This reminded me of a piece I posted on talk.bizarre back in 1995:

Step back and take a look one level bigger. Fly over your city in an airplane and look at it. Sit quietly in the woods or in a park on a clear day. Think about your job. What do you do? No, what exactly is it that you really do, and why? Detach yourself from it and have another look. Take a day off and go for a ride. Insert this day between all the other days; this day doesn’t exist.

I used to swim in high school. My two main events were 100m butterfly and 200m individual medley. In the hundred fly, breathing is a bad thing to do. If you do it too often, you lose. You want to breathe? Except at the turns, you do it once, maybe twice per leg in a 50m pool, and probably not at all, max once, in a 25m pool. When you do breathe, you make the most of it.

Every once in a while, at work or at school, I notice that I haven’t breathed in six or eight weeks. This happened to me a lot as an undergrad, less as a grad student. I try to make sure it doesn’t happen at all anymore, but occasionally it still does. When it does, I don’t do anything for anyone. I might go to the zoo. I might go out to Fallingwater. I might go to the park or the woods and sit quietly for a while. This day doesn’t exist. And I can breathe.

What do I do for a living? I don’t remember; ask me again tomorrow.

Originally posted 17 April 1995 to usenet talk.bizarre.

(Post script: As a parent of two small children, I now expect to get to breathe again next sometime in June of 2023. If I’m still alive then.)

I wanted a smallish dog, maybe Jack Russell sized. Not too big. Vanessa wanted something maybe a bit bigger. We wandered around in the shelter for a bit, looking at some dogs that looked interesting, making a mental list. We both noticed one very large black and white dog in particular who was definitely not a contender. He was barking madly, jumping around in circles in his cage like an insane creature. Nope. Not that one.

After a while we signaled to one of the volunteers that we were ready to meet some dogs. After asking us a few questions, she told us that since we had a small child (Becky was with us, at about 18 months old), she would only let us adopt a pet whose behavior around small children had been tested in a foster environment and had been proven. They would rather have us leave pissed off than have us adopt a dog who would be unsafe for us (a pretty good policy, I’d say). Indeed, there was only one dog at the shelter at the moment who met that criterion. His name was Gilbert, and he was a Border Collie mix who had been there for about six months and had a glowing foster report. A big black and white dog. Yes. That one.

We read the report, and it sounded completely unlike the beast in the cage. So we agreed to meet him. She got him out and got some tennis balls and we got in a little yard with him and he calmed down and played with Becky. And he knew she was a baby. He deferred to her. We adopted him. When we got him home, he wouldn’t even take food from her when she shoved it in his face. He never tore anything up around the house. My friends and I would talk at work about stuff our dogs did and they would always wind up telling me “you don’t even have a dog. Gilbert’s not a dog. He’s too good to be a real dog.”

Animal Friends had saved him from Animal Control’s death row; he’d been picked up as a stray. He was not neutered when they got him but they took care of that. He clearly had been someone’s dog before, who had trained him well. He had a bladder of steel. (Even if he clearly had to go, if it was raining out, he’d look out the door and turn around as if to say “naaah, I’ll wait,” and never had an accident until near the end.) He never begged for food at the table (at least, not until Vanessa trained him to). Yet we suspect he had been abused, because whenever we raised our voices at home (“HEY, REF? WHAT ARE YOU, BLIND? NO WAY THAT WAS ICING!!!”) he would slink off into a corner and tremble like he expected a beating. (I think it was only sometime in the last 2 years that he decided we probably weren’t really going to do it.)

So we don’t really know how old he was. Our vet said he was probably about 3 or 4 when we adopted him, so he was probably born in sometime in 1998 or maybe 1999.

We always accepted Animal Friends’ assertion that he was a Border Collie mix, because he looked and acted like a Border Collie. He also looked a little like a Black Lab, so we figured he was maybe a Border Collie-Lab mix, with maybe some other things in there, like maybe a little bit of Dalmatian or something, since he had some spots in the white parts of his fur, and his head shape was a little bit Dalmatian-like. We ordered a DNA test in the Fall. They say these DNA tests are less reliable if they come up with “a little of this, a little of that”, but quite reliable if they come up with only one or two breeds. His came up with 50% Labrador Retriever and 50% Chihuahua. We did not believe it at first. But hey: anything is possible en nombre del amor. We ordered a second test from a different company. We’ll see if it comes back the same.

He had a stroke (or some other sort of neurological event) last month, and today (January 2), the best dog in the world was no longer up to the task of standing up to eat and drink. Our lives were enriched by his having been in them.

So I think maybe GK could maybe ease off a bit, and not push us to think too hard about who is co-opting what holiday, because I don’t really think that comes out very well for him. Mmkay?

If anyone knows what this book might have been, please let me know via @twitter message or email or something.

Thanks!

He said,

The only group that is making less revenue is the record labels.

Reading the linked article and its associated chart, it does seem that this would be true, as nearly all of the revenue streams on that chart are rising, and the only one that’s falling significantly is for labels.

We’ve all heard about the horrible business practices of the record labels, and we all know the great success stories about how artists are now bypassing record labels and releasing directly to fans. Great! Let’s just do away with the labels then, let digital downloads be free, and everybody wins.

There’s just this one little problem: the revenue lines on the graph are only labeled right for the old music industry business models.

In the brave new world where artists self-release, or run their own micro-labels, that big ol’ declining line at the top labeled “Recorded revenue (to labels)” should really say “Recorded revenue (to artists)”.

“No problem,” you might say. “They can make up that revenue in live performance revenues.”

Hmm. A couple of problems with that.

First, some artists don’t tend to perform much. Suck it up and play live, I guess is the answer to that. (Or just resign ourselves to music being a money-losing hobby.)

Second, other artists might perform, but find it hard to turn a profit doing it. Last weekend, I tweeted:

It was a great show, and I believe it was sold out. But it was sponsored by a couple of the aforementioned micro-labels and a bed & breakfast to supplement ticket sales enough to meet the expenses of producing it. Why? Click the link to see the stage setup and you might get an idea of why it was expensive to put on. And even though this was a sold-out show, this sort of music doesn’t exactly support huge night-after-night audiences. (We tried to get a similar concert series going in Pittsburgh, and practically had to beg people and offer rides to get people into the seats. Clearly a large and well-established series in Philadelphia is about enough for Pennsylvania.)

My point is that live revenues work well for some artists, but they aren’t going to do it for everybody. Many musicians are still very interested in revenue streams from selling recorded music; it’s not just the record labels.

I used to take Imitrex (100mg sumatriptan succinate) for migraines, but found that it tended to give me the shakes and sweats a bit and I would feel a little “off” after taking it. I mentioned these side effets to my neurologist, and he mentioned the new drug, Treximet, which is a formulation of 85mg sumatriptan and 500mg naproxen, formulated together specifically to address the side effects I had mentioned. Of course I’m sure the fact that the manufacturer’s Imitrex patent was about to expire had something to do with it too. But the fact is that it did indeed help me with exactly the side effects I had experienced, and it turned out to be a much better match for me as a medication than Imitrex had been.

Fast forward a year or so. I change employers and insurance companies, and I go to refill my Treximet prescription, only to discover that with my new insurer, it is not on the list of covered medications.

Why not? Well, there is a list of five other medications that they will cover for migraine, which their panel deems to be sufficient, including Imitrex.

But, you see, I’ve discussed those medications with my doctor, and tried Imitrex, and we settled on this one, because it’s what’s best for me. So I’d like to use this one. I call up the insurance company to find out how to get this covered.

I have to write a letter to their “appeals” department and have my doctor explain that he would like to have me take this drug instead of a different one, and wait several weeks to see what they say.

This seems wrong to me.

Because my doctor already wrote a note like that. It’s called a prescription.

You know, an “Rx”. The little dealio where a “Doctor”, who is a person that has to go to school for a long time and take very specialized classes that cost lots and lots of money, and is generally recognized to be building up some form of expertise in the treatment of illnesses and medical conditions, consults with someone called a “patient”, who is someone who has an actual illness or condition (generally a person, often a decent one, sometimes even one who pays insurance premiums and/or contributes services to an employer who pays them on his or her behalf), evaluates that person’s actual needs in their actual circumstances, as opposed to generalities in textbooks and case studies, often in the actual presence of said “patient”, and then decides among several medication options, choosing the one that he or she feels is best for that particular patient for his or her particular needs and circumstances, and then writes them down in on a little piece of paper, which is generally access-controlled and tamper-proof, in some sort of scrawly, nearly-illegible cipher that is decodable by someone called a “pharmacist”, who can then dispense the medication to the patient.

But no. The “panel” is effectively saying, a priori, “we think all migraine patients should take one of these other things instead.” Well, gosh, mister panel. If my doctor (who is a nationally recognized leading expert in the treatment of migraines, and who knows me as an actual patient rather than as a statistic or simply a source of insurance premium revenue) thought that one of those would have worked better, maybe he would have written one of those things on that little slip of Rx paper, instead of what he actually did write.

“But we can’t have all the riff-raff (our customers) buying all these expensive drugs willy-nilly! We must accuse them all of using ignorant doctors, and second-guess them, and make them re-justify their decisions, because we know better.” Or at least we can pretend we know better, in the hopes that some of them will just bend over and figure it ain’t worth arguing about it, and we can save a boatload of cash in the process. Not our problem if their actual quality of life suffers as a result.

Oopsie

I think better proofreading might be in order.

A Bee

A Flower

It’ll do, I think.

(Reposted from my internal blog at work.)

The Pittsburgh Penguins will meet the Detroit Red Wings in a rematch of last year’s finals. Games 1 and 2 are on NBC on Saturday and Sunday, May 30 and 31, in Detroit. Games 3 and 4 are on Versus on Tuesday and Thursday, June 2 and 4, in Pittsburgh.

Game 5 (if necessary) will be on NBC on Saturday, June 6, in Detroit. Game 6 (if necessary) will be on NBC on Tuesday, June 9, in Pittsburgh. Game 7 (if necessary) will be on NBC on Friday, June 12, in Detroit.

All games except Game 2 are at 8:00pm EDT. Game 2 is “TBD – Night”.