The Indigestible

From the Department of Meaningless Coincidences:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.

It’s not as obvious as you might think. The story goes on to detail some of the demographics. The 25% of self-admitted annual illiterates does not, in fact, overlap the cadre of Bush supporters. Many of them seem to be from rural, poverty-stricken and possibly undereducated regions, which isn’t surprising; and interestingly the national median for books read in the last year was just seven.

Seven.

Hell, I ate that many Pratchett novels in a two-month window.*

Fewer men, apparently, read; and of those that do, nonfiction is preferred. Women seem more ready to include fiction, and poetry and classical lit are hovering at around 5% consumption.

This means, of course, that I read like a girl. A nerdy girl. Sigh.

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Today, August 16th of 2006, I took The Indigestible online once more after a multiple-year hiatus.

To me, it doesn’t seem like a year has passed.

To you, of course, it might well seem much, much longer.

Recently there was a progressive open house at the Medical Professional Center, a more or less satellite facility to the hospital here where physicians have private practices. The idea was that, in order to publicize a half dozen recently-arrived physicians, there would be a sort of food scavenger hunt from office to office.

Beginning with beverages, progressing to crudité, light mini-foods (BBQ meatballs, scallops, etc.), desserts and finally coffee, visitors were encouraged to go from office to office and meet the physicians. There was live music too and door prizes.

I mention all of this because I was asked to produce the promotional materials for the event, and developed something that was significantly at variance from what is normally found in advertising in a small town in Arizona. Along the way I happened across an unexpected bonus in the form of a kind of visual pun.

The main ad’s after the fold.

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The last time I wrote about John Couey was March of this year, after he’d been found guilty of the rape and ghastly murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford. The question at the time was whether he was mentally capable of understanding the magnitude of his crimes; if he was, in short, mentally retarded and therefore unsuitable for killing.

The ruling today is that he is, indeed, eligible to face the death penalty.

Circuit Judge Ric Howard in Citrus County ruled that the most credible intelligence exam rated Couey’s IQ at 78, slightly above the 70 level generally considered retarded, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

This isn’t a cause for celebration. Killing Couey will not resurrect his victim. But as I commented before, given the absolutely horrendous nature of his crime, I don’t believe there is any purpose in keeping this man alive.

I wrote this in 1999, when I was there.

I actually lived in this. In Wausau. Some mornings the air was so cold you felt your breath freeze in your nostrils as you inhaled. The moisture from your out-breath just solidified on the hairs and passages in your nose as you breathed in.

It is a very strange feeling to have ice crust inside your head. Dry, crackly and cold, as though your nose-hairs turned to crystal in a moment, scratching and breaking as your nostrils flare.

But the cold, absolute as it was, wasn’t horrible; after all I was in a parka, and could go back inside to the gentle heat of the glycol baseboard warmers any time I pussed out. It was instead a pause, a lacuna in life; it was just a moment when the world, sere and blanketed in white, gathered itself to think about the freshness of the coming year.

Snow drifts under the eaves of my home didn’t simply peak; they curled, their tips curving over like a wave stopped, frozen, in the moment of breaking.

That was Wausau, set in the middle of Wisconsin’s cold Northwoods heart. Milwaukee, on Lake Michigan and below the 45th parallel, was much more humid and considerably warmer; traveling north I could feel the ambient change from wet to very dry, very different air at about 50 miles south of Wausau. The entire tone of the atmosphere changed.

And it smelled only of pine.

Overnight, in downtown MKE, we rarely dropped below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and the warmed sidewalks were never crusted with snow or ice; they were just wet, as though washed by a gentle rain. It was like a Hollywood winter set, for about five months solid. Skyscrapers’ shadows stood sentinel over the most stubborn patches, keeping them slushily crusted with white well into March or even April, even as the grass beneath insisted upon itself.

Wausau was more like a cake, covered in glistening powdered-sugar frosting for a craps’ win of the year.

I liked Wausau. I really did. What made it impossible for me was the daytime duration in winter. Eight hours from sun to sun just wasn’t enough; I rose in darkness, went to work in darkness, went home in darkness. I’m an Arizona boy. I need more light than that.

But I sure do miss the icicles; and one night, in the depth of the cold of the year, I even saw the Aurora Borealis flickering gently in the sky. I watched it for a while, knowing my lover was in my home, in my bed, and I let him sleep while I sat on the patio, shivering brutally in the relentless cold, and enjoyed the quiet majesty.

I didn’t leave everything behind when I left Wisconsin, but I found and lost quite a lot while I was there.

The prose follows the fold.

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I forgot that I entered some of the hospital’s ads into a couple of design competitions for 2006. Healthcare Marketing Report handed out a Merit Award — basically a thanks for participating — but Aster awarded me a silver, which ain’t too crappy.

Both were for the same ad, oddly enough, a 6×5 newspaper piece in support of a special program put on by our Hospice group, Getting Through the Holidays. The ad follows the flip.

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Okay, this leads to some interesting questions.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) — Dutch students have invented powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.

The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gram packets that cost €1-1.5 ($1.35-$2).

Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.

Possibly this could be sold to people under 16 in the Netherlands — but we can be proximally certain it wouldn’t fly in the states. For one thing, I don’t think the laws barring sale to alcohol to minors specify that it has to be liquid; and besides, adults in the US seem to prefer their teens begging for pleasure rather than having control over their own chemically-altered destinies.*

Apparently, though, Dutch laws are more specific, dictating that alcohol is a liquid, not a solid.

“Because the alcohol is not in liquid form, we can sell it to people below 16,” said project member Martyn van Nierop. […] The students said companies interested in making the product commercially could avoid taxes because the alcohol was in powder form. A number of companies are interested, they said.

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…28% to go.

Jerry Falwell has, at last, died. One less baptard to herd the fold.

Don’t despair; I’m sure some other useless sack of shit will slime in to replace him within 24 hours.

UPDATE: PZ posted this interview excerpt between Anderson Cooper and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens describes Falwell’s brand of religion as “an actual danger to democracy, to culture, to civilization.”

UPDATE 2: A mine of bigoted and insane quotes from the worthless fat fucking retard corpse. My non-god, this planet is so much better off without that asinine bastard.

Because I totally get this post from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

It’s obvious I’m doomed to never get laid again.

Post number 256 (new today!) at XKCD is a map of online communities. And it’s pretty keeno.

So what part of the ’net are you from?

Over the years we’ve been treated to a lot of reasons why we’re not supposed to use illegal drugs, though most of those reasons are pretty damn silly. The most recent spate of cheesily-animated anti-pot ads are even trying to suggest that marijuana is addictive. It’s not.

And of course Nancy Reagan, wife of useless (and now dead*) president Ronald Reagan, coined the “Just Say No” phrase, which probably stands as a high-water mark in the history of cortex-free attempts at social engineering.

But I think I’ve finally hit upon the very best reason not to use hard drugs ever.

“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” [Stones guitarist Keith] Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

I’ve never really felt tempted to use cocaine. Given the foregoing, that lack of temptation has become considerably more like ewwwww, fuck no.

Thanks, Keith.

====

* Thus, slightly more useful now.

Wal-Mart announced today that it’s dropped its bid to open its own line of banks. Citing “manufactured controversy” the retail monolith’s spokespeople denied attempts to impose yet another facet of control over a nation which is already arguably far too Wallified for its own good, instead all but blaming the Librul Medya for their problems.

Ever notice how, when skullduggery and unethical behavor get exposed, it’s somehow the fault of those who shine a light into the nest of cockroaches? Well, Wal-Mart won’t be opening a bank, at least not this year, and it’s pouting as only an underrepresented, powerless, helpless and dirt-poor US megacorporation can.

I’m going to wax elitist in the next graf, so be warned. Feel free to skip ahead if you want.

Considering the caliber of clientele Wal-Mart usually draws, one has to wonder what the hell the company thought it would accomplish. We’re talking people who have trouble with simple one-variable algebra, for non-god’s sake, whose account balances are always three figures if you include the stuff to the right of the decimal, whose checks are generally not merely rubber but actually Flubber. And Wal-Mart thought it could make a viable financial gain from this kind of customer base?

Sneering arrogance aside, though, you have to admit the idea is damned clever. Think about it. All they’d have to do is issue any accountholder a purchase card that links to their bank balance, and can be used at any Wal-Mart checkstand just like a debit card — with, possibly, an option to automatically issue credit overage at an industry-standard APR for predatory lenders, say a nice even 25%. That bulk box of Ding-Dongs doesn’t seem like such a bargain any more, does it?

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