So last week we got a cat.

We couldn't just get any cat though. Jules and I had been searching for weeks on Petfinder and whatnot for orange, already declawed cats.

"Declawed". Yes, a word rife with controversy and consternation. I had no clue.

When we went to the National Adoption Weekend being hosted at the local Petsmart and mentioned that we were looking for an already declawed cat, I immediately had several pamphlets and accusatory looks thrown my way. Apparently cat lovers do not take kindly to the declawing process.

Naturally Julie tried to hold her ground with the ladies at the Petsmart who were explaining to us how cruel the whole thing was, and equally naturally I made it my job to make the situation even more of a mess.

Jules: We're looking for an already declawed cat so we don't have to declaw a kitten.

Me: Babe, look at this pamphlet. Did you know that they cut the whole bone off? This looks terrible!

In a chat earlier today with the LastBestAngryMan, he informed me of a new drug that may be sweeping the nation.

Perhaps the cat's pooping habits may be of some use after all!

I don't want to think about what two straight posts on feces is going to do to my search statistics.

Now that I'm home from work, I can finish what I started in Part I.

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Sunday Morning - The Big Day

After nearly killing Jeff, we spent the remainder of the day relaxing and drinking some beers. Figuring my task was not nearly difficult enough, I stayed up until about 2 AM chatting and drinking beer after beer. By the time Jeff and I stood up to go to bed, the ground was actually spinning.

Real smart move. I went to bed and woke up with a well deserved headache.

A couple of aspirin, two bottles of water and three cups of coffee later, it was time to face the hour of my reckoning.

Sunday Afternoon - Meet Your Partner

With the wedding now 12 days away, as you can imagine things have been a little busy. Add to that the fact that I'm trying to get a big project done at work in the middle of all this and you basically have a situation where when I do have some free time available I haven't been spending it blogging.

In lieu of some meatier updates, I'm just going to do a real quick rundown of some things I've wanted to blog about but haven't done so yet.

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Last weekend I spent about an hour or so putting a bookshelf together. It's one of those "no tools required" bookshelves so that anti-handymen like myself may end up with something that has an outside chance of actually holding up books when completed.

I suspect that most of the people here would agree with me, although it hasn't exactly come up in an overt way: the majority of kids who come to the attention of adults because of their alcohol or drug using behavior don't, fundamentally, have a drug problem. If kids are smoking pot before class, they have a school problem. If they are drinking six beers at a party and then driving home, they might have a social problem and they certainly have a judgment problem, as most adolescents do. Kids in poor neighborhoods who end up involved with criminal drug dealing gangs likely have an economic problem.

But the basic issue is not that there are bad chemicals out there and we need to sit down and talk with them about chemicals. There might be something we need to talk with them about, or really, there might not be a problem at all -- they might just be experimenting because kids like to try new things. The vast majority who do so do not end up getting into any kind of trouble at all, except for the trouble that overreacting adults make for them.

I have yet to solve this puzzle known as employment. Last post dealt with the wondrous lessons I learned as a temp, most of which reflected a certain bitterness after a day spent in the closest thing I've got to a business suit, passing out folders to European doctors who looked at me like I had some sort of contagious fungus on my face. Two days later, I got to play a faux mobster in a scavenger hunt and make sixty dollars talking about how my cousin got himself flattened under a parade route's worth of elephants. Yet, since then: nothing. We're about 4 days away from signing up for electroshock studies. $100 for 3 hours of voltage-induced agony, eh? Do they pay for parking?

The give and take is this: no work equals no money but no work equals no stress. Call it the reverse Puff Daddy corrolary; if mo money means mo problems, no money means no problems. After all, food and shelter: highly overrated.

They got some pretty little women there and .. .

Oh, never mind. Anyway, my jet setting lifestyle continues as I will be in Jersey City Sunday through Wednesday for the Third International Conference on Antiretroviral Adherence. Sounds a little narrow, I know, but the subject actually is quite revealing as a test case for physician-patient relationships and communication and disease management and stuff in general.

Conference presentations aren't as strictly and paranoically embargoed as journal articles, so I will tell you that in general terms, my colleagues and I have found that if you give doctors a report about their patients' medication taking behavior, they will indeed talk about it more during the visit -- twice as much, on average, in fact. However, that does not result in the patients being more adherent to their medication regimens.

In fact, it has the opposite effect.

I'm not a Microsoft hater. In fact, I like Microsoft quite a bit. I think Surface looks pretty cool, Excel isn't that bad of an app, and .NET is waaaaay fun to code in.

However, I can certainly understand why people get so frustrated with them. Whenever I do web work, for example, I discover some new bizarre behavior in IE 6. Sometimes the way something is implemented in .NET will make you scratch your head. It is frustrating that Office doesn't play that well with other products. Etc etc.

Earlier this week I was working on a presentation. This is not something I do that often these days, spending most of my time happy and content inside of a code window. But in past jobs I had to do this sort of thing on a regular basis so it doesn't bother me. I popped open good ol' Powerpoint and got cracking.

Thus we descended into the fourth chasm,
Gaining still farther on the dolesome shore
Which all the woe of the universe insacks...

Here saw I people, more than elsewhere, many,
On one side and the other, with great howls,
Rolling weights forward by main force of chest.

They clashed together, and then at that point
Each one turned backward, rolling retrograde,
Crying, "Why keepest?" and, "Why squanderest thou?"

Thus they returned along the lurid circle
On either hand unto the opposite point,
Shouting their shameful metre evermore.

  -- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy - Inferno

About a month ago Jules and I moved into a new place. I'd use that as an excuse for not having posted in awhile, but the real reason is that I've just been extremely lazy.

Monday morning I continue my jet setting lifestyle by flying off to DC for the Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness. That refers to substance abuse treatment.

Now, like a lot of you, the way I remember my adolescence the biggest drug problem we had was insufficient supply. However, the problem we have today is entirely different. There is a major epidemic of adolescent opioid addiction in the U.S. right now, including 16 and 18 year old kids who inject heroin. When I was a youth the idea of going anywhere near heroin was absolutely appalling. I never knew anyone who would even consider it. Ditto with meth. Yes, people got into that stuff but usually not so young, and it was largely limited to poor communities. Scholars of addiction could honestly say that the problem was not drugs, but lack of life prospects, or psychological damage. People with jobs to go to and education to pursue could get high on weekends but they would show up on Monday because they had a reason to, and they did not become addicted.

day than a summer day today. It's cold and dreary, overcast and intermittently rainy. We were out late last night "gallactic bowling" with some friends. It was sort of fun, but I drank too much beer, ate too much bowling alley food, and well, I can't deny it... bowling kicked my ass. I started off strong with a spare, then as I got tireder and tireder (I know that's not a word) I got worse and worse and got many many gutter balls. But oh well, better than sitting home on my birthday. : )

Got tagged by DM Osbon for this blog meme all the cool kids are into. Now that I am doing it, that almost certainly means it has ceased to be cool but I'll give it a shot anyway.

Four Jobs I have had in my life (not including current job):

1. Shopping Cart Pusher - I collected shopping carts in the lot part time one summer at a grocery store. I actually witnessed more rampant drug use at this particular job than any other place I worked, including waiting tables. Once I also saw a couple guys throwing boxes of cereal up into the ceiling fans in back. That was absolutely spectacular. Me, I just pushed carts for four hours straight with a fifteen minute break somewhere in the middle. Time has never, ever moved more slowly than it did that summer.

Erratic posting lately is due to a trip to Brockton yesterday, and another day trip to Portsmouth today. Tomorrow I have to go to Lowell. These excursions all happen mostly over commuter roads, and I can tell you that in spite of the price of gasoline and reports that MBTA ridership is up a bit, the congestion is the same as ever. The state and federal governments just got done spending $16 billion to fix the whole mess by burying the interstate under the center of Boston and adding bridges, tunnels, and service roads all over creation but you already know what happened -- as soon as there was more pavement available, it filled right up. It still takes a half an hour to move a mile and a half from Sullivan Square to the exit to the Callahan Tunnel on I-93 South, all day, every day.

This happens because right now, people don't have much choice. A lot of them live in places that don't offer an easy trip in and out of town on mass transit. Others -- like me much of this week -- need to have their vehicles with them for business. And, if they all decided they couldn't afford the gasoline any more and tried piling into public transit, that wouldn't work either, because getting on an MBTA train is already to know what it's like to be trash in a compactor.

I'm surprised that an incident that occurred last Saturday night didn't get more attention on the news, especially here in New York.

A Yankee fan and his girlfriend were in a bar in Cambridge, MA when they were accosted by three guys who were apparently Red Sox fans and started busting on him about being a fan of the Yankees (he was wearing a Yankee hat). The couple then walked out of the bar when the group of three white males attacked the Yankee fan, and he suffered head and facial injuries. Fortunately they were not serious injuries.

More on the incident: http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/homepage/x1637136069

I was disturbed to hear that something like this happened. There was a similar incident last October, but the team loyalties were reversed. A Red Sox fan in a bar in Yonkers, NY got into an argument with two Yankee fans, and after he left the bar they attacked him and he was seriously hurt and spent time in the hospital.

A week before Army Gen. David Petraeus updates Congress on the war in Iraq, two new studies have found that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from especially high rates of post-combat psychological problems, exacerbated by an unusually high rate of repeat deployments.

Veterans for America’s (VFA) Wounded Warrior Outreach Program is concerned with the staggeringly high levels of mental health problems and neurological injuries experienced by today’s troops, and the lack of resources and rehabilitative programs available for our wounded.

Okay, let's imagine you're a U.S. Army psychiatrist.

Oh, so they attack your base with mortars every night? How does that make you feel?

Mmhmm, difficulty sleeping, I see.

Whenever you go out they what? Try to kill you with bombs, machine guns, and rocket propelled grenades? So do you think people are out to get you?

And how does that make you feel?

Anxious, afraid? Ah hah. Angry?

Well you know that's irrational, President Bush isn't shooting at you. And what else is bothering you?

You don't like shooting people. Well, we all have a job to do, it isn't always pleasant . . .

There is no genre in gaming that kicks the crap out of me like First Person Shooters. For reasons unknown, I am just not very good at these. That's kind of a funny thing, because I've played quite a few of them, and college was full of FPS sessions on the campus network. There was a game or two where I became competent, but at some point these games got too fast and confusing for me to handle, and I now spend most of my time getting fragged.

Seriously, I've gotten so bad at these games that there are some of them I can't beat even with cheat codes.

The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.

-Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus, Professor of Psychology

My future mother-in-law came for a visit last week and through the weekend to help finalize a lot of the wedding plans. It was a very accomplishing weekend and I think everybody feels that things are coming together nicely.

During lunch yesterday before she left for the airport, she asked me a very simple question. "How long have your parents lived in Georgia?"

Without too much hesitation I answered that it had been over ten years. For the last few years I have distinctly remembered them moving to Atlanta right around the same time I left for college.

We shouldn't get all misty-eyed at the revelation that the studios are happy the strike has happened.

Jeff Zucker picks up an easy $40 million by terminating overall deals. Peter Chernin is the face of reality when he boasts, "We save more money in..., you know, story costs and probably the lack of making pilots than we lose in potential advertising."

We shouldn't be surprised that a cable network told a tv-writer last week that her movie will go into production, but before they green light her project, they need the tiniest of rewrites before they green light. They know the WGA doesn't want her to do the work, but maybe she could 'supervise' someone else who could. Wink, wink.

Item One: It is my duty to comment on the study published last week in NEJM that came up with a new estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. The consensus spin on this was "See, those peaceniks got all hysterical over the earlier estimate of 600,000, it was only 150,000." So I guess the war was a good idea after all. Actually neither study is conclusive. The new one was based on a larger sample, which all things being equal is better, but it was conducted later, which is worse. The basic problem is that households in which people have died are less likely to be around to be sampled, and the problem gets worse as time goes on. This happens for a few reasons -- some households get wiped out entirely, and then there is no-one left to sample. Households that have lost the breadwinner are likely to dissolve, to move in with relatives, to leave the country entirely -- as 2 million Iraqis have done.

Prologue: The Heelys Guestapo Incident

Heelys-haters beware: If you would rather spend your energy sniffing out Heelys-wearing kids and reprimanding their parents for letting them wear the devil's rollershoes in your stores than being cordial and professional, maybe you're missing the point of what your job is supposed to be in the first place. (Whatever it is, it isn't playing detective Dickhead from the Heely Police.)

I've been sick
Originally uploaded by m.Lee Hello. I hope everybody had a very nice weekend and end of the week while I have been MIA.

I came down with some horrible stomach flu on Wednesday night and didn't get better until Sunday. It started with the chills Wednesday night and didn't end until I woke up today. But once it was gone it was gone. It was bad enough that I had a hard time feeding blee because I didn't have the calories or the water to spare. Bad enough that I probably shed a few pounds the unhealthy way. And Jon had to work from home on Thursday or Friday so he could help out. I also had to cancel a dental appointment.

The morning plenary was about HIV treatment in poor countries, mostly Africa. There is a lot I could tell you, but in the ten minutes I have between sessions I'll just mention this. It seems that one of the more common reasons that people in Africa don't take their meds as prescribed is because when they don't take the meds, they don't have any appetite, and if they don't have any food, they'd rather not be hungry.

If the clinics can get food from the World Food Program, the people will take their pills, gain weight, and stay healthy. Giving people food is also a good way to make sure they come in for their appointments. So here's a side effect of the rising global price and scarcity of food, which we are experiencing right now. Not only will people starve, they won't take their HIV meds, which means their viral loads will go up and they will become more contagious -- until they die, which will happen sooner, of course.

It's also a reminder that, while the various global funds are doing a a better job of getting medications to people, hunger is still a major problem in much of the world, and it's getting worse. It all goes together.

My troubles with my Wii have been well documented (ZING).

I've struggled for several months now with the little white box, trying to figure out what the heck I should be doing with it. I've tried several games at this point, all of which have been either sent back to the store or traded for another game.

Yesterday it became starkly clear to me that I might just be the problem here with this system.

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In my last post, I asked people to think through the implications of accepting the idea that fibromyalgia (for example -- the analysis extends much further) is, yes, a real phenomenon and a physical phenomenon, and also is located in the brain, not the body parts that hurt. C. Corax notes, correctly, that making the diagnosis psychiatric or psychological both stigmatizes sufferers, and may limit their insurance benefits for the condition. But why is this?

This past weekend I headed up to New Jersey for the sixth annual CraigCon.

Back in college, I made a few great, lasting friendships playing D&D on a regular basis in the old "Conshohocken House". I lived in this house with 4 other people, 2 of which were gamers like myself. We started a game that I ran for close to a year.

One thing you have to understand was we played this game in the basement of that crowded house. The basement was such a mess by the end of that game that I was literally using a pile of old pizza boxes as a table to keep my books and dice. In retrospect it's amazing we didn't contract bubonic plague.

the not so elusive blee smile
Originally uploaded by m.Lee My baby is a happy little caterpillar today. She's a bit of a stinky caterpillar to be honest because I am afraid to give her a proper bath by myself. But I cleaned her up as much as I could getting into her chins with a wet cloth and then lotioning her up good.

At the end of last year, I did a top 10 list of my favorite things that was probably of interest to no one but me. Well tough noogies. I'm doing it again.

Before I do though, it's kind of interesting to take a peek at last year's list and see that some of those things still rank pretty high. I still play Dwarf Fortress (#10) and Guitar Hero (#6) like crazy. I haven't read a book this year that was better than last year's conclusion to the Prince of Nothing series (#3). But there were plenty of highlights from 2007 that made it the greatest of years so far.

10 - Armageddon Empires

From screenwriter Brian Nelson (HARD CANDY, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) --

The other day I had a conversation with a friend of mine who works in Craft Services. It was an unsettling talk. While this friend has been quite supportive of me all through the strike, during this talk he kept raising points that felt more like what people on the other side would say. "Well, it'll take a long time to undo all the damage ... the moment there was a DGA deal, why didn't the WGA just jump on that? ... It seemed like they were a lot more willing to talk to the DGA than to you guys, and I wonder why." I took a while and patiently responded to all these points, but it struck me that every time I'd respond, he didn't really acknowledge it but came back with another bone to pick.

What it brought home to me was that while my friend was definitely on our side because he felt that the corporate bosses were out to screw us all, he still was very wary of the WGA. Now that the WGA didn't need him so overtly on our side, he felt freer to express a lot of the frustration that BTL people must still feel.