Kaki update and books you should read
OK, for all of you cat lovers out there, I have an update.
Don’t worry about the flea collar that I (in apparent ignorance) bought. The girl doesn’t have fleas. Yes, of course we’ll have her fixed. Once we are sure she’s not come to us in a family way. You know what I mean.
At first I thought she was a mellow cat. Hah! Not the case. She was just so starved that she didn’t have any energy. She is now acting like a proper cat.
She likes to sit on top of the fish tank and terrorize the angel fish. She can get from one end of the house to the other without ever touching a paw to carpet. She, in fact, can dash at about five-point-eight times the speed of light.
She is determined to eat my infusion set hose. Great cat toy, those hoses. Anyway, very soon that will not be a problem, but more on that sad story in the near future.
And, as befits her kind, she is now a certified huntress with one grasshopper and one small grey field mouse to her credit.
Every morning I find she has chosen to sleep in a different location. One day she jumped out from behind a 15 volume complete works of Jules Vern in our library. One day she was curled up in Rio’s booster seat. One day in a pile of laundry that didn’t get into the machine as planned the night before. One day on top of the coffee table, another time guarding over Debbie and Rio as they slept.
She’s rowdy, independent, inquisitive, and surprisingly affectionate; especially with the little one who frequently picks her up in ways that makes it hard to maintain cat dignity and dumps her into my lap with the happy exclamation of “Cat Delivery!” In short: she’s a cat. And my life is more interesting, and fuller, since she came to live with us.
On a completely different subject Rio brought home some plague from Kindergarten that my immune system had never encountered before and I spent the better part of a week and a half in bed with no energy to do anything but read.
So I highly recommend War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayers, Iron Coffins by Herbert Albert Werner, and Lives per Gallon by Terry Tamminen.
Cowards is about a London Times Hollywood correspondent who finds himself “embedded” with the US forces during the most recent invasion of Iraq. I don’t want to spoil the book, so just trust me that this is worth a read.
Coffins is an older book that was actually loaned to me by one of my patients. It is written by one of the few U-Boat commanders who actually fought for most of the war and survived. Losses in the German U-Boat arm in World War II were nothing short of appalling. It is supposed to be a book about the U-Boat war, but it is so much more. I was taken with his observations of how much things changed for him back home after every patrol as the war drug on and Germany’s fates became worse with every passing day. A sad book, but worth a read.
I’m currently a bout a third of the way through Lives. It was billed as a book about the true cost of our addiction to oil. I had expected an revealing look at all the sleazy things those nasty oil companies are doing overseas. I wasn’t disappointed by that, but the book had many other surprises too. Among tid bits to either keep you up at night or raise your blood pressure: as you are gassing up at three bucks more or less per gallon with the full knowledge that the oil companies are posting record profits keep in mind that these same companies are the beneficiaries of mind-boggling large government subsidies. Tamminen puts the total of these various incentives at trillion dollars per year. We even give the bastards tax payer money because the world’s supply of oil is dwindling. Can you fucking believe that? Tamminen estimates if we didn’t give the most profitable off all American corporations subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives we could give the very best health care in the world to our citizens plus build 1,500 new schools in every state.
More shocking than all of that, to me, is the fact that gasoline is a poison. Both as pollution, or just sitting there evaporating out of your fuel lines in the parking lot on a hot day. Of the many evils that make up the toxic soup of gas is Benzene, which has been linked to endocrine disorders. More and more of this stuff is turning up in our environment. What the author doesn’t know, but you and I do, is that Type-1 in adults is on the rise.
Benzene is on the rise.
Benzene can fuck up the endocrine system.
T-1 Diabetes is on the rise, surprisingly, in adults.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm……
Don’t worry about the flea collar that I (in apparent ignorance) bought. The girl doesn’t have fleas. Yes, of course we’ll have her fixed. Once we are sure she’s not come to us in a family way. You know what I mean.
At first I thought she was a mellow cat. Hah! Not the case. She was just so starved that she didn’t have any energy. She is now acting like a proper cat.
She likes to sit on top of the fish tank and terrorize the angel fish. She can get from one end of the house to the other without ever touching a paw to carpet. She, in fact, can dash at about five-point-eight times the speed of light.
She is determined to eat my infusion set hose. Great cat toy, those hoses. Anyway, very soon that will not be a problem, but more on that sad story in the near future.
And, as befits her kind, she is now a certified huntress with one grasshopper and one small grey field mouse to her credit.
Every morning I find she has chosen to sleep in a different location. One day she jumped out from behind a 15 volume complete works of Jules Vern in our library. One day she was curled up in Rio’s booster seat. One day in a pile of laundry that didn’t get into the machine as planned the night before. One day on top of the coffee table, another time guarding over Debbie and Rio as they slept.
She’s rowdy, independent, inquisitive, and surprisingly affectionate; especially with the little one who frequently picks her up in ways that makes it hard to maintain cat dignity and dumps her into my lap with the happy exclamation of “Cat Delivery!” In short: she’s a cat. And my life is more interesting, and fuller, since she came to live with us.
On a completely different subject Rio brought home some plague from Kindergarten that my immune system had never encountered before and I spent the better part of a week and a half in bed with no energy to do anything but read.
So I highly recommend War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayers, Iron Coffins by Herbert Albert Werner, and Lives per Gallon by Terry Tamminen.
Cowards is about a London Times Hollywood correspondent who finds himself “embedded” with the US forces during the most recent invasion of Iraq. I don’t want to spoil the book, so just trust me that this is worth a read.
Coffins is an older book that was actually loaned to me by one of my patients. It is written by one of the few U-Boat commanders who actually fought for most of the war and survived. Losses in the German U-Boat arm in World War II were nothing short of appalling. It is supposed to be a book about the U-Boat war, but it is so much more. I was taken with his observations of how much things changed for him back home after every patrol as the war drug on and Germany’s fates became worse with every passing day. A sad book, but worth a read.
I’m currently a bout a third of the way through Lives. It was billed as a book about the true cost of our addiction to oil. I had expected an revealing look at all the sleazy things those nasty oil companies are doing overseas. I wasn’t disappointed by that, but the book had many other surprises too. Among tid bits to either keep you up at night or raise your blood pressure: as you are gassing up at three bucks more or less per gallon with the full knowledge that the oil companies are posting record profits keep in mind that these same companies are the beneficiaries of mind-boggling large government subsidies. Tamminen puts the total of these various incentives at trillion dollars per year. We even give the bastards tax payer money because the world’s supply of oil is dwindling. Can you fucking believe that? Tamminen estimates if we didn’t give the most profitable off all American corporations subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives we could give the very best health care in the world to our citizens plus build 1,500 new schools in every state.
More shocking than all of that, to me, is the fact that gasoline is a poison. Both as pollution, or just sitting there evaporating out of your fuel lines in the parking lot on a hot day. Of the many evils that make up the toxic soup of gas is Benzene, which has been linked to endocrine disorders. More and more of this stuff is turning up in our environment. What the author doesn’t know, but you and I do, is that Type-1 in adults is on the rise.
Benzene is on the rise.
Benzene can fuck up the endocrine system.
T-1 Diabetes is on the rise, surprisingly, in adults.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm……
posted by Wil | 8:48 PM
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