Magazines

Melting Pot by Kevin Eastman and Simon Bisley.

Looking up Takin' a Ride led me to Heavy Metal. I used to subscribe to the magazine when I was back in college, but shortly after I graduated they went off into some kind of noveau art phase and I lost interest. Or maybe since I had a job I could afford my own plutonium nyborg, and I didn't need to subsist on someone else's stories about it. Whatever.
    I'm looking at their website and I see they have a full length graphic novel you can read online or even download. Cool. Except that in order to read the text easily, I need to blow up the images 200%, which means that not even a quarter of a two page spread will fit on my monitor. Okay, it's not the biggest monitor in the world, but it's not the smallest either. We've got 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution. So I can download the pics, and blow them up on the screen, but I have to pan and scroll to see everything, which kind of spoils the experience. Do you think those critters swinging those swords around are having to pan and scroll to find the next fiend to disembowel? The answer is no, they do not.
    Today I go the doctor's office (yes, another one. This one is an allergist. I need another bottle of magic jungle juice.) and I'm reading a Time magazine and I come across this picture.

Feb. 19, 2014. Riot police officers stand on Independence Square during on-going anti-government protests in downtown Kiev, Ukraine. Alexey Furman—EPA

I've seen a bunch of pictures form Kiev recently, but this one I thought was pretty stunning. I have to give the photographer credit for the composition, but I also have to give credit to Time for printing such a large image. You would need a monitor that was 50,000 pixels across to show all the detail you can see in the original printed version.
    So while newspapers made be fading and pop culture is moving en bloc to the digital world, there is still a place for printing on paper. Will the digital world ever completely usurp paper and ink? I hope not.
     The upshot is that I ordered a one year subscription to Heavy Metal. If I can't get any plutonium nyborg anymore, at least I can still read about it.

Leaning Bottle of Pisa

Picked this up from the close out shelf at the local liquor store yesterday for $10. Supposedly it's flavored with hazelnuts, pistachios and almonds. I can only smell the almonds, it smells like one of those almond turnover things you find in the bakery. 25% alcohol and a such a cute bottle. (Get it? Leaning tower of Pisa, leaning bottle of Pisa.) It's sweet as liqueurs usually are. It's strong enough to give a pleasant warm feeling, but not so strong that it burns.
     There were a whole lot of other things on the closeout shelf as well. Has the number of liquor brands exploded over the last few years? It sure seems like it, or maybe I'm just now noticing it.
    Yes, I know I should have an apertif glass, but hey, I'm a barbarian from the great north woods, we don't need to steenking upperteef glasses.

Depression

 

Rose is Rose by Don Wimmer and Pat Brady

I suffer from depression. Except I don't seem to be suffering too much. Maybe I should say I've been 'diagnosed with' or I am 'coping with' it. When I first got the diagnosis, which must have been 10 or 15 years ago, I went and told my parents. I tell my dad, and what does he say? "You know, I think your mother is depressed." I told my mom, and what did she say? You guessed it: "You know, I think your father is depressed." So maybe it runs in the family. The technical term for what I have is disthymia, which is long term, low grade depression.
    I'm talking to a guy I know who is also suffering from depression, and he was trying to explain how hard it is to explain depression to someone who doesn't have it, and I have to agree. It's not something that is amenable to logic. One of the worst things about depression is that it prevents you from asking for help.
    Depression makes it really hard to do just about anything. It's like there is no impetus. The question of "why bother?" doesn't even come up. You can know what you need to do, and you can know that if you just started doing things you would feel better about yourself, but that little spark that gets you going is missing. You can be just as smart, just as capable and just as knowledgeable as a normal person, but you can't get anything done. It's like there is a tiny little engine deep inside you, and it connects the part of you that wants things done to the part that does things, and that little engine has been turned off.
    I'm thinking about this and a vision comes to me. I'm standing at the bottom of swimming pool full of water. All the people are up there on the deck surrounding the pool. It should be easy enough to get there, just push off from the bottom, or shoot, just float up to the surface, and I could climb out and be with all the normal people, but I can't move. I can't even float. (I'm not drowning because I don't need any air because I'm not breathing.)
    This reminds me of a story Haruki Murakami wrote about man who got dumped in a dry well in Mongolia. Somehow he managed to survive the fall to the bottom, but there was no water, and no way to climb out. So he sat at the bottom of the well and waited. If I recall correctly, eventually someone came by and pulled him out. He went back to Japan and eventually wound up as "therapist" to rich Japanese women. The "therapy" consisted of sitting in the same room with this guy. Something about him made the women feel better. (What can I say? It's a Murakami story.) Now that he is successful, he was a well dug outside his house and occasionally goes down there (with a ladder) to recharge himself.
    Which reminds me of Rose's Dungeon of Resentment, which is where I got the illustration.
    Funny thing about depression. I remember getting one of those useless healthy living newsletters and it had a list of symptoms of depression, and I read down through it and said, no, that's not me. A week later my wife reads the same list and says "you're depressed, and you're going to the doctor". She was right. Prozac basically saved my life. You're only supposed to take it for six months or so, by which time you should be better, but here it is 15 years later and I'm still taking it. Occasionally I will try going off of it, but it never seems to go well. It's not there is any big outward difference, but I notice that some small things change, like my temper gets a little shorter, so I go back to taking it again. It's gone off patent, so you can get the generic version.

Pic of the Day

 U.S. Soldier Patrols Outside FOB Shank In Afghanistan

FOB (Forward Operating Base) Shank? Who the neck names these things? Or maybe this is where they send all the guys who can't play golf. People have got to be the most disagreeable creatures on Earth. I mean who else would pick a fight over gravel?

No 6207

Seems like when I was growing up all these heavy industrial activities were kind of glossed over as being old hat, ordinary and unimportant. I guess they sort of were, after all we had the latest high gloss whiz bang from Detroit to drool over, not to mention all the crazy flying machines the war department was cooking up. There is still some heavy industry going on - Caterpillar is still going great guns, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big earth moving machines outweighed one of these old steam locomotives.
    Seems like the people who put together movies these days mostly focus on useless, foolish nonsense. I suppose it pays the bills, but if you are looking for something worthwhile if means there is a whole lot of crap you have to wade through.
    Kudos to Comrade Misfit for finding this one.

P.S. About No 6207: I didn't realize that steam locomotives had both inner and outer cylinders (witness the crankshaft-axle). I was only aware of the outer ones. The narrator doesn't make a big deal about it, which kind of implies that it was typical, but I don't think it was. I think most locos only had the outer cylinders.

Suburbia

This weekend I had to go pick up a script from Walgreens, but not the one I usually go to on 10th. No I had to go clear over to the one that is over by Kohl's on Cornelius Pass. Okay, it's not really a big deal, it's only a couple of miles over there, and there are some other stores over there as well, so we can kill a couple of birds with this one stone. But I still didn't like it because that area, newly built up, epitomizes everything I hate about suburbia: landscape trimmed to within an inch of its life, wide sidewalks that no one walks on, gently winding streets full of people who couldn't get out of the way if their life depended on it (all charter members of the anti-destination league I'm sure), wide expanses of new asphalt paved parking lots with lots of free parking for places I have no desire to go, and lots of stores full of useless stuff that I neither want nor need. Tell me again why we are over here? The place is like the ultimate product of soulless corporate hucksters and government officials protecting you from yourself. I hate it.
    But then I had an epiphany. The entire construct is just a tool, a tool to distribute consumer products to consumers, and it does that very well, and that's why it exists. Hating it is like hating your hammer because it has a red handle. The color of the handle has no impact on how well it does it's job.
    Tools are used to build things, so my next question is: what are we building with this tool? Near as I can tell we are building the next generation of soldiers to continue our fight in the war against the rocks, which is basically what life is, right? Rocks are the very opposite of life, they don't think, they don't care, they would just as soon crush little rocks as big rocks. So the mere existence of all life on this planet, all life anywhere, is a blow against our rocky oppressors. Right now we have a little breathing room. We have walked all over this planet and pretty much pounded all the rocks into submission. Oh, there are still a few upstarts here and there that give us some trouble from time to time, but things are generally quiet. However, that could change in a heartbeat, so we best be getting prepared for whatever the next calamity might be. Because you know another thing about rocks? They never give up.

P.S. On our stone's throw we were walking down the sidewalk in front of Winco (a local monster grocery store) and a kid pulling a train of grocery carts crosses our path. No big deal, right? He'll have his carts across the sidewalk in a few seconds and we'll be on our way. But then I look to see how many carts he's got and it must be a zillion. There's some kind of motorized tractor pushing them along. It's like a freight train, and just like a train it gets halfway in the building and then stops. It's just a hiccup right? They'll start rolling again in a second, but no, they don't and we have to venture way out into the parking lot (a dozen steps at least) in order to get around this thing. I suspect the grocery carts are in league with the rocks.

Medical Scribe

 

Statue of a scribe. Saqqara, Egypt. Antiquities Service Excavations 1893. c. 2500 BC.

I know a couple of people who are lawyers. They don't write, and they don't type. If they need a letter written, they dictate it and someone else turns their words into print. When I started having to write things, that is prose instead of code, at work, I thought it would be nice if we had a typing service to help out. Hunting and pecking is okay if you are writing code, I mean half of what you write isn't even letters or numbers, and every character is critical. Writing English prose is a little more forgiving, and some people have made it their business to know how to type, so if you are producing a lot of written material, it would make sense to have a typist. But my ignorant employers didn't see it that way, so I sort of had to teach myself.
    Went to the doctor this morning for an annual checkup and he had a scribe with him. This was something new. Previously he had always operated the computer himself. Now he has a medical student doing it for him. Kind of nice. He spent all his time paying attention to me instead of trying to decipher the cryptic computer display.

From The Medical Scribe Journal:

Nationally, the average salary for a Emergency Medicine doctor is about $250,000  per year, versus $87,000 for nurse practitioners, and $79,634 for physician assistants.

Medical scribes make $20-$23 per hour, which is roughly half what a nurse practitioner makes.