Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Thursday Potpourri

Item: The Right comes up on the wrong side of this idea, that all OTC (Over The Counter) drugs are a better deal than prescription (R/X) drugs of the identical formulation. Example: Omeprazole, aka, Prilosec. It's been out for decades, and it's been OTC for at least a decade, but the price is still on the order of a dollar per pill, when by now, it ought to be down to a dime or less. There are other examples. What is going to happen with this FDA ruling is that some widely-prescribed drugs that are losing their patents (patents timing out) and would have become very inexpensive for sufferers to use, will now NOT get cheap, and their OTC prices will be maintained at artificially high levels. So, just moving a drug out of the R/X class and into the OTC class is not a guarantee of saving anyone any money, and in fact, some of these patent-expired drugs will show steep price rises when they hit the OTC counters. Mostly, the drug companies benefit from this, not the patients. Oh, and that thing in the article about having to go to see the doc every time a R/X is adjusted? BullTweet! You CALL your doctor's charge nurse, and the nurse handles that. I do that all the time and there is never a bill for it.

Item: The case against Roger Clemens. If you know baseball, and I'm a fan, you know that there was a sea change in top-line pitchers about 10-15 years ago. The very best pitchers, like Clemens, USED to be "location" pitchers. They could consistently put the ball within a couple of inches of where they wanted it, and scouting told them where they wanted it. Now, the best pitchers are "power" pitchers, who have the ability to throw 95 mph fastballs and sliders, at ordinary accuracy, for 6 innings or better. "Location" pitchers are now closers, who only have to throw for two innings at most, never more than 35-40 pitches total. That just the evolution of the game, but Clemens was caught up in it. As the best "location" pitcher on the mound, the game passed him by because he couldn't toss the screamers time after time. He tried to pump himself into better shape via chemicals, so as to prolong his career at the top of the heap. I can't blame him for that, and the idiotic doping trial is just that, idiotic.

Item: Afghanistan. I had occasion, night before last, to listen to a local college Professor expound on the 'Stan. Very knowledgeable guy, Prof. Grant Farr of Portland State University, spent a lot of time over there, including through the Soviet occupation. His take, in a nutshell, is that Obama's Grand Plan won't work. Why it won't work is that Obama doesn't understand the nature of the country. First of all, Afghanistan is NOT a "country" in any real understanding of the term. It's a region of three main tribal groups, each having major problems with the other, and each being unlikely to ever cede ANY authority to the others within it's own tribal influence area. If that wasn't bad enough, our whole "nation building" exercise in the 'Stan is based on building a modern national Army which can hold it's own, and hold the Nation together. The major problem is that there is 70% total illiteracy in the 'Stan, and of the Army recruits, maybe one in ten can read and write, but probably not. You simply can't raise a modern Army from recruits who can't read or write, and expecially from those who not only can't read or write, but don't want to learn to do so, lest they be labeled as blasphemous by their local imams, who DO read and write, and want to hold that over their parishoners' heads. It all adds up to FAIL, just as it added up to FAIL for every major nation which has tried in the past century (we are the third world power in the past 100 years to try to "civilize" the 'Stan).

Item: STFU, Christie. Yep, others look at Tubby and see the same potential horror story I've seen.

Final Item: I realize that Zoos are places where humans may learn about other animal species, but you have to have just a LITTLE smarts before you go. Consider NOT dressing your little tyke to look like a baby zebra (prey animal) and parking him in front of the lion's den...

Wednesday WTF

OK, snowy day, so I'm relaxing and playing/learning with my smartass phone. I download a Smarty-Barcode Scanner for it.

Next, I get a coupon for a decent price on soda pop from the gudwife, and scan it, thinking I might be able to do better than Walgreen's price.

Guess what comes up?

A car part!

For a 60's or 70's Triumph TR-6 or TR-250, a right-hand trunk hinge!

Strange, very strange

Oops, mea culpa

...for an oxymoron: "corrupt mayors"

ca va sans dire, as the French would say...

Headline fun

OK, it's Super Bowl Sunday, but you're cruising a few blogs to pass the time until the game.

Glad you stopped by!

For your light entertainment, may I present "Headline Fun"

Headline: Obama has small-check donor advantage over Romney Reuters

DUH! Of course the Obamanoids write small checks. Small economy, small checks, unwilling to gamble more on a failed Prez, you pick it.

Headline: Special Report: Bloomberg reloads in push for gun control Reuters

Sure, I heard his spiel. "400,00 gun deaths from illegal guns". I actually watched some of NBC's "Eat the Press" today (sorry, that's a gay joke from 30 years ago). In the same time, how many millions died from crashing cars, planes, or BASE-jumping, but operating in any of those regimes is not illegal, is it, Mister Mayor? BTW, when you speak of "reloading", I hope you are going to consider reloading MAIG with some actual law-abiding mayors. There have been over a dozen of "your" Mayors arrested for corruption, and we all know that corruption arrests only happen in the worst cases, so there might be hundreds of MAIG Mayors who actually ARE corrupt. So, if you ever have the bad fortune to actually MEET Mayor Bloomberg, ask him the "one big question": Mister Mayor, why does MAIG want MORE people to die because you want them disarmed and incapable of defending themselves?

Headline: Analysis: Romney win leaves rivals few options AP

Wrong, the rivals have plenty of options, and there is a "nuclear option", too. The Nuclear Option would be for all of them to get together, demand an open, unpledged convention, or face the certainty that right after the election, the formation of a Conservative Party will take place, and the GOP will never again be able to win any election anywhere. A lesser option would be for all of them to get togher before the convention, and write their platform, a conservative platform, have a loyalty oath attached to it, and demand that if Romney doesn't sign that loyalty oath, he will be booted from the party. The third option, not "nuclear", but definitely a WMD, would be to threaten to have a Stay Home on Election Day campaign (or my version, a Go To The Range on Election Day campaign). There are plenty of options left.

Headline: Parents urge more tests as twitches spread at New York school

Heh-heh. The kids have their Soccer Mommies and Mommied-Daddies on the run over this. It's a contination of the "planking" thing, as I see it. Any teen worth his or her emo quotient can put on a convincing twitch. Hell, in my youte, we used to do it to lampoon the less fortunate who actually DID twitch (and no, I don't regret it, I did a lot of bonehead things when I was a kid, but I outgrew all that, didn't YOU?)

OK, that's Headline Fun for Super-Sunday. Enjoy the game, Go Pats!

Dept of Redundancy Department

Note the headline here.

This is the guaranteed result of a dumbed-down educational system.

The Meaning of Liff

I am surprised, that as the Chief Pedant in Charge of the Internet, I haven't run across this collection of nonsense words to describe stock human responses to life situations before now. Reading the list, the words will not stick with you, but you've probably experienced a full half of all those situations listed if you're as old as Dirt like I am.

Oh, BTW, I am not a Hitchens fanboy either, Og. Hitchens did NOT attain the greatness of the great philosophers, not because he couldn't think and write as well, he could, but because unlike the great ones, he felt the need to rub less-gifted and educated mortals' faces in their own excrement, feeling secure in the knowledge, one presumes of the man, that his own shit not only didn't stink, but was actually a beneficial face-cream...

H/T to Og, who misses the title of Pedant, just barely, by actually being able to DO things with his hands...

Breast Feeding in public causes traffic tieup...

Something must be done about this.

MSFW photo below the fold...

Two Vasectomies

From email this ayem:

A TALE OF TWO VASECTOMIES

A man goes into the hospital for a vasectomy. Before the procedure a very attractive nurse comes in and takes his vitals, then tells him to take all of his clothes off.

When he is fully undressed she instructs him to lie down on the table.

The man obeys. The nurse then takes all of her clothes off and climbs on top and has her way with him.

Upon the completion of the act the man catches his breath and asks what that was all about. The nurse informs the patient that studies have shown that before a vasectomy if the man has an ejaculation, he will be more relaxed and that the vas deferens (sperm duct) is easier for the surgeon to locate and sever, thereby making the surgery safer, more efficient and quicker.

The nurse then wheels the patient to the operating room. While they are going down the hall the patient looks through a window to the right and sees six men in a room masturbating. Curious, the man asks," What are they doing in there"?

The nurse responds, "They are getting vasectomies too, but you have Blue Cross and they have Obama Care."

heheheheheh....tip of the flight helmet to the Colonel.

Mr. Crabby makes a discovery

OK, I have a good friend and neighbor, retired Ironworker, who is a fishing fanatic. Right now, there's little to fish for in the streams or bays, so he takes his river sled, drags it down to the coast, and fishes the bays for Dungeness Crab.

He struck the Mother Lode of crab this week, so, Tuesday evening, he dropped off about 4 large Dungeness here for the gudwife and I. We were out at a Military Ball that night plus had a dinner engagement Wednesday night, but tore into them last night, and today, I picked out the rest of the crab-meat and froze it (about a full pint).

So, I'm dressed in washables, not wool as per my usual habit in Winter, and I'm flying through the job (very detailed job if you've never done it), and crab/crab-juice is going EVERYWHERE.

I had a cuppa joe sitting there, and as I used the shears to cut an upper leg open (smart crab-pickers use shears, not crab-crackers, the shears do a cleaner job with less shell in the output), and a large chunk of crab flies out of the leg-joint and heads for, then lands perfectly in, the cuppa joe. Mind you this is a large tankard of Joe, and it's expensive Joe, $10 per 12-oz (Seattle's Best Level 4).

I take a test-sip of the Joe. Can't taste the crab. Keep sipping the Joe, no crabby taste, all the way to the bottom, where the large chunk of crab, now turned black by the Joe, appears. Slightly crabby, but still decent Joe. I fish out the crab and glom it.

There is a half-crabby, half Joey-nutty flavor there.

I may be onto something here, but first, you have to get by the idea of eating black crab-meat...

Every CEO, every Chief Engineer

...needs this where they have to look at it the entire time they're in their offices. Not a bad idea for permanent placement on the Employee Bulletin Boards, either.

"A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don’t get hacked off and buy another product instead.
     Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
     The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everryone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.
     A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!”  he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.
It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren't picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.
     Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.
     A few feet before the scale, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
 
    "Oh, that," says one of the workers ”one of the guys put it there cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang."

There's some Latin for that, too: "Quod erat demonstratum, est" (That which was to be demonstrated, was)