It’s just the Meds

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

I wish I could say I didn’t post for some high flung ladida reason. But the fact is I didn’t post because I took benadryl last night. So looking for a post to do a blast from the past put me in an ADD spin.

And then there’s family stuff and — ARGH.

Post tomorrow. This is just to let you know I’m okay. I’m finishing entering changes in the fairy tales.

It’s likely we’ll be out of town/busy all next week, but after that we should be fine, actually.

97 thoughts on “It’s just the Meds”

  1. Just to seed discussion while Our Hostess is busy / scare the crap out of everyone:

    2. This is what happens when you allow your right to bear arms to be taken away. It sure seems like the current ruling politicians in USA, Canada, Western Europe and Australia are all in a race to see who can go full totalitarian the fastest.

      1. For a while now I’ve had the idea of taking something the size of a 2,000 lb bomb casing and fill it with as much guns and ammo as can fit along with a reasonable retardation device. I call them freedom seeds and we should load them onto B-2 and B-21’s to drop anywhere in the world that bans people from having guns.

        The ability to own weapons is the ability to be free.

        3. “The right to own weapons is the right to be free.” — The Weapon Shops Of Isher, A.E. Van Vogt

      2. You can’t trust leaders who ask you to make sacrifices they aren’t willing to make themselves.

      3. It’s spreading. This was next night, in Walnut Creek:

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10226929/Gang-80-thieves-ransacks-California-Nordstrom-store-organized-raid-lasted-just-one-minute.html

        From an email I got from the area:
        ===
        “…gangs of 30-40 are roving the Bay Area….at night and broad daylight. They’ve decimated this Nordstrom’s in Walnut Creek at Broadway Plaza, hit Castro Valley, Hayward. Jewelry stores, pharmacies and pot shops getting hit as well. Most stores the employees get in trouble or fired if they try to intercede and private security stands around and just watches.

        All dressed in black hoodies. They are warning regular holiday shoppers to be very careful. Merry f-in Christmas.

        ….this is what mob rule looks like.

        People have forgotten the miraculous law enforcement value of the sound of a pump action shotgun…”

        1. That’s because even showing these GVG members a shotgun means you’ll be the one in jail.

          Law enforcement value: ZERO.

    5. The citizens need to start murdering their overlords. There appears to be no other way out of the tyranny.

      And who exactly is driving the trucks? Operating the camps? Their neighbors.

      Every. Damn. Time.

      You’d think we’d learn. But nooooo.

      1. Almost a quarter millenia ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” It is still true.

      1. I’m Jonesing for some satire now that the Bee has gone into hard news coverage only.

        Maybe I’ll have some time to write some of my ideas up and share in the near future.

        1. Sorry Bob, I suspect you’ll not be able to come up with anything wackier than reality. After all, today we had a white guy, who says he’s a black guy, say that the white guys, killed in self defense by another white guy while they were rioting on behalf of a black guy, who was shot by the cops — I think at least one of the cops was black but never mind — for attacking a woman, are now honorary black guys.

          1. And the white guy who shot the rioting white guys says he has sympathy for Black Lives Matter because of the way the prosecutors treated him, which is likely the sanest response I’ve seen so far

            1. Yeah.

              This stuff is making /me/ wonder if maybe there might have been a legitimate problem somewhere.

              Obviously, not one that their solutions would address, but still. Me.

              1. There is a legitimate problem, but it has nothing to do with race. You can tell because the powers that be are saying it has everything to do with race.

                I think a good start would be to created an elected Public Defender akin to the District Attorney and give the PD a budget significantly larger than the DA’s.

                1. Oooh, an elected Public Defender with an equivalent budget to the DA’s. Forget the no need for bail, no prisons, no police. This is the real solution. Would answer all the problems of police oppressing minorities. Thank you Jeff.

                2. I agree it’s a scandal and has been for some time. Complete failure by the judges involved, they seem more interested in managing their docket than justice. 93% conviction rate. So someone jaywalks and you tell them cop a plea or we change you with murder. Go to trial and lose you get life go to trial and win and get bankrupt. Your choice, Oh, and good luck complaining if you lose because absolute immunity.

                  1. :points at the guy who took out the Christmas parade:

                    It’s not the conviction rate that’s the problem.

                    It’s the guys who aren’t charged, or who are charged and released, without consideration of the proof involved, apparently based off of getting good numbers.

                    Along with the very obvious pressure to get a specific outcome on THIS case, followed by a public demonstration that no, they *really* aren’t any good at this. Heck yeah I want to see if these guys have been doing this elsewhere/before– but part of that is because I know they have done the arrest-followed-by-eternal-“investigation” in other cases, even when the guy arrested shouldn’t have been out at all.

                    1. ..the career criminal, Darrell Edward Brooks Jr., who was out on minimal bail after trying to run down a woman in a parking lot. (Apparently a practice run.) Who raps about killin’ whitey.

                      Yeah, gonna be real interesting to see how THAT case comes out.

                    2. The BLM terror soldier, who most likely saw it as a reprisal for the deaths of other BLM terror soldiers.

                      The BLM terror soldiers, generally, who certain lawyers recently have conspired to keep alive, free, and able to act.

                      The BLM terror soldiers who generations of lawyers may have conspired to accumulate by perverting criminal law.

                    3. Probably more of a pro-spiracy than a con-spiracy, rooted in the emotion captured by Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Aesthete.

                      IE, do something so obviously stupid that folks figure there MUST be something brilliant behind it.

                  2. Hence my suggestion of ensuring that each defendant has someone who is committed to ensuring the DA is following the rules and is able to accomplish that. Someone who can look at a DA who is overcharging and tell him that they’ll relish the opportunity to demolish his case in court.

                    1. And equally relish the opportunity to demolish it in front of the state bar…. with the DAs license to practice law on the line so he can’t do this with anyone else..

                      The “can’t do this with anyone else” is a key factor; I started having doubts about the “rule of law” in college when my accounting major included a tax law course where they documented the IRS’ habit of disregarding even SCOTUS telling them they were wrong to interpret the tax code that way by responding “but THIS time it’s different; prove it isn’t, taxpaying peasant.”

                    2. Chevron deference is profoundly unamerican. The government should be the one required to prove that some act is against the law every single time.

            2. Yeah, Rittenhouse saying that he’s a BLM supporter has got to be the most epic troll ever. After all what else would we call a “white supremacist” who killed two long-time criminal white guys who hijacked a peaceful BLM demonstration to discredit it by burning minority-owned businesses? Makes sense to me.

              1. Well, apparently he’s as Hispanic as Sarah’s kids are Lusitanian, but neglected to change his name to Carlos Reyes-Huerta, or something similar.

                Same problem as Mr. Zimmerman.

              2. His reason is entirely valid. You have to get beyond the sound bite. Rittenhouse doesn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer and I can’t see him trolling anyone.

                Yes, BLM qua BLM is Marxist nonsense because the name was copywrited by a bunch of academics who’ve made a fortune off corporate donations. grifters gonna grift. Behind it is a very real feeling that the justice system isn’t just. 93% convictions, 93%! Overcharge and plea down. Couple that with the police writing tickets being a critical revenue source for these bankrupt blue cities and you get people who have a very different view of it all.

                1. Well yes BGE, I didn’t mean that he was INTENTIONALLY trolling anyone, but the response could be equivalent to Let’s Go Brandon. 😉

                2. Falling down on the job. Los Angeles County convictions, last I paid attention, was at 96-97%.

                  Thanks almost entirely to the plea bargain.

                3. “for these bankrupt blue cities”

                  And states; I’ve told the story of the Dubach LA speed trap before, but what got the Louisiana State Police to shut it down WASN’T the fact they had a speed limit sign on wheels to create violations. It was that the police chief got greedy and wasn’t sending the LSP’s share of the plunder in.

                  1. Coburg, Oregon. Wasn’t the CPD but the city government. Anyone who drives that section of I-5 knows that it is at most 5 MPH over the posted speed limit from the time you pass the Beltline overpass until you are past the next rest stop. If headed south, slow down to 5 MPH over posted speed limit as soon as you see the rest area and stay at that speed … technically one could include I-5 north and south of the Hwy 58 exits but traffic volume generally slows people down through there anyway.

                    Or was. Now, might occasionally see a CPD patrol car in their old staging places. City of Coburg was funding the city with I-5 traffic violation fines … and not sending the county or state their share. State passed a law that jurisdictions could only fund a certain percentage of their budges from traffic violations. But any excess fines had to be forwarded to the county and state coffers. If the cities weren’t getting the money, then (essentially) phooey on the higher jurisdictions … the county or state could just patrol it. Naturally they don’t. Didn’t make the speed trap concepts illegal, but they did go away as they were originally conducted; not just on I-5 either. You still see traffic patrols and stops, but it has changed.

                    I still enjoy the Washington State’s patrols news articles (don’t see them as much now that we’re out of Longview, but occasionally they’ll popup). They have a roving division that saturates sections of road for periods of time. There have been reports of drivers getting 2 or more tickets through the stretch of freeway being monitored, within an hour. You know the drill. Get pulled over, got your ticket. Pull out. Get out of sight of the patrol car, and punch it … After all just got nailed by the one patrol car, Right? Nope. They run 6 or more patrol cars, with aircraft or other over watch depending on weather type, in this saturation patrol.

                    1. Grew up knowing that if you have out-of-state plates, you don’t do any over the limit in Oregon. Taught by my oregonian mom. 😀

                      That said, I LOVE the saturation patrols in Washington. For at least a WEEK after one went through, we wouldn’t have the insane ballet dancer drivers making a hazard! (Folks have probably seen these guys– the ones with no sense of “safe passing distance” or that there is a “stopping distance,” going around causing accidents. I’d usually pass the same idiots 5-10 times going over Snow-Q, by sitting in the slow lane with my van set on the speed limit with cruise control, getting over to pass trucks and otherwise just WATCHING these twits hanging out in the fast lane, roaring up to 90 on the downhills, and then discovering their vehicles didn’t have the guts to deal with hills so they’d drop to 10-15 under the speed limit….

                    2. Anymore the out of state plates problem in Oregon isn’t a problem. But what do I know? We’ve had Oregon plates now (again) since ’85.

  3. Mandatory vaccination, and confinement to a camp if not cooperating? That’s some playing with fire there … playing with fire in a basement full of leaking gasoline cans.

    3. Don’t forget that it isn’t just “positive tests”, but also anyone who is a “close contact”.

      That is a classic strategy to get people to enforce on everyone else for fear in getting the hammer. This has Chyna written all over it.

      2. Impossible.

        PRC orchestration isn’t a viable alternative hypothesis to a whole bunch of domestic nutjobs.

        Domestic motivations, individually in every country pulling this stuff, have always been the only possible explanation.

        (At this point, I’m kinda hoping that the next major novel idea that I crash and burn on /won’t/ be something like reptiods hijacking UFOs to use the engines for a colony drop* of the Moon onto Earth. Because 2024 victory of the PRC candidate for US President is a little bit ‘ummm’ for 2019 story idea.)

        *I had a bit of nutty idea for an isekai get invalidated because Operation British was so early in the war.

      1. Showers are good. As a veteran of several Cons over the years I highly recommend showering for all sentient beings. Eu de funk is not in this season. Or any season.

        Speaking of things forgotten, it’s probably time for breakfast. At six pm. Huh. Why is the clock so late, again?

          1. I am extremely diligent about showering at cons. I want to be sure that all I offend know it’s intentional.
            ~

  5. I had a pain problem (probably severe inflammation) last night too– and took benedryl. It’s been a lazy day… I’m happy to say that the pain is gone… and hopefully I’ll be fully recovered tomorrow.

        1. My lower spine goes in and out. This time it hit a few nerves.

          –
          For hubby & I it is our pelvis get out of alignment and “stuck”. His has triggered pinching of the sciatic nerve. But then his hip sockets were bad (since replaced). Problem stretches tendons incorrectly, which causes lower back muscles to over correct, triggering spasms. As in OMG … NOOOOOOOOOOOO. As in when the doctor does a slight poke and asks “Does this hurt?” … When you come down from levitating to the ceiling, you gasp barely “yes”. Thank God for Chiropractors. A proper gesture to the luck gods … neither of us have had a problem now for a couple of years. It is still ever lurking, but there for awhile (in hubby’s case, years) took regular immediate treatments and back strengthening exercises, to get to a more stabling point. FYI, nothing touches the pain to stop it, short of unconsciousness … well that or getting realigned (even then sore back, but the difference on the pain scale is 4 to 20, on the 10 scale).

        1. I don’t have allergies. But I’ve “just” had a cold … I can imagine.

          I hope Sarah feels better too.

  6. A snot-clotted girl took the Benadryl
    So her sinuses no longer would fill
    She fell in a daze
    And walked in a haze
    The Epinephrine is much better, still.

    (Yes, I’m aware that she likely took it for different, itchier, reasons. But this was more fun.)

  9. :sings:
    It was just the ben-ah-drill talkin’…..

    (There’s not many medications that scan for tequila, even with a really strong twang, OK?)

  10. Tylenol/Advil PM knocks me out when my system just laughs at 15 mg of Melatonin … Lord help me if I can’t just sleep it out either. Also, I’m not suppose to take the PM versions, or cough meds (yeah that’s happening … NOT! … if I’m stuffed up) because of glaucoma … But when I need sleep … what works, gets used.

    1. I took up Melatonin when I realized that I was tending to fall asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow – but becoming WIDE awake again after about five minutes.

      One benefit of that when I was working on my Accounting degree is that I could read the driest conceivable textbooks without getting drowsy.
      ~

      1. Anymore it isn’t Falling asleep that is the problem (usually). It is going back to sleep when the dog needs to go out in OMG AM, or (more like she got me up, me too) my bladder decides it can’t wait. But sometimes the “Come on. I’m exhausted!”, heart racing, cannot nod off for anything, without help. Melatonin helps with the former, does nada with the latter. And I’m someone who has to take a nap if my BS goes over 110. I avoid naps during the daytime because I have to have the Sleep Apnea keep-me-alive device in use.

        When we got home from our fall vacation it took 3 nights before I got a full night of good rest. I was just too tired to get good sleep, the first two nights. This was after driving 13 hours straight, or rather being in the car, I only drove 5 hours of it. At least I didn’t get sick this time. I generally do. (Sigh. Got hubby to stop halfway, ish, going. Failed this time coming home … I mean the Canada trip home it made sense to keep going Sunday evening to get through Seattle, and south of Olympia … then we just had to avoid Monday morning Portland traffic … now, although it is 1 AM, we are only 90 minutes home ….)

        Seriously. Any advise on how to get someone to stop for the night after hitting your home state border? Like a horse headed for the barn, I swear.

        1. Short of long pointy things or medium caliber firearms, I’m not sure acute getthereitis is curable when $HOME is the destination. Medical Emergency, perhaps?

          When I was going to visit family in the Midwest every few years, I’d stop 3 times (usually, more if the route was scenic), but the homeward trip was almost invariably 2 overnight stays.

          On pee breaks, I seem to be better off ignoring the full-ish bladder, and then I can catch 45-60 minutes before hydraulic pressure says “Enough!” If I do get up, much of the time, I might as well plan to stay up. OTOH, I do fairly well on 6 hours of sleep a night, and occasional short stretches of 5 hour nights is tolerable–usually followed by a 7 hour sleep-in. (I have a suspicion that I erased any sleep deficit when I was dealing with the knee injury. Can’t do much, reach for the CPAP machine. Hoseheads unite!)

          1. acute getthereitis

            –
            🙂 Brilliant description!

            Hoseheads unite!

            –
            In my case it is a mouth piece. But yes! If I nap without it, I have Pepper to wake me up. She’s not really trained for that, but she does it. Also guarantied low grade migraine. So, avoid is definitely the trick.

        2. “Any advise on how to get someone to stop for the night after hitting your home state border?”

          It rather depends on having the right home state, doesn’t it? If you live in Rhode Island or even Ohio the time required to get across is no big deal, whereas if you live in (for example) North Carolina, the distance from Cherokee to Nag’s Head can be a fair deterrent, while residents of Texas can cross the border and yet have many a mile to go before they sleep.

          I always found it an incentive to discover a conveniently located good Chinese or Indian restaurant as an incentive to break my drive. Back when the daughtorial unit was wee (and her presentation at the In-Laws’ Philadelphia table de rigeur on holidays we found an excellent Chinese place attached to a hotel in Petersburg to be a pleasant break on the way home, leaving a pleasant 4 – 5 hour completion of the journey the following day. On the way up there was a superb Indian place about midway up the Del-Mar peninsula between Washington and Annapolis which allowed a leisurely trip into Center City the following day. When travelling with a child it is always prudent to avoid unduly exhausting the child’s capacity for travel (particularly when an inexperienced grand-pa waited to work the toddler up into a state of extreme exhausted excitement.)
          ~

          1. Oregon definitely isn’t as bad as Texas, for sure. But it does depend on where crossing border.

            Portland – Two hours without Portland traffic jam, then add an hour (or two)
            Ashland – Three hours
            Ontario, Or – Seven hours (cutting across state, taking I-84 the I-5, add an hour). Note this is the route home from Yellowstone or Tetons. It is only 13 hours total from either! Of coarse fighting wind the entire way across Idaho, so it seems longer … but …
            Hermiston, Or – Almost 5 hours

        3. Not easy to cure people of ‘barn sour’.
          Last time I hit my own limit, HARD, I was coming back from Huntsville, AL and made it to Iowa… and in Center Point there was an ancient motel. I paid cash, they gave me a METAL KEY (outdated even back then…) and told me check-out was, “Leave it on the counter in the room when you depart.” It certainly felt a bit odd to have that much trust, BUT.. rural-ish Iowa, obviously tired traveler, and the King: CASH.

      2. So the more you take the less effective? Well crap. Okay. Scratch that.

        I avoid OTC Ibuprofen unless really need it. It knocks me out too, but not something I want to use if I can’t sleep.

        The prescription stuff … guarantied to knock me out, at about half dose.

    1. I’ve not watched the show in years decades, but I knew they could be funny.

      I had no idea they could do it intentionally, however.
      ~

      1. Used to, they could. Dan Aykroyd. Norm MacDonald. John Belushi. Bill Murray. Back in the days where anything was fair game. When it didn’t matter who you made fun of, as long as it was funny. You could say something that everybody knew was true, but wasn’t willing to say it out loud- as long as you told them a joke at the same time.

        Humor is a powerful weapon. It has slain giants (or rather, giant egos) for as long as there have been humans, I’ll bet.

        That SNL lost its sense of humor is no great surprise. When the whole thing starts getting to be un-funny because you’re not allowed to make jokes about the things that *are* funny anymore, the people who want to *be* funny leave. Funny how that all happens, right? *grin*

  14. I figured you were busy with the ongoing mess so no worries from me! I hope things get settled soon.

  15. The hardest part for me is accepting what God allows in my life. “Good” and “Bad” according to my depraved perception.

    The rest of this conversation needs an anthology and at least 6 months at a non-Starbucks coffee shop.

  16. Thought I would post a random bit of interesting potential science: Since this is indeed clownworld, some purple-haired losers did actually try to cancel this guy for some unfathomably stupid reason. (Which is why you have to skip about 15 minutes of introductory stuff to get to the presentation itself.) However, this guys school didn’t summarily eject him into a shark tank, it actually stood up for his right to speak, and this being 2021, he posted the talk on the internet where the entire world, as opposed to just MIT, got to listen to it.

    It has nothing to do with politics: It’s about exoplanets.

    https://jmp.princeton.edu/events/climate-and-potential-life-other-planets

    So, some random background commentary of mine:
    There is a distribution of stellar masses in the galaxy, biased towards lighter and cooler stars. The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram gives you a picture of the relationship between size, luminosity, and surface temperature of the main sequence and off-main-sequence stars. About 80% of stars are smaller and cooler than the sun: M type stars. Some K types, then G types like the sun (then progressively hotter, larger, shorter lived, rarer stars.) I remember in my youth it was believed that due to the band in which liquid water could exist (the habitable band) being smaller and narrower about cooler stars, that there was very little chance of an Earthlike world forming within the band for stars smaller than the sun. (And stars larger than the sun don’t last very long, so it was thought life wouldn’t have time to form around a star like Sirius.)

    There was speculation that planetary systems themselves were something rare. Then we started picking out far-orbiting super-Jovians like Fomalhaut b with our telescopes. Then it was speculated that the only other things in the sky were jovian or proto-stellar objects. (A little absurd at that point – it was clearly instrument bias. We couldn’t detect anything else.) We got evidence of close orbiting super-massive planets by looking at the wobble induced in the mutual orbit in the stars.

    There was a space telescope that operated for a few years called Kepler that managed to find a few thousand exoplanets via the transit method (looking at and logging the periodic fractional dimming of starlight as a planet crossed the stellar disk along an ecliptic plane aligned with our line of sight to the star). It observed a small square of the sky for a few years before the pointing gyros finally gave out.

    My blog post on that topic: https://www.amssolarempire.com/Blog/?p=58

    Since that post, all sorts of weird and wonderful planets were discovered. Some of them apparently unlike anything in our solar system. And tons of things were found to exist in the habitable bands of M stars: It seems that smaller stars also have more densely packed systems than the solar system. There could be some relationship there, or it could just be an accident that the solar system is as sparsely populated as it is (Jupiter setting up orbital-resonant zones where other planets couldn’t form or something.) So that’s good.

    The next objection was that anything orbiting too close to the parent star would end up tide-locked or near-tide-locked like Mercury or our moon, with one point on the surface always facing the parent star. This would give rise to a very weird climate, but it isn’t a deal-breaker for water and life to exist on these worlds. The twilight band would still be liveable, even on one of these tide-locked worlds.

    This guys presentation points out an interesting possibility about the climate of tide-locked worlds with water: The sun would set up a convection pattern with an updraft over the sunward facing pole and a downdraft over the anti-sun pole. Surface winds towards the sunward facing pole and high altitude winds away. This updraft would lead to the development of a huge cloud system above the sunward facing pole (similar to how Earth’s tropical updraft leads to the condensation of clouds in a band around the equator): This would serve to block a lot of the incoming sunlight and cool the planet. This in turn could allow the planets to exist over a much wider range of radii with a livable climate: Closer to the parent star than we had assumed before.

    Anyway, in the “hard” sci-fi circles in my youth, there was this sort of “rare-Earth” “dismal blandness bias”, prior to us having any solid information about what actually existed out there (to the extent that we do now!). I find it interesting that none of our observations to date justify it: Instead the universe seems pretty extravagant in terms of what sort of planets can exist, and it seems that anything goes.

    (This is a bit long – delete it if you want to.)

  17. Don’t look at me. I’m supposed to be at rehearsal. I’m at home because after lifting weights (new personal best), moving heavy and awkward boxes from the house to storage, writing all day, then cleaning firearms for an hour or so, my bod said, “Nope!,” downed tools, and that was that.

    1. I had an ambitious list of things I was going to accomplish a couple of weekends back. I got as far as raking and mowing done. I wasn’t very tired, but I was very sore, in several places, for days. Plus blisters.

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