Work Don’t Want Me

So I got sent home today. Four hours at work and home I am. It turned out that after 11:00 the hospital needed less staff (honestly they had been fudging it even before that), so a whole bunch of techs and nurses got the boot. One of the other techs I was working with lived in Pennsylvania and the other rode the bus, which had stopped, so I volunteered…what a nice guy I am.

Since Buzz is off doing the whole goyim Christmas thing, and my health care responsibilities have been curtailed for the evening I figured I might as well make up for THREE MONTHS of blog neglect.

Deep breath…hold it…hold it…and release:

So the Mitchell Report came out a week and a half ago (here’s the 40 page summary), and it was worse then I, or any other real fan of baseball for that matter, had feared.

For those out of the loop, this report by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, was Congress’s 20 month long official investigation into steroid and human growth hormone abuses in Major League Baseball. And the the official list of those named in the report is:

NEW NAMES

Chad Allen
Mike Bell
Gary Bennett
Larry Bigbie
Kevin Brown
Alex Cabrera
Mark Carreon
Jason Christiansen
Howie Clark
Roger Clemens
Jack Cust
Brendan Donnelly
Chris Donnels
Matt Franco
Eric Gagne
Matt Herges
Phil Hiatt
Glenallen Hill
Todd Hundley
Mike Judd
David Justice
Chuck Knoblauch
Tim Laker
Mike Lansing
Paul Lo Duca
Nook Logan
Josias Manzanillo
Cody McKay
Kent Mercker
Bart Miadich
Hal Morris
Daniel Naulty
Denny Neagle
Jim Parque
Luis Perez
Andy Pettitte
Adam Piatt
Todd Pratt
Stephen Randolph
Adam Riggs
Armando Rios
Brian Roberts
F.P. Santangelo
Mike Stanton
Ricky Stone
Miguel Tejada
Ismael Valdez
Mo Vaughn
Ron Villone
Fernando Vina
Rondell White
Jeff Williams
Todd Williams
Steve Woodard
Kevin Young
Gregg Zaun

PREVIOUSLY LINKED

Manny Alexander
Rick Ankiel
David Bell
Marvin Benard
Barry Bonds
Ricky Bones
Paul Byrd
Ken Caminiti
Jose Canseco
Paxton Crawford
Lenny Dykstra
Bobby Estalella
Ryan Franklin
Jason Giambi
Jeremy Giambi
Jay Gibbons
Troy Glaus
Juan Gonzalez
Jason Grimsley
Jose Guillen
Jerry Hairston Jr.
Darren Holmes
Ryan Jorgensen
Wally Joyner
Gary Matthews Jr.
Rafael Palmeiro
John Rocker
Benito Santiago
Scott Schoeneweis
David Segui
Gary Sheffield
Derrick Turnbow
Randy Velarde
Matt Williams

Now of course, not all of the people in this list are directly linked to steroids. Derrick Turnbow [of the Brewers in full disclosure], for example, tested positive for an Olympic but not US banned chemical at one point, and a number of them used HGH before it were banned by MLB. Still this is essentially a list of cheaters, in one form or another.

What most people got from the 1994 MLB strike was that baseball players were greedy as hell, but now what are they? Payed a fortune for being the best at what they do, except they’re not, they’re just juiced up. I gotta say this whole thing really tore me up, way more than I would have guessed. Some of these guys: Lenny Dykstra, David Justice, Wally Joyner, Mo Vaughn, for example, were serious heroes of mine as a kid and later. Every team had at least one player named, and every great organization of the last 20 years now has a cloud hanging over it. Thank god I don’t have to explain this one to my kids…

 

 

…or Brittany Spears’s sister getting knocked up either. Wasn’t she the goody-two-shoes character in that show of hers?

“So you see little Allison…some times sweet girls…even though they’re only 16…even though they have 18 year old boyfriends…even though he may face rape charges…when you really love someone…even though her mother let her older sister get breast implants at her age…even though…um…well…you see…when you get older…and obviously mistakes were made…oh hell she’s just a little hussy, and don’t you ever be like her, got it?”

Kinda like watching the “Don’t Smoke” ads from RJ Reynolds isn’t it?

 

 

So poor South Africa is doomed. No Ifs, Ands, or Buts about it. The ruling ANC just elected Jacob Zuma (former Deputy President) as its new head, and the head of the ANC is a guaranteed winner in any national elections. Jacob Zuma is another of those apartheid guerrilla veterans that make up most of the South African government. Unlike the current president Thabo Mbeki, who was educated abroad, Zuma never graduated high school. Last year he was charged with the rape of one of his deceased friends daughters, who he knew to be HIV positive. The court eventually dismissed the charges, mostly because the Public Prosecution Office dragged their feet. Zuma said the sex was consensual and that he took a shower afterwards to ward off HIV infection. At the moment he is being investigated for arms deals in 2005 which is why he was removed from his office in the first place. These charges were originally dismissed last year even though his right hand man was sentenced to 15 years in jail for fraud and corruption for the exact same incidences as Zuma. Supposedly, the Public Prosecutor is nearing another attempt at the corruption charges, but of course now it will just seem like a political stunt. Poor poor SA.

***

 

Care for a band that will knock you freaking socks off? The Thermals, The Body, the Blood, the Machine, has been playing nonstop on our CD player/iPod/Zune for about a month now. Go. Get. It.

Or if you prefer a free song that drills it’s way into your cerebellum, but you know, in a good way, I suggest The Mae Shi’s Run to your Grave. Have I ever mentioned my love of any song with a “clappy part”.

The first of the baby boomers has applied for Social Security, may god have sweet sweet mercy on us all. I vote we raise the retirement age to 150, that’ll show ‘em.

Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze are making the movie version of Where The Wild Things Are. Seriously, is there any possible way this movie will not simply be the greatest thing since sliced bread. “Transforming the 338-word story of Where the Wild Things Are into a 111-page screenplay”. Holy moley, Being John Malkovich meets Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I think I need to sit down.

On the awesome podcast front, try out The Meth Minute, a collection of cartoon shorts, very nice, very funny.

Two comics for ya’ll:

xkcd – Post office showdown. I totally do this…like all the time…ever prepared am I.

Mac Hall – Yeah That’s Me. Money is such a fluid thing.

In a completely undefinable category, a video that was described as the “worst punishment you could inflict on a hungover person”. The louder you turn the volume the more horrible it is, so there’s that.

And we’ll wrap up this little opus on an “I’m feeling old school” note. These are all classic internet Meme’s and sort of shook themselves out of me in the last week:

Christmas Lights – the original

Evolution of Dance – I guess this also would be an original. This guy is a motivational speaker or something now. Important math lesson, YouTube fame ≠ real fame.

Star Trek the Next Generation Episode Song – Man my inner geek is cool. I’m not saying I could have done the song on my own, but I didn’t have to strain my brain to list the plots of all of them.

Enjoy all your silly holidays people, and some day you’ll see the light and celebrate his grand Pastafarian Holiness the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and only then can you be allowed into heaven with its beer volcanoes and stripper factories. Peace.

So the funniest thing happened at work…

It occurs to me that I have a preponderance of whiny negative stories about work, so it seems only natural that I should highlight some of the funny things that happen at my hospital. Funny, you say? At a hospital, you say? But of course, there’s nothing funnier than sick people sometimes, after all they are a bit prone to exaggeration.

• I walked in on a patient and one of his visitors screaming at each other. The basis of the argument was that they had both had surgery at one point and both had died (briefly) on the table. My patient swore he saw a bright light and felt no fear, while his friend swore that there was nothing when he died. The debate (can you even call it that) eventually degenerated into,

“There is!”

“There isn’t!”

“I saw it!”

“You didn’t!”

and I was forced to escort the agitated non-believer out of the room.

• One of the nurses told me that two elderly gentlemen, roommates, weren’t getting along, and we were going to move them to separate rooms. So both of us entered the room to find the two old (and I mean old) men slowly (and I mean slowly) working their way across the room towards each other. The guy in the second bed was hobbling along with his cane, while the gent in bed one was surfing from one piece of furniture to the next in an attempt to cross the room. So the two of us are watching this scene VERY slowly unfold before of us, as these two very old “broken hips waiting to happen” cruise towards each other yelling racial epitaphs at each other. Basically our solution was to place a couple of chairs in between the two of them, this proving to be too much of an obstacle for either of them to maneuver around, and once the guys wore themselves out yelling at each other and had to sit down, we just slid a wheelchair in behind the first guy and rolled him out of the room. He was asleep before we made down the hall.

• This one actually happened just a couple of days ago. The rehab unit gets a pretty steady stream of student nurses. So a new batch showed up for their second day interacting with patients, EVER . Now when the instructor is dividing up patients they try to figure out which students, if any, have nursing assistant backgrounds, figuring they can handle a couple of patients. This particular group didn’t have any, so this huddle of students came trailing along behind me and the other tech as we tried to finish up our work, peppering us with questions. Here are some of the highlights:

1. “So I knock on the door and then enter, right?”
2. “Can I touch him?”
3. The follow up to question 2 was the student standing three feet away from the bed and bowing at the waist to get close enough to see an incision.
4. “MAY I turn on the lights?”
5. “Do your lights have switches?”
6. “Is your patient nice? (with lower lip quiver)”
7. Standing in the hall, watching the patient watching TV, “I’d hate to bother them.”
8. “Have you seen my stethoscope?”
9. “Do you smell that? What is that?” Actually, I heard this one thrice.
10. A student standing in the hall with both palms extended away from him, mouthing “left”, “right”, and nodding.

So there you go. It ain’t all gloom and doom at hospitals. Frankly those nursing student made my day. They were quite possibly the cutest damn thing I’d seen in a while.

Later.

SamCast Episode 2

I may end up having to reduce the quality of these things a bit if they keep getting longer, otherwise the files are gonna get huge.

Episode 2 of the SamCast

 

 

Bored bored bored bored…

I tell ya what, if it weren’t for sports I’d be in a lot of trouble. As it is, I’ve got football and baseball playoffs (go Rockies) to hold my attention, and I’m still kinda zoned out. Duuuuuuh…

Oh yeah, way to go Springboks! The SA rugby team has made it to the semifinals in the Rugby World Cup and are beating Argentina 24-6 in the 39th minute, so it looks like they’ll be facing England in the finals. Lekker!

A couple of links for ya’ll:

A Google maps app that shows the antipodes of any point on earth. It’s amazing, the entire continental US is smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world, not a speck of land. Weird.

Here’s “One more Cup of Coffee” by Bob Dylan, one of my favorites, performed in Nashville. He was joined on stage by Jack White. Great version of this song but here’s the catch, the video quality is terrible, so don’t even watch it, just open it and then do something else while you listen.

A cappella horses in flash. Hey I said I was bored.

And of course my obligatory link to a Mac Hall comic, “Strike Three”, from their archive. I’ve only got four more of my favorites left.

So mom’s well into her criss crossing transcontinental road trip, and has requested some driving music. I try to give her relatively new music for these mixed tapes, anyone have suggestions? What would your 60 something year old mother like? Gangsta rap? Death metal? Yanni?

Episode 1 and Stuff

“Who are you?”

“I’m God.”

“Your name is God or you’re God?”

“I am God.”

“Well we have a special guest today…I guess…it’s God. Um, you have a Nike shirt on.”

“Yeah.”

“…why do you have a wireless mike on if you’re God?”

“It just happened that way.”

“Do you, uh, watch the show? Uh, why are you here?”

“Yeah I watch your ‘cast…podcast.

“Huh…cool.”

“We’re on now, right?”

“Yeah, yeah…we’re on…did you come here for a reason, do you have a message, or did you just stop by? What do you want, did I do something, am I dead?”

“You’re ok, I’m just killing time”

[Awkward silence]

-Lynchland, Episode 12

Oh my, how amateur internet has sucked up all my free time.

 

 

So I managed to put together the official “Episode 1″ audiocast from scratch to post in about an hour and a half, and it sounds twice as good, so that’s gotta be improvement.

Go get it here – Episode 1

So on a more professional level we have Smodcast. This is the podcast produced by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, the Director/Producer combo for Clerks, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Dogma, etc…

While the entire thing is HI-larious I feel the need to draw particular attention to Episode 14 which covers Canadian politic, and may very well be the FUNNIEST thing I’ve ever heard! If you ignore all other advice I spew, listen to this one episode!

 

 

A couple of quotes for the gang:

Some relatively unknown JFK quotes

A sweet Carl Sagan diatribe on “The Dragon in his Garage”

 

On a musical note:

Anyone want some free Smashing Pumpkins? This is the Smashing Pumpkins bootleg page, like 15 years of bootlegs.

Smashing Bootlegs

 

And on a very disturbing note. Pavement. Kings of the 90’s indie/alt scene (which was pretty much the golden age of indie/alt)…sung by children…what has the world come to.

 

Wrapping up on a humourous note, web comics!

 

xkcd – Engineering Hubris

Mac Hall (a two part strip) – FF Tic-Tacs & FF Tic-Tacs Advanced

 

Two and half weeks on my own. Poor, poor, living things in our apartment.

 

Ring Pictures by Request

Since Elizabeth is on a blog hiatus, I guess I’ll be the one to post these:

Buzz very nonchalantly showing off her ring.

And the up close.

She keeps looking at the ring, but I keep looking at her. I think we both came out pretty happy.

Ow! My Heart Strings!

Well, hello again. It’s been so long since I checked in I was afraid you may have wandered off by now. But a real pleasure to see you as always.

Explanations for my absence? Only work I’m afraid. It feels like I’ve been living at that hospital recently. I’ve been really sucking up the overtime, so my days off tend to be singular and isolated, which of course means all I do is sleep the day away. This actually is my first three day off stretch in a while, so with a solid 14 hours of sleep behind me, I figured I’d be able to sit down and really focus on this thing.

I gotta say the last couple weeks have been some real trying ones at Union Memorial Hospital. Sometimes you’re lucky, and you have a weeks long stretch of patients who are getting better, or at least not getting worse. Spirits of the staff lift, and we’re all smiling a bit more. People call in sick less, and even the ever present fussiness among the older nurses seems to slacken. You get that reminder of why you do what you do for a living.

But of course, as the saying goes, once it does start raining, look out! And what I’ve been pour I’ve weathering recently. Its just been one heart breaker after another. My unit has been open only periodically over the last couple of weeks due to a wildly fluctuating hospital census. So I’ve been everywhere. Oncology? Check. Cardiac, ICU, MedSurg, Rehab, Pediatrics, Geriatrics? Check, check, check, check, check, check. Man I’ve seen the hospital top to bottom, and I still can’t remember half the nurses names!

“Hey…umm…nurse for 303 bed 1!” or my personal favorite

“WHO HAS 511?”

And everywhere I went (my own floor included) it sucked! It was grim and depressing everywhere. Just plain awful.

Moving up the elevator:

• Half a dozen infectious Alzheimers patients who simply wailed and cried ALL night long, regardless of who went near them or what we said to try and calm them down.

• A man who was so determined to get his intubation tube out that he stabbed a nurse with her scissors.

• I spent an hour helping a surgeon with a patient on Friday and the both of us came out with blood up to our elbows and massive puddles on the floor and bed (wish I’d had a gown on!). This same patient then informed us that he didn’t care how low his pressure dropped from fluid loss, we could “Damn well leave him alone until the morning!”

• A 16 year old asthmatic in an oxygen tent who even with our best efforts we could barely keep from completely desaturating.

• A woman who hit a nurse in the head when he tried to give her CPR after her heart stopped (actually that was kinda funny).

And back down on 6ES, my very own unit:

• A suicidal alcoholic who tried to kill himself by wrapping the IV’s power cord around his neck, then when we took it away from him, he wrapped a coat hanger around his neck. He then proceeded to break the leather restraints (!!) we put on him, and ripped the sink out of the wall. The only solution ended up being doping him into a coma and putting him on a heart monitor.

• The nicest 25 year old I’ve met in a long time, but the poor girl had uncontrolled high blood pressure and cholesterol (even with medication), and was with us because of the onset of diabetes that after 48 hours in the hospital was still at dangerous levels.

• And worst of all, a 22 year old guy with obvious full blown AIDS (no immune system at all) who refused to even get tested for it. He’s in an airborne isolation room while we rule out TB and as soon as he leaves it, he’s gonna catch some little bug that’s gonna be life threatening, all because he won’t get tested so we can put him on the drugs.

And yet I walked out of that room and out of that hospital, and it was a beautiful morning. So I guess I don’t know what to make about that.

 

 

It seemed almost fitting that I found this quote this week, it seemed to capture my disposition of the last couple of weeks. It’s written by Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz who is famous for writing about the what the Jews did in the camps as opposed to what was done to them. He tells about a small child who was paralyzed from the waist down and was unable to speak.

• “Hurbinek [the name the prisoners called the child] , who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm–even his–bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.”

Man, it’s been a rough couple of weeks.

 

 

***

 

 

 

But here I am with three whole days off! Unfortunately Elizabeth bailed on me and went home for the holiday weekend, so I am forced to fend for myself. Thank goodness the cats remind me when they get hungry, because if they were fish they would totally starve while she’s gone.

I’m kinda looking forward to doing nothing for a few days. I mean I’ve got several computers cluttering our living room that need work done, but thats just plain cathartic. A friend of mine just dropped her computer off for me to de-virus and this particular Dell is the only computer I’ve ever seen that you can’t open the case. Fortunately I don’t need to, but out of curiosity I searched the web for how to get around the bolts on the back. The most common suggestion is (honest to god) “jimmy the case with a can opener”! Nice product.

So about my music picks. I know I promised it like two weeks ago but, well, I’m not done yet. So the hope is I bang it out this weekend what with time on my hands. We’ll see.

A couple of links:

Bob Dylan…Weird Man?

A guy having a metaphysical discussion with his dog

 

Ciao!

 

 

 

 

 

Big Group Project!

So the you may remember a couple of months ago I linked to South By Southwest’s collection of music.

The original post is:
Ha! Commie Pigs in Space! (and music)

So basically this thing was 738 songs (only one per artist) that covered every single performer at the festival. Now its been taking me a while to work my way through this thing, and I’m just now finishing up the “P’s”, but for those of you out there who downloaded this 3GB monstrosity and have worked you way though it, I’ve got a challenge.

I want everyone to put together a 12 song best of album! Winnow down this huge thing to a short little collection of your personal favorites, so the rest of us don’t have to wade through the whole thing time and time again. And I’m making no requests to “branch out” or “go for something different”, I just want what you like best.

Now I know that just about everyone has a blog or website or something. So if you want to post the list to your own site and then just drop the link as a comment here, that’s fine by me. I realize that this may take a while to put together, since at least a cursory re-listen is probably required, so take your time. I’ll try to have mine put together by next Sunday or Monday, and then I’ll either put up a download link for the songs or be lazy and just list them as a comment.

Hey, one great song out of every 60 shouldn’t be too tough right? This is gonna be fun.

Music Edition Number Something

I was chatting with Elizabeth’s friend Laurii yesterday trying to get Qnext working, with disappointing results. It reminded me, as we were swapping songs (one by one unfortunately), that I have found a couple of bands/sites that are full of musicliciousness.

So the first comes from the Brian Jonestown Massacre website. I didn’t really get into this band until I saw the movie Dig!, a documentary about the early careers of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. Great movie. The lead singer of Brian Jonestown Massacre comes as as being a crazy fella, though obviously a musical genious.

So here is the Brian Jonestown Massacre music site.

You can download every one of their albums in mp3 format. Great great music.

One of my most recent CD purchases was “Boys and Girls in America” by the Hold Steady. I have got to say, this album is just plain Awesome! The whole thing has a very live feel to it. Even though it’s a studio album, it’s just a roar of the crowd away from being a concert.

Here’s the song “Chips Ahoy”.

Definitely my Album of the Year at the moment (It being only April of course).

I got an album by The Comfies with a magazine subscription recently. We’ll call it good overall, with a couple of great songs. They just put out there first album which is only an EP. I’m really only mentioning this because they are from Nashville, and they’ve got a lot of potential, so go check ‘em out Nashvillians. You’ll notice that I’m linking to their own site which is lousy. From there you can go to the record company site (which I recommend) or their MySpace site. I won’t link directly to any MySpace sites due to the large number of viruses and exploits running around there, and I don’t want to feel responsible for sending someone to a site that might be infected.

Good luck with all that. I am lucky enough to have the next three days off, and am gearing up for a royal bout of lazy. Go me.

Your pic of the post, Mars in true color: