The online journal, notebook and playground of HFM

It’s Hard to Fight For a Liar

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From CNN — “We have actually, since this deployment began, we have decided that we will no longer be in the army.”
HEMMER: Oh, he’s getting out after this tour of duty in Iraq? How do feel about that?
HAMILTON: Yes, yes. He can’t stand for it.
HEMMER: Why is that?
HAMILTON: I support him 100 percent.
HEMMER: Why do you say he can’t stand it?
HAMILTON: It’s hard on the families, it’s hard on the soldiers, and it’s especially hard to know that you put your faith and trust into a president, and they continue to lie to you, they break promises, and it’s hard to fight for somebody like that.

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Soldier: “I’d ask him for his resignation”

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From ABC News — If Donald Rumsfeld were sitting here in front of us, what would you say to him?” I asked a group of soldiers who gathered around a table, eager to talk to a visiting reporter.
“If he was here,” said Pfc. Jason Punyahotra, “I would ask him why we’re still here, why we’ve been told so many times and it’s changed.”
In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. “If Donald Rumsfeld was here,” he said, “I’d ask him for his resignation.”

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Recent News Items

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Or, “Things That You Overlook When You’re Appendix is Exploding”

  • Michael Savage, darling of the right-wing, got fired for saying he hoped someone would get AIDS. Good lord, you didn’t realize the man said stuff like this all the time? Did you listen to him at all before you hired him?
  • Bush is exposed as overstating (non-existent) links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam.
  • Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction are being exposed. And it’s about way more than those 16 little words in his State of the Union, kids. You can say “case closed” all you want to, Georgie, but that ain’t gonna make it so.
  • Other countries are responding to Bush’s appeal for military help in Iraq by pointing out their hands are tied by Bush’s diplomatic failure: “‘[link deprecated:http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters07-14-021232.asp?reg=ASIA”>Were there to be an explicit U.N. mandate for the purpose, the government of India could consider the deployment of our troops in Iraq,]” foreign minister Yashwant Sinha told reporters after a two-hour meeting of the cabinet’s security committee.” Or to put it more succinctly: “We’d love to help, but we can’t without a U.N. mandate, and oh, yes, you fail to wait for one. Sorry.”
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Appendix Rupture

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Appendix Diagram

Well, I Never Read the Appendixes Anyway

I’m back to work today and doing a lot better. I’m still not 100% and I’m pretty tired, but I’ll be fine if I can just get home and crash tonight. This past week and a half has been hell. I’m like a human pin cushion. I was in the hospital from Wednesday through Monday morning hooked up to an IV, and they had to move that around a bunch as well as take blood once a day to test my white-blood cell count, so my arms are bruised and full of holes and I look like a junkie. I hate the hospital with a passion and if I could figure out how to get out of going back there, I would. But there’s no way I can avoid it.

But I will need to go back in and have my appendix removed in the very near future.

The whole thing started back on Wednesday, July 2nd, when I had an upset stomach and couldn’t eat anything. But I felt better on Thursday, and the July 4th weekend was great. Then Sunday I had an upset stomach again and couldn’t keep anything down — I threw-up long after I had anything left in my system. But I still thought it was just the stomach flu at that point. By Monday the 7th, though, I knew something was seriously wrong and I went to the emergency room because I couldn’t get ahold of my doctor. I was completely doubled over and the pain in my lower right side was the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

They decided right away that I had gall stones, even though I wanted them to rule out appendicitis and I kept telling them the pain was lower than where they were scanning with the ultrasound. They said the tests to rule out appendicitis were too expensive, and that with women over 30 who are overweight, the problem is always gallstones. But they decided they couldn’t see anything on the ultrasound because they weren’t radiologists, and wanted a real radiologist to give me one. They filled me up with pain medication and anti-nausea medication (but no antibiotics!!!!) and sent me home to wait for an appointment at Methodist East Medical plaza, which is way over on east Washington Street. The appointment was Wednesday morning, and Kathy drove me over there. By this point my appendix had already burst. It probably happened sometime late Monday in the hospital or on Tuesday while I was at home waiting to get an appointment.

To her credit, the radiologist at Methodist East realized what was really going on pretty quickly when I told her she wasn’t scanning where the pain was actually occurring. When she started to scan where the pain was, she said, “well that’s where the appendix is,” and then stopped to look at me, and left the room. I know she went to call and arrange an emergency CT scan at the Methodist South facility because she knew my appendix had already burst and I was probably in trouble at that point. So Kathy raced me to the south side, where they hustled me into the big donut tube and confirmed that I did have ruptured appendix. And they sent Kathy and I immediately back to the Methodist emergency room downtown with the x-rays of my oozing insides.

The first thing they said when we walked into the emergency room was “why didn’t you come in here on Monday when the pain started?” You should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them I had, and they sent me home.

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I’ve Been in the Hospital

I’ve been in the hospital all week. I went to the emergency room last Monday because I had a massive pain in my right side caused by appendicitis, and they mis-diagnosed it as gall stones. So while they were running me all over town to get tests at the various Methodist facilities, my appendix burst. So I’ve been stuck in a hospital bed all week while they tried to control the inflamation and get me in decent shape. I should go back in a few weeks to get my appendix removed.

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Dialect Survey Results

Or, how to pronounce shit. Check out the maps where the wrong answer is concentrated in the south. And my favorite sample question: “What do you call the big clumps of dust that gather under furniture and in corners?”

Also: “What do you say when you want to lay claim to the front seat of a car?”

Plus, soda, pop, coke or soft drink: where people live, what term they use.

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Alanis: Irony Defined.

Irony defined — by the British, of course, because they did invent the language after all. I’m posting this here because I’m resisting the temptation to send it directly to people.
Favorite part so far: “every one of us, I’d guess, has a friend who engages in an argument, waits patiently until you’ve said something really trenchant and probably wrong, then cocks his (or her) head to one side and says, “Do you think that’s true?” thereafter pursuing each one of your most ridiculous points and challenging them from a perspective of utter (pretended) ignorance. Weirdly, this is never called irony, even though every other bloody thing that anyone ever says is.”

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