Well, I’m finished with my Prilosec regiment — just got done with it a week ago.
Taking the pills was a bother, like I mentioned before — you have to take them immediately after waking up (or at least before you eat anything in the morning), and optimally not eat until about an hour afterwards. Little to say, this was a rule I often ignored.
After 14 days — well, almost; I forgot one day and had to skip it, but the information I found on the US government’s Medline Plus site told me that it was perfectly fine if you forgot to take a day’s pill. Either way, after about 14 days I was done.
As far as I can tell, it’s working… the other day, we had a “chili cook-off” at my workplace, and not only did I try every type of chili there (four different bowls), I followed it up by drinking a Coca-cola.
If you’re a heartburn sufferer, you probably winced a little bit at that description.
So, I waited, and… nothing. Not heartburn, no gas — nothing.
Am I cured? Do I still need to “take it easy?” I still will, probably, because of one semi-unrelated thing I discovered during my regiment.
You know those boxes of “Instant Brown Rice” you can buy in stores, under various brand names? (I just buy the Wal-Mart brand, myself.) Yeah — my stomach, really, really, really doesn’t like that stuff. It’s happened several different times now, with several different meals, and it’s the only common denominator — one time the pain kept me up all night.
I guess it’s got something to do with the rice’s natural “quick-cooking-by-absorbing-any-and-all-water” properties.
A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.
I’m gonna hold ya to that, Barack. That’s one campaign promise I’m not going to forget about when 2012 comes around.
(Just for the record, this is not an announcement of who I voted for/will be voting for. That usually always remains a secret with me. ;) Though, I won’t be hesistant about publicly supporting an Obama presidency in 2012 if he’s been a good president.)
I’ve been on a regimen of Prilosec for about a week now (been pretty good about remember to take the pills each morning, too, except for this morning!). I figured that it was getting pretty ridiculous — I can hardly drink a coke anymore, of any sort, without getting bad heartburn for hours afterwards.
It’s not like I’m trying to down dish after dish of spicy food and washing it down with chili powder — there’s no rhyme or reason as to why I’m sometimes afflicted with heartburn. So, I figured, why not try and do something to prevent it, instead of just constantly treating it when it happens?
It’s weird — you have 14 days worth of pills, one for each day, and you take them as soon as you wake up and before you eat anything. After the 14 days are over with, that’s it — no more. The package specifically states to not take anymore for at least 4 months.
Makes me wonder why they sell 28-pill packages in Wal-Mart. (By the way, I’m taking the generic Wal-Mart version — it’s ridiculous what the name brand costs for this stuff.)
I’ll have more to write about this when I’m done with the regimen!
Roger Ebert talks about political-correctness and “history revision” gone insane in his latest article: Thank you for smoking
This stamp honoring Bette Davis was issued by the U. S. Postal Service on Sept. 18. The portrait by Michael Deas was inspired by a still photo from “All About Eve.” Notice anything missing? Before you even read this far, you were thinking, Where’s her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes. But isn’t this is carrying the anti-smoking campaign one step over the line?
And a New York Times article that still makes me sad, even if I know what it talks about is inevitable: A Power That May Not Stay So Super
AT the turn of the 20th century, toward the end of a brutal and surprisingly difficult victory in the Second Boer War, the people of Britain began to contemplate the possibility that theirs was a nation in decline. They worried that London’s big financial sector was draining resources from the industrial economy and wondered whether Britain’s schools were inadequate. In 1905, a new book — a fictional history, set in the year 2005 — appeared under the title, “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.”
The crisis of confidence led to a sharp political reaction. In the 1906 election, the Liberals ousted the Conservatives in a landslide and ushered in an era of reform. But it did not stave off a slide from economic or political prominence. Within four decades, a much larger country, across an ocean to the west, would clearly supplant Britain as the world’s dominant power.
The United States of today and Britain of 1905 are certainly more different than they are similar. Yet the financial shocks of the past several weeks — coming on top of an already weak economy and an unpopular war — have created their own crisis of national confidence.
The New Yorker decided to formally endorse Barack Obama for president this week, in a piece involving scathing messages about John McCain:
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
A very good piece in the New Yorker about the presidential election this fall — the quote up above resounded with me, greatly. I used to have a lot of respect for John McCain — before 2004 he really was a “maverick,” going against the course of the rest of the Republicans in Congress many times — but since then, he might as well have been tied to Bush’s hip.
He — of all bloody people — decided to go against a bill against torture, a bill he helped to write.
Make sure and check out my new little widget thingy over in the right-hand sidebar — it’s a plugin that shows the last 6 or so entries on my tumblr page.
I love my little tumblr account — it’s like Twitter, but I use it as a picture blog. The pictures you see on their are all uploaded from my cell phone, when I’m out and about.
The tumblr plugin code is a wonderful little bit of code from Robert Nyman — I had been working on my own Tumblr include script a while back, but was going at a from a completely different direction (I was trying to parse things server-side beforehand, and was kinda rusty when it comes to PHP). Robert apparently thought about doing the obvious thing and loading the Tumblr JSON API into an html “script” tag, and then just using JavaScript to do everything. Bloody brilliant.
I remember watching this when it was shown in its entirety back in the mid-90’s on MTV (back when MTV was still cool :P). And, you know… there are undertones to this story that I missed completely when I was just 13. :\
The tale of the Maxx is a deep, deep, deep story, and is seriously a work of modern art (and not “modern” art like Andy Warhol’s trash, but more like “recent” art).
Here’s a promo to the series — you can see most of it on youtube, as well:
Ah, good ol’ Arthur C. Clarke. Even though he’s no longer with us, his optimistic beliefs in what humanity will one day accomplish live on.
In the world of Songs of Distant Earth, humanity has spread to the stars (only a handful of stars, however) in order to escape the Earth’s sun going nova, around the year 3650. Humanity has known about the imminent fate of the Sun since the early 21st century, but in true human fashion, it has dragged its ass over the ensuing millennium and a half, sending out a few probes and human “seeding” ships on slow-speed journeys to other habitable stars.
The story stars on a star seeded by one of these ships — an idyllic, ocean world, whose few land masses seem to have weather that makes them exactly like Hawaii. In other words, a nearly perfect world.
This world has been on its own for nearly 700 years, having been seeded in about the year 2700 or so — at first, it’s colonists communicated with the Earth, sending back progress reports and whatnot, but their main transmitter disc for the planet was damaged in an quake, and the totally laid-back colonists just never got around to fixing it.
Well, eventually a ship appears in their system, carring a million passengers from the last, wild days of Earth before the planet was destroyed by the sun going nova, and this beautiful laid-back planet gets its first bit of true strife and trouble.
But, you see — this is an Arthur C. Clarke book, so there’s not really any “bad guys,” and everybody generally gets along. I’m not trying to point this out as a downside — his books are still very enjoyable. (Mankind’s antagonist isn’t a singular evil figure in an Arthur C. Clarke book — his antagonist is usually just the “unknown” or something that needs to be “explored.”)
Though, usually his books end on a sad note — and I’m not just talking about the death of a character or anything simple like that. When you’re done reading one of his books, you’re always left with the idea that man is just a small, small part in the entire canvas of the universe, and that no matter what we ever discover, or how many millions of years we’re here, after we’re gone (and we will eventually cease to be) the universe will continue to spin on, and on, nearly forever.
Really humbling, you know? Seriously — get to the end of the Rama series and tell me you didn’t nearly want to weep (for all the second book’s shortcomings, the series was amazing, trust me).
I’m guessing that there may have been a lot of hubbub around Heinlein’s Friday when it was released — the little blurbs on the back speak to me of how this is Heinlein’s first “strong” woman protagonist, etc., etc., etc….
Yeah, I don’t see it. Not that the character of Friday in the book Friday isn’t a strong female character — she is — I just don’t see the need for it. The character of Star in Glory Road was a pretty damn strong female character, wasn’t she? I mean Jesus, she was [spoiler here] — isn’t that strong enough? Can you get any “stronger” of a lead than that? And he wrote that book 20 years prior.
Either way — Friday’s a good book. The lead character is a genetically created artificial person — an “artifact,” as they’re referred to in the book. No different than a regular human being, of course, besides the super-strength and intelligence and imperviousness to illnesses and so on. She works as a “combat courier,” shuttling top secret intelligence and small items back and forth across the lines of security present in this world — a world in which the entire Earth has seemingly Balkanized, that is, where all nations have further split into other small nations, and no real power is held by anyone except for large, multi-national corporations. Friday really doesn’t know who she works for, and doesn’t care, as long as she’s given the respect she feels she deserves, which she gets working for her shadowy employer.
Now, the book is not “hard” SF, but there’s two instances in which Heinlein’s description of a particular part of technology sounded real neat to me.
First was his description of a world without money — one totally reliant upon electronic credit and debit. It was really neat and really relevant to the way we perform business today, but I can’t for the life of me remember what page it was on, so blegh.
The other was this passage, where our protagonist was describing her trip to a library for a bit of research:
There was no reason for any of us to be bored as we had full individual terminal service. People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be — and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways — paying bills, making telephonic calls, listening to news bulletins — that one can neglect its richer uses. If a subscriber is willing to pay for the service, almost anything can be done at a terminal that can be done out of bed.
Like music? I could punch in a concert going on live in Berkeley this evening, but a concert given ten years ago in London, its conductor long dead, is just as “live,” just as immediate, as any listed on today’s program. Electrons don’t care. Once data of any sort go into the net, time is frozen. All that is necessary is to remember that all the endless riches of the past are available any time you punch for them.
Do you see what he’s describing there? It’s the bloody Internet. Now, granted, computers were around in 1982, and there was some idea that they could be hooked together to form networks, but the idea of a world-spanning network with all knowledge that humanity has available at your fingertips wasn’t a realization until the modern day world wide web, circa 1996-1997 or so.
Oh, but that’s not all. Listen to this:
That morning I was speed-searching the index of the Tulane University library (one of the best in the Lone Star Republic), looking for history of Old Vicksburg, when I stumbled onto a cross-reference to spectral types of stars and found myself hooked. I don’t recall why there was such a cross-referral but these do occur for the most unlikely reasons.
I was still reading about the evolution of stars when Professor Perry suggested that we go to lunch.
[...]
That afternoon I got back to Old Vicksburg and was footnoted to Show Boat, a musical play concerning the era — and then spent the rest of the day looking at and listening to Broadway musical plays from the happy days before the North American Federation fell to pieces. Why can’t they write music like that today?
If that’s not an eerily-exact description of what it’s like to get lost in Wikipedia today, I don’t know what is. And Heinlein was writing about this kinda of thing back in 1982.
Anyway, it’s a damn good book, and one of the last Heinlein wrote before he sadly passed away in the later 80’s.
The Jewels of Aptor
By Samuel R. Delany
I picked up this book not realizing that it was actually Samuel R. Delany’s very first work he ever published. And let me tell you, it’s different. I mean, if you’re like me and very first stuff you ever read by Delany was Triton and “Aye, and Gomorrah.”
I’ll just break it down for you — no orgies, no gender-bending hypersexual roles, no sarcastic social commentary — just a pretty straightforward fantasy story taking place in a civilization long after a “Great Fire,” which I take to mean nuclear war. That’s right — it’s actually fantasy, not really SF. I mean, it’s not bad, just not what I was expecting.
You can see some of Delany’s later themes taking their first roots here, though. It’s a short work, though, so definitely give it a read if you’re a fan.
The Fall of the Towers
By Samuel R. Delany
The Fall of the Towers is actually a saga of three books that Delany wrote early in his career, too — right after The Jewels of Aptor, early 60’s. It’s kinda like Jewels in that it’s kinda of a “serious” work — however, I really, really liked this one.
Taking place far in the future, somewhere (could be Earth, though it might not be), after another apocalyptic event has razed the planet and most of humanity has returned back to primitive roots. There exists three distinct species of human in these days. One is a squat, primitive, short form of human, a little over 1.5 m high, with very low intelligence; these are called “neandrathals” by the characters of the book. Next is regular humans — I don’t need to describe these, hopefully. Finally, the final form of human present in this world is a quiet, extremely tall (2.5 m or more) form of human whom the “regular” humans call “forest guards,” due to their likeness for living in the vast forests present on this world.
The Fall of the Towers is an extremely long tale (not so much in words, but in depth), full of multiple themes and plots — far, far too many to go into here. Just know that the main theme is that of the city (and empire) of Toromon — an extremely advanced city that has somehow escaped the apocalypse to reign supreme over whatever parts of the planet not rendered unlivable by vast amounts of radiation — and its eventual fall from grace due to corruption and “societal decay,” I guess you’d call it.
The book largely follows the lives of three characters — an escaped prisoner, a Duchess of one of the royal families of Toromon, and a forest guard with telepathic abilities. They are being used as agents by an unknown entity in its fight against a being called the “Lord of the Flames.”
Somewhat present thoughout the series, but especially in the third book, is a very, very strong anti-war message. And not just any “war is bad message,” but a Orwell-esque message about how war is sometimes used by very successful civilizations in order to “use up” surpluses of goods and money that could otherwise be used to improve upon its peoples’ lives.
Trust me — I’m barely scratching the surface of this book. It’s actually really, really good, even if it’s an “earlier” Delany work and somewhat surprised me.
Well, I’m finished with my Prilosec regiment — just got done with it a week ago.
