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If a science fiction writer’s abdomen explodes, shooting pus and bile onto the dinner table, is it a sign?

Last night, I visited the aforementioned SF writer, who had undergone an emergency appendectomy two Saturdays ago, at a hospital near his apartment in Philadelphia (he stays down there during the week, where he teaches at Temple U).

A week after the surgery, he somewhat deliriously asked me to come get him and bring him up to his home in NYC. We were about halfway down to Philly when he called to cancel the trip, since his daughter had convinced him to stay down there for a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Tuesday.

The official VM girlfriend and I shook our heads, got off the Turnpike, and hung out in Princeton for a little while. I cut friends lots of slack when they’re under stress, so I didn’t get too put out by his vagaries.

Which turned out to be for the best. A day later, after his friend John made dinner for them, the writer got up from the table and his abdomen exploded.

I only have his description of this to go by, but it appears that the post-surgery pus and bile didn’t vent anywhere, and built up in his abdomen, putting stress on the staples that held his incision closed. In addition, he was growing feverish and weakening at a time when he should’ve been on the mend.

The pressure on the staples got too great, and they burst. The writer thought his number was up, for obvious reasons. “Geez, man,” I said last night, “not a lot of people are going to look down at their own exploding abdomens and say, ‘This’ll all work out for the best!'”

He laughed. “Yeah. I didn’t exactly look at John and say, ‘This is easily treatable!'”

An ambulance got to his place within two minutes of the rupture (he lives a few blocks from a hospital), and doctors got the wound cleaned and the infection treated. The downside is that the writer now has a GAW.

“GAW?” I asked.

“Gaping Abdominal Wound,” he replied, clearly milking the moment for all it was worth. He added that, if this had happened in my car on Saturday, he’d probably have died, and I’d have probably felt like crap for the rest of my days.

The GAW has to be cleaned and packed twice a day, and it’s going to take many months to heal. According to him (and I have to check on this), as many as 10% of appendectomies yield this sorta result. That number sounds pretty high, but people also project that 10% of the population is gay, so what do I know?

I sound flip about this, I know, but I do take it pretty seriously. So much so that I drove into NYC last night for a 10-minute visit with the old guy, since a friend drove him up from Philly earlier in the day. He seemed pretty well, just tired. Not as debilitated as I feared.

So if a male writer whose major works involve the ambiguity of gender now has a vaginal-looking gash in his abdomen, is it a sign?

Bernie Ebbers, former WorldCom CEO got his ass handed to him, with the jury finding him guilty on all 9 counts of fraud. His defense was two-pronged:

A) Say that your CFO was a coke-swilling scumbag, or rather, say that your CFO’s coke-swilling scumbag ways make him an unreliable witness;

B) Say that you were a terrible CEO, who was virtually deaf, dumb and blind, physically and mentally feeble.

Problem with this strategy was that Ebbers was somehow coherent enough to plan and execute the rollup strategy that took his rinkydink company to the point of becoming the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

I mean, listen to his testimony, and you wouldn’t want to let this guy park your car, much less be the chief executive officer of a major telecom company.

Fortunately, he’s going to get jail time. And members of the board are facing shareholder suits.

In other legal news, CNN actually felt it was headline-worthy that the crazy-ass guy who shot a judge, a deputy sheriff, a court reporter and a federal agent this weekend won’t be getting bail.

There’s a not-so-nice biography out about Bernard-Henri Levy, the Frenchman who wrote a book about the murder of Danny Pearl. Here’s a quote from the biography’s review:

Character assassination in France is less of a sport than in Britain, because the French care less about character, and in the culture that gave us Les Liaisons Dangereuses it is hard to inflame prurient sentiment by saying that a man has slept with a woman not his wife. On the other hand you can seriously damage a reputation by suggesting that an idea for a book was not the author’s own, or that he has misconstrued his classical sources.

The Official VM Mom turns [fill in number here] today!

My buddy The Brooding Persian is on fire.

The Official VM Girlfriend‘s birthday was on Thursday, so I did some nice stuff for her this weekend. First, I picked up the first season of Deadwood, a show she loves. The new season started earlier tonight, so we spent the weekend watching the first season (I hadn’t seen it): all 12 one-hour episodes.

It’s a heck of a show, with its Hobbesian portrayal of frontier life. For some reason, critics harped on the excessive profanity of the characters’ speech, but I really didn’t notice it. Of course, I tend to curse like a sailor, to the point at which I made it a routine question when I was interviewing potential associate editors last year: “Do you take offense at profane language? Because if you do, this is not a good working environment for you. I can just about guarantee that you’ll get offended and quit before I get around to changing my ways.”

So the language on Deadwood wasn’t too shocking to me. The means of exploring “the city and man,” on the other hand, was pretty vibrant and compelling. Ian McShane’s performance as Al Swearengen is amazing and complex. Amy & I talked about it Saturday night, during a conversation about how this show was sorta impossible before The Sopranos, and it reminded me of that show and how I realized that it was about an evil man who loves his family (at least, in the first season: I heard subsequent seasons of The Sopranos sucked ass, so I never watched them).

It’s so hard to get depth out of evil characters in our art, as opposed to simply justifying their evil by bringing up their hard childhoods or something. But portraying the complexity of an evil person is heck of an accomplishment; those two shows do it in different ways, while also tackling larger subjects. Deadwood, as I said, really seems to go after Hobbes’ view of reality, the way that law and governing arises out of lawlessness and chaos. I TiVo’d the first episode of the new run tonight, and will give it a whirl tomorrow, I figure.

As I mentioned, I did some nice stuff for my girlfriend. In addition to spending twelve hours on the sofa watching the DVDs with her, I also treated her to dinner at one of the finest restaurants around: Café Matisse. My publisher had told me about this place for years, but I’d never gotten around to it. Saturday night, I realized the error of my ways.

I had one of the finest dinners I’ll ever eat. Here’re the details:

Gil’s appetizer: Lump Crabmeat Croquette – orange glazed seared scallop and shrimp with citrus salad vanilla oil, chili oil and cilantro

Amy’s appetizer: Thinly Sliced Rabbit Tenderloin – roasted braised garlic and caramelized shallot manchego, thyme timbale with sour dough crostini and balsamic burgundy butter sauce

Gil’s entrée: Parmsean / Olive Crusted Veal Loin Medallions – with roasted garlic potato confit, grilled artichoke hearts with tomato infused demi glace

Amy’s entrée: Roasted Venison Loin – with carmelized foie gras, cardamom infused parsnips, candied pearl onions & currants with red wine date demi glace, zinfandel syrup

My dessert was a chocolate/marshmallow/espresso ice cream confection that nearly finished me off. Amy went with the vanilla cr�me brulee. We also had a bottle of Ristow Cabernet Sauvignon (2000).

Now, those of you who know me can attest to my near-inability to discriminate, when it comes to food. I don’t have high tastes, and I have a propensity to eat whatever’s in front of me, or nearby. That said, as my girl realized Saturday night, “You really are a Foodie! It just needs to be some of the best food ever prepared!”

So it was a learning experience for both of us. I seriously advise, if you’re in NJ (or close enough), have some money to spare, and are looking for an unforgettable meal, to get thee to Caf� Matisse. I have spoken.

In other weekend news, I bought a new bed (frame only) last Saturday. It was supposed to arrive in about 6 weeks, but the retailer called mid-week and explained that they were ready to deliver the same model to another place, but were informed that that house wouldn’t be finished for 2 more months. “Would you mind if we delivered the bed to you on Saturday?”

“You’re going to get me the bed ONE WEEK after I ordered it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure thing!” So they did. I managed to heft the king-sized platform bed out onto the balcony, a last remnant of Dad’s mid-life crisis, back in 1981. It’s a legendary platform bed: alternating stripes of matte & gloss black, plus a fluorescent light tube under the overhang of the platform. I think Rick James used to own it.

Anyway, I hefted it out and it’s now been replaced with some Zen.

And I got an estimate for a new garage door; after 37 years, it’s time to retire the current one.

So here’s the weekend: watched a ton of Deadwood, ate one of the best meals ever, and got a new bed. It ain’t a bad life.

Barry Bonds, rambling about steroid abuse without ever saying, “No, I don’t use steroids”:

Bonds even brought up another alleged side affect of using steroids, a reduction in size of genitalia.

“They say it makes your testicles shrink,” he said. “I can tell you my testicles are the same size. They haven’t shrunk. They’re the same and work just the same as they always have.”

I like that the article’s sidebar reads, “Canseco: Steroids help staying power”.

Vegas, as long-time readers know, is among my favorite places in the U.S., basically because it doesn’t even pretend to be real.

Over on Drudge this morning, there was a link to this story about LV’s mayor speaking to a room of 4th graders:

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman told a group of fourth graders on Monday that if he was marooned on a desert island the one thing he would want to have with him is a bottle of gin.

And when a student quizzed Goodman about his hobbies he replied that “drinking” was one of them, said Mackey Elementary School Principal Kamala Washington [. . .]

Goodman was unapologetic for his comments [. . .] “I’m the George Washington of mayors. I can’t tell a lie. If they didn’t want the answer, the kid shouldn’t have asked the question,” Goodman said. “It’s me, what can I do?”

I wish I could follow this up with a joke or a quip.

I was pretty ecstatic this morning when I read the news that the parliament of Lebanon chose to dissolve, facing popular protest against Syrian occupation/influence. Good article today in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only, so no link) about the history of the Syrian occupation. It somehow manages to avoid mention of the Israeli invasion, so maybe it’s not that good an article. Still, it helps explain a lot of the current dynamic among the politico-religious factions in Lebanon. I hope that Syria follows Israel’s lead and withdraws its troops (along with its secret service) from the country.

I’m not quite as sanguine about the news out of Egypt, where Mubarak is pledging to institute democratic reforms for a multiparty election. Still, to hear him even pay lip service to this concept is amazing.

Wonder what prompted the change of heart?

Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero has an update from Beirut:

In a land where civil war is endemic but political protest is almost unknown, long-feuding Muslims, Christians and Druze are camping out just blocks from the parliament saying they will not leave until either Syrian troops leave their country or the government falls.

The latter goal could come as early as Monday, after pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami agreed to a no-confidence vote in parliament that had been demanded by the opposition parties.