Showing posts with label Pink Floyd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pink Floyd. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Angry Birds


"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
---Revelation 18:2

I had to fix the tsukubai this morning because some nighttime visitor had knocked over the return pipe so the water poured into the ground instead of back into the sone basin that sits above an uderground reservoir with a pump. 

The entire time I was repairing the problem, the hummingbirds, those small annoying hyper nasty “yappy dogs” of the bird kingdom, nagged me to get out of their day spa. It took me longer to fix because I was yelling at them to get out of my yard. I sounded like that archetypical angry old man yelling at a cloud. Hummingbirds aren’t hateful, they’re just noisy neighbors.

In other news, I’ve had this recent e-mail conversation with my doc about drug side effects. In the course of this conversation, he asked how often do I take Vicoden? Here’s my draft reply: 

Subject: Vicoden Vs. Warfarin

Dear Doc,

How often I take a Vicoden depends entirely on my decision about how often I’d like to sleep through the night without waking in pain. Hypothetically, I prefer to sleep enough hours nightly to avoid having to suffer daily from sleep deprivation hallucinations. Notwithstanding the foregoing however, I also don’t want to take Vicoden more often than 3 nights a week because the more I take, the less it works. And I need it to work.

And now that we’re on the subject of how much you care about potential drug side effects, it may interest you to know that the warfarin I take to thin my blood (Fun fact: warfarin is rat poison. I shit you not.) is problematic wrt/ side effects.
  • For instance, I bruise so easily that if someone speaks sharply to me they leave a bruise.
  • For instance, large bruises - say =>3” in diameter - are painful. Who knew?
  • For instance, increasingly, my bruised fingers and hands swell up and turn purple in a tight and painful generalized bruise that lasts two weeks, and that keeps me up nights looking at the dark side of the moon while my hands look like two balloons.
  • For instance, if I get the least little scratch, I bleed so much that if CSI used one of those backlights in my house they’d think it was a Manson Family time-share.
  • For instance, if I had invested in Band-Aid stock when I started on warfarin, I’d be rich enough to have a doctor who first did no harm.


Let’s call it a working draft reply and leave it at that.


Sunday, April 01, 2012

Seize the Vicodin

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
- - Gilmour, Water, Wright, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

It’s poppy season in Afghanistan: beautiful but deadly, and not just for those who grow and consume the harvest.

Meanwhile, back in America, it’s April Fool’s Day. The news stories about New York school officials censoring words from performance tests to avoid upsetting children are, regrettably, not a joke. After all, it’s not just New York where, for example, censoring words that might make kids feel bad like “poverty” and “divorce” are not the only example of such attempts to cocoon children from the really, really bad old world. It’s also no joke that California apparently bans the word “weed” from tests. Of course, as a gardener, I too, am upset by weeds…

In honor of poppy season/April Fools Day, I am hereby instituting a dress code for my blog. Please don’t read or post here if you’re not tastefully and modestly clothed. A bit of cleavage or a glimpse of a bulging codpiece is upsetting enough to your friends and family. Please spare the rest of us.

On a related note, there’s another line from the Pink Floyd song quoted above that has always mystified me: “… you wore out your welcome with random precision…” Does anybody know what that means?

Once again, I have achieved a world record in labels that will never be seen together again.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

The More You Know...

“If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

Pink Floyd

Happy thanksgiving everybody.

Saturday, December 04, 2010

Fourteen FAQ Answers

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and it was gone, I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone.

The Great Boston molasses flood of 1919.

Yes, there is an approved form for that.

We use white rabbit hair that is dyed pink.

Genius lives on. All else is merely transitory.

The report called it an unidentified particulate.

We get that one all the time. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology has a network of pollen counters across the United States. Each counter works under the direction of an AAAAI member and must first pass a certification course provided through the AAAAI.

I would prefer not to.

It was like that when I got here.

Yes: vegetarians can eat animal crackers.

That would be Jacques Chirac.

These people are beyond science, logic and reason. They have strangled the fuzzy bunny of reason, backed over it with their under-inflated off-road tires of ignorance, popped it into reverse, and driven over reason’s flattened bloody corpse.

Although this poison is colorless and tasteless, the presence of arsenic has been detectable since the Marsh test was developed in 1836. So, no.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.