It is better and it is my heart

Since New Year's eve I have been fighting with a bad cold that has progressed to bronchitis, which we have been treating with various drugs. Sunday morning I had a typically disturbed kind of sleep, waking up at 4 A.M. possibly because of the steroids I had been prescribed. I did make it back to sleep and woke at around my usual time a couple of hours later. There was one odd thing I noticed at the time, though, and that was the way my heart seemed to be racing, regardless of my trying to induce a relaxed mental state. I got up, had breakfast, took my medicines, and was just getting dressed to go out to the gym when I noticed a feeling of pressure around my chest. Going up a flight of stairs made me feel winded, and the rapid heartbeat was still unchanged from before. Time to ask my wife to drive me to the nearest emergency room.
It had been a couple of years since my last trip to the E.R. and the hospital we went to that time is not even in business any more now. We went to the very new facility at Englewood Hospital a couple of miles away and was soon set up with medications to treat the condition. After a few hours, I was set up in a room in the Cardiac Step-Down ward waiting for my heart to "flip" back over to a normal rhythm, or, failing that, schedule a cryoablation to reset it. I didn't know that a person's heart could fibrillate for twelve hours and still be alive, but now I do.
I spent the night and was released today after they had a chance to image the malfunctioning part with ultrasound, apparently not sustaining any permanent damage. I'm on a couple new prescriptions and advised to avoid going on a "bender" which can set this sort of thing off. Wilco. Also, pleased to be here.

Artrial fibrillation. from just leenarts on Vimeo.

Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the BCS trophy

Sooners! (Or possibly Cowboys of OK State or some such.) Perhaps I was the last to know.

Thor did indeed rebuild Asgard, in Oklahoma, and he embarked on a quest to liberate his fellow Asgardians who were trapped in mortal shells.

And here I thought a guy named Thor Odinson be up with his people among the fans of the Golden Gophers (though admittedly, the Marvel canon has been relatively silent on the latter). Stereotypes are so ugly and destructive, and do not ultimately account for the power of the great nemeses such as the Crimson Tide.

Entropy - it doesn't just happen

originally uploaded by theimpulsivebuy.

What fools we were in the 1970s when we did not know that we needed a product like this to ensure that our hair looked messy, trusting instead to literal winds of chance, inadvertent bed-head (before that was a scientific term), and desperate self-barbering upon occasion. For if science has taught us anything, it's that one cannot trust nature to revert to disorder when one's (fashion) life might depend on it. I imagine that the Axe people have incorporated nanomachinery into their product to make sure that no two strands parallel one another over a significant distance, and perhaps a dab of adaptive optics to befuddle the hapless viewer's eye to see more of a fractal Medusa's nest than is practically possible to engineer in reality. Back in those days the mathematics of strange attractors was regrettably unavailable to describe the chaotic hair dynamics that is now understood to be essential to sustain modern standards of presentability.

The eff word

Perfume name: In-eff-able

via flickr.com

Were I to manufacture this, I would support it with a sleazy marketing campaign.

Posted via web from Poor Poor Thing

Crisis averted for now

Name for the last decade: The kooky glasses era

via flickr.com

Makers of novelty eyewear have had to be more inventive than usual this year because of the missing double-aughts in the middle of the year. I predict that next year the available strategems will prove to be too strained to come up with a viable marketable product.

Posted via web from Poor Poor Thing