Incommunicado

I have kind of withdrawn as of late, and I apologize. I haven't really felt like being plugged in, sharing every thought, blah blah blah...  I am having a hard time thinking about anything other that what is going on with my health. I just want to feel "normal" again. Thankfully, it seems that all the medical probing and prodding is starting to show something finally. It appears that I have sleep apnea. I went for a sleep study and I had enough instances where I stopped breathing, fell out of REM sleep, etc, and so forth that they woke me up halfway through the night and put a CPAP on me. It will still be a couple of weeks before I go back to see the pulmonologist and get fitted for a CPAP to use at home, but hopefully that makes a difference.

I am tired of being tired...

Ow!

Today is not a good day. It's not a bad day; I don't feel ill. I went down to the medical records department and got a copy of the report for mt CT scan from Tueday (I didn't want to wait till July 12th for my follow-up) and it's all normal. On the surface everything is normal - copacetic... But the reality is that I feel like crap. I ache all over. I feel run down and tired - almost sleepy. My back is sore and I am stiff in my hips. WTF is wrong with me!? I think I could tolerate being ill; I mean seriously ill... I am generally optimistic enough that a serious illness or condition would not drag me under. Hell, I had open heart surgery when I was in my 20's - I've spent plenty of time in hospital beds in the course of my life. It's feeling like this and the doctors having no clue what is wrong with me is what is killing me. If I knew what was going on I could steel myself and face it. Not knowing what I'm up against is frustrating and makes me feel
even more powerless.

Laugh If You Want To...

...but I have to admit to a bit of a new man-crush: John Krasinski.

I just finished watching Away We Go with him and Maya Rudolph and loved it. I liked it but I think the odd choice of having the whole movie scored with Alexi Murdoch songs simply did not work.

There is just something so completely endearing about Krasinski. He's comes across (in The Office too) as the kind of guy you'd want to hang out, drink beer with and shoot the shit. He's the perfect best man for a thousand weddings.

I'm Worried for Bobby Jindal...

The other night on the evening news I saw Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal very angrily raging against the environmental disaster that ravaging his state's shores and threatening to destroy a way of life for a great number of people for many years to come. A moment later he was criticizing President Obama and calling on him to lift the moratorium on issuing offshore oil drilling permits. Does the governor have an undiagnosed aneurysm or perhaps an as-of-yet undiagnosed schizophrenic personality disorder? ...my thoughts are with him and his family - I hope that they quickly diagnose whatever the hell is wreaking havoc with his brain.

Update on the health situation

I meant to do this earlier... sorry. So I met with Dr. Dulala, my new Hematologist/Oncologist last Friday and she basically confirmed everything that I already didn't know. She looked me over, asked a bunch of questions and we talked about what might or might not be going on with me. She's ordered a whole buttload of lab testing, most of which is still pending: BCR/ABL mutation analysis, Flow Cytometry, a couple of electrophoresis tests... I meet with her next Friday to discuss the results. If those results are inconclusive, the next step is extracting bone marrow for analysis... *SHUDDER*

American I-dull

The honeymoon is over. I officially no longer give a crap who wins Idol.

I've noticed for a while that the show had been becoming more and more formulated and predictable, which is a shame. For the first few seasons I was glued to the TV but over the years it seemed that they started picking contestants more for their ability to fit into a convenient niche or their ability to predictably appeal to marketable demographics and the fact that they could (not always capably) carry a tune was a secondary consideration. It seems like every year there MUST be an ambiguously gay man, a rocker chick, a rocker dude, a cute kid, the perky girl, the black guy and girl, the Latino/Latina, the sob story, etc... I think with Taylor Hicks winning a few years back the producers had a shocking "OMG" moment and realized "This guy is easily not marketable and selling his records are going to be difficult." Since then they've seemed to have stacked the deck so that at the end they would stand a better chance of having a winner who could sell records. The result has been a string of safe, non-controversial winners who are easily forgettable. Honestly, do you find yourself saying, "I simply could not live without my David Cook CD?" Me either.

And now that Simon is leaving as well the only highlight for me during the "critique" part of the show is going to be Ellen's occasional one-liners. The snarkiness at the end of the line of drivel was usually some of my favorite part of the show. Randy's "Dude! Dog! What?!" and Kara's overwrought mental contortions do nothing for me. If they do not find someone who is absolutely ruthless and nasty to replace Simon (for me they will have to out-Simon Simon) I don't know if I will actually watch it next season.

And what the hell is going on with Seacrest? Is the strenuous schedule the man keeps causing him to crack? He does realize he's just an emcee, right? The moments where he transformed into Contestant Advocate Man were awkward and unbecoming. His responsibility should be to make sure that the show flows along at an acceptable pace, not to ensure that the judges are giving adequately constructive feedback.

If Idol wants to keep me as a viewer next year they have to go back to what they were during season one: an open competition where anyone with a great voice can get a shot at a record deal - not a controlled marketing machine pandering to the largest possible demographic mix.

Rand (I'm not a racist - I only pander to racists) Paul

Joe Conason had an excellent article in Salon.com about the candidate from Kentucky:
"To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism."

. . .

"The last time that anyone examined the details of the Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when the New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out under Ron's name to raise money, and found that they were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine that opposed the 'paleo' deviation, gave the most revealing account of its movement's degenerate element.

"Following Ron Paul's dismal performance in the 1988 presidential campaign as the Libertarian Party candidate, Rockwell and Rothbard 'championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters' uncovered by the New Republic. Rothbard died in 1995, but in 2008 Rockwell was still at Paul's side as a top advisor, 'accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings.'

"According to Sanchez and Weigel, the tone of Paul's newsletters shifted to reflect his political circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign and his return to Congress in 1996 as a Republican, they were filled with slurs against blacks generally and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the accusation that the civil rights leader 'seduced underage girls and boys.' Rothbard hated King deeply, describing him in November 1994 as 'a socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious opponent of private-property rights ... who was long under close Communist Party control,' and concluding that 'there is one excellent litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and what we can now call "left-libertarians." And that test is where one stands on "Doctor" King.' (Then again, he hated Lincoln too, whom he disparaged in the same essay as 'one of the major despots of American history.')"

. . .

There is a reason why Rand Paul is choosing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as his primary example of the government over-stepping its boundries. There are a lot of other pieces of legislature at which he could have taken aim: anti-trust laws, OSHA, the newly-passed financial reform law... But in speaking out against the Civil Rights Act he's secretly winking at the far, far-right wing racist factions of the GOP. This is just like Reagan giving his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi where civil rights workers were killed in the 1960's. In speaking about the importance of "State Rights" at that speech he was giving a little wink and nod to racist southerners in a code that they clearly understood.

This veiled, secretive embracing of racism is present at every level of GOP campaigning. From the '08 presidential campaign where McCain did nothing to dispel or disavow the rampant racism that infected his campaign. It was only when he couldn't put the genie back in the bottle that he actually took the trouble to address the xenophobia and racism that began to overshadow his message. Just look at the TV ad campaign Linda McMahon is pushing in Connecticut: the whitest, white people in the whole state talking about how Linda is "one of them" and "understands their concerns." It may be a bit more innocuous than Sarah Palin blathering about "Real Americans" in redneck central but it essentially sends the same message.