Chapter 6: Terminal Cancer, Election.
This is my fabulous brownie
recipe. It comes from the Silver Palate Good Times cookbook. It has
been utterly reliable for me, and has engendered several proposals of
marriage.
Coffee Blond Brownies
1 pound dark brown sugar
¾ cup
(1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter
2 tablespoons strong instant coffee powder
1
tablespoon hot water
2 eggs
2 tablespoons (yes, tablespoons) vanilla
extract
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½
teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup semisweet chocolate
bits
1) Heat the brown sugar and butter in a medium-size saucepan over
medium-low heat until the butter melts. Dissolve the coffee in the hot
water and stir into the butter mixture. Let cool to room
temperature.
2) Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter an 11 x 8 inch baking
pan.
3) When the butter mixture is cool, beat in the eggs and vanilla with a
hand-held mixture.
4) Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together and
stir into the butter mixture with a wooden spoon. Stir in the pecans and
chocolate.
5) Spread the mixture evenly in the prepared pan with a rubber
spatula. Bake until lightly browned, 25 to 30 minutes. Do not
overbake.
6) Cool completely and cut into 2-inch squares.
20
brownies
--
Aloha,
Catharine
Eat that which is good, and
let your soul delight itself in
fatness.
--Isaiah 55:2
A while ago I made some comment
about the 'net being a good noise source, and that the amount of disinformation
drowns the information. I just saw another comment on this on the BC group
(below). I think someone could probably do a PhD study on this, the
more I think about it the more I see it runs deeper than it
seems.
I think you're right. Fortunately, I and the normal
people I know use the Net for anecdotal personal support, like the stuff we
get from the normal people on the BC support group. Now, my
sister went a little overboard with her infertility stuff back when she
was infertile, but that fortunately seems to have died down and she's
not downing gallons of Robitussin anymore. (Two children under three act
as a significant mental birth-control method.)
You are quite right here to
point out that what I am talking about is the net as a reasearch tool (its
original purpose after all). It is still a wonderful communications
medium for personal and group discussions, and spam doesn't really impact
that. (Who's normal anyway?).
Unlike existing publication media, 'information' on the net can be
placed by individuals with no observation, checking or verification by peers of
any sort. Looking at this as an information theory problem, we have signal
(genuine facts, which are researched and independently verified to match the
real world) and noise (the rest - opinion, advertising, deliberate libels and so
on). How now do we design a 'filter' to descriminate between the facts we
want to find and the noise that others want to sell us.
I highly recommend
quackwatch.com. It has lots of useful information about information
discrimination.
Yes sure, I love it, but the proponents of quackery would see
that as biased disinformation too. In this case there is a clear
majority in favour of the mainstream, but the distinction is getting more and
more blurred. One day there won't be a mainstream to comfortably stick
to, just a range of sources of varying credibility.
A noise filter has to
somehow discriminate between true data and deliberate lies or distortion, eg
in this case that put about by either drug companies or herbal remedy
salespeople. Remember the research paper that found that chocolate is
good for your teeth? (Funded by the sugar industry). The usual
mechanism is peer review, the opposite of a free-for-all publishing system,
but that is expensive. Quackwatch is a sort of peer review, but it is
still a single voice and does not have the real authority of a majority
opinion.
On the other hand Linux does this well, it is both peer reviewed
and self moderated, a real Darwinist system. (One writes a chunk
of code and publishes it, with source code. If other users like it they
use it. If they want to change it they do and publish the changes.
If the changed version is more popular it supplants the original.) I
suppose that could be an example of how things should work, but I am not sure
how you can apply it to other areas. More work for PhD
students!
In my own life, before I discovered Quackwatch, I
automatically mentally filtered out anything with key words such as "secret of
the ages," "organic," "all-natural," and "they don't want you to know."
Also anything in all-capital letters is suspect.
I am still trying to write rules for my browser to trap such
spam. Last week a list-mail from my bank went into my trash mailbox
because they sent it to generic recipients and forgot to fill in the 'from'
field. My main spamtrap is "To:<not my name> & From:<not on
my list>". I protested that it had routed with "Hot Teen Sluts" and
they promised it wouild not happen again, but it is damned difficult to trap
all the crap and still pass all the important stuff. (We have naked
Barbie-dolls all over the house. I don't generally find nude teenagers
very exciting. I prefer grown-ups) Well, that's a relief.
In the medical arena,
anything which appeals to my emotions or starts out with unsubstantiated
allegations that are not commonsense, I ignore. If it can't make
its point on verifyable facts then it probably doesn't have
any.
In the end we have to assume the information is not to be trusted and
each do our own review of everything we read, testing each offered hypothesis
against observed facts. But this is exactly what we do without the 'net.
The 'net was intended to allow many people's observations to be collected and
used to dramatically speed the process of testing hypotheses, but that was its
use by the scientific community who basically trusted each other at least to
describe their observations honestly. In its new public incarnation as an
advertising medium this trust is lost. As a source of hypotheses to be
tested it is just a 'noise source' and is only a substitute for
imagination.
In the end there is a danger, if not a certainty, that it will
be about as easy to get information from the net as from roadside advertising
posters.
To this end I pondered the setting up of a disinformation website
named, say, Tiger Spots. This would contain hundreds or thousands of pages
with a deliberate lie at the top of each one, and then a disclaimer underneath
like "Not everything you read is true" (courtesy of the Guinness poster series a
couple of years ago - which ran silly quotes like "80% of pollution is
caused by trees - R Reagan" over a line like this). The effect would be
that many search engines would pick up these lines and display them, shorn of
the disclaimer, among the 'real' page headers. It would be a bit like an
email bomb attack, but attacking search engines instead.
The upshot is enjoy
the net while we've got it. It is doomed to die, killed by what we now
perceive as spam.
Really? I think spam will
actually decrease, as advertising cookies get more sophisticated and people
(like me) accept ads as part of getting free Internet hosting and tune it
out.
I'm sure that in time advertising
executives (and their clients) will come to realise that painting volume adverts
on the screens of unwilling recipients does little to enhance sales, as you say
they get tuned out. We have Shockwave's Shockmachine which simulates a
games machine on the PC in Java, and Natasha likes playing it. When you
are online it streams adverts in a box above the game screen. Quit
honestly I couldn't tell you what was in the box, even whether it was an advert
or the offline banner. My eyes *never* go up there.
This is really 'push'
advertising, mass mailing in another guise. The web page carrying the
banner may be demand-displayed, but the banner itself is broadcast spam.
I'm not sure I even know the vocabulary for this, or if there is one at
all. 'Broadcast', 'publish' etc. all mean
sender-controlled
transmission, like Usenet. 'Mail' means consensual
one-to-one (or one-to-few) transmission. There isn't really a word for
reader-controlled transmission like the web.
What I am concerned about is the
more directed level of 'pull' advertising which appears as news, public
information, more like 'advertorial' in the press. The stuff that you get
when you search for information on a subject. Search engines taking payment to
push your item to the front of the result
list. This is the real growth
area, for which I cannot see bounds. As the sophistication increases the
pros should learn the 'blocking' keywords and styles, and avoid them, and
realise that this gets straight to the potential customer without annoying
millions of passers-by and thereby generating
negative
corporate-awareness.
These boy wonders are so bright that they still flood us
with images we don't see. How long would it take them to realise that web
searching was falling into disuse because they were degrading the information
base? Their feedback is so slow, it can take years to find out whether an
advertising
strategy works or not, and decades to realise its efficacy has
fallen. It all works on fashion and hearsay, and numbers of customers
'reached'.
(There can be few people who listened to pop music in the UK in
the sixties who don't know how to spell Keynsham (pronounced Cane-sham).
Radio Luxembourg, the first commercial pop station, ran an advert for a football
pools gambling 'method' from a company based in this town, and because of the
unphonetic spelling they spelled it out in the ad. It was so overplayed
that Keynsham became a byword for advertising
overkill).
Tim, may I ask you
questions about Lyuda's decline and death, or is it still too painful to discuss
with a casual acquaintance?
Of course you
may. That's why I still get involved in alt.s.c.b. It stoppped being
painful as soon as she stopped breathing. I'm not sure why it was like
that for me and not for other people. The Minister at the funeral (a very
bright ex-physicist) said this was an unusual reaction. For me, the
relationship was completed and life moved on. I suppose it had become
stagnant, although had she lived I'm sure we would have found new ways to
progress it again after a while. I wasn't very happy with how things were, but I
had no mind for looking for anything else. Also, I never felt
dependent
on her, having lived alone most of my life. Maybe a combination of these
things, and my habit of running my emotions ahead of reality, in what-if
scenarios, made it like that.
Okay. What I'm trying to get
an idea of is what things look like when the doc says, "You're terminal."
I am very uneasy with my doctor's ability to tell me if/when I'm really
dying. I have a feeling he's just going to keep trying and trying and
trying. Do you have any old lab reports from her?
I am impressed with
your honesty about your wife.
I recognise
the attitude of the doctors. Ours never said "You're terminal", he just
figured that we knew that metastatic meant terminal, eventually. We
discussed prognosis and he said typically one to two years, but he had one
patient at ten years or something, I've forgotten now, but it was in one
of my articles. In fact she lived one year to the week.
Hmm. I can't
remember. Did she have just bone mets or some soft tissue
mets?
Initially it was just bone mets, but inevitably it spread
elsewhere eventually, liver in her
case.
Thanks for letting me
know. I am feeling blue (well, actually green) with nausea for the last
three days, from the weekly Taxotere that is not supposed to cause me
nausea. If I become nauseated from Taxotere there must be something
wrong with me.
I wouldn't say that was guaranteed at all. Firstly,
reaction to drugs is a pretty personal thing and could vary a lot. Maybe
you are reacting to the Taxotere.
Secondly there is the possibility of an
immune type reaction to the drug. If I drink more than three pints of beer I
get more nauseated than drunk. According to received wisdom that doesn't
happen, but it is not uncommon. It doesn't happen with wine. It was
explained to me that I 'react' to something in the beer. Maybe you 'react' in
this way to Taxotere.
Thirdly it may be that you are reacting to something
else that you are taking.
Fourthly it may be that the anti-nausea
medications that come with the dose are insufficient. Lyudmila had no
nausea on Taxol, after they gave her a Zafron pill along with the
infusion. They wouldn't have given her that if they didn't expect
nausea, its expensive.
Only after all these might one suggest that it is an
independent symptom of something else wrong. Even then it's probably not
cancer.
No. I believe it
is G-d punishing me for my sins. :)
Well the sins must have been fun then.
:-}
Yes, indeedy.
Non, je ne regrette rien and all that.
Lab reports are something it is not so easy to get hold of
here. You have to get the consultants permission, and he has to be
convinced you have a good reason to need it.
How silly, I must
say. Oh, well, at least then you're not in the position I am of having
the scary bone scan and no one to tell me if it means I'll be dead in two
years or not.
Freedom of information
is all very well, but it seems to work against you here. Our drs think
that the ordinary patient in the street can't understand a technical report,
and they are probably quite right. So what one gets is an explanation of
the meaning of the results in a face to face interview with a
consultant. Consequently they get a bit secretive about the actual
reports, nominally to avoid misunderstanding. That said, nearly all the
times I've wanted to see them there has been no
problem.
One particularly bad registrar tried to hide one particularly
bad bone scan report like a schoolgirl afraid of her classmate copying. I
read it upside down on her desk between her arms. There was a bit of a row
and we didn't see her again.
The reports were highly technical, and I had to
learn the vocabulary to understand them. I can understand the drs being
afraid that patients will get wrong ideas from reading what they partly
understand, but even mildly intelligent patients soon learn what is important
about their particular
disease, (and we aren't talking 'mildly' here).
The scan reports generally said things like "increased uptake to ... " and a
long list of bits of anatomy, followed by "This is indicative of metastatic
disease." The diagnostic X-rays looked pretty scary. Now I know it
takes a lot of knowledge of anatomy to read an X-ray plate but even I know that
spines shouldn't bend like that, and surely that jumble of bones at the bottom
should be a bit more orderly.
Once the M word had been said, then it was
explained that the regime was now 'palliative care'.
See, my doc says that
chemotherapy at this point is palliative or "salvage," which I dislike even
more, but then he says to keep plugging away at the taxotere until we see if
it's doing any good. Huh?
Well that makes sense even in a palliative regime. If
it can hold the disease at bay then it's worth doing. People like
Carolyn seem to survive quite a long time quite comfortably under this sort of
regime. It does happen that the disease goes into remission,
sometimes.
Well, if I could survive
comfortably, I would do it. I must say, though, the taste of bone met
pain I had was far preferable to nausea. At least if I took my pain meds
and lay still it didn't hurt. I'm gonna have to have a long serious talk
with my family and my doctor.
A taste isn't the real thing. You want to know how bad
bone pain can get? Well it gets bad enough your muscles cramp up and you sweat
all the time and you can't sleep.
Well, that's pretty
much the taste that I got, except people kept telling me it was bad
bursitis.
I am relieved that I
appear to be adequately prepared.
Yeah they kept telling Lyudmila it was arthritis in her
back until she went to an orthopod who said it wasn't. I get the
impression they try treating for anything that looks remotely likely on the
grounds that if its not mets it might fix it, and if it is, well they can't
fix it anyway and trying won't do any harm. Only thing is they don't
tell the patient what they are thinking.
So then you have to have pain meds if only to sleep, more and
more. 30mg of morphine is ok, it kills off the pain and makes you constipated
and that's about it, but as the bone erodes the pain keeps on getting worse
and you need more and more morphine 100mg, 300mg, more.
Around there you
start to get disorientated and to sleep all the time, and twitch a lot even
when you are asleep, while trying to strike a balance between constipation and
diahorrea. At high doses you can switch to other drugs like Fentanyl,
which is better, but you still end up back in the same place after a
while. Then there are structural problems, even if you can control the
pain you can't move around much because you break things. The drugs don't stop
the pain completely, you've still got some pain all the time you are awake,
and a lot whenever you move. You end up deciding how you want to balance
sleep and pain, you can have pain-free and no life by sleeping all the time,
or you can have a painful wakeful life, or something in
between.
If you can keep the tumours down and minimise
the structural damage, you minimise the source of pain in the first place and
don't get into these problems. Pain meds are not a complete answer, they
are only a part of the solution, to take off the last bit. Radiation,
chemo and anti-inflammatories all play a part.
That said, chemo is the
bottom of this particular totem pole. It is generally least effective
against bone mets. It didn't have much effect for Lyudmila. Oncs
tend to want to keep it in reserve for holding soft tissue mets down once it
gets beyond bone. They went for it with her partly because she was
demanding it, and partly because the bone mets were advancing fast and they
thought it might slow things down. They stopped it midway because of gut
problems that were probably a combination of lumbar radiation and
anti-inflamatory side effects.
Maybe they can improve on the anti-nausea
meds.
What I'd like to know is how long it's going to take to
determine if the Taxotere is doing any good. The way I feel now, I don't
want to go back on Monday for my third treatment. If I knew for sure
something like, "oh, after six treatments we'll be able to tell" I might be
happier about it.
Sorry to be so miserable.
Can't the onc tell you what his criteria and aims are?
I imagine he will go for a full course unless overtaken by events. Maybe
he'll do scans halfway through to check it out.
I intend to press
it. He is inexperienced and very nice. He actually has a Ph.D. in
comparative literature and was inspired to become an oncologist by the death
of his first wife. Oh G-d spare me. No wonder he loves how witty
and literary I am.
The doctors never really claimed to be able to tell me if and
when she was dying until it was really obvious, about 2 weeks before the end
when the bloodwork showed she had liver disease. The District Nurse was
much better at this, I guess she has much more relevant
experience.
Even she couldn't say when. She knew what 'stage' she was
looking at, but she said some would cling on for months in the 'final' stages,
you just couldn't tell. The doctors were very much 'close to' the
problems, attacking the symptoms as they occurred with little concern for
overall progress. This is the way with palliative care, you just react to
the symptoms of the disease as it progresses to maximise the comfort of the
patient.
Another matter, last week a close friend (John, early 50's) got a muscle pain in
his thigh that was bad enough to stop him working in the business he owns.
On Friday we heard that it was a tumour and they were operating. This morning I
got a call from his wife: its cancer and he's in ICU! She was
understandably shocked. What a bastard. When it slow and you have
time to adjust is one thing, but having it dumped on you like that is truly
awful. At least he literally bought the farm about 15 years ago, that was
how I met him, I bought his old house.
Oh, heavens, that is sudden and horrible. Is he in ICU
because of the cancer or because of the surgery?
I don't know yet,
his wife wasn't in any state to start discussing technicalities with someone not
immediately involved. However the fact that he is a chronic asthmatic
probably doesn't help. I'll probably find out today.
:
We got some more information on my friend John, and he seems to
be recovering now although it was touch-and-go for a while there. It appears he
had a bowel cancer in the rectum. The operation was complicated by a chest
infection on top of his asthma. He was having heart function and breathing
supported on Friday, but he is under his own steam again now. They took
out a chunk of gut and gave him a stoma bag. I haven't heard anything
about pathology reports yet.
Oh NO. How dreadful.
Poor John. Stomas and bags just gross me out, and I heartily
pray I never need one.
Talk about a pain in the
arse!
You, sir, are a bad bad
man. Shame.
Me and my BSOH.
Quoi? Qu'est-ce que c'est un BSOH?
Well, singles ads usually ask
for a GSOH - good sense of humour, so...Comprenez?
AH... the penny drops. Why would anyone specify a GSOH in a
singles ad?
Wouldn't it be a given? Would someone want a BSOH?
Some (most) people are very
naive. They usually also specify that the want a 'genuine' person.
I would be quite interesting in discovering what the alternative was. I
suppose they mean a serious relationship. I had fun writing mine like a
piece of advertising copy. At least it got some replies.
You should
see the Russian girls' ads. They all say the same thing. I have
sometimes seen them word for word identical, I guess they just copied the
sample text handed out by the agency because their English wasn't good
enough. Usually something like <height , weight, hair colour, eye
colour,
d-o-b>.."I am affectionate and loving. I like theatre,
cinema, family life and travelling. I want to meet an intelligent caring
sensitive generous man who does not drink." Totally content-free:
Avoid! Avoid!
I have seen some. They remind me of the Filipino girls'
ads, though the Filipino girls' ads tend to emphasize their
old-fashionedness. I worked with an organization in Hawaii that helped
mail-order brides (mainly Filipina and Thai) so I am somewhat familiar with
the type.
:
He is now out of hospital and
recovering after a -very- near brush with death. He still has the tumour,
but he also had an abscess on his thigh, double pneumonia and deep vein
thrombosis. They are planning chemo to reduce the size of the tumour
before operating on that, once he has recovered from the current lot. They
say the tumour has not attached anything important apart from affecting the
sciatic nerve, which was what first raised the alarm. They are confident
that once it is reduced they will be able to clear it and may even be able to
reverse the stoma. Heavens, what a
relief.
Now he
is stuck at home with very limited mobility and bored out of his brain. He
has just asked me to get him some computer games - e.g. a joystick and a flight
simulator.
Yup, that's what I got David, who is stuck in a hotel room in
New Jersey for most of the next couple of months. Now me, I would want a
book, but I guess there's something about blowing away alien invaders that
appeals to the couch-bound male.
Cindy the child-minder has been
remarkable. Despite her own disability, she has been running John's
(reconditioned industrial heaters) business for him in his absence as well as
looking after Natasha. She knows quite a bit about the business since
writing his website (which is how he came to introduce her to me). She has
sorted out his accounts, answered the phone, processed orders and sales, paid
bills etc. and ensured that his one employee (who is a good mechanic but has no
idea about office work) has enough work to do to keep him busy until after
Christmas. No wonder she needs a holiday.
She needs a new title besides child-minder. How about fairy
godmother?
It has been mentioned. She got
back from her holiday today and insisted on meeting Natasha from school, despite
not having slept for 48 hours. Said she wanted to force her body back into
local time. And to fill time until the pub opened and she could replenish
her Guinness deficiency. Apparently you can't easily get Guiness in the
Dominican Republic. Did I mention she has a 'hollow leg' as far as beer is
concerned.
What a charming and unique woman!
OT: Simon Schama's "History of Britain" series started on the History
Channel last night. Very good, and he managed to make the pre-1066 Saxons
vs. Romano-Brits vs. Vikings intelligible and interesting. It's
something that I, as a history major, have generally skipped over to get to the
more glamourous Plantagenets, Black Death, and Georges. Is he a media
darling in the UK? If so, does he have some kind of congenital twitch I
shouldn't make fun of, or does he just emote in a comical way?
Sorry, I don't know him. I think
this is something to do with that other world called Television to which most
earthlings seem to be able to transport at will. I admit I have seen,
heard or read a few good items on this era recently, it seems to be now a
fashionable area for research, having been neglected for so long. When did
we learn to call Bodicea Boudicca? Maybe something like the monk
researching the ancient scrolls suddenly coming out shouting "We got it all
wrong! It was a transcription error! The word was
celebrate!"
So are you near the naughty River Ouze, whose misbehavior we see on CNN?
Just how soggy IS it there?
No I am standing here at about 800ft
altitude on a hillside on the other side of the Pennines laughing my socks off.
Oh, good for you. It
doesn't flood here, it would have to fill up Manchester first, and that's on a
plain. You can melt the whole ice-cap for all I care. That might
take care of the first 50ft.
Well its pretty wet in the south and
east, but I haven't had to go there. Why do people think its such a good idea to
build houses on the river flood plains, then complain because the people
upstream build flood defences which confine the river and pass the problem
downstream rather than letting the valley buffer the excess?
I
don't know. We do the same thing here. I have no sympathy when
expensive beach houses in Malibu crumble into the ocean because I have grown
up on a beach and I know the nature of a beach is to be there and then again
not to be there. Why do people live on the barrier islands in the
Carolinas? Why do people live in Bangladesh? I don't know.
Ah the last one is a bit
different I think, they get born there, I don't think they have much of an
immigrant problem. This is just raw population limits - the fertile
river delta will support a big population as long as it doesn't mind being
washed away from time to time. So then they have to breed like rabbits
again to produce enough population to satisfy the river god next
time.
Now there's a thought. What we need is a good birth control policy
for Bangladesh, then build some nice desireable residences right on the
waterfront, double glazing, air conditioning and lots of air freshener, and
persuade the great and the good, well the great anyway, that this
would be a good place to be tax-exiled to. The fashionable place to
live. That's real population control. We could pump away our
least desireable assets on a regular basis.
My godmother's daughter Martha, who is 28 and utterly gorgeous, is on
her second two-year tour of duty in Bangladesh with the Peace Corps.
She loves it and never wants to leave. I guess it takes all kinds. And
*she* grew up in East Anglia and Grosse Point, Michigan, which *I* think are
both fabulous spots.
Oh, how I would love to straighten out the third
world.
I laughed my ass off when I read about a tornado hitting a mobile home
park in Bognor Regis. Tee hee. Mobile homes (or trailers, or
whatever you want to call them) are so clearly tornado magnets in the US that
I don't understand why some bring grad student hasn't done a study on the
phenomenon. Then to find out that this very rare event in England zaps a
MOBILE HOME PARK... hahahahahahaha. Too funny. At least the
phenomenon is consistent.
I was not happy about buying this house that
we're living in now. It is on the flood plain for the Green River.
The real estate agent told us (and research confirmed) that it has never
flooded here. David makes fun of me. However, my uneasy feeling
has continued. Newspaper article last week: Mt. Rainier is
America's most dangerous volcano, and we are DIRECTLY in the path of an ash,
mud or lava flow if it blows up, as it is due to do in the next 75-100
years. I *knew* something felt funny.
Well I suppose living under a lava
flow would make it feel like home.
This is just to rub it in.
We have a protest about fuel prices, well you're a yank, you wouldn't understand
that, but it meant no fuel for a week, then we have a rail accident and everyone
jumps up and down about safety, so the rail authority goes "Alright - you want
safety first, OK lets do it" and shuts most of the network down for safety
checks. Then floods, and the protesters threatening to have another go
next week, although that's mostl;y media hype.
Apparently the protesters
intend to mount a slow-convoy blockade of certain roads and waterways.
There was a joke that the trucks would block the roads in the north and the
boats would block the roads in the south.
Yes, we saw it on the news.
I am enjoying the first real autumn I have ever seen, with the leaves
turning colors and all that. However, I, as a child of the tropics, have a
little trouble managing a coat. I accept that when it is 35° F outside, I
will need a coat. However, I get into my car in the garage, which
is kept warm by the water heater. It's only when I get to where I am
going and face a lengthy chilly stroll across the parking lot that I wish I
remembered my coat. Sigh. I guess I'd better just keep one in the
car.
I am quite annoyed by the presidential election here. I am praying
that Gore somehow manages to pull Florida out of the hat, but I have a bad
feeling that he won't, and we will have the first Republican President and
Republican Congress since Eisenhower. And we all know that the '50s were a
time of great social progress, yeah right, grumble piss moan.
I can't understand why the news hacks think we are so
interested in it.
BECAUSE WE'RE THE BIGGEST AND BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD YA YA
NEENER NEENER SIS BOOM BAH! (pounding on chest and
hooting)
Yeah but we've got HISTORY.
We're INTERESTING.
It almost knocked off the
wonderful story of the failed burglary of the Millenium Dome where the burglars
used an earth mover to dig under a vault containing a display of diamonds.
Sadly the police were there waiting for them, and the diamonds had been removed
to safety. I think they had been watching too many
movies.I saw that! I thought it was hilarious! It ought to be
made into a movie.
Said hacks this morning were expressing sadness
that 'Dublyu' appeared to have got in.
That should be "Dubya," BTW.
Touché! I guess the
newsreader mispronounced it. After all they still can't even say
Chechnya without the mandatory southern-english ending "Chechnyar" or even
"Chechneeyar". No wonder they didn't report the war in Tbilisi very
much.
They seem to think he is a bit
of a bad joke.
Yeah, well, a Republican president + a
Republican-dominated Congress = Eisenhower, and many of us who are concerned
with rights secured since Eisenhower are nervous.
I can't believe
there are serious political issues that divide the American people right down
the middle like that, it sounds more like the issues are mainly trivial, and
while everyone has an opinion which they will defend to the death, no-one has a
convincing argument in favour of either.
That is exactly true. We love heavy-duty emotional issues
like the death penalty and abortion, and we don't care about the ones that
really make a difference to us, like economic and trade policies. They're
too boring.
Funny, my favorite candidate for Senate from my district, Maria
Cantwell, is a dot-com millionaire who refused federal election money and all
PAC donations and is spending her own money on the campaign -- and people
don't trust her and think there's something up her sleeve.