Colonoscopy Fun!

Similar to my own recent experience. Thanks to Jim R.
DO NOT LET THIS STOP YOU FROM GETTNG ONE. IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!
Dave Barry's colonoscopy journal: I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis . Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!' I left Andy's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I willdiscuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies. I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because > MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon. The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground. MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you> have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet. After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, 'What if > I spurt on Andy?' How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough. At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked. Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house. When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the> room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs> that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' has to be the least appropriate. 'You want me to turn it up?' said Andy, from> somewhere behind me. 'Ha ha,' I said. And then it> was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like. I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, Feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that 'It' was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ. ABOUT THE WRITER: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.

How Hurricanes Gain In Stregnth

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/katrina_seaheight.html

Sit Down Bass

Here's my latest favorite shot from a couple of weeks ago at music camp. Photo is as taken, no fixing. I was my self surprised by the fiddles, and because one of the fiddles was left handed , it framed the bass fiddle wonderfully

60's Terrorists

Thanks to Bob T. for this

counterpunch.com Weekend EditionAugust 2 / 3, 2008
Westmoreland, Johnson and Nixon
Meet the Real Terrorists of the 1960s
By HARVERY WASSERMAN Hate-mongering against alleged “leftist 1960s terrorists” now fills the days of anti-Obama rage for the Rovian bloviator battalion. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Baby Boom professors, social workers , etc, are front and center for the hateful blatherings of the usual GOP flunkies all cowering at the prospect of an African-American president. But there were, indeed, three 1960s terrorists whose murderous, planet-killing rampage continues to poison this nation. They tower above all others. Their names: William Westmoreland, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.This unholy trinity killed outright more than 55,000 Americans and several million southeast Asians---most of them innocent civilians---while bombing, strafing and spewing horrific toxic chemicals onto countless of square miles of previously pristine jungle. Their Agent Orange caused tens of thousands of deaths and deformities that still carry through the generations.No single terror act in the history of the United States even remotely compares to the lethal psychosis that created and was then furthered by the Vietnam War.As Commander In Chief of US forces in Southeast Asia, Westmoreland dragged the US into the Vietnam quagmire. He repeatedly assured Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam’s north-south civil war was “winnable”.In the 1980s I debated Westmoreland on two campuses (the University of Florida and Juneata College) and heard him tell me directly that “we never lost the war in Vietnam.” According to the man who lit the fuse, the US spent all those lives and dollars “successfully protecting” Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines from Communist dictatorships. Never mind that Suharto (Indonesia), Lee Kwan Yew (Singapore), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines) were among history’s most violent and authoritarian kleptocrats. In Westmoreland’s world, all that death, destruction and expenditure were worth it to keep these torturers in office while they stacked billions of public dollars in their private bank accounts.Lyndon Johnson bought Westmoreland’s lies. With Defense Secretary Robert McNamara explaining the war in terms of “kill ratios,” Johnson used a fake non-attack by alleged North Vietnamese gunboats to get a blank check from Congress and impose wholesale slaughter on both the US and Vietnam.’Johnson’s March, 1965, decision to escalate the war is arguably the turning point from which America’s moral standing and quality of life took their definitive downward plunge.While he crumbled from the psychological and spiritual strain, LBJ sent 550,000 Americans to Vietnam to perpetrate a human and ecological slaughter on a scale unique in the modern annals of gratuitous terror.Richard Nixon followed with still more. After winning the presidency based on a “Secret Plan” to end the war, he escalated air attacks on an innocent nation that exceeded all the explosive tonnage dropped during World War 2. Nixon illegally expanded the war into Cambodia, where three million civilians eventually died in wholesale slaughter.At home, Nixon’s close friend, Governor James A. Rhodes, furnished the Ohio National Guard with the live ammunition they used to kill four unarmed students. Two more died soon thereafter in an official attack on a college dormitory at Mississippi’s Jackson State.A clearly deranged psychotic, Nixon’s resignation journey should have taken him straight to prison, rather than to a presidential retreat alongside the Pacific.None of these horrific terrorists was ever prosecuted or imprisoned. But their ungodly assault drove America’s economy, currency, health care and educational systems, moral and military standing, and much, much more, into a deep decline from which we have yet to recover. None of those bilious corporate bloviators ever mention these highest-ranking terrorists in their rants against all things sixties. But when it comes to an American axis of evil perpetrating useless, gratuitous and totally unredeemed mass destruction of people and the planet, this is the 1960s trio that overshadows all others.
Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com