i had signed up for NaBloPoMo with the best of intentions. a post a day for a month? i could handle that. even with some light holiday travel, i could post from my phone. i’m not working right now, so what better way to exercise my photography and writing muscles?

who was i kidding. this is 2009. if there’s been a consistent theme this year, it’s been this: make a plan, have it fucked with. it’s amazing we even got to mexico (the asshattery of acapulco notwithstanding), all things considered.

so what happened to my plans this month? well, i learned two new medical terms, of course. (i hate learning new medical terms. “fetal bradycardia” was the first one of the year, and it’s been a constant suck since then.) these are the new two:

giant cell tumor of the tendon sheath; and
pigmented villonodular synovitis

there’s a school of thought that they’re really the same thing, just in different sites. from a treatment point of view, it doesn’t matter which one it is. neither is malignant; they’re both benign aggressive soft tissue tumors.

and i have one or the other in my right foot. it’s about the size of a golf ball. it wasn’t always so big, and only recently has it begun to cause any pain. by now, though, it has enveloped the two peroneus tendons and eaten up part of the cuboid bone (the x-ray and MRI look amazingly like a mouse has been at it). because of this, it needs to be removed before it causes major permanent structural damage. it needs to be removed NOW, because i’m still trying to get knocked up, and i’m not about to undergo general anaesthesia while newly preggers – again (we saw how well that worked out back in april). or, for that matter, hugely preggers (i know i’m getting ahead of myself, but i’m still hopeful). and since it’s an aggressive tumor, if it’s not removed, it’s going to keep growing, getting more painful, and doing more damage to my dainty (okay, size 9 – but it’s long and elegant at the moment) foot. even with the tumor removed, there’s a 45% chance it will grow back. grmpf. the upshot is that the week after thanksgiving (and two days before my birthday, no less – those plans certainly got screwed too), i’m going back under the knife.

that’s right. i’m headed for four surgeries in oh-nine. one for each quarter. yay me.

so i’ve been too grumpy to blog daily, and for the last week i’ve been gimpy due to pain and swelling following an exuberant core biopsy that angrified the tumor and the foot, which cut in on photography, and my plans to start working out again, and my plans to look for a job.

and there you go. the universe is mocking me. doing a damn good job of it, too.

clarence thomas wants you to know that you should hide your drugs in your underwear, because there’s no way that the school will have the balls to look for them there!

(in an amazing twist of logic, thomas wrote,

“Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments,” he said. “Nor will she be the last after today’s decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school.”

which might make some sense if redding actually had concealed anything in her underwear… but she hadn’t. thomas thinks it’s okay to abuse children because of what they might do. nice.)

(with audio book sales)

g is getting a kindle 2 for his birthday, or the ides of march, or whenever it shows up. i’m not letting the cat out of the bag by posting this; he knows i ordered it for him before xmas, and the order’s been languishing in amazon’s no-stock purgatory for months. and although infinite jest isn’t yet available for the e-book reader, i think it’s still a pretty useful gadget.

version 2 has a number of improvements and changes from version 1, including the ability to “read” the book out loud. a great boon for people with poor eyesight (like g’s grandmother), or people who want the book along for road trips. but the authors guild is apparently up in arms about it, arguing that the reader function violates the author’s copyright and erodes the market for audio books.

they’re morons. (and the EFF points out the real absurdity of their arguments.)

for one thing, once i have an authorized copy of a work, i can do pretty much what i want with it. i can have it fitted nasally. i can use it as a dog toy. i can even *gasp* read it out loud to the mice living under the dishwasher! (that’s a topic for another post.)

but let me see: if i could choose between (picking a book at random, here) the graveyard book being read by author neil gaiman, or the same book read by the kindle’s robotic voice, which would i pick? that’s a no-brainer – i’d go with neil. (and i happily will still go with neil, as he’s sensibly against the guild’s infringement stance.)

another thing: i’d be very surprised to learn that every book available for the kindle is also available in audiobook. (infinite jest, for example, isn’t available in either format.) picking a book at random – kerouac’s on the road (original scroll edition) is available for the kindle, and… oh, okay, i’ll pick another one. beverly cleary’s beezus and ramona is available for the kindle… no, that’s available in audiobook as well. hmm. how about terhune’s lad: a dog? okay not available for the kindle, or in audiobook. trying again… anthony beevor’s the battle for spain: the spanish civil war 1936-1939 is available for the kindle, but is not available in audiobook form.

i rest my case.

but seriously. copyright infringement? eroding the market for the audiobooks? please. it almost might be worth tracking down the authors who agree with the guild and boycotting their works in any form.

grab & go!

apparently the washington post has problems with berkeley breathed’s brand of humor, and pulled last week’s opus strip. salon has full story, including the post’s reluctance to run an installment featuring lola granola’s conversion from amish nudist to radical islamist. they really shouldn’t be so pc about the amish… i hear they don’t use the interwebs much.

in other news, the nyt magazine apparently thinks $40 for a wifebeater is a good bargain (the link to it from the front page reads “Cheap Find: Cotton Tank Top”); the Great Arlington Coffee War has made it to the usnews website (sans the customer’s side of the story); and lacking for a third interesting thing, i give you this: a texas school district that is trying to force a five-year-old boy to get a haircut. i might as well throw in a mention that my uncle made the front page of the wapo on february 15, 1967, for the same thing – the headline ran, “youth fights order to cut long locks.” *sigh*

for a long while, in a previous professional life, i was a tobacco control advocate. i worked on the framework convention on tobacco control, coordinated legislative proposals in “the global south,” and helped review “how-to” manuals released by such august organizations as the UICC and the american cancer society.

it was interesting work, and i was, i still believe, fighting the good fight.

but as with many well-intentioned projects, there comes a time when the work spontaneously becomes reductio ad absurdum. such is the case with old morris tobacconists, in the city of victoria, british columbia.

Rick Arora is caught in a situation you would only expect to find in a dark comedy about bureaucracy run amok. If he covers up the historic signs on Old Morris Tobacconists, the City of Victoria is threatening big fines.

If he doesn’t, the Vancouver Island Health Authority plans to charge him under provincial laws banning tobacco ads and displays where people under 19 can see them.

my take remains the same as it was when i discovered harpercollins had removed the cigarette from the jacket photo of clement hurd, the illustrator for goodnight, moon (coincidentally one of my favorite children’s books ever): enough already. pre-verbal children won’t become smokers because of a barely-visible butt in an old black-and-white photo, and i seriously doubt teenagers are going to have an uncontrollable urge to light up after seeing antique signs for “house blend tobaccos” and “havana cigars.”

yes, public health measures are by nature coercive. but when they attempt to rewrite history, they go too far. such exercises are more fitting of stalinists and the taliban – company that public health advocates in “free” societies should be loathe to keep.

hat tip: james.

going into effect on july 1 in virginia: a law “preventing school bus drivers from using cell phones while driving.”

*sigh* we really need a law for that?

a pilot program to bypass customs! what could possibly go wrong?

it really makes a lovely juxtaposition with those haldol-happy ICE officers. anyone else think we were a more humane nation when we had the immigration and naturalization service, rather than immigration and customs enforcement?

i tell ya, i really should stop reading the morning paper.

where does dartmouth find these people? (to be honest, i’m surprised she wasn’t teaching mcm 1110 at brown. and boy, just reading the word oeuvre gives me flashbacks to mc66.)

hat tip: todd

for some reason, my phone won’t let me input “laloca” directly. it automatically assumes an “i” after the second “l,” or when pressed, will let “p” be input. but even sliding my finger over i-o-p after inputting that second “l” won’t make the “o” hot.

can anyone with an iphone attempt to replicate the problem? i see it with beejive and other safari inputs…

[another annoyance: the phone's insistence on capitalizing the "i," no matter how often i dismiss the correction. e.e. cummings would never use an iphone to write poetry...]