Author: Gil

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Katrina and the Obvious Joke

The official VM fiancee and I have been watching the weather reports all day long, since her family lives in the New Orleans area (they evacuated on Satuday) and we’ll be having our wedding down there next spring.

Our two lighthearted moments occurred when

a) she said, “We’re not paying the second installment of our deposit to the wedding hall till we know if it’s still standing,” and

b) when the news reports said that 20,000 to 30,000 people will be holed up in the Superdome, I said, “But how will they know if it can hold that many people?”

Let’s hope the cholera outbreaks die down by the time we go visit her family in October.

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Mazel Tov!

I’ve been known to goof pretty fiercely on my black-hatted brethren. Why, just today at lunch, I launched into a tirade about religious fundamentalists of all faiths, in response to my boss’s queries about the Gaza Strip. I even tossed out my standard line about how there seems to be some part of the Torah that says people are supposed to dress like it’s 1862 Poland.

That said, when I was stopping at gas station after gas station this evening looking for a can of gas for my dad’s stalled-out car, it was a young Hasidic man who walked up to me and said, “I have a can in my car that; why don’t you take that?”

He opened his trunk, handed me a nice, plastic two-gallon container, and told me, “I don’t need it; just take it.”

“That’s quite a mitzvah,” I said. “You have yourself a good shabbat tomorrow night, sir.”

Then he got into his car, which appeared to be from 1962 Detroit, and headed off to (in all likelihood) Spring Valley, NY.

So, when you hear/read me excoriating religious zealots in future, I guess you oughtta think to yourself, “What a goddamn ingrate this guy is…”

Like I have a point.

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Did the cake have a file in it?

I enjoyed this story about an this international smuggling-ring bust because it centered around two undercover FBI agents who organized a fake wedding:

[T]he bride and groom were actually undercover FBI agents who worked with the accused smugglers for several years, said Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

“Invitations were sent out, a date was given and RSVPs were received from different points around the world,” Christie said at a Justice Department news conference.

For some reason, I’m getting a Mr. & Mrs. Smith vibe off of this story.

I mean, the official VM fiancee & I have gone over our guest list a bunch of times, and figuring out co-workers to invite has been a problem. I can’t imagine how tough it would’ve been for our two undercover agents to put together a plausible list: “Gosh, honey, if we invite the kingpin, then we REALLY need to invite those two foot-soldiers we met at the pier. . .”

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What Goes On

Hey, gentlereader! Sorry to be absent for a while (except for those little goofy posts). I’ve been in a little bit of a writing-malaise lately, taking a mini-summer break.

I’ve also been exercising for the first time in forever. The upside is that I’m feeling a bazillion times better, even though all I’m doing is a half-hour on the treadmill. The downside is that I sweat worse than Patrick Ewing by the time I’m done. After that, I’m really not in a writing mood.

It’s only been about 3 weeks of exercise, but that’s an achievement for me, since I have zero willpower. I don’t run down physically, but it’s really tough to motivate myself to keep going. So nowadays I either pivot the gigantor-vision TV around so I can watch a baseball game while I’m treading, or I put an issue of the City Journal up on the display, so’s I can read while I’m on. Most magazines have too small a point size for me to read on the treadmill; I’m really hoping The Economist comes out with a large-print edition for myopic, out-of-shape mo’fo’s like myself.

Anyway, this post is more in the update mode than one with a particular theme. This week’s book is A Canticle For Leibowitz, after I got bored silly by Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I hoped for more out of that book, but through the first 85 pages it really focused far more on the biography of Proust than on the literary writing of Proust. Those are two really different things, and I’m not sure what Botton was thinking in focusing on that stuff. I’ll read the rest of it some evening, just to see if it gets better.

I’ve also been answering people’s questions about the Merck/Vioxx case. I mean, I’ve been trying to get them to understand the questions they’re asking, because the world’s a lot more complicated than “Did Merck lie?”

So today’s big lesson was that there’s a drug with more bizarre problems with Vioxx. A journalist called me earlier today to ask about some drug companies. Then he mentioned Mirapex, and wanted to know if I had anything to see about “the lawsuits.”

I’d never heard of the drug, so I googled it whle we were talking. This is what I found. Yup! There’s a Parkinson’s drug that may leave users with “powerful urges to gamble, shop, have sex and eat compulsively.”

Or, as I like to say, “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!”

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Adding injury to injury

I had an MRI in 1991 after I blew out my knee playing hoops. I don’t remember any office furniture flying through the air but, according to the NYTimes, there’s an epidemic of accidents caused by the strong magnets in the equipment.

The story sounds fine, but the pictures they posted with it (courtesy of Dr. Moriel NessAvier, who has a website on MRI safety) make me think it’s a hoax.

As the official VM fiancee put it, “Mr. Smith, I’ve found the problem. You seem to have an office chair wedged between your ass cheeks.”

Dr. NessAvier has more pix of flying stuff!