A few years ago I went into a comic books store to buy a book of reprints of Marvel comics from my remote youth (back when comics were printed in Latin on cheap papyrus) and happened to notice something in the glass display case under the cash register, namely, a model or sculpture or diorama or whatever the proper term is showing Jabba the Hutt in his palace surrounded by various supporting characters. Lounging back against him was Princess Leia in the nice desert outfit he bought her. (I gather it’s pretty warm on that planet, and it was probably a lot more comfortable than the white chador she wore in the first movie would have been.)
I casually remarked to the the young fellow working there that it was interesting how much my tastes matched Jabba’s. This he found hilarious for some reason.
The more I think of it, the more I realize we do have a lot of things in common. Granted, he was more successful than I am, but I resemble him rather more than I do, say, young Han Solo. He and I both found Carrie Fisher appealing, and I’ve been through bad break-ups as well.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who’d like to see Jabba get more respect. As this fellow points out, Jabba does a lot of good things:
In case you missed it, here’s the opening bit from the last episode of Saturday Night Live, worth watching especially for Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld, star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc.), who does a perfect impression of Bernie Sanders. (Sanders said that Larry David does a better Bernie Sanders than he does.)
Just to show I’m nearly as old as I am pedantic, Saturday Night Live was actually the name of a live prime-time ABC variety show hosted by Howard Cosell, far better known as a sports anchor. The show also had a regular cast called the Prime Time Players. It ran only 18 episodes starting in the fall of 1975.
At the same time NBC launched its own late-night live variety show called simply Saturday Night with a cast called the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. In very short order the public got confused about which show was called Saturday Night Live, with almost everybody referred to the NBC program by that name, especially after the ABC show folded. So eventually NBC adopted the name formally, and now refers to it officially as Saturday Night Live or SNL. But the original title is still heard at the end of almost every opening skit, including the one above, when someone exclaims, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
As I’ve made pretty clear by now, I really admire John Oliver and his staff for their intelligent political commentary and investigative reporting. Here’s his take on the Canadian election taking place today, supported by a musical beaver, a moose getting a colonoscopy thanks to Canada’s healthcare system, and Canadian Mike Myers. (Apparently public memory of The Love Guru has subsided enough to allow Myers to show his face in public.)
Oliver says one thing in this segment that, I’m glad to say, is not actually true. There is a Canadian law dating back to the 1920s against foreigners’ trying to “induce” a Canadian to vote for or against a candidate, but that basically refers to vote-buying. It’s perfectly legal for non-Canadians to implore Canadians to vote against Harper or or or against anybody else, and I join Oliver in urging Canadians not keep Harper in office (or anyway I would if there were any chance any Canadians will read this before voting in today’s election). In fact, I’d even suggest sending Harper somewhere there are enough of his sort that one more won’t make a difference. Canada already did this with Ted Cruz, and did so quite presciently when he was only four.
Update: Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party won the election with a parliamentary majority. The Conservatives came in second (though I gather Harper is resigning party leadership), and the New Democrats, headed by the person likely the most competent candidate for PM, came in last.
Sorry to be so late mentioning this, but the new Jesse Stone movie, Lost in Paradise, premiered on the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel last night, and naturally I missed it. It will be shown again October 25 on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel and it appears I’ll miss that one as well, dagnabbit. Anyway here’s the trailer:
There’s a (positive) review at this link and some additional information about the film here (including the tidbit that Selleck wrote a part in the film specifically for his Blue Bloods co-star Amelia Rose Blaire.
My reviews of the previous Jesse Stone movies can be found here. (That’s the single most popular entry in this blog, with more then 27,000 views in the past year.)
I’m even later in mentioning that UniMás, a U.S. Spanish-language channel affiliated with Univision, broadcast the film Jesse Stone: Benefit of a Doubt (El beneficio de la duda) on September 30. I came across it completely by accident and watched a only few minutes (I know very little Spanish), but it was nice to see the movie series reaching a larger audience. The dubbing Jesse Stone’s lines has a much deeper voice than Tom Selleck, which was briefly disconcerting for those of us used to hearing Selleck, but I doubt it detracted from the enjoyment for Spanish-speakers.
There’s a promo for El beneficio de la duda on the UniMás Facebook page here. Unfortunately you don’t get to hear Jesse’s voice, but if I can find a link to a clip I’ll add it later.
About ten years ago I saw a doctor for a sinus infection and he prescribed antibiotics, even saying I wouldn’t get over it without them. That struck me as a bit implausible at the time. Did people really never recover from sinus infections a century ago? It turns out that serious studies suggest that antibiotics not only aren’t usually necessary to treat sinus infections that aren’t chronic, they’re very often a waste of money. And in general, of course, overuse of antibiotics promotes development of drug-resistant pathogens.
I should emphasize that this post is not medical advice specific to an individual condition. Listen to your actual doctor and not me on this. For one thing I’m not a physician, and for another there might be specific reasons why you should take an antibiotic for a sinus infection in many cases. For example, my infection had been with me for a while and an antibiotic might well have been appropriate, and in any event I followed my doctor’s instructions, filled that prescription, and took the full course of antibiotics. (I know enough not to stop taking antibiotics early just because I feel better. That leads to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) Here I’m just reporting something said by people I think probably know what they’re talking about. It’s fine to ask your doctor whether you really need an antibiotic (there’s even a series of public health announcements on TV here in North Carolina to promote that), but don’t casually substitute your amateur judgment or mine for a doctor’s training. They might be wrong, but they have a better chance of being right than you or I do.
Several years ago the American Board of Internal Medicine’s ABIM Foundation launched an initiative called Choosing Wisely to provide doctors with evidence-based advice intended to discourage unneeded (and sometimes even harmful) interventions and diagnostic tests, something that sounds to me like a really good idea. For one thing, Americans may be spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually on tests, medications, and surgeries that aren’t actually helping them, and if so that’s a lot of waste. (Total medical waste in the U.S. may add up to well over a trillion dollars a year, as noted in the first video below.) Unfortunately, so far efforts to address this don’t seem to have had much influence.
Following are two videos on this subject (running about 10 minutes total) from pediatrician and author Dr Aaron Carroll:
On the program called Choosing Wisely as its advice to doctors:
Incidentally, to maintain my reputation as an insufferably annoying pedantic git, I’ll point out that Carroll apparently at least sometimes pronounces “processes” as “processeez,” probably unconsciously imitating the ending of plurals such as “crises” and “parentheses.” But the latter are plurals imported from Greek that involve changing the last syllable from -sis to -ses. “Processes” is a regular old English plural formed by adding -es to “process.”
One of the new movie genres invented on YouTube consists of people babbling as they recover from general anesthesia or sedation after major dental work. Below is another in that vein from earlier this month. I am not at all proud of how much I laughed at it. Also, to save your having to point it out, the person who shot this (the mother of the subject, I believe) is indeed guilty of at least two major sins, namely, shooting video while driving and shooting vertical video.
I have never had general anesthesia or sedation for dental surgery. In fact, when I had my wisdom teeth removed during my Navy days, two of them were so impacted that the work was done by two dental surgeons in a naval hospital, and at one point they ran out of hands and I ended up running suction, assisting in my own oral surgery.
At one point the guy with the scalpel said, “Oops!” and I said, “Oo?” He explained that he’d cut a little more than he’d intended and would have to put in an extra stitch or two. He added that he used to have an assistant prone to saying things like, “Ooh, Doctor, look at all that blood!”
A former office mate of mine at Duke had some dental work done under general anesthesia and woke up by herself, which of course isn’t supposed to happen for anyone under general anesthesia. She was so out of it that she became convinced that her husband was waiting for her in his car outside. When she tried to get up and go to him, she discovered that she was too wobbly to stand, so she proceeded to crawl. Flying under the radar, so to speak, helped her departure go unnoticed by the dental staff until she was halfway across a waiting room, drizzling a trail of blood and saliva onto the carpet, in front of horrified spectators waiting their own turn. At this point the receptionist or some other employee of the office realized that an escape was in progress and sounded the alarm. A phalanx of dental professionals rushed into the waiting room, picked her up, and carried her back into the bowels of the place no doubt crying, “You fool, you’ll never get away! Ahhahahahahaha!!”
Finally, for anyone inclined to defend the creation of vertical videos, please see this previous post.
I think Hank is probably right in his conclusion that no, we probably could not (and it would still obviously be insane to test the idea).
That last sentence might lead some to leap to the erroneous conclusion that Hank Green is somehow defending nuclear weapons or even minimizing the horror of nuclear war, but of course he’s saying no such thing. As he makes pretty clear, a major nuclear war would likely wipe out most humans and cause a major extinction event affecting other kinds of living things. It’s nonetheless a little reassuring to think that life itself, and even a fraction of humans, would probably survive something that horrific.
Some might also fear that even mentioning this could encourage some maniac to think that a nuclear war might be winnable. It seems to me that anyone that deranged is pretty much by definition not going to be influenced much one way or the other by a rational analysis.
In passing, this reminds me of a related popular idea, namely that the “duck and over” drills of the early Cold War were crazy or naive. If you’re young enough to be unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, for a while in the 1950s and early 1960s schools in the U.S. (and probably other countries) held civil defense practice drills in which students would duck under their desks and cover their heads and faces.
There is a popular belief today that such drills were a waste of time, given that a nearby strike from a hydrogen bomb meant certain death. But few civil defense officials had any delusions about that. The purpose of the drills wasn’t to protect students near ground zero but those far enough away from an explosion that the immediate danger to them was from the shockwave and resulting flying glass and debris and structural collapse. In fact, duck and cover is a good practice in the event of a tornado, earthquake, or nearby conventional explosion.
An obvious response is that an all-out nuclear war would kill everybody anyway, either immediately or in a terrible lingering fashion as a result of radioactive fallout. What this overlooks is that a nuclear war might be limited. To belabor the obvious, I’m not suggesting that it would be anything less than lunacy to launch a nuclear war in the expectation that it could be kept limited. The point is that it’s not impossible. For example, an accidental detonation or an attack launched by a small nuclear power (basically anything other than the Soviet Union) or by terrorists or by rogue military personnel (as in Dr Strangelove) would likely have been limited unless it provoked an all-out counterstrike and counter-counterstrike. In the event of such a limited number of nuclear explosions it would make sense to take steps to try save as many lives as possible.
The same goes for natural disasters, and in fact we have actual evidence of this. Many people were seriously injured as the result of an asteroid superbolide over the southern Urals in Russia in 2013. But as this Wikipedia entry) notes, a fourth-grade schoolteacher almost certainly saved her students from injury by having them “duck and cover”:
A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was hailed as a hero after saving 44 children from imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room’s windows and to perform a duck and cover maneuver. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms; however, none of her students, whom she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered cuts.
In those Cold War U.S. civil defense drills, students were taught to “duck and cover” on their own in the event of a bright flash, which could be evidence of a nuclear explosion as well as a superbolide. I would be not surprised if Ms Karbysheva was old enough to remember such drills from her youth and acted accordingly.
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