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Ideas I need to come back to:
- M&M's Game
- Zombies: RPG
March 18th, 2010
Molly was NOT impressed with S. Patrick's Day, till I showed her that it's all about free green sugar cookies at EVERY Super Market Bakery. I love the thick over-building of these stores, and how you can usually find an Albertsons across the street from a Safeway, which is just on the corner of a Strip-Mall that contains a QFC and a Top Food & Drug. I'll bet that a person with a cute 4-year-old could probably pick up an entire DOZEN free cookies on St. Patrick's Day without even needing to go back to the truck!
March 17th, 2010
FINANCIAL: Spent nothing, still $1.33 OVER my budget of $20 per month. FAIL.
CLEANLINESS: 45-minutes between 9am and 10:30am, interrupted frequently by phone calls and a bored Molly.
HEALTH: 1 Hour on the treadmill for 3.24 miles, 1,149.47 miles to DISNEYLAND!!!
Today has felt like just one long battle. I can't do anything right and everybody is more than willing to point it ut to me. I just want to curl-up in t my big stack of comic books and retreat from the world for a while.
CLEANLINESS: 45-minutes between 9am and 10:30am, interrupted frequently by phone calls and a bored Molly.
HEALTH: 1 Hour on the treadmill for 3.24 miles, 1,149.47 miles to DISNEYLAND!!!
Today has felt like just one long battle. I can't do anything right and everybody is more than willing to point it ut to me. I just want to curl-up in t my big stack of comic books and retreat from the world for a while.
Been so busy with Convention stuff, I didn't have time for my Daily Challenge Updates!
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
FINANCIAL: Spent NOTHING, despite the alluring scent of Subway Sandwiches permeating the convention floor.
CLEANLINESS: Kept my Convention Loot contained to just around my favorite chair? FAIL.
HEALTH: After looking over the convention floor plan and estimating distances, I walked some 27 miles over the course of the weekend while carrying 25+ Pounds of loot with me for 20 of those miles. Based on hos sore and weak I felt all day Monday, I'm gonna go ahead and count that as a work-out! However, I won't count the distance in my "Walking To Disneyland" totals.
MONDAY
Didn't spend money, didn't work out, didn't clean... just sat in my chair ignoring Molly and reading comics. FAIL.
TUESDAY
FINANCIAL: SABOTAGE! I needed some Onions, and Crystal suggested that I go to JD's Market to get them because JD's is ALWAYS the cheapest. As I have mentioned before, they're like The Island of Misfit Toys for fresh produce. When everyplace else has Bananas for $1.99 a pound, they somehow have Bananas for 19-cents a pound. Spotty, starchy, tasteless bananas... BUT BANANAS NONE THE LESS! So I went to JD's to spend my remaining $3 and some change for the month. Found a 3lb bag of onions for a buck-fifty, took it up to the check-out and saw the sign; "NO DEBIT OR CREDIT CARD FOR ORDERS UNDER $5". Oh, snap :( So! 3 pounds of onions, 15 pounds of red potatoes, 4 Pounds of Baking Potatoes and 4 pounds of Apples later I had finally come to $5.11 worth f purchase. $1.33 OVER my budget of $20 per month. FAIL.
CLEANLINESS: One solid hour end of the day, split between doing dishes and trying to contain my new stack of comics.
HEALTH: 1 Hour on the treadmill for 2.15 miles, 1,152.71 miles to DISNEYLAND!!!
Also, my menu for the week got kinda screwed-up because of a dentist appointment and the unauthorized use of my Spaghetti & Meatballs dinner ahead of schedule. Working on getting that back n track tonight
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
FINANCIAL: Spent NOTHING, despite the alluring scent of Subway Sandwiches permeating the convention floor.
CLEANLINESS: Kept my Convention Loot contained to just around my favorite chair? FAIL.
HEALTH: After looking over the convention floor plan and estimating distances, I walked some 27 miles over the course of the weekend while carrying 25+ Pounds of loot with me for 20 of those miles. Based on hos sore and weak I felt all day Monday, I'm gonna go ahead and count that as a work-out! However, I won't count the distance in my "Walking To Disneyland" totals.
MONDAY
Didn't spend money, didn't work out, didn't clean... just sat in my chair ignoring Molly and reading comics. FAIL.
TUESDAY
FINANCIAL: SABOTAGE! I needed some Onions, and Crystal suggested that I go to JD's Market to get them because JD's is ALWAYS the cheapest. As I have mentioned before, they're like The Island of Misfit Toys for fresh produce. When everyplace else has Bananas for $1.99 a pound, they somehow have Bananas for 19-cents a pound. Spotty, starchy, tasteless bananas... BUT BANANAS NONE THE LESS! So I went to JD's to spend my remaining $3 and some change for the month. Found a 3lb bag of onions for a buck-fifty, took it up to the check-out and saw the sign; "NO DEBIT OR CREDIT CARD FOR ORDERS UNDER $5". Oh, snap :( So! 3 pounds of onions, 15 pounds of red potatoes, 4 Pounds of Baking Potatoes and 4 pounds of Apples later I had finally come to $5.11 worth f purchase. $1.33 OVER my budget of $20 per month. FAIL.
CLEANLINESS: One solid hour end of the day, split between doing dishes and trying to contain my new stack of comics.
HEALTH: 1 Hour on the treadmill for 2.15 miles, 1,152.71 miles to DISNEYLAND!!!
Also, my menu for the week got kinda screwed-up because of a dentist appointment and the unauthorized use of my Spaghetti & Meatballs dinner ahead of schedule. Working on getting that back n track tonight
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March 16th, 2010
Cancer News Offers Readers Hope and Hype, But No Help
David Casarett, M.D.Doctor, Author
Posted: March 16, 2010 08:52 AM
Cancer is a serious, life-threatening illness that kills more than half a million people every year in the U.S. alone. But you'd never know that if you get most of your information from newspapers and magazines. This is the surprising result of a study that was published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
A group of researchers (of which I was one) examined more than 400 articles about cancer and cancer treatment that appeared in publications with a national and international readership. We looked in magazines like People, Time, and Newsweek, as well as in newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. And what we found surprised us.
For instance, we discovered that although 95 percent reported exclusively on aggressive treatments like chemotherapy, radiation therapy and bone marrow transplants, only 13 percent mentioned that those aggressive treatments can fail. Moreover, less than a third mentioned the adverse effects--like nausea, hair loss, immune suppression, and fatigue--that these treatments can cause.
These results are disappointing, because it's clear that these articles aren't providing readers with the information they need. Imagine if you, or someone you love, have cancer. Now imagine that you're reading one of these articles, looking for advice and guidance about the side effects of treatment. Maybe you want to know if a problem or a symptom is normal. Or maybe you want a sense of what other problems might be lurking around the corner. You're not going to get that information from the articles that we found.
Of course, it's not such a terrible thing if we can't find what we need about cancer in newspapers and magazines. These are just one source of information that's available to us. If we don't find what we're looking for in one of these articles, we can look somewhere else.
That's why the real problem with these articles is not the information that's missing from them, but rather the biased picture that they give of what it's like to have cancer.
For instance, only one percent of these articles focused on palliative interventions like hospice that can improve the quality of life of people with incurable cancer. That's a serious omission because it suggests to readers that these symptoms can't be managed. But that's simply not true. Although cancer may be impossible to cure, pain can always be treated. That's what I tell my patients, and that's what these articles should be telling the public, but they're not.
The most worrisome thing we found in these articles, though, was the way that they carefully avoid mentioning death and dying. In fact, only eight percent mentioned the possibility that people die of their cancer. And of the more than 200 individual patients who were described in these articles, about 80 percent were reported to have survived. That message is unfortunate, because although cure rates are this high for a few cancers, the prognosis for most is much worse.
What's the message that these results offer readers? It's clear: People don't die of cancer. But of course they do. Every day.
Perhaps this bias shouldn't be surprising. It's just one face of the media's hype around hope. We're all scared of getting cancer, and of course we're scared of dying. So these articles play to this fear by reassuring us that there are treatments that work, and that there are cures that are effective. That is, they tell us what we want to hear.
It's unlikely that message is going to change any time soon. People want hope, and newspapers and magazines need to give their readers what they want. That's particularly true today, in this era of shrinking circulations and online competition. So we shouldn't expect a more honest portrayal of cancer anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the future isn't entirely bleak, because we have access to a wide range of other sources of information that can offer a more honest view of what it's like to live (and die) with serious illnesses like cancer. For instance, people are turning to social networking sites like Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family members who are struggling with serious illness. In fact, some sites like CarePages are designed specifically for this purpose. Those sites provide a wealth of facts and feelings and beliefs, raw and unfiltered.
And blogs, of course, are becoming a widely available source of genuine perspectives of real people. Honest, direct, and passionate, many blogs tell it like it is. Like the wonderful blog of Eva Markvoort, a young woman dying of Cystic Fibrosis, who shares what she learns from each day that she has left.
Eva's blog, and many others like it, carry messages of hope, of course. In that regard they're not so different than what we'd get from the New York Times. They tell us what we want to hear.
But they also don't shy away from the realities that people with serious illnesses like cancer face every day. They tell us not only about the good days, but about the bad days, too. They're not just about hope, but also about despair. That is, they're telling us not just what we want to hear, but also what we need to hear.
David Casarett, M.D.Doctor, Author
Posted: March 16, 2010 08:52 AM
Cancer is a serious, life-threatening illness that kills more than half a million people every year in the U.S. alone. But you'd never know that if you get most of your information from newspapers and magazines. This is the surprising result of a study that was published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
A group of researchers (of which I was one) examined more than 400 articles about cancer and cancer treatment that appeared in publications with a national and international readership. We looked in magazines like People, Time, and Newsweek, as well as in newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. And what we found surprised us.
For instance, we discovered that although 95 percent reported exclusively on aggressive treatments like chemotherapy, radiation therapy and bone marrow transplants, only 13 percent mentioned that those aggressive treatments can fail. Moreover, less than a third mentioned the adverse effects--like nausea, hair loss, immune suppression, and fatigue--that these treatments can cause.
These results are disappointing, because it's clear that these articles aren't providing readers with the information they need. Imagine if you, or someone you love, have cancer. Now imagine that you're reading one of these articles, looking for advice and guidance about the side effects of treatment. Maybe you want to know if a problem or a symptom is normal. Or maybe you want a sense of what other problems might be lurking around the corner. You're not going to get that information from the articles that we found.
Of course, it's not such a terrible thing if we can't find what we need about cancer in newspapers and magazines. These are just one source of information that's available to us. If we don't find what we're looking for in one of these articles, we can look somewhere else.
That's why the real problem with these articles is not the information that's missing from them, but rather the biased picture that they give of what it's like to have cancer.
For instance, only one percent of these articles focused on palliative interventions like hospice that can improve the quality of life of people with incurable cancer. That's a serious omission because it suggests to readers that these symptoms can't be managed. But that's simply not true. Although cancer may be impossible to cure, pain can always be treated. That's what I tell my patients, and that's what these articles should be telling the public, but they're not.
The most worrisome thing we found in these articles, though, was the way that they carefully avoid mentioning death and dying. In fact, only eight percent mentioned the possibility that people die of their cancer. And of the more than 200 individual patients who were described in these articles, about 80 percent were reported to have survived. That message is unfortunate, because although cure rates are this high for a few cancers, the prognosis for most is much worse.
What's the message that these results offer readers? It's clear: People don't die of cancer. But of course they do. Every day.
Perhaps this bias shouldn't be surprising. It's just one face of the media's hype around hope. We're all scared of getting cancer, and of course we're scared of dying. So these articles play to this fear by reassuring us that there are treatments that work, and that there are cures that are effective. That is, they tell us what we want to hear.
It's unlikely that message is going to change any time soon. People want hope, and newspapers and magazines need to give their readers what they want. That's particularly true today, in this era of shrinking circulations and online competition. So we shouldn't expect a more honest portrayal of cancer anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the future isn't entirely bleak, because we have access to a wide range of other sources of information that can offer a more honest view of what it's like to live (and die) with serious illnesses like cancer. For instance, people are turning to social networking sites like Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family members who are struggling with serious illness. In fact, some sites like CarePages are designed specifically for this purpose. Those sites provide a wealth of facts and feelings and beliefs, raw and unfiltered.
And blogs, of course, are becoming a widely available source of genuine perspectives of real people. Honest, direct, and passionate, many blogs tell it like it is. Like the wonderful blog of Eva Markvoort, a young woman dying of Cystic Fibrosis, who shares what she learns from each day that she has left.
Eva's blog, and many others like it, carry messages of hope, of course. In that regard they're not so different than what we'd get from the New York Times. They tell us what we want to hear.
But they also don't shy away from the realities that people with serious illnesses like cancer face every day. They tell us not only about the good days, but about the bad days, too. They're not just about hope, but also about despair. That is, they're telling us not just what we want to hear, but also what we need to hear.
- Bought $150 worth of 1970's Adventure Comics for $10. The guy was asking $50, I started the counter-offer at $10 AND HE TOOK IT! That was QUITE a rush!
- Random girl came up to me and said "Do you like these?" indicating thehttp://www.livejournal.com/download/
4 booster packs of Hero Clix she was holding. Ends up she won them at the Spin-N-Win thingee back in the Gaming Area and she didn't actually want them, so I gave her $10 for all 4 boxes. - Perfect moment to bump in to Neal and Kristen, got to walk and talk with Neal as he was freshly exuberant from signing on to write for Nightmares of The Macabre (details on that can be read at his website).
- Made Angus Oblong giggle by asking him to "Fill my autograph book with two dollars worth of Original Artwork, please".
- Got to tell Marvel EIC Joe Quesada "You don't know me and I'm not gonna come after you for stealing my ideas if this ends up in a Marvel Comic, but... LATVERIAN BUREAU OF TOURISM. Use it! You're welcome"
- Sold my box of Magic: The Gathering cards (donated by the ever lovely Jeremy) to these two kids of approximately 12 years old for $50. They had never played before but got EXTREMELY interested by the free starter deck in the "Swag Bag" that everybody got, s I feel god about having fed their new found addiction :)
- Matt (of the Seattle Geekly Podcast) returned my lost Water Bottle to me at the EXACT moment I was talking about my lost water bottle to Troy! Servic e with a smile provided by Seattle-Geekly.com Podcast!
- Impromptu "Incredible Hulk Vs. Godzilla" debates everywhere I went, instigated by *me*!
The one person I wanted to meet during the convention but never got the chance to was Thomas Jane. He was The Punisher in the movie that featured John Travolta as The Villain, which is THE BEST of all the attempts to bring The Punisher to the big screen. He's also the star of the Showtime Original Series "Hung", as well as being a writer/director/producer/hair-stylist/co
Every time I went to his table, he was gone :(
So there I was, hanging out at the Crater on The Moon Booth (my favorite Local Indie Comic) when up walks the handsomest man I've ever seen in my entire life.
Let me tell ya when this guy comes walking up, just a bit taller than me but obviously *cut*... manly 5-o-clock stubble all over his perfectly chiseled jaw... retro-70's brown leather jacket hanging off his ever-so-wide shoulders... jeans that look like he was born in them... and smelling like a day-old shower covered in Brut aftershave? My bread ain't buttered on that side (if ya know what I mean) but for a man like THAT I'd be asking "please pass the JELLY!"
(Not sure what that means, but I think it got the point across)
Anywho, he asks me what this comic is all about and I *instantly* know that it's Thomas Jane. I swallow my Fanboy desire to fawn over him and start explaining the book to him better than the guy behind the booth could ever do (not the creator or the star, just some guy who was handling the money). He ended up buying some of the books, and we walked and talked for a while after that about generally geeky things; never once did I scream YOU ARE MY FAVORITE PUNISHER which is good because I'll bet that when taken out of context that might have sounded kinda Gay...
Every time I went to his table, he was gone :(
So there I was, hanging out at the Crater on The Moon Booth (my favorite Local Indie Comic) when up walks the handsomest man I've ever seen in my entire life.
Let me tell ya when this guy comes walking up, just a bit taller than me but obviously *cut*... manly 5-o-clock stubble all over his perfectly chiseled jaw... retro-70's brown leather jacket hanging off his ever-so-wide shoulders... jeans that look like he was born in them... and smelling like a day-old shower covered in Brut aftershave? My bread ain't buttered on that side (if ya know what I mean) but for a man like THAT I'd be asking "please pass the JELLY!"
(Not sure what that means, but I think it got the point across)
Anywho, he asks me what this comic is all about and I *instantly* know that it's Thomas Jane. I swallow my Fanboy desire to fawn over him and start explaining the book to him better than the guy behind the booth could ever do (not the creator or the star, just some guy who was handling the money). He ended up buying some of the books, and we walked and talked for a while after that about generally geeky things; never once did I scream YOU ARE MY FAVORITE PUNISHER which is good because I'll bet that when taken out of context that might have sounded kinda Gay...
Day TWO started with the pre-convention Seattle Geekly Star Trek Trivia Meet-Up, featuring the awesomely awesome Larry Nemecek (author of Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion as well as being generally accepted as THE authority on all things Trek). There were prizes involved, but that wasn't the best part. It was like... have you ever been to a Star Trek Convention? You know that part where they start up the slide show and tell you stuff like "Here's a picture of Walter Koenig right before the 1975 Star Trek Convention... not many people know this, but the tie he was wearing that day was actually given to him by Leonard Nimoy just a week before the event when they were shopping in Tijuana together"? It was like that, only face-to-face instead of in a converted ballroom of the Red Lion Inn with 1700 of your closest friends. Very intimate, very friendly, very awesome :)
Matt & Shannon (of the Seattle Geekly Podcast) were great hosts for this event, and every bit as Matt-n-Shannony as they are on their podcast (trust me, it's a good thing). They're not super-geeks who talk over your head with obscure references and techno-babble, they're not business-minded non-geeks trying to make a quick buck off of the sudden popularity of Nerd Culture... they're just average people who really like geeky stuff and have taken it upon themselves to promote the lifestyle they love in the best way possible - with a PODCAST! Each episode is like sitting down with a couple of friends to talk about geeky stuff. It's warm, comforting, and very easy to fall asleep after :)
So anywho, at the Trek Trivia Competition? Some of the folks had been to the competition the night before and were still playing by those rules, some folks were still shell-shocked by Convention combined with Daylight Savings Time... whatever the reason, I TOTALLY cleaned-up taking approximately HALF of the prizes home with me! I felt so guilty, especially since a good chunk of those prizes were won due to process of elimination and/or blind luck. Not guilty enough to give back the prizes or anything, but guilty none the less!
Molly's favorite thing I won is the Kirk & Gorn Bobblehead Set... she's been making them fight for two straight days now!
So there I was, with 15 minutes till the convention even opened, and I already had a duffel bag FULL of Star Trek stuff. It was gonna be an awesome day :)
Matt & Shannon (of the Seattle Geekly Podcast) were great hosts for this event, and every bit as Matt-n-Shannony as they are on their podcast (trust me, it's a good thing). They're not super-geeks who talk over your head with obscure references and techno-babble, they're not business-minded non-geeks trying to make a quick buck off of the sudden popularity of Nerd Culture... they're just average people who really like geeky stuff and have taken it upon themselves to promote the lifestyle they love in the best way possible - with a PODCAST! Each episode is like sitting down with a couple of friends to talk about geeky stuff. It's warm, comforting, and very easy to fall asleep after :)
So anywho, at the Trek Trivia Competition? Some of the folks had been to the competition the night before and were still playing by those rules, some folks were still shell-shocked by Convention combined with Daylight Savings Time... whatever the reason, I TOTALLY cleaned-up taking approximately HALF of the prizes home with me! I felt so guilty, especially since a good chunk of those prizes were won due to process of elimination and/or blind luck. Not guilty enough to give back the prizes or anything, but guilty none the less!
Molly's favorite thing I won is the Kirk & Gorn Bobblehead Set... she's been making them fight for two straight days now!
So there I was, with 15 minutes till the convention even opened, and I already had a duffel bag FULL of Star Trek stuff. It was gonna be an awesome day :)
Welcome to weird happy hyper mood posting. Eff you comma!
