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The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Archives for June 2006

The Father Leans On The Son

June 23, 2006 by Jack Steiner 3 Comments

Life never slows down. It doesn’t stop and it doesn’t wait. No matter how badly you try to hold on and no matter how desperately you beg for it to just give you a moment to catch your breath you are forced to accept a simple truth.

Life continues.

In the midst of your glory and in the middle of your pain life continues. The river just never stops flowing.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

My father just called to ask for my advice. It seems that my grandfather is not doing as well as he could be doing. When I was at their house last night we noticed that he seemed a little weaker and that something wasn’t quite right, but at his age it is to be expected. Some days are good and some are bad.

Anyway, my father called to consult with me regarding what to do about my grandfather. Do we take him into the hospital or do we wait and see what happens. In some respects it seems to be an easy decision, but like so many others there are some twists.

At his age it is quite likely that he’ll be admitted to the hospital. There are a couple of concerns. During the past 18 months he has been hospitalized about three times, once for a broken pelvis and twice for some other issues that his doc attributes to his old age.

Each stay leaves him disoriented. Each stay pushes him further into a place inside his head that we cannot follow. He grows less responsive to anyone besides my father and myself, and even that is at times sketchy. If you push him he will respond. He recognizes us, but sometimes the dates are screwed up and sometimes he thinks that I am my father, albeit a younger version.

Here are the other components currently involved in this decision. We haven’t been able to get in touch with his doc to discuss this, but have discussed this with my BIL the doctor. My BIL is in touch with my grandfather’s doc and familiar with his health, but at the same time he is not here to say yea or nay.

At the moment he says the decision is up to us.

The next ingredient in our recipe is that my parents are supposed to leave tomorrow for a weekend trip. If we could definitively say that this is a major health episode they would cancel it, but at the moment we can’t make that determination.

So now we are waiting for my grandfather’s doc to call and are hopeful that he’ll provide a little guidance. In the interim I am concerned. The fear that I wrote about still exists. I worry about my father and my grandfather.

I have instructed my father to go on this trip. I want him and my mother to get away. I am here to watch over my grandfather and if need be I’ll see that he is taken to the hospital. But I worry and wonder.

And now I am going to spend a little time with my son. My beautiful little boy who says that when dads have a bad day they should go to a place where dads can play with their sons because that always makes them feel better.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Supervolcanoes

June 23, 2006 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

And while we are on the topic of science I’d like to share this too. Sometimes the world reminds us how very small we are.

“Lurking deep below the surface in California and Wyoming are two hibernating volcanoes of almost unimaginable fury. Were they to go critical, they would blanket the western U.S. with many centimeters of ash in a matter of hours. Between them, they have done so at least four times in the past two million years. Similar supervolcanoes smolder underneath Indonesia and New Zealand.

A supervolcano eruption packs the devastating force of a small asteroid colliding with the earth and occurs 10 times more often–making such an explosion one of the most dramatic natural catastrophes humanity should expect to undergo. Beyond causing immediate destruction from scalding ash flows, active supervolcanoes spew gases that severely disrupt global climate for years afterward.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Study says spider web developed just once

June 23, 2006 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

I find science to be quite interesting.

“WASHINGTON – Will you walk into my parlor, said a Cretaceous spider to an ancient fly. The classic spider’s web, like Charlotte would have woven, was invented just once, way back in the Cretaceous period some 136 million years ago, scientists report.

Called an orb web, it’s the generally circular style spun by two major types of spiders, which had raised the possibility of the two groups evolving this form separately.

But a paper in Friday’s issue of the journal Science says a comparison of the spider genes related to web making shows that the orb web developed just once.

Researchers led by Jessica Garb of the University of California, Riverside, compared orb-web building spiders in the genuses Deinopoidea and Araneoidea. Both build orb webs to catch prey and the deinopoids also include net-casting spiders that throw a modified orb web over their prey.

Araneoids include the orb weavers such as golden silk spiders with their traditional spiraling web as well as those that weave sheet webs.

Garb said in a statement that the finding “does not support a double origin for the orb web,” but indicates that the unique design evolved only once.

While the two groups probably developed orb-web spinning from a common ancestor, they came up with different ways of making the web catch prey.

Araneoid webs have glue droplets that make prey stick to the web, while deinopoids wrap their threads with a different type of silk fiber that “the spiders comb, until it almost has the appearance of Velcro under a microscope, and they snag insects that way,” Garb reported.

Not all spiders make orb webs. The black widow, for example, weaves a web that is a tangle of silk without the circular pattern.”

Click here for the story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The World Cup is Over

June 22, 2006 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

The US is out of the World Cup. Consider me one of 170 people who noticed but not one who cares all that much.

Though one day I suspect you might see us dominating the sport just because we can, assuming that we don’t all fall asleep.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Sleep Sex Is No Joke

June 22, 2006 by Jack Steiner 1 Comment

Is it just me or does this look like it should be in the National Enquirer.

Sex While Sleeping Is Real, And May Be No Joke

“An extreme form of sleep-walking-having sex while asleep-is probably much more common than physicians have previously suspected, researchers reported here.

“The important message is that this is a real entity,” said Colin Shapiro, M.B., ChB, Ph.D., of the University Health Network in Toronto at Sleep 2006, the joint meeting of the Sleep Research Society and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Doctors and others, including prosecutors, need to take this reality into account, he added. “It’s a more common problem than people have hitherto recognized.”

“I look at it as one form of parasomnia,” he said in an interview. “People walk in their sleep, they talk in their sleep, they drive their motorbikes in their sleep, they eat in their sleep, and they have sex in their sleep.”

Dr. Shapiro and colleagues reported the results of an anonymous 28-item Internet survey that had 219 validated responses. “It’s not huge,” Dr. Shapiro said, and like all Internet research it has limitations, “but for me it’s a proof of principle.” A more directed survey, among 300 patients at Dr. Shapiro’s Toronto sleep clinic, is under way, he said.

“The problem with an Internet survey,” he said, “is that you don’t know who you’ve surveyed.” So, for instance, the researchers say they have no idea how prevalent sex during sleep—dubbed “sexomnia”-actually is among the general population.

On the other hand, the Internet survey appears to show that the problem-once thought to be predominately found in males-actually is more broadly distributed: Thirty-one percent of the 219 respondents were female.’


Click here to read the whole story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Too Many Sequels

June 22, 2006 by Jack Steiner 10 Comments

One of the diseases of the modern filmmaker is the need to make sequels to a film. In and of itself a sequel is not necessarily a bad thing and sometimes can be better than the original film.

The problem arises when the company decides that in the name of profit they are going to just keep pumping out films and to hell with the quality. Here is a short stream of consciousness list of movies that went astray.

Jaws– A classic film and a classic soundtrack. Without Jaws we wouldn’t have had the fun of watching spin-off flick Orca. Of course we wouldn’t have been subjected to such horrific movies as Jaws IV.

Revenge of The Nerds
– The first one was ok and kind of fun but by the time they got to number 4 it was just painful.

Police Academy– First movie was fine. It wasn’t spectacular but it was enjoyable. If I am not mistaken they are still making these films. Police Academy 27 rolls out later this week.

Rocky– I admit to having enjoyed each one, but by the time they reached Rocky 49 I was just bored beyond belief.

Batman– The Batman series as done by Tim Burton was never great and at times rarely good. The first one was enjoyable in part because of the novelty but Batman and Robin was horrible. On the other hand Batman Begins was excellent.

Analyze This– Ok, Deniro and Crystal pulled off a few laughs in this one but the sequel Analyze That was so bad SAG threatened to pull their cards.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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