Notices by M.S. Bellows, Jr. (msbellows@c.im), page 4

Response #2 (which remains the most important response - though not the *only* response)

Response #4:

Response #5:

Response #6:

@ethanz #TIL that there's such a thing as the "Journal of Quantitative Description." Cool!

Crap. Just 15 minutes in and I'm suddenly wanting Biden to step aside and let Harris be the nominee.

@tokyo_0 In our case, the ER took excellent care of her, splinted her, and referred her to the on-call orthopedic surgeon, whose billing person said they don't accept her secondary insurance and then, when my wife called back to say the insurer claimed they WERE on their list and had offered to talk to the billing person, just hung up on her.

Current status, as reflected in a text I just sent my brother and daughters:

Further update: fractured fibula AND medial malleolus. They're splinting her now so she can ice and elevate for a few days, and then she'll see an orthopedist probably Thursday, and then probably have surgery next week.

Update: Lyricdancer indeed broke her fibula (and maybe more; still waiting) stepping off our back deck onto an uneven surface. But little pain (she declined opiates), and she's mostly (a) worried about whether she can still sail this weekend and (b) happy to have been surrounded by sexy firefighters (her not-even-secret kink).

Pro tip: don't step awkardly off a step and suffer a Maissoneuve fracture of the fibula and medial malleolus. My poor wife's leg is immobilized from foot through knee (not TO knee; THROUGH knee). Two months of her summer are gone.

Both kids came over last night, thinking they were supporting my wife (who broke her leg in two places last Tuesday and STILL hasn't been able to find an orthopedic surgeon to see her, four days later, and so is just lying in bed making phone calls), and really what the kids wound up doing was relieving me.

The U.S. needs to nationalize all healthcare now. Not just singlepayer; nationalized DELIVERY. "In network," "yes, we take your Medicare but we're not signed up with your SECONDARY insurance," "our clinic only does ankles, not legs, so you need two surgeries to repair one injury," etc. is not only illogical, but evil.

Jeebus Howard Christmas. My wife broke her leg in two places Tuesday in what's called a Maisonneuve fracture, where tension on a ligament breaks both the fibula near the knee AND an ankle bone on the other side. It's fairly common, and requires surgery. AND EVERY ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON SHE'S SPOKEN TO SPECIALIZES ONLY IN KNEES OR ANKLES, AND CAN'T FIX BOTH! So she's spent two days in pain, immobilized, unable to obtain care, just making phone call after phone call without success.

Oh, man, I wanna make this! Read to the end:

"[T]he tomato-based version [of ketchup] did not appear until around a century after other types. An early recipe for "Tomato Catsup" from 1817 includes anchovies:

"Gather a gallon of fine, red, and full ripe tomatas; mash them with one pound of salt.
Let them rest for three days, press off the juice, and to each quart add a quarter of a pound of anchovies, two ounces of shallots, and an ounce of ground black pepper.
Boil up together for half an hour, strain through a sieve, and put to it the following spices; a quarter of an ounce of mace, the same of allspice and ginger, half an ounce of nutmeg, a drachm of coriander seed, and half a drachm of cochineal.
Pound all together; let them simmer gently for twenty minutes, and strain through a bag: when cold, bottle it, adding to each bottle a wineglass of brandy. It will keep for seven years."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup

File this under "cool cool hey what the actual ??? nope!!!":

"[E]arly recipes for various different varieties of ketchup contained mushrooms, oysters, mussels, egg whites, grapes or walnuts...."

"In the United Kingdom, ketchup was historically prepared with mushrooms as a primary ingredient, rather than tomatoes." #TIL
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup

@juergen_hubert @woo @Catawu @mcc The U.S. incarceration system literally is a response to a seemingly-harmless clause in the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, >>>except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted<<<, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Slavers and other racists realized that mass prosecution of Blacks could partially reinstate slavery, and then that, hey, cool, it also can be used to keep them from voting!

I'm gonna share some completely anticlimactic TMI for the benefit of other middle-aged men:

The day before yesterday, I was very stressed and anxious for a variety of reasons, and we were moving some furniture out of a storage locker, and I was feeling lethargic and a little lightheaded and generally out of it, and then I began feeling nausea and indigestion and my jaw was tight and then my left arm and hand started feeling a little numb. Nothing terrible! Just: feeling meh, and those minor symptoms.

And then guess what crazy thing we did?

We went to the nearby emergency room.

Yep.

And they were very nice to me, and quickly administered an EKG and blood tests, and guess what?

I *wasn't* having a heart attack.

I was just stressed and tired and anxious. That's all.

But if I *had* been having a heart attack, going to the E.R. could have saved my life. And even though I wasn't, they were very nice to me. No one made fun of me. No one called me a whiner or a hypochondriac. My wife expressed gratitude that I took my survival seriously. And I was home again in less than two hours.

So this is for my fellow typical men, who are inclined to ignore health issues because: John Wayne or something:

Don't ignore stuff. Don't wait until you're sure. Be willing to overreact. Be willing to waste everyone's time. It's okay! The world won't end! (And you may even get to take a nap under a warm blanket, like I did!)

@JuliusGoat
The Left: "Let's protect and respect everybody!"

The Right: "Let's kill everybody!"

Thanos: [acts as mediator, finds a compromise]

#ThanosWasntRight #ThanosWasCentrist

@revoluciana Hello.

The lesser of two evils = less evil.

Harm reduction reduces harm.

Having a limb amputated sucks, but sucks less than dying of gangrene.

And Biden has frozen arms shipments to Israel, and has promised to freeze more if Israel attacks Rafah.

Grow the fzck up.

@Npars01 @abdalian Maybe we taxpayers should start funding them again to the point that tuition is free (like the University of California and many other schools used to be), making donors unnecessary and therefore powerless.

But hey, I'm just a hippie.