The Captain’s (B)log

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.

The Choice: Comment: The New Yorker.

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.

The man’s not right in the head.