I Swerve For Possums

Sunday night in suburban Chicago:

"A motorist who swerved to avoid hitting a small animal, possibly an opossum, allegedly caused a three-vehicle accident that sent five people to the hospital."

The driver was ticketed for not having a license.

No word on the fate of the small animal.

Even if it were reported dead,
It might just be playing possum instead.

Fall Back

Here in the States, if you're on Daylight Savings Time, it's just about time to fall back an hour.

I've always wondered how operations with three 8-hour shifts handle this. For instance, what do police departments do? Do they give the night shift an hour of overtime?

Or is there an hour when none of the police are working?

That would be the time
To commit the perfect crime.

Legal Prescriptions

There have been some stories in the news about pharmacists refusing to dispense emergency contraception because doing so would violate their moral standards. Some have demanded laws requiring pharmacists to dispense against their will in such cases.

But here's a well-written rant that proposes an alternative solution: repealing pharmacists' legal power.

It would also have saved this poor paraplegic from a long stay in prison. Allegedly, he forged some pain med prescriptions for himself.

"Publicly, Paey's prosecutors have conceded that the 25-year sentence was excessive, yet they insist that Paey himself is to blame, citing his refusal to accept a plea agreement."

Rules that require a doctor's Rx
Sometimes have nasty effects.

Fibbing to the Feds

Don't lie to the feds! Even when you're not under oath, you can get in trouble for making false statements to them.

What puzzles me is why this doesn't operate at the local level. I never hear about anyone going to jail for lying to the Chicago Police.

And what about traffic stops?

"Ma'am, do you know how fast you were going?"

"Why, officer, I wasn't going fast at all!"

"Ma'am, that's one misdemeanor for speeding, and one felony for misleading the highway patrol."

Be careful, or they'll bust us
All for obstruction of justice!

Keep Those Doctors Out

Here's an article headlined: Rich Countries Contribute To Brain Drain.

So... what bad thing are we doing now? Well, we're letting people into our country. Doctor-type people. Who apparently should be confined to the poor countries they were born in.

If you ever want us to let you in
Don't dare study medicine!

88 Years Later

The White Sox win the Series.
So much for inductive theories.
Logic is suspended
And causality up-ended.

But seriously, the odd thing about the Series is that they were all close games that somehow turned into a sweep. The Sox didn't really look much better than the Astros, except that they kept squeaking by them game after game. It looked a bit like a coin toss sequence of 4 heads in a row.

Great Lake Getaway

In local news, a suspected carjacker jumped into Lake Michigan to get away from the cops last night. The water temperature was 55 degrees Farenheit. The police just waited him out, arresting him when he waded back to dry land.

In the Fall it is folly to make
An attempted escape in that lake.
There's nowhere to hide,
And soon you'll decide
That you just made a chilling mistake.

Lap Dunce?

Here's a story about a CEO who ran up some charges at a lap dance joint in NYC.

The charges were mostly tips to the dancers. American Express is now suing him, trying to get him to pay for the charges - to the tune of $241,000.

I suspect drinking
Affected his thinking.

Bioethicist - Nooooo!

A bioethicist writes: "John Stuart Katz is at high risk of dying if he gets the flu. It is up to you not to kill him. And it is up to your government to do more than it has to date to make sure that you cannot insist on putting his life at risk."

I don't want my government to do "more". It's done more than enough already to foul up the flu shot business. I want my government to do less, if by "less" we mean getting rid of the bureaucratic regulation that is choking the vaccine supply.

There's plenty of demand
But not enough supply.

To fix it, just untie
The invisible hand.

Reflection

Love has its secret bells,
Heard by no one else.

Deafening sounds
That shake the ground.

But only in the minds
Of those love finds.

Academic Help Desk

Kids with algebra problems can now get help from India. That's right, high-quality Indian math tutoring is available on the net, at discount rates.

Maybe there's something to it. Our entire system of numerals comes from India, and it was quite an improvement over the Roman numeral system - which didn't even have a zero.

Whoever invented zero deserves our thanks.
Otherwise when
You went to write "ten",
It would just be a one and a blank.

The Green Threat

Plants spread pollen through-out the land,
Causing wheezing and sneezing.
If they weren't natural... they'd be banned!
Still, I admit, their appearance is pleasing.

Accounting for Vaccine Shortages

Today the Wall St. Journal ran an opinion piece by John Berlau, entitled "Death By Accounting?" His thesis is that our vaccine shortages are partly caused by a 1999 SEC accounting rule.

The new accounting rule applied to all sorts of businesses, but hit vaccine makers hard.

Here's how it works. Uncle Sam gives you money to make vaccines. You spend a lot of the money during the manufacturing process. On your books, you have to show the money you spent. But you are forbidden to show the money you already took in - until you actually deliver the vaccines. So your books look like you are losing money. And most companies hate looking unprofitable.

Berlau writes: "While one part of government is urging manufacturers to have a reserve on hand for a flu outbreak, another is telling them that they won't show any gain on their books for doing so."

Earlier in the year the Washington Post ran a story about the problem: "Although opinions differ, it appears that the Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile has become an innocent bystander wounded in the government's crackdown on deceptive accounting practices."

It looks to me
Like the books
Were cooked
By the SEC.

He Asked For It

Monday a local woman counter-attacked an armed assailant, Kendro Earl.

"She smashed her attacker over the head with a bottle... leaped on Earl's back, bit him and jammed a finger into the gun's trigger guard to stop him from firing. The struggle spilled into the kitchen, where she grabbed a knife and stabbed Earl several times. Earl escaped, but an off-duty Cook County sheriff's deputy heard the woman's screams and caught up with him."

When he gets out of the hospital
He'll go to jail.
To keep him from getting out at all
They set high bail.

To Sleep, Perchance

Don Watkins, in a post about rational decision-making, writes about the proper way to evaluate the question: should one stay up late reading Atlas Shrugged?

Here are 2 ways to decide:

A. Compare the value of reading now to the disvalue of being tired tomorrow.

B. Compare the value of reading now to the value of getting more sleep.

He thinks choice B is correct. I'm still trying to figure out if there is a real difference here.

As for me,
Whether A or B,
It's time for bed.
'Nuff said.

Flu Query Update

The other day I wondered why we kept seeing delays and shortages in the flu vaccine business. Today there was an interesting opinion piece that touched on this in Investor's Business Daily. Titled "Why The U.S. Isn't Prepared For Bird Flu," it was written by Sally Pipes, who is the president of the Pacific Research Institute.

She asks: "So why don't U.S. drug companies, which dominate the global medicine market, make vaccines?"

Her answers, in brief:

1) Excessive FDA screening

2) Vaccines are expensive to produce

3) Out-of-control lawsuits about vaccines scare manufacturers away

4) Government price controls limit profitability. ("The government now buys 57% of all childhood vaccines, forcing steep discounts on manufacturers.")

Now I understand.
They got in the way of supply and demand.

Finishing The Portrait

I finished reading Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I'm not recommending it, but if you want to read it, make sure to get an edition that has good notes so you can decipher some of the allusions, the Irish dialect, and the Latin which litters the text. I had some advantages reading this book. I know a medium amount about Ireland, Catholicism, and what the Irish do with English. Still, I found myself checking the notes quite a bit.

The novel combines a stream of consciousness technique with a lot of naturalistic detail. I found it hard to keep my bearings in the stream of consciousness, and hard to plow through the naturalistic detail. There isn't a plot, exactly, but there is a through-line to the story: the writer's liberation from the psychological confines of his family, religion, and schooling. At least, that's how I read it.

Joyce does write beautifully at times:

"His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon the tide."

"A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze."

Despite his gift of gab
I found the story drab.

Wherefore Art Thou

I have a dog named Romeo.

At the pound, they were calling him Calvin. That was too religious for me, so I decided to call him Pal.

But my wife wanted to call him Romeo. You see, our other dog is named Juliette.

My wife won.

Romeo and Juliette -
The corniest dog names yet!

Jubilation

I hear the explosions of fireworks, the honking of horns, and young men yelling in my neighborhood.

The White Sox have won the American League pennant, and the South Side is celebrating.

I remember the last time. 1959. I was 7. The mayor authorized the sounding of the city's air raid sirens - scaring a lot of people who weren't baseball fans. So far, I don't hear sirens.

I was in 2nd grade. Our teacher, Sister Mary Bartholomew, brought a TV set to the classroom so that we could watch some of the World Series games during class.

Now I suppose we'll have to play the Cardinals, our neighbors down I-55.

Beating the Cards
Could be hard.

EDIT: Nope. Doesn't look like the Cards at all. I was so busy paying attention to the White Sox that I had stopped paying attention to the National League. I actually mis-read a headline and thought the Cards were ahead. Anyway, in truth, it looks far more likely that the Houston Astros will be our opponents in the World Series.

Replacement rhyme:

I hope that team from Texas
Doesn't vex us.

Iwo Jima Scandal

Joe Rosenthal was the photographer who snapped the famous shot of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, one of the bloodier island battles of World War II. He has been accused of staging the shot - mostly because it came out so good. His primary accuser recanted, but the rumor keeps swirling. You can read about it in some of its complicated detail here.

On the other hand, here is an amusing parody of how the story might come out today:

"Many believe that, as the huge number of casualties mounted in the ill-fated and pointless invasion of this tiny island, the Roosevelt administration, desperate for a bit of pro-war propaganda, arranged to have the photo taken for dissemination to the world's news services."

Casualties are always "mounting"
When the press does the accounting.