The Wild Winds of Fortune

Dear Ken Burns,

Astroturf was named after the Astrodome.  It was NOT invented for the Astrodome. It was renamed after it was installed in the Astrodome Its first installation was at a school in Providence, Rhode Island.

Get it right.

Me

Football combines the two worst aspects of American life.  It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.  George Will.

I do not agree with Will on many things — even football — but even when I disagree with him I love to hear him speak or write.  He is brilliant, especially on baseball.

I am on new medicines for fibromyalgia.  One of which, Lyrica, is turning me into a zombie until about three o’clock each afternoon.  This is inconvenient beyond belief.

My face is puffy. I am not drooling (yet), but I look dazed and confused.  I cannot drive.  I had to rip out three different knitting projects yesterday because I kept dropping the needles. I was able to re-string a broken bracelet, but it took me an hour when normally it would take fifteen minutes, if that. (This was a repair, not a design job, and no wirework was  involved.)  My typing is … well, let’s just say that it took  me twice as long to write this because I kept hitting two keys at once.

Supposedly, the drowsiness (and the vertigo!) will go away after a week or two.  If not, I am getting off the Lyrica — living like this long-term would be unbearable. Being free of the pain does me little good if I become nonfunctional due to the medicine’s side effects.*

I think whether or not it has cognitive effects is an open question.  When the doctor was looking at drugs, I told him the one side effect I could not cope with was cognitive impairment.  But again, being able to think is not helpful if you can’t really do anything.

I do feel like screaming for brains.  If only I had a way to transplant them…..

*And let’s not discuss the weight gain and fluid retention.

Adam Lambert was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, singing “Never Close Our Eyes.”  The Resident Shrink and I were listening, and we agreed…

We hated the mid-’80s the first time around, and neither of us sees any reason whatsoever to revisit the era.

I have finished online traffic school.  And although I said otherwise on their mandatory course evaluation survey (they have my completion certificate on their servers and I’m paranoid), I really would not recommend these people to anyone.

Their website was pedestrian, not particularly interesting, and written for fifth-graders. (They also did not explain why you got a question wrong, simply telling you to go back and re-read the chapter.) On one chapter, I answered a question correctly, had it marked wrong, and then re-answered it using all the answers in turn, and the correct answer was finally marked correct.  It cost me probably twenty minutes, and six weeks off my life in frustration.* There is a downside to going the cheap route. (I do so wish I had had the extraneous $200 to blow on the MCLE4Lawyers traffic school.  It at least would have been better written than this site.) On the other hand, they recycled the questions for the final from the questions in the quizzes, so all I had to do was remember what I had answered the first time.

These people went off the rails when it came to the DUI chapter, however.** Drinking was evil incarnate.  They went into how much alcohol damages your body.  It read much like a DARE pamphlet.  And even when they came back to driving, the subject they were supposed to be lecturing me about, they tended to be seriously over the top.  My favorite paragraph:

How much does alcohol affect your driving? Your awareness of your surroundings decreases in proportion to how many drinks you have had. As a driver’s awareness and intelligence decreases, physical impotence increases. One psychologist put it quite well, saying “Nothing like alcohol to increase the desire and reduce the ability.” And an impotent drinking driver is a danger to others on the road, as well as to his own safety.

I know guys sometimes use their vehicles to compensate for deficiencies in other areas, but really.

*I was going to say six months, and then decided, no, it had been frustrating, but not that frustrating. I am working on my tendency to blow small things out of all proportion.  Fixing that personality flaw may make me a decidedly less interesting person, but it will make life easier for everybody who has to deal with me on a daily basis.
**The chapter on defensive driving had its own surreal moments, but that’s for another post.

So I have not posted yet today.  I may not really post anything substantive tomorrow, either.  (Even though a Facebook friend posted link to a really cool article about, I think, causality from arstechnica.  I think I understand it, but  IANAP.)

The reason?

I am engaged in a serious endeavor that has significant implications….


Online traffic school.

Oh, and knitting a scarf.

I am doing traffic school online this week for a ticket I earned in October. Shasta County sent me a list of approved online providers, and one caught my eye: MCLE4lawyers.  From their website:

Time is scarce for everyone, especially lawyers. Traffic school takes an entire day, and so does an MCLE course offering 6.5 credit hours. Now, you can reclaim a full day of your most valuable resource … time … by taking MCLE 4 Lawyers’ traffic violator school course. 

Since 1997, we have been offering California lawyers the opportunity to earn 6.5 MCLE credit hours (including 1 credit hour in substance abuse) and a traffic violator school completion certificate AT THE SAME TIME!

This is genius.  Completely.  I was all set to take it (even though I have no need of MCLE hours, since I  am not licensed to practice law because I have not paid my bar dues in years) until I saw that they were charging nearly $200 for it.*

There are limits to professional curiosity.  Usually about $50.

*Actually, that’s not bad for an MCLE course.

Post under construction.

(For those who may have seen it before it disappeared, it has been taken down to be incorporated into a longer, more incoherent rant about the subject matter of frivolous lawsuits.  Hopefully.  If I can’t get it together to write said longer post, I may at a future date repost the short one, since it contained a sentence which may be the best thing I’ve written in months, but which would look odd out of context.)

Those of you familiar with the Boston\Cambridge area have seen the “smoot” markings on the Harvard Bridge, painted  on originally in October, 1958.*  The unit of measure was a Lambda Chi pledge, one Oliver R. Smoot (5′ 7″), who went on to….

Head the American National Standards Institute and the International Standards Organization.

*The smoot markings have become so much a part of the local landscape that when the Harvard Bridge was renovated in the ’80s the Cambridge Police requested that they be retained since they had become a useful tool for identifying accident sites.  The contractor complied, even scoring the concrete on the sidewalk in 5′ 7″ increments rather than the traditional six feet.

I mentioned Demotivational posters in my last post.* I looked once again at Despair Inc.’s website — the maker of the very best in uninspirational office decor — and was reminded of how much I love their work.

My favorite is Persistence … no, Blogging … no, Worth … wait a minute! Achievement!** Except there is also Romance, and Madness, and  Potential, and Limitations, and Tranquility (every parent needs this one), and Mistakes, and Opportunity….

Actually, my very favorite is Despair.  Perhaps because it is so very, very true.

With that said, have a nice weekend everybody.  If you can.

*You do read the footnotes, right?
**My grandboss at the Census, a wonderful man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Dick Cheney, and who joked about it, passed the Achievement poster around the office.  A truly great guy to work for.  Once, in response to a comment I made about our mountain of backlogged work (caused by incompetence in the DC and Indiana Powers That Be), Tom commented, “Yeah, welcome to Bataan.”

The Pentagon is a serious place.