Man’s best friend just got a few more gold stars.
Trained dogs are now sniffing out cancer. And according to a study done by someplace called the Pine Street foundation they are doggone good at it. Like 99% of the time dead on accurate.
Now it’s long been know that doggies have pretty accurate noses. In fact those wet snuffers can sort out a stink of less than a few parts per billion. To put it another way a dog could smell a single grain of salt in a swimming pool.
Which begs the question why my dog once ate a skunk but that’s for another time.
So these scientific types captured the breath of a group of people with either lung or Breast cancer and some without, bottled it and let the dogs sniff away. Of course these pooches were trained to recognize what cancer smells like and sit when they did. Time after time the md’s (medical dogs?) sat when they snorted cancer.
Dogs have been used for a long time to ferret out drugs, bombs and even dead people. Now man’s best buddy may help us to live longer. It’s an interesting thought and not a big leap to wonder if the doggies couldn’t be trained to sniff out a few other things.
Could a properly trained dog work at a bank beside a loan officer and sniff out deadbeats? Could we have roving rovers patrol the halls of congress for bribe takers, or maybe let them on the senate floor, trained to bark when they detect a lie?
On second thought that probably wouldn’t be too practical. The dogs would make so much noise you’d never hear anything else.
Tired. Another run of long-ass late nights on the job. But…and this is a pretty important but, Sunday off.
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Just got an exceptionally high blood sugar-trying an experiment to lower it. Report in a few lines.
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Google anal-lytics say readers are fleeing this stain on the internet like lemmings before the sea. Buh bye, readers. Come back someday?
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The hummingbirds move their little feet like they are running when they sip from our feeder. It’s hysterical.
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Mama robin has once more picked the nest by the porch to make her home and has three eggs she is working on. This always ends the same way. Because she is constantly flying out when we leave the house the attention of some predator who likes delicious robins eggs or even worse baby robins is drawn to her nest. The result is always the same.
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A great time was had by us at the Back Mt. library auction. Details will be in Wednesdays WEEKENDER column. We will go back today and probably for a while on Sunday. We are good customers. I love the library. You can leave with thousands of dollars worth of books, videos, cds, etc. and it’s all free. As long as you bring them back.
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Do I betray my age, saying “videos?” Should I say DVDs?
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My MGB has brakes again which makes it infinitely more pleasurable (not to mention safer) to drive. It received it’s yearly going over and inspection. Ted, the affable MG mechanic, allows as how it is showing it’s age. The car is the exact same age as my older son, who celebrates 37 today. He has parts that are failing him as well, most notably the new hairless do mandated by loss of follicles. Such is life.
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Blood sugar experiment…epic fail. I can think of no reason why I am getting elevated numbers. This disease is as baffling as it is depressing. I think I will go eat something.
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My old boss from the radio (the best boss I have had in this life,bar none) and a guy I consider a close friend is coming back to town to work for a radio group that I also worked for years ago. He has some challenges there, but that is what he excels at. It’s odd that he would end back here. Radio is a very closed circuit sometimes. Welcome back, John. Hope we get to spend some quality time near a purveyor of fine wine.
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It’s been really hot here. Humid too. My god…am I resorting to talking about the weather? Shame on me.
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I mentioned here last week that I was considering doing away with the Rant D’Jour post. I am still thinking about it. High blood sugar numbers and lower Google numbers today. I could easily go into a tailspin. So I will hang it up for today.
As always, those of you left, both of you. Thanks for reading.
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The Rant D’Jour is about an unfortunate personality trait of mine.
I hate buying new clothes. I am probably the least fashion oriented person on the planet. There are… more
I am probably the least fashion oriented person on the planet. There are a number of reasons for this. Remember the Police song “King of pain� Well I am the king of stain. Give me a light colored shirt and lunch and I will put the two together faster than you can say egg on your tie.
The long-suffering wife shows me new evidence of this personality trait every day. “What is this?†she will ask, showing me something on my pants. “Probably something I didn’t eat†I will reply and then duck quickly out of the room. So it makes no sense for me to have high quality clothing.
The odds of me putting an uncapped felt tipped pen in my shirt pocket are directly related to the price of the shirt. The more it costs the more likely I am going home with clothing that will end up being used to wash the car.
The other problem is my constantly shrinking and expanding size. I live from diet to diet. I can lose and gain more weight more quickly than anyone I know. So as a result I have to keep buying clothes in bigger and then smaller sizes. I have closets full of the in-between sizes. The conventional wisdom is when you lose weight to throw away your fat clothes. For me this would be a financial catastrophe so I have clothes that fit me now and clothes that will fit me before Thanksgiving and after Christmas. And so on.
Yet every time I lose a significant amount of weight I somehow find myself at the door of the dressing room. And I can’t tell you how much I hate this experience in words I can use in public. I think it stems from childhood where Mom would wait outside the fitting room and approve or disapprove the selections. This is still how it works but instead it’s the long- suffering wife who passes judgment. I just want to be anywhere else, preferably at lunch.
Finding anything that fits my short legs and large waist is always a challenge. The size I need is never the size they have and if by some miracle they have my size the one I find has been magically altered so it doesn’t fit. It makes for an unpleasant experience at best and at worst turns me into a snarling uncooperative jerk with the manners of a five year old. You haven’t seen anything till you see me throw pants around in the K-mart trying to find something that comes close to fitting. The first manufacturer who comes up with clothing that automatically adjusts to your current size gets my vote for king of the world.
If you feel bad that you didn’t get me a Fathers day gift I have a way for you to make it up.
Buy me this new Volkswagen.
Bugatti Veyron
More on that in a moment.
I currently alternate my driving between two automobiles. One is a sort of downsized SUV called an Outlander. Mitsubishi makes it. You of World War 2 vintage may remember their fine zero aircraft. I digress.
My second, fair weather only car is a MGB. It’s a car for people who like cars that don’t run. It’s from ’74.
Both of these cars have only four puny cylinders, thank you OPEC oil producing companies. In both cases you could mark the amount of time it takes to go from 0 to 60 mph using a calendar. Built for speed these are not.
When I was growing up Volkswagen meant a “bug”. The lovable little rear engine almost a car. People called them pregnant roller skates.
Now of course Volkswagen makes all sorts of fancy cars.
Including the Bugatti Veyron.
It’s the world’s most expensive car and it may be fastest.
Price tag? 1 Million smackers. 0 to 60 ? 2.5 seconds. Count that to yourself. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thou…and you’re breaking the speed limit on almost any US highway. Cylinders? 16. 12 more than my cars. 1001 horsepower. Top speed? 252 mph.
Let’s put that in perspective. NASCAR Driver Bill Elliot on the Talladega Superspeedway once went 212 MPH. In a car with roll bars wearing a fireproof suit on a track by himself. Right after that NASCAR made the cars go slower. The Veyron would have passed “awesome” Bill like he was tied to a post.
I once got to ride in a jet powered truck at an air show. It had two jet engines in the cargo bed. It went 319 miles per hour. When I tell people I went 319 miles per hour they look at me like I have sprouted another head on my shoulders.
Yup-319 MPH
But if you get me Volkswagen Bugatti Veyron I will make everyone a believer. I wonder what the fine would be for going 200 mph over the speed limit? I guess if you can afford a 1 million dollar car you don’t need to worry about that.
I am not sure what the PD did with his days. I know he spent zero time programming the music on WJNC. That’s because the announcers had total freedom and control over what was played, when it was played and how often.
Heh.
Sounds good until you come to the fact that you could only play what the station had in its library. And there was the rub. Next to the control console was a bin with 45’s in slots labeled by type. “Inst†for instrumental (no vocals), current male, current female and current group. Current was only a relative term at WJNC. I think the newest songs were 6 months to a year old. There may have been a Carpenters song. Maybe a Donnie Osmond. Contemporary it was not.
Then behind the control room was the LP library. It was, as I recall, quite extensive. Possibly 2-3 thousand albums of middle of the road artists in loose alphabetical order. Jack Jones, Al Martino, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Perry Como and so on, ad nauseam.
Beyond the loose formatics of don’t play two females back to back (not sure why, but this was taught like it was the golden rule) you were pretty much on your own. At least I was, for a while.
Working on the radio in that era was a busy proposition. You had to pick the music, play the music, time out to join network news to the second on the top of the hour and prepare the stacks of commercials to be played off carts and read live from scripts. Plus you had to tend to the cranky automation running the FM and gather news for the hourly newscasts. It was a pretty hectic work day and the hours from 10am to 3pm I worked on the air (Midday) went by very quickly for the most part.
Once you learned the technical aspects of the job and mastered the foibles of the equipment it was a fun job. The console was wired oddly – you played three of the cart machines on one pot or volume control but the three were sequential. So machines 1, 2 and 3 were on one pot, 4, 5 and 6 on another-sounds logical but cart technology in those days was not real sophisticated. It was not uncommon for a cart to miss it’s recue and play again or if the cart was recorded sloppy, for it to “burp†on recue. The trick was to “pot downâ€, turn the volume control down after a cart finished. This meant you had to remember to play them in the right sequence. It went pretty smoothly once you got the hang of it. I concentrated my efforts of making the music at least palatable to my 20 year old sensibilities.
Big mistake.
One of the office gals was friendly. In those days I viewed all the people I worked with as “Older†so I am not sure how old she was. In retrospect she was probably in her forties. She was a blonde southern gal and she may have been a cougar although I was numb to that at the time. Faithfulness to my pregnant wife was not even something I thought about. It just was. She told me she noticed that music I played was “Up tempo.†That when she was driving and listening to me her foot was heavy on the gas. I thought that was a compliment. She was, in her very nice way, trying to warn me.
After about a month, PD called me into his office for a meeting. The subject was the music I was playing. It wouldn’t be the last time I was called into a meeting with radio station management about the music, but this was the first. He allowed as how I needed to “tone down†my music tempo. That the owner, Bob Mendlesome, was telling him I was playing too much “Rock and Roll.â€
I was flabbergasted. And pissed off. Out of the lousy library of music (to my 20 year old ears) I was playing too much “Uptempo†music? I went back and my attitude was “Screw them.†I know what I am doing. I had always had a problem with authority. Now they were saying I didn’t know how to pick music? I’ll show them.
Big mistake #2.
So for a few days I picked nothing but the slowest, most syrupy and boring music I could find. I mean the most up-tempo thing I played was a waltz. Listening to my show must have been like taking a sleeping pill. I went WAY too far, over-reacted and it was obvious I was being rebellious.
Back in PDs office a few days later the meeting was quick and not pleasant. If it had been me I would have fired me. But he was stuck with me. Finding someone to work the shifts he had me filling would be more work for him. So his solution, no doubt at the behest of the owner, was to program my music.
So, for the rest of my mercifully brief time at WJNC the PD had to supply me with a stack of records to play, and a little playlist written out for me. Bob hated this because it meant he actually had to DO something. I hated it because I took it personally. It was the beginning of the end for me on the airwaves of North Carolina.
I was told that as part of my compensation that I would be assigned to do “remote broadcasts†for extra dough. Charest was clearly uneasy about sending me out to represent the station with my long hair and beard but I pressured him about it and he finally relented and sent me to a “bar gig†where I was to learn southern hospitality in a big way.
I am sure Bob got a big laugh thinking about it. Watch this scene from the “Blues Brothers†movie:
The difference was I was on the stage by myself (and there WAS chicken wire between me and the audience) playing records. The same hostile audience. The same reaction as I tried to play what I thought was “dance music†for the shit-kicker crowd. The nicest thing they called me was “longhaired freak.†The worst involved my parents and some sort of incest.
I got my hair cut and shaved my beard off the next day. I may have been rebellious but I was beginning to be smarter about it.
It was winter when we were in the South. To a born and bred, never left New England boy the concept of warm days in February with no winter coats was exciting. We went to a beach one Saturday and spent the whole day soaking up the sun.
Big mistake #3.
I am Irish and fair skinned. The hours of sun turned me into a pain pig. That Saturday night I was a puking, shaking, sweating mess. I was really sick and so I called Bob to see if he had anyone who could fill in for me, at least for the morning portion of my 12 hour Sunday.
Bob had no fill in announcers and no sympathy for me.
“If you was in the Marines they would throw you in the stockade for abusing guvmint property boy! Jest get yourself in there, you’ll be OK.â€
I really was beginning to dislike him.
NEXT: Slave labor in the production studio, the first experience as a “Sock Hop” DJ, my shortcomings as a newscaster exposed and the end of my time at WJNC.
The Rant D’Jour is about fat and games.
Sometimes I can’t help but be amazed at the headlines in the newspaper. It seems to me sometimes that…Rant D’Jour
Sometimes I can’t help but be amazed at the headlines in the newspaper. It seems to me sometimes that I may be the only one who looks at them and thinks, are we in complete denial or just stupid?
Case in point. Two headlines in a recent issue of USA Today.
Obese boomers face immobile future. And right under that Stacking cups hits the heights.
OK. The obese headline needs no explanation. As we get older and fatter the chances we are going to end up in a pride mobility scooter are ever increasing. And the generation of baby boomers is at most risk.
But the cup deal?
It seems that the latest competitive challenge in our world is something called sport stacking. The idea is you take these plastic cups and make a pyramid out of them and then take it down. Fastest stacker wins. That’s it. When I was a kid we had what was called in those days when dinosaurs had leathery wings and flew low over our heads recess. It involved things like running, jumping, dodge ball and other forms of exercise in the fresh air. If I had suggested to my teacher that we sit at our desks and stack cups I would have suffered what we called back then corporal punishment. You know, a crack across the dupa and be sent to the principals office.
Now here’s a quote from the teacher of the year in the fine state of Delaware whose motto is Liberty and Independence. Doesn’t mention smart.
The teacher of the year said “”It’s the perfect elementary activity, because you don’t have to be physically gifted to do it.”
Amen to that.
So we are teaching our kids at an early age that they don’t have to be physically gifted or even physical at all to be great at something. They can just sit there and make piles of cups and then unmake them. And we wonder why kids are becoming fatter, lazier and stupid.
I am just pointing at another one of those signposts on the slippery slope to the warm place. The slope seems to be getting steeper and more slippery all the time.
A couple of nights before the Fourth, the chimes of freedom were flashing.
Bob Dylan wrote “The Chimes of Freedom†in 1964. 47 years ago. I was ten. I am certain I had no ideas about freedom or drawing comparisons to thunder and lightning and the concepts he was singing about. But I liked the song. I am even more certain now that I only barely have a grasp on what Dylan wrote about. But I still like the song. What I write here owes a lot to him.
I love thunder and lightning storms. When I can watch them from a safe place, that is. Something majestic there is about that power. With a crash and a stroke of light the power goes out and then comes back on. I arise from my bed and tell the long-suffering wife the mission is to reset the sump pumps in the basement. We have been married a long time. She knows where I am really headed.
I stand on our tiny porch. It doesn’t really protect me from the rain when the wind blows but tonight the downpours stay on their side of the roof. I watch the eerie, stop motion of light and dark, the flashbulb glimpses of the place where I live life, love life and work to keep it safe and ours. I admit the “Majestic bells of bolts†made me cringe involuntarily. If the LSW was up she would exhort me to come in to safety and not be an idiot. I am what I am. She slumbers through the pyrotechnics.
Sometimes I wonder if what we see of real life isn’t just what is illuminated by zaps of clear light in-between the darkness. It’s a life of quiet desperation mostly, isn’t it? The fine things, a good glass of wine, a smile of genuine delight from a youngster, coupled with the moments of abject terror about our own sure mortality followed closely by the realization that we are never more alive, then when we are close to death. And in the big scheme of things we are always a moment closer to death. Another brilliant flash and crash. I listened one last time, took one last look.
It’s a lot to burden a weather phenomenon with, I think.
The storm passes. I reset the sump pumps and return to bed.
The medals on a soldier’s chest are supposed to be symbols of what he or she has gone through in the service of their country. A Purple Heart is awarded to those injured in combat. A Bronze Star Award is made for acts of heroism and our nations highest such award, the Medal of Honor is awarded by the President in the name of Congress to a person who, distinguishes himself or herself at the risk of his life or her life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States.
The deed performed must have been one of personal bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual above his comrades and must have involved risk of life. Incontestable proof of the performance of the service will be exacted and each recommendation for the award of this decoration will be considered on the standard of extraordinary merit.
So you can see that they don’t just hand out those sorts of medals like prizes in cereal boxes. But you may be disturbed to learn that you can buy actual medals on EBay.
And to make it worse some of those medals have found their way onto the chests of men, and I use that term advisedly, who have never even been a member of our armed forces, never mind served in combat.
Why would someone stoop so low as to pretend to be a combat veteran? They get to play the role of a war hero at military funerals, banquets and benefits. They do it for attention and to get noticed.
And soon, if they get caught, they can play the role of cellmate to a large man named Bubba. Congress is considering passing the stolen valor act which would make it a crime to even claim the medal was earned. Right now if you wear a medal of honor you could go to the slammer for a year and pay a hefty $100,000 fine. If this bill passes it will make it a crime to wear any medal you paid for but didn’t earn.
No matter what you think about war and it’s consequences you have to believe that is justice. All I can think about is what my Father, who earned his medals with blood, would say to some creep wearing a medal he bought at a flea market. It wouldn’t be pretty.
