Full of Ship.
Light ‘Em Up.
I’d always assumed lightning bugs–also known as “fireflies” by the utterly pretentious–could be found in Britain as well as the United States. There are legends there of the will-o’-the-wisp that would lure unwary travelers into bogs and drown them, although that was probably swamp gas. And there are glow-worms. There’s a glow-worm in Roald Dahl’s James And The Giant Peach. She’s a pretty minor character and I think Dahl forgot about her once most of the action moved to the top of the peach, but it’s not as though bioluminescent insects are unknown on the other side of the pond. So it kind of threw me when, as we were walking up the driveway to the house where I was staying, my British friend stopped and said, “Chris…why are there little lights all over your yard?”
We’d had a few drinks and he wondered if I’d slipped something in his beer while he wasn’t looking. In retrospect I wish I’d strung him along a little bit and asked, “What? What the hell are you talking about?” Instead I reached down and scooped up a lightning bug. And it was a good opportunity to tell him about the time when I was a kid and filled a jar with lightning bugs then turned them loose in the house. My parents spent half the night catching them. Then when they finally went to bed they lay there in the dark and could see the occasional flash.
This was in Indiana where a bill to make the lightning bug the state insect. It never went anywhere. Regardless of your political views how can you not embrace that? There’s a U-Haul trailer design of a giant lightning bug that specifically says “Indiana”.
Maybe it’s because they’re sneaky. I set a camera out one night when there seemed to be hundreds of them out. No matter where I put it they seemed to say, “Okay, we’re being watched. Let’s move over there!”
I’m Writing Like A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off.
“I didn’t even know what salmonella was. Until I was twenty years old I thought it was some guy who used to run around and dip his ass in mayonnaise products.”
I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I feed our dogs raw food, which is called, appropriately enough, the Bones And Raw Food or BARF diet. It’s supposed to approximate what dogs would eat in the wild, minus the hair, parasites, and fights over who gets the head, which some of my Southern family members have assured me is the tastiest part of the squirrel, but that’s another story.
Providing this diet means every few weeks I grind up a hundred and twenty pounds or so of raw chicken, usually in the form of chicken necks.
It’s not as bad as it sounds.
Raw chicken necks also occasionally come with the head still attached, which is all part of the fun. I run the necks—minus the heads, which I’m pretty sure aren’t that tasty anyway—through a meat grinder. And I’m careful because raw chicken can carry salmonella.
My chicken chamber of horrors.
Accidents can still happen, though. I’ve heard cases of cooks getting sick from a little squirt of chicken liquid while they were chopping one up for the fryer. And there was a possible outbreak of salmonella over at Crankoutloud that confirmed that it’s not a lot of fun.
Because we buy chicken necks in bulk, sometimes directly from a distributor, I sometimes get them frozen in a block of ice. This means I end up with coolers full of watery chicken blood. I’ve found safe ways to dispose of this. I used to dump it in the front yard, thinking it would be good fertilizer, but I got into trouble when the photographer across the street, the one who’s been stuck at home since he broke his leg, saw me dumping blood while my wife was out of town.
I hope you don’t need this to underline the punchline for you.
Source: IMDB
The last time I ground chicken necks I went out to dinner afterwards, and I imagined coming down with salmonella. This might lead to an investigation of the restaurant. I can see the headline.
Then there’d be an investigation of me and they’d find the freezer full of ground up raw chicken. I can see the headline.
You Can’t Get There From Here.
Why is the sidewalk closed? Why do I have to go at least a block out of my way and cross in the middle of the street just to get to the bus stop? All this is because construction is going on. And may be going on for an unknown length of time. The bus may even be rerouted, and they won’t advertise that. You just might be sitting at a stop for a very long time.
I get that urban renewal and new construction has to go on. It’s a fact of life living in a city. It just irks me that it’s the pedestrians are the ones who get hit. The construction would go a lot faster if they had to shut down the street.
He’s a rocket man!
Happy birthday Chris Elliott. Born May 31st, 1960.
A Tree Grows In Nashville.
I’m pretty sure this is graffiti. It’s on a wall near Nashville’s Centennial Park. If you’re familiar with the area it’s next to the entrance to Rotier’s restaurant, a little hole in the wall diner that’s been there since dirt was clean. People who went to the original centennial exposition in 1897 dined at Rotier’s afterwards. Businesses have come and gone but Rotier’s is eternal. Man fears time, but time fears Rotier’s.
This is not really an advertisement for the restaurant I won’t name again, especially since I’ve never eaten there. What really interests me is this graffiti. Someone put some thought and effort into creating this mini-mural. Many people see graffiti as ugly and I guess a lot of it is, but this, subtle, almost unnoticeable as it is, makes me stop and think about how the area has changed and grown. Maybe that was the artist’s intent. Maybe the artist was just somebody who felt compelled to paint a nice picture of a tree going up a wall.
Here’s a picture or Rotier’s to give you some idea of its antebellum charm. It really has survived decades of changes to the area.
Some Of Her Best Friends Were…
Hail and farewell Anne Meara. She and Jerry Stiller were part of an early wave of performers who, through albums, brought their acts out of the nightclubs and into homes. They must have seemed like an unlikely pair which may explain why some of their funniest routines revolved around an unlikely pair finding each other. Another routine that I’ve been able to find online is Stiller and Meara playing two strangers who meet and develop a relationship when one of them calls the wrong number. It’s funny but also touching. Unlikely they may have been, but we were lucky to have them.
I Don’t Want A New Drug.
My blood pressure spiked at 639 over 225. Or something like that. It’s been high ever since my surgery in December. It seemed natural for it to be high after a procedure that involved slicing me open from my nipples to my navel and pushing everything aside so they could yank out some lymph nodes that, in the end, had a few teratomas which are a benign kind of tumor that can turn into anything like skin, teeth, or eyes. I would have been okay with that, since they could keep watch on what was going on down there, but the doctors didn’t think it was such a good idea. They don’t think my consistently high blood pressure is such a good thing either. I talked to my primary care physician, or PCP, who thought it might be from the surgery. He thought an artery going into one of my kidneys may have been kinked. Because the kidney wouldn’t get enough blood it would think the whole body wasn’t getting enough blood and would produce a hormone to raise the blood pressure. The kidneys also filter your blood and produce urine, and are the site of the adrenal glands which produce the fight-or-flight response when we’re in trouble, all things that seem completely unrelated, and yet no one can explain to me while growing an eye next to my liver would be a bad thing, but that’s another story. My PCP prescribed a drug that would lower my blood pressure. To deal with my hot flashes he’d also previously prescribed a daily testosterone medication. At this point I’m beginning to think I should stop calling him my PCP and just call him my dealer. Maybe I’ll do that the next time I’m sitting in the exam room listening to The Eagles song Journey of the Sorcerer on an endless loop on the office intercom.
“The problem with your artery can probably be fixed non-surgically,” he told me.
“How would they do that?” I imagined some guy punching me in the back until my artery was straightened out.
“They’ll make an incision in your leg and use a probe to place a stent in the artery.”
I’m not a medical professional but any time the phrase “make an incision” is used that’s surgery. I told him this and he agreed, but went on to say it would be very minor surgery.
“They’ll just give you a local. You’ll probably be awake through the whole thing.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “The last time they gave me a local I went out like a light.”
“Oh? You’re a cheap date.”
I’ve got the greatest doctor in the world.
The greatest Doctor not of this world.
After I met with my PCP I was referred to a very smart cardiologist who told me she didn’t think it was a problem with the artery, which was a huge relief. If I can skip the surgery, no matter how minor it is, that’s a good thing. When she told me it might be a part of my kidney dying that didn’t sound so good, but she said, “It’s not quite dead,” in a Pythonesque voice, and that reassured me that I was dealing with a professional with priorities. If it didn’t bother her that a small part of my kidney was on its way to join the bloody choir invisible I wasn’t going to let it bother me, especially since the goal is to get my blood pressure down.
To that end, though, she prescribed another drug. And then she had some tests run and noticed that my thyroid was low, so 
she prescribed a drug for that too.
For three months last summer I had a killer cocktail pumped through my body, and on top of that I had regular doses of pills. I was 
prescribed anti-anxiety meds, pain pills, pills for nausea, pills to make me piss like a racehorse, an array of blitzers, tinglers, zippers, and baby aspirin. Most of these I didn’t take more than a couple of times because I didn’t need them, and the ones I did need I weaned myself off of as soon as I could. Drugs just aren’t my thing. It’s not that I’m afraid of addiction—I’m not. I can’t even remember to take a multivitamin regularly. I’m too lazy to be an addict. Think about it: addicts are the hardest working people in the world. They have to be because nothing will stand between them and their next fix. Eventually for most it’s not even pursuit of the high that drives them; it’s the need to feel normal. And deep down I think that’s what worries me. I don’t want to be tethered to something, especially a drug. It feels so limiting. What if I get stranded on a desert island? Yes I’ll have bigger things to worry about, and maybe eating coconuts and fish all day will naturally level out my blood pressure and thyroid. And if I look at it one way it depresses me to think I’ll probably be taking some of these drugs for the rest of my life, but looked at another way the phrase “the rest of my life” has taken on a whole new meaning over the past year. A life of popping pills is better than no life at all.
And then I realized I already am an addict, and have been for a long time. I start every morning with a cold coffee with milk. I didn’t realize how important that was until my wife and I were staying in a hotel and I started a couple of mornings with a Coke instead. I was getting the caffeine, but it just wasn’t quite right. The third morning I went to the hotel coffee shop and ordered a gargantua triple cappuccino over ice.
“Is that for here or to go?” the woman asked as she frothed the milk.
“Just pour it in an IV bag and stick a needle in my arm.”
Try getting that on a desert island.
One Of A Kind.
Source: IMDB
With Mad Max and the Terminator back and Jurassic Park reopening, plus a slew of sequels coming to theaters this summer, it seems like everything old is new again. I often hear complaints about remakes. In fact I seem to hear the same complaint about remakes over and over, which is funny when you think about it, but that’s another story. In principle I don’t have any problem with remakes. I’ve mentioned that my favorite movie is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, but it doesn’t bother me that I have to specify that I mean the 1956 version. There are things I like about the 1978 version, including the inside-joke-cameo by Kevin McCarthy.
The problem I have with the 2015 remake of Poltergeist isn’t that it’s a remake. The problem is the absence of Zelda Rubinstein. I’m sure Jared Harris is a fine actor, but let me be blunt: Zelda Rubinstein was perfectly cast in the original because she may have been physically small but projected being psychically strong. She carried herself with grace and strength. The original Poltergeist is full of strong women, but Rubinstein’s Tangina towers over all of them. The first time I heard her say, “This house is clean” I expected the credits to roll. I can’t imagine anyone would want to mess with her, but it seemed like anyone who did would regret it.
Maybe that’s why her work to fight AIDS in what only seemed like the disease’s early days—it had been around for years, but Rubinstein’s work began in 1984—was so powerful to me.
AIDS and HIV have only affected me indirectly. I can’t speak to, or even imagine, the horror suffered by those who lost those they loved, especially in the early days when the disease was so poorly understood. The closest I could come was someone else’s experience. A friend of mine who was a few years older lost his first longtime partner to AIDS. They had been separated for several years. It was the partner’s diagnosis and hospitalization that brought them back together briefly. One summer when I was home from college my friend told me the whole story. His partner had died only a short time before and I did what I could to help him through his grief. He never said so, but I knew from the way he described it that his time with his partner was the happiest time of his life. We’d go to restaurants and sit and he would tell me how they used to climb a hill overlooking Centennial Park and spend the night there just talking.
Even before I met him, even before I knew anyone I knew was gay the tragedy of AIDS saddened me. Kids I knew would make tasteless jokes about it and I hated them. Maybe it scared and saddened them too and that was their way of dealing with it, but I don’t want to let them off the hook. It was a scary thing to a teenage boy, even one who had almost no chance of being infected with HIV, but that doesn’t matter. Those of us who were hitting puberty during the AIDS crisis should have been able to sympathize, to know that joking about AIDS wasn’t wrong, but joking about the victims was. The subtext of every AIDS joke I heard at the time was “if you have AIDS you deserve it”. Sadly the kids who told those jokes were just repeating what they’d heard from adults, but as teenage boys we should have been smarter and more understanding. Our bodies were surging with hormones that were almost screaming at us to have sex, and the news was telling us “Sex can kill you.” The one AIDS joke that made me laugh was when a kid sitting next to me in math class leaned over and whispered, “I’m so scared of it I’m wearing a condom right now.” There was also a Bloom County strip that reflected the dating scene at the time that also tickled me.
Maybe that’s why when I thought about AIDS all I cared about is that it was a disease and it was killing people. Whom it killed didn’t matter to me. It did matter to others, though. It mattered enough that there was a stigma surrounding it that fed the fear. AIDS was popularly considered a “gay disease”, but the fear was directed at anyone who had it. When I was sixteen one of my teachers read a story to the class about a boy with hemophilia who’d gotten HIV from a blood transfusion. His neighbors drove past his house chanting “KILL HIM! KILL HIM!” This fear spread even to those who worked with or even knew anyone with AIDS.
Here’s my version of an 80’s AIDS joke: how do you find out who your real friends are? Get HIV.
It’s against that backdrop that Zelda Rubinstein took part in the LA CARES advertising campaign. I remember seeing one of the ads in a magazine and thinking, “Hey, that’s the lady from Poltergeist. She’s so cool!”
This was the ad I saw. I didn’t realize it was just one in a larger campaign.
Source: The Advocate
Hollywood, where, within a few years red ribbons would become ubiquitous, didn’t think she was so cool at the time. She didn’t work for a year after publicly speaking out about AIDS. In case you think there just might not have been any roles for her check out her IMDB page and note how much she worked, which makes the absence of any credits for 1985 very conspicuous.
Was Poltergeist about AIDS? Not intentionally, and not even unintentionally since it was released in 1982, and it’s probably a bad idea to even try to tie the two, but let me offer some thoughts. The film was called “Poltergeist”, suggesting a single entity, but the haunting is caused by a group of ghosts. We speak of a disease as a single thing but it’s the manifestation of a multitude of organisms. The Freeling family notices odd things at first, but they’re afraid to talk to their neighbors openly about it. They retreat into their home and only turn to professional help when they lose their daughter. They don’t do anything to deserve being tormented. And then there’s that tagline: “It knows what scares you.” (It’s been changed to “They know what scares you” for the remake.) Sexual contact is the most common way HIV spreads. I don’t care how casual a hookup seems. Sex is always intimate contact which makes HIV a disease shared by intimacy. It also forced people who’d kept part of themselves secret, who’d been afraid to admit to the world who they really were, to come out. And for others, like my friend, there was nothing more terrifying than losing someone he loved. So many lost their lives. So many others lost everything else.
On the other hand the Freeling family escapes in the end. People with AIDS often disappeared, but there was no escape from the disease.
Zelda Rubinstein, who worked to make the world a better place, was born May 28th, 1933. She passed away January 27th, 2010. She lived to see HIV infection become a treatable disease even if there still is no cure. There will never be another one like her.
Your Morning Toast Is A Wake Up Call.
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Congratulations. You have updated yMaillard from version 1.1.1.1.1.3.4.2.1a to version 2.1.3beta. Please note the following changes that yMaillard has made to your ySmarToast system:
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In previous versions the lowest setting was 1 and the highest setting was 10. The lowest setting is now 1.0. The highest setting is now 1.999999999.
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This update fixes several bugs found in previous versions. Any cockroaches currently in your ySmartToast system have been disintegrated. You may find pieces of them in food you use your ySmartToast system to prepare for up to six months. Future cockroaches are no longer able to penetrate the ySmarToast system. Ants still come pre-installed. We plan to have this fixed in update 2.6.2.5.4.