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!”