September 2008

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We could all have another job this January

September 30, 2008 in Cycling by CyclistRick | 2 comments

In late ‘88 or early ‘89 I heard a radio commentator say (paraphrasing, since I do not remember the exact words): ‘the ranks of the Secret Service just grew by 200 Million.’  It might be odd to some, but the simple statement was a backhanded way of saying that the thought of Dan Quayle becoming President of the U. S. was so frightening that everyone in the country was going to be protecting George H. W. Bush.

After listening to the Alaskan governor speak, and reading more about her, I think that if McCain wins in November that not only will the ranks of the Secret Service have a couple hundred million new volunteer workers but that there will be a large number of medical professionals looking after Mr. McCain’s health on a voluntary basis.  And there will a lot of folks, even non-believers, who will start praying for his well being.

What is the antonym of exuberance?

September 29, 2008 in Economy by CyclistRick | 4 comments

In a speech about 10 years ago Alan Greenspan used the phrase ‘irrational exuberance’ to characterize the run-up in stock values above any underlying traditional valuation metric.  The driving force nderneath that ‘irrational exuberance’ was an optimism in how the Internet would drive the economy going forward.  There was no clear way to limit that optimism, nothing that could be done to keep values in check.   And from that boom came the inevitable bust.

The U.S. economy, correction, the world economy, is now experiencing the opposite, a profound pessimism that is to a degree irrational.  The current economic woes are the downside of ‘irrational exuberance, part 2′, the unfettered and unregulated development and implementation of complex investment vehicles revolving around home mortgages.  Mortgages often given out without proper vetting of the customer and without collateral.  As these mortgages fail it has caused a worldwide credit drought, which fuels the spiral.  The unsettled, and unsettling question, is how to stop this pessimism, keep folks from making runs on the banks (having folks pull over $60 Billion in assets out of WaMu in less than 2 weeks qualifies as a run in my book), and let the dust settle.

The current U.S. administration put forth a plan to try to stop the economic downward spiral.  After a couple of weeks of wrangling the leaders of both parties hammered out a compromise this past weekend.  It was without a doubt a stinking fish, something no one wanted.  The deal was struck over the weekend in hopes of settling the world financial markets when they opened this morning.  But that ideal failed miserably.  And it was made worse when most of the legislators from one party, the party of the current administration (the administration that first proposed the general concept of the plan),  voted against the deal.  And the reason their leaders are giving for voting against this plan?  That the Speaker of the House made a speech before the vote blaming the administration for the problem.  Who do these legislators think is to blame?  The investment houses and banks?  Sure, the investment houses and banks hold the ultimate blame, but is not oversight and regulatory compliance a function of the executive branch of our government?  Where were the regulators during all this ‘creative financing’?  Another reason being given is that the plan is unpopular with the populace and with an election 5 weeks away some folks are afraid it may cause them to lose re-election.  These same folks who fiddled with the emperor while the empire burned are now fearing for their jobs.  To which I say, good riddance and don’t let the door hit you in the backside on the way out.

Quiet time

September 25, 2008 in Misc. by CyclistRick | 4 comments

It’s been a quiet week in Woe-Is-Me, my hometown.   The end of the road racing season and me still on the sidelines of real life means there is not much to discuss.  We could talk about the bunch of yahoos arguing over whether or not to dole out $700,000,000,000 of our money to overpaid fat-cats, but that is too depressing.  Or maybe mock the Guv of the 2nd least populous state whose handlers are keeping her from talking to anyone who might actually figure out how little is going on bethind that smile; but the thought of her being one heart attack away from having the keys to the nuke-lar weapons is even more depressing.

On the lighter side, we can think about whether flatulence is battery against a person:

DUI suspect who farted at police officer charged with battery

Associated Press

Article Launched: 09/25/2008 11:27:55 AM PDT

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A West Virginia man who police said passed gas and fanned it toward a patrolman has been charged with battery on a police officer.

Jose A. Cruz, 34, of Clarksburg, was pulled over early Tuesday for driving without headlights, police said. According to the criminal complaint, Cruz smelled of alcohol, had slurred speech and failed three field sobriety tests before he was handcuffed and taken to a police station for a breathalyzer test.

As Patrolman T.E. Parsons prepared the machine, Cruz scooted his chair toward Parsons, lifted his leg and “passed gas loudly,” the complaint said.

Cruz, according to complaint, then fanned the gas toward the officer.

“The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature with Patrolman Parsons,” the complaint alleged.

He was also charged with driving under the influence, driving without headlights and two counts of obstruction.

Cruz acknowledged passing gas, but said he didn’t move his chair toward the officer nor aim gas at the patrolman. He said he had an upset stomach at the time, but police denied his request to go to the bathroom when he first arrived at the station.

“I couldn’t hold it no more,” he said.

He also denied being drunk and uncooperative as the police complaint alleged. He added he was upset at being prepared for a breathalyzer test while having an asthma attack. The police statement said he later resisted being secured for a trip to a hospital that he requested for asthma treatment. Cruz said the officers thought the gas incident was funny when it happened and laughed about it with him.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I could be facing time.”

Uncommitted

September 17, 2008 in Cycle Racing, Cycling by CyclistRick | 3 comments

’tis the season as they say.  The calls are going out from teams looking to sign up racers for next year.  The team whose colors I have flown this year is taking applications for ‘committed’ racers for 2009, trying to get folks selected before the uniform orders have to go to the vendor.  It had been my plan and goal to become a ‘committed’ racer for that team next year, but after consideration I will not apply.  The reason is simple:  I am not sure how much I can realistically commit to for next year.  I can walk unaided (no crutch, no cane) now, but barely and not for far.  I can ride on the trainer, but a power meter connected to the bike would show  embarrassingly low numbers.  I can pedal fine sitting down, but as soon as I stand up things grind to a halt as soon as the right leg gets to 12 o’clock; not enough strength in the leg, yet, to push the crank over the top of the stroke.   I suspect it will be another 6-8 weeks, minimum, before I can do any real riding and who knows how much longer before I can do anything resembling ‘training’.  And that means being able to compete is somewhere off past the horizon.

So I will stay ‘uncommitted’.  I will order new uniforms from the club/team, and will race in them when and if I am able.  But I cannot, in good conscience, say I will line up for X number of races next year.

Food, Inc.

September 9, 2008 in Food by CyclistRick | 5 comments

I love food.  Good food.  I am not one to just shovel any old edible item in to satisfy the cravings unless I am really desperate.  Even though I thought I was fairly selective in what I ate, I keep bumping into people, articles, books, and movies that cause me to think hard about the food choices I make.

Fast Food NationA couple of years back The Wife returned from a trip reading the book ‘Fast Food Nation’.  She read me large sections, and we both came away a bit concerned about our food supply and made some changes into what and how we ate.    Soon after that the movie ‘Super Size Me’ by Morgan Spurlock came out, reinforcing some of the biases we developed from ‘Fast Food Nation’, though in part I am a bit immune from the McDonalds phenomenon.  I have not eaten at a McDonalds since circa 1969, a while before the concept of ’super size’ was developed.

Last year on our trip to Canada we stayed at an Inn in Kelowna, B.C., run by an expatriate from L.A. who is an advocate of the 100-mile diet.  He had run an orchard for years, but had changed to running a sheep and goat farm after rehabilitating a 1909 arts and crafts house as an inn/artist’s workshop.   Our breakfast conversations revolved around the ethics and politics of eating locally produced foods items, all while we dined on fresh goat milk yogurt and a variety of items produced either on the property or nearby.

Omnivore's DilemmaAt the present time I am reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan.  The first part of the book, the first of the four meals, is what Pollan terms the ‘industrial diet’.  Specifically he talks about the current diet in the U.S., a diet based primarily in some form on soybeans and number 2 feed corn.   He traces the feed corn from a farm in Iowa through feedlots, cereal processors, and the industrial production of items like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), pointing out that the current farm policy that favors this type of food production is the legacy of the policies of Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture.  The villians in this section are our government along with the manufacturer’s reaping the benefits, mostly Cargill and ADM. Reading that section is enough to scare one away from most of the stuff items found at the local supermarket.  The last of the four meals, the part I am reading now, follows the diet that Pollan himself admits is not sustainable in our current environment,  the hunter-gatherer way of life.  Most interesting, to me, was the third meal, a meal based upon foods grown locally on managed grasslands. Grazers were rotated through sections of land in prescribed progression without chemical inputs. Here the case is made that we should be looking at local, low impact on the land, non-industrial food production with its inherent seasonality and favoring quality over quantity.

Yesterday, at the Toronto film festival, a movie titled ‘Food, Inc.’ premiered. From the press pieces it sounds like a movie documentary version of Pollan’s industrial diet, and features Pollan, Joel Salatin (the grassland farmer followed by Pollan), and the author of ‘Fast Food Nation’, Eric Schlossberg. The movie has not been picked up by a distributor yet, so I will not be seeing it soon. But the more I see and read about our food supply the more tempted I am to rip out all landscaping and to start growing as much of my own food as I can.

Violating orders

September 3, 2008 in Crash, Health by CyclistRick | 9 comments

For much of my adult life I have been skeptical of physicians.  It was a skepticism born of familiarity.  My bachelors degree is in Biology from a large University where over 90% of the Biology and Chemistry majors I dealt with regularly were pre-med.  Through the graduate school process, and afterwards as an instructor, I dealt with more of the pre-med and medical school students.  There were some intelligent folks, but then there were a lot who were not so bright, and a few whose ethical compass I found scary.  I am not sure how many of those last two groups got weeded out in the medical school process, but let’s say I am not thrilled to be doing a statistical sampling to find out.

Then there have been my own horror story experiences with doctors.  When I contracted malaria I knew what I had, and I conveyed that to my primary care physician.  The problem is he did not want to believe me and instead chased diagnoses of other exotic diseases (meningitis, encephalitis, and others) all the while failing to order the simple blood test that would determine whether or not I had malaria.  That was close to being a fatal mistake.  Finally my complaining resulted in a new primary care physician being assigned to me and  within hours we had a confirmed diagnosis and treatment started.   Then there is the case of my sensitivity to oats.   I knew something was wrong and I conveyed the physical symptoms to the physician.  He found anomalies in the blood tests,  also, but did not want to consider that it all might be food related.  Many, many tests later, looking for all sorts of exotic causes, the physician more or less gave up and told me to live with it.  So I started my own ‘process of elimination’ food testing and eventually came to discover that oats were the culprit.  As soon as I removed oats from my diet the physical symptoms went away and my blood composition returned to a more ‘normal’ state.

For the last few years I have been trying to put aside my past biases and to work with my physicians.  And that is what I was doing with the orthopedic surgeon in regards to my hip.  I have followed her orders, so far, to the letter.  But now it is time for me to consider going outside those bounds.    I was content until yesterday when I learned that she did not want to give me the extra leash I think I can use.  All I asked for was a referral for Physical Therapy.  I am progressing well, and think that I could use some help to guide my recovery.  But the orthopedic surgeon says no, and that if she decides I should have PT that decision will come after my next visit … 5 weeks from today.  Note that she may still decide against it, and from the tone of her message I take it that is a distinct probability.

So now it is time to go against doctors orders and to see about starting on a physical therapy plan.  A friend who is a DPT suggested the exercise I did in the swimming pool on Monday, and she is coming by tonight to assess my ‘walk’ (as it is) and to determine what I need to work on to get to the goal of walking without aids (crutches/canes/etc.).

There are times to be compliant and follow directions.  And there are times to decide that perhaps there are alternatives.