{"id":623,"date":"2005-08-22T22:46:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-23T02:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vmalt\/?p=623"},"modified":"2005-12-11T11:40:44","modified_gmt":"2005-12-11T16:40:44","slug":"what-goes-on-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/what-goes-on-3","title":{"rendered":"What Goes On"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> by the time I’m done. After that, I’m really not in a writing mood.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this post is more in the update mode than one with a particular theme. This week’s book is A Canticle For Leibowitz<\/a>, after I got bored silly by Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

I’ve also been answering people’s questions about the Merck\/Vioxx case<\/a>. 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?”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

I’d never heard of the drug, so I googled it whle we were talking. This<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

Or, as I like to say, “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What Goes On”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-pharmaceuticals"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-a3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3214,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/writing-on-buildings","url_meta":{"origin":623,"position":0},"title":"Writing on Buildings","author":"Gil","date":"January 10, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Just because the NYTimes' architecture critic lives on another planet (lemme tell you, Nicolai: the problem with starchitecture is not that it failed to focus on public housing), that doesn't mean there isn't good writing about architecture in other newspapers. Dwell's blog offers up a bunch of them!","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15162,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-480-nicholas-delbanco","url_meta":{"origin":623,"position":1},"title":"Episode 480 – Nicholas Delbanco","author":"Gil","date":"April 5, 2022","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 480: Nicholas Delbanco \"As you grow older, you become an amalgam of so many separate influences and so many voices that you tried to learn how to copy that you become in effect your own original, rather than a slavish adept.\" Author & MFA teacher Nicholas Delbanco\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/delbanco2022comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C720&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/delbanco2022comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C720&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/delbanco2022comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C720&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/delbanco2022comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C720&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/delbanco2022comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C720&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":15823,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-523-dawn-raffel","url_meta":{"origin":623,"position":2},"title":"Episode 523 – Dawn Raffel","author":"Gil","date":"January 23, 2023","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 523: Dawn Raffel \"For me, the most interesting about the whole process of writing isn't sentence-making (although I could spend a year reworking the same sentence); it's finding unexpected connections.\" Author Dawn Raffel rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new book, Boundless As The Sky (Sagging\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/raffel2023comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C792&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/raffel2023comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C792&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/raffel2023comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C792&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/raffel2023comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C792&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/raffel2023comp.jpg?fit=1200%2C792&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1982,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/writing-and-blogging","url_meta":{"origin":623,"position":3},"title":"Writing and Blogging","author":"Gil","date":"April 2, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The NY Observer has a funny article about how there's no \"career path\" for writers nowadays, because they can't work their way up from magazines into high-paying jobs as 'intelligentsia' or something, the way they once could. 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Then I began to notice after I got married and had kids that those things from earlier in my life began to disappear.\" With\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/portercomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C579&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/portercomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C579&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/portercomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C579&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/portercomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C579&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/portercomp.jpg?fit=1200%2C579&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":16094,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-541-jonathan-papernick","url_meta":{"origin":623,"position":5},"title":"Episode 541 – Jonathan Papernick","author":"Gil","date":"June 6, 2023","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 541: Jonathan Papernick Author Jonathan Papernick joins the show to celebrate his fantastic new short story collection, Gallery of the Disappeared Men, and new novel, I am my Beloveds (Story Plant). 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