Category: Allegory, parable, rhetoric

Massive Cookie Sales Record

4/2014

The April 7, 2014 issue of Time magazine celebrated Katie Francis for selling 18,107 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in a 7 week period, setting an all-time record.

If 12-year-old Katie sold cookies 6 days a week during those 7 weeks, she sold an average of 431 boxes per day.  If Katie attends school M-F, let’s presume she gets out of school at 3:30 pm and has a curfew of 10:00 pm.  On Saturday, lets say she sells from 8:00 am until 8:00 pm with 1 hour for lunch, bath room visits and just plain goofing off, giving her 43.5 hours per week to sell cookies.   She is selling 1 box per minute, 59.5 boxes per hour or 2587 boxes per week.

Horse puckey.

What is happening is that Mom and/or Dad is/are hustling off to sell cookies and enlist siblings, Uncles, Aunts and her parent’s friends to contribute to the endeavor.

Is it no wonder that we live in an entitlement world?  Talk about helicopter parenting.

Oh, wait.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t read the fine print.  It seems that Katie will get an advanced contract with the local GM dealer to sell GM vehicles.  I guess Mom and Dad are going to go with her to work with GM selling cars for Katie.

In GM’s dreams.

Your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave, thinking he just shouldn’t read Time magazine.

Weary.

Wind farms and rotisserie chicken

7/2017

As I sit here contemplating my glass of iced tea, I thought of something.  It came to mind that the globing-warming crowd has been predicting that the oceans are gonna rise and coastal communities are gonna go swimming.  But, something is not right in this argument.

Now, I am not a physicist, but I decided to try an experiment.  I filled my glass full of water and poured it into a graduated beaker (if you haven’t been to science class for a while, that is what scientists call a measuring cup).  The glass held 12 0z of water. Then I filled it with ice and water and measured.  It held 12 oz of ice and water.  I then let the ice water warm to room temperature, i.e. I let the ice melt.  Shazam, there was less than 12 oz of water after the ice melted.

OK, so I didn’t really do this experiment but it can be confirmed easily even if you don’t trust the internet for correct answers. See, water expands when it freezes as opposed to other substances that shrink when they freeze.

So, the global-warmed melted ice in the oceans will lower the oceans, not raise them.

But what about the land ice melt runoff?  Huh, Uncle Dave?

Just maybe, the runoff will bring the shrunken coastline back to where it was thereby preserving the exorbitantly inflated coastal property values?

But, what if the windmill huggers are right?

To prevent global warming, as the story goes, wind farms will save the planet because it will decrease the dependence on fossil fuels.  Most can see the use of wind-generated energy (actually the energy is not generated at all, it is just converted from one form to another) to reduce the dependence on fossil-fuel-generated energy, but it takes a real visionary to see the use of wind sails for personal and commercial transportation, for moving products across this great nation and for powering all those energy consuming devices still miles from any generator.  Enter the law of unintended consequences and friction.

As we increase the Earth’s resistance to rotation, that is what all those windmill blades do, the velocity (speed) of the earth’s rotation may eventually slow down.  As the rotation slows, the time allowed for the sun’s rays to contact the earth will increase, increasing the core temperature and causing the ice to thaw.  Hence, the oceans will rise.  Exactly what the wind farms were touted to prevent.

I prefer to think it in terms of the rotisserie chicken on a July 4th BBQ.  If the rotisserie turns at the proper speed, you get nice juicy run off and moist perfect chicken.  But, if it turns too slow, or not at all, you get dry burnt crap on one side and near raw chicken on the other.

Just what the global-warmers are offering us, half ass’ed chicken crap.

Just some more random thoughts from your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Techno Speak

7/2017

Orthopedic Surgeons are structural engineers, essentially.  They design and install the components that are required to keep a person erect and ambulatory.  That being said, they work on bones.  To evaluate bones, in modern medicine, they need x-rays.  This allows them to see the damage to the bone, the structural component.  In the “old days”, like before about 2002, most orthopedists did not have the capability of viewing x-rays in real time and had to come into the hospital and physically look at the image on a piece of celluloid, or rely on the consulting docs verbal description.

In training, we (us doctors) all learned how to describe x-ray findings to another physician in anticipation of this.  It is very logical, compulsive, thorough and defined.  Let me describe what I mean by describing my patients x-rays as I described it to the orthopedist.

The tibia (the big bone in the leg below the knee) is fractured (broken) in a comminuted fashion (involving multiple pieces) with no angulation (not listing to one side or the other, or straight in the axial dimension) and 100% displaced (one end of the bone overlapping the other through the longitudinal axis).  There is an open wound over the fracture (a laceration of the overlying skin).  The fibula (the skinny bone in the leg) is essentially the same, broken and displaced.  I attempt to explain in layman’s terms with the comments in parentheses.

With a description like this, the orthopedist can quickly come to the conclusion that the patient needs to go to surgery and pretty soon. The longer the delay the more likely an infection of the bone and therefore, more likely a poor outcome.

So, I had this little old lady who fell on the stairs and broke her leg as described above.  I called the orthopedist on call and gave him this great description of the x-rays, the wound and the case.  I won’t torture you with a blow by blow detail of what he said, just that he did his best to get me to say that I was exaggerating my reading and that the injury was not as severe as I implied.  I would not back down.  He also whined that he could not see the x-ray on his home monitor.  Like I could do anything about that?

When he came through the ED, I casually asked him if he had had a chance to look at the x-rays, and he said, “Yeah, they look like shit.  I’m taking her to surgery.”

No shit!

I’m just waiting until the next time I get to call him about a patient with a bad break of some bone.  I’m gonna call him up and tell him that the x-ray looks like shit and the patient needs to go to surgery.

I need to keep up with the times, techno-lingually speaking that is.

From your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Pain is Weakness…

7/2017

In the Marine Corps, and other fitness buff industries, there is a common phrase.

Pain is weakness leaving the body

What they don’t tell you is that weakness may be all you have left.

I’ve always understood that in working in the Emergency Department, I’m on the front line of disease. Whatever is new, different or around, I see it and get it.

Now, I also understand that like politics, it’s local.

Since my wife started working in an ED 120 miles away, I get the local version and she gets her local version and then we get to swap them out with each other.

Double indemnity from your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.