In Illness and in Link Wealth

In this death defying entry, I will attempt to both whine about being sick and share videos and links with you at the same time.

Please keep your hands and head inside the vehicle at all times and if you are ill, elderly, have a heart condition, or are just really fucking stupid, you might want to consult your doctor before going any further into this no doubt highly contagious and flammable blog entry.

First, a video link. This looks like a pretty interesting movie.

Granted, the trailer does not exactly tell you what this non movie is about, but there is enough intriguing thought fodder there that I am quite intrigued. There is still a lot of life in the powerful “handheld with special effects” style of film-making, at least in my books, and this seems like it leverages that power to great effect.

I only hope that this film-maker is a real guy who was really arrested for making a movie deemed critical of the Iranian power structure, and the film really had to be smuggled out or Iran to Cannes on a USB memory stick hidden in a cake.

If that is all just a public relations myth created to give the movie false value via viral marketing, I will be extremely disappointed and lose all interest in the movie.

Well, maybe not all interest, but most of it. It would still be an intriguing looking movie, even if shorn of its meta-narrative. But I would be pretty pissed off.

OK, back to me. Finger still doing fine in the dressing that looking like a hand knit condom. Taking the antibiotics and so on.

But wait, a new contender has arrived!

I have been experiencing the symptom known as sulfur burps. Burps that taste like sulfur, or in other words, have that distinctive “rotten egg” flavour to them.

This has been accompanied by a loss of appetite and a large increase in gassiness. Historically, these have been the heralds of Bad Times In The Small Intestine in my life, and so I am being very, very careful about what I eat and drink, and making sure to eat slowly and with plenty of water so that there is no chance of that gass getting bottled up by a blockage or bolus and giving me cramping.

Back to the other stuff. I do not get what is so creepy about this now banned app.

Sure, it gives guys a heads-up about what girls are around and gives you some basic info about them, but
that is about it.

I distinctly feel I must be missing something here.

OK, back to me. As the sulfur burps article states, one of the causes for them is two fairly serious infections, Helicobacter pylori and Giardia, the latter of which causes Giardiasis, more commonly know as “beaver fever”.

What it has to do with beavers is beyond me.

I am worried that I have one of those two problems. I have been made well aware of the effects of a malfunctioning immune syndrome lately, and Helicobacter pylori in particular is one of those infections that you can have for years without any symptoms, but then when opportunity arises, it becomes a problem, and that sounds like the perfect recipe for something that has recurred many times in my life without apparently cause or cure.

Back to content. I think this video is all the proof I will ever need that George Lucas will not stop, will not rest, until ever nerd in the world hates him to the maximum of their capacity for hate.

Yes, that is beloved anti-hero Han Solo dancing like a gay zombie robot in an officially licensed Lucasarts video game.

To me, it is like Lucas is actively hunting the tiny shreds of respect that I did not even know I still had for Star Wars, and terminating them with extreme prejudice.

I envy those who are numb to these things now.

Back to me. Interestingly, from what I can tell, the literature says Keflex can actually kill both of these infections. So really, I am already taking the solution. But I don’t know.

Doctor Wong from the ER said that Keflex can also kill all your useful gut flora and fauna, and if that happened, that might be just the opportunity an infection needed to take over the joint.

I will see how things work out. I have skipped supper due to lack of appetite, but that is the last meal I skip before I am confident I am back to normalish.

Back to content. I really enjoyed this little bit of satire about the Quantum Nature of Mitt Romney.

It explores the deep science required to understand how Mitt Romney can hold so many positions at the same time, and how it is mathematically impossible to know both what his position is now and what it will be in the future. Position or vector… pick one.

It is, admittedly, a fairly nerdy kind of satire. But I am a fairly nerdy guy.

OK, back to my sepia toned kind of life.

I am trying to balance proper alertness to potential health problems with the proper amount of skepticism needed to keep things in their proper perspective.

There has to be some sane middle point between self-neglect and hypochondria. In my life, it has tended to be either/or. Half the reason I neglect my own health is that I lack the coping skills to handle dealing with health issues in a balanced sane way. So it is either ignore things completely, or freak out over them.

Both of those are bad, but at least ignoring them is not painful in the short term.

That has been the emotional calculus so far, but I hope to write a better equation into myself in the future via my own brand of cognitive therapy.

Even if it is one of those infections, while they can be very serious, most of the time they are not. So really, there is no rational basis for worry.

Yeah. That always works.