Voenix Rising

I’m taking the last week in August off.  It will be my first vacation in nearly a year and I was looking for something fun to do.

My initial thought was to make my first trip back to San Francisco in six years.  It sounded good at first: it would allow me to catch up in person with the few friends who are still in the Bay Area and afford me the opportunity to meet Adam and Moby (even though he made no attempt to contact me when he was here recently - /snark) in person.  It would also get me out of the unrelenting heat, and provide a fine—if somewhat predictable—road trip.  But every time I thought about it, I realized I was unconsciously making what cb affectionately refers to as “bad smell face.”

It’s obvious I have some unacknowledged demons regarding San Francisco and the sixteen years of my life spent there, but facing them now is not exactly what what I had in mind when describing the word fun.

So last night, shortly around midnight, it came to me: go back to Yellowstone!  Now that would be fun!

Or at least it seemed so at midnight…

I went online and fired off an email to Knottyboy asking if he and Tony would mind seeing me again, and afterward headed off to bed.

This morning the cold harsh reality of making such a trip slapped me up the side of the head and I thought, “WTF was I thinking?”

Yes, it would be fun.  And having made the trip once already, I could easily avoid the mistakes I made the last time.  Also, since I’d already seen part of the park, I could bypass those areas and head to as yet unvisited destinations.  But when I thought about the drive—including the hundreds of miles of nothing that constituted the majority of the trek through Utah—and the lodging and gasoline expense, I thought, “Nah.  Some other time.”  (Because I would like to go back at some point.)

I also wondered what I would do if one or the other of the two stone particles remaining in my kidney decided to break loose when I was in the middle of those hundreds of miles of nothing.  Not exactly the best place to be when you suddenly find yourself wanting to assume a fetal position on the ground.

Finally I decided to just spend the week at home.  Sometimes those are the best vacations after all.  Float in the pool, maybe spend a couple days in Tucson, and take the money I would’ve spent on gas and lodging to finally replace the living room sofa that I discarded in my move six months ago.  Or get that camera and bank the rest.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I saw my urologist two weeks ago.  Peering at the most recent x-ray he said I still had two pieces of the original 14mm stone lodged in my right kidney.  He said he wanted to do another lithotripsy to break them up and flush ‘em out.

Remembering the horrific pain I experienced the day after my first lithotripsy, I told him I was in no hurry to go through that again, and asked if it was medically okay to put off the procedure—for like a month or so.  He said that because of the size of these particular particles it was unlikely that after the procedure I’d have that sort of pain again, but added that waiting wasn’t an issue—as long as I was aware of the fact that if the two pieces did break loose and head out on their own, I’d be in a world of hurt.

It was a risk I was willing to live with. “That’s what ERs are for,” I said.

I told him I was also somewhat concerned that after a week since the procedure I still hadn’t passed anything notable, especially since I knew from the CT scan done when I was in the ER that there was supposedly still a 4mm stone in the distal end of my ureter as well as several smaller particles backed up behind it.  “I don’t see anything like that on the x-ray, and since you’re not in pain, there’s no blood in your urine and you’re still passing sand, you’re obviously not blocked.  I wouldn’t be too concerned unless that changes.”

Okay, whatever.  You’ve been through this more times than I have.

So that’s where things stand at the moment.  I see him again in September.

ABBOTSFORD, British Columbia - A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province’s most prolific mother in 20 years.

“We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that’s the reason we did not stop the life,” said Alexandru Ionce.

Jeebus.

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that humans are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern: a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague.” - Agent Smith, The Matrix

Run Roll for your lives!

Spotted over at Mike Says:

“Don’t be afraid of growing old. Be afraid of growing boring.” — Anonymous

I normally don’t copy other bloggers’ entire posts, but this information (which I was totally unaware of) is too important and needs to get out there as far and wide as possible.  In its entirety, from Bill in Exile:

Many people following this election know that John Sydney McCain is the son and grandson of Navy admirals and that by dint of his birth he was afforded a degree of latitude in his military career for less than stellar behavior that goes along with a family tree like that; such as being one of the worst students in his class at Annapolis yet still managing to graduate.

Yet what many don’t realize is that thanks to McCain’s lineage—a lineage providing connections much like George W. Bush’s—his actions as a Navy pilot that would have resulted in dismissal  from the service and possible court martial in anyone else have apparently become a virtual black hole in history.

And part of that historical black hole is that McCain has frequently been accused by men with whom he served in the Navy as being the person directly responsible for the deaths of 131 of his shipmates in 1967 and with whom he served on board the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal {CV-59}.

The USS Forrestal — CV-59

McCain was acknowledged by many of his peers at the time as being an unsafe pilot and irresponsible hot dog—by the time of the Forrestal incident McCain had crashed four aircraft that he was piloting, a record that in any other naval aviator would have ended a career—and one of the unsafe practices that McCain was notorious for was a thing known as a “wet start” of his aircraft.

A wet start is when the pilot of a jet allows kerosene or jet fuel to pool in the engine and then, once enough fuel has accumulated, the pilot ignites his engine which results in a huge flame being shot to the rear.  The purpose of this is to scare the shit out of the pilot in the plane immediately behind you who is waiting to take off.

Wet starts are illegal in the Navy but were common during the Vietnam era among hot young fighter jocks like McCain and by all accounts he enjoyed performing them whenever he thought he could get away with it.

On July 29th 1967, John McCain was in his A-4 Skyhawk aboard the USS Forrestal waiting to be taxied onto the steam catapult in order to launch from the deck of the ship.

Behind his aircraft was an F-4 Phantom jet fully loaded with ordinance including M-34 air to ground Zuni rockets.

At 10:52 AM as McCain waited for take off instructions reports from sailors on the scene indicate that he apparently decided to shake up the pilot of the F-4 to his rear and he performed a wet start on his jet.

Hot shot pilot McCain is standing on the right.

The flame from his aircraft’s engine shot back reaching the Phantom and ignited the solid fuel motor on one of the Zuni missiles under the wing of  that aircraft.  The missile shot across the flight deck of the crowded carrier and slammed into the belly tank of a parked A-4D Skyhawk next to McCain’s craft and ignited the 400 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel in the tank.

When the fuel tank exploded it knocked two 1,000 pound bombs off their mounts and the burning fuel that spread across the deck  ignited one of the bombs.  The resulting explosion started a chain reaction, cooking off ordinance that was being loaded onto waiting aircraft all across the rear of the huge ship.

Fire fighting efforts on July 29th, 1967.

One young sailor ran into the flames and found the strength to pick up a red hot 250 pound bomb that was on the verge of exploding and carried it to the side of the ship and threw it overboard.

The flight deck fire was brought under control in about an hour but the burning fuel that leaked into the hanger deck below caused even more ordinance to explode and that fire took more than 12 hours to extinguish.

At the end of the ordeal 131 sailors were dead—either blown to pieces or burned to death—and 168 were badly injured and before the smoke had even cleared or all the dead and wounded counted the navy had rushed John McCain off the aircraft carrier to the USS Oriskany, the only uninjured person on board the Forrestal to be evacuated in this way.

Sailors who were on board that day contend that the Navy removed McCain from the stricken carrier because they feared for his life at the hands of his fellow shipmates.

Needless to say, many of the sailors who lived through that horror have claimed that the Navy apparently hushed up much of the investigation and scrubbed the official findings so that McCain would never be able to be held to account and as of this date McCain has refused to release the complete set of his Navy records for examination—something that John Kerry did in 2004 during his presidential run.

There isn’t a politician alive today with balls enough to do this.  (Okay, maybe one or two, but they’re not exactly on the national stage.)

(Hat tip to Nuno.)

From Proceed at Your Own Risk:

Ironically, the Republicans had it right when they attempted to impeach Bill Clinton: it wasn’t about the sex, it was about the lie.  That was the sin; that was the crime.

Today Christians lie about everything—and in the name of Christ!  They lie about science, they lie about sex, they lie about misuse of government funds and they lie about politics—and the media swallows it all like some hungry pig bottom.”