakening [emphasis added].

I think David Ammons, Associated Press Writer is trying a bit too hard.

Virginia’s Alexandria Country Day School ran out of milk at lunch, so it served the “limeade” in the refrigerator to its elementary school students. Unfortunately it wasn’t “limeade”, it was “leftover margaritas”.