Allegory, parable, rhetoric – Page 20

Missouri Chainsaw Massacre

7/2017

The movie Texas Chain Saw Massacre came out in 1974. Here a group of teenagers is stalked by ritualistic cannibals with chainsaws.

The movie Mash came out in 1970. It was a spoof on the Vietnam war through the venue of the Korean war. In the movie, a prime character had an episode of erectile dysfunction and became depressed about it. The Docs of the MASH unit in the film decided to help him along with a last supper type of farewell. A song, later to become the theme song of the movie was written for the part.

The film director’s son helped write the lyrics for the song, Suicide is Painless. He was 15 y/o. His dad, the director, made about $70,000 off his director duties and the son made over$1,000,000 off his contribution to the lyrics. The lyrics basically describe why the protagonist feels that suicide is OK.

So, what prompted all this is a recent patient that wanted to kill himself. With a chain saw. He failed. He did have a cut on his left shoulder just above the collar bone, where he tried to cut his head off with the chainsaw, that I had to repair.

Seems to me that a chain saw would not fit into the painless category.

Musings from your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Bespeak The Obvious

7/2017

I had this conversation at work the other night.

“So, how ya doing?”, I said as I entered the room.

“I hurt Doc. I hit myself in the leg with a sledgehammer,” he said. I presumed that he did this while working on something and it was an accident. But, I didn’t ask.

When I examined his leg, there was a large area of swelling, abrasion and the purple discoloration of a big hematoma just below the outside of his right knee.

I said, “Well, I’ll get an x-ray of your leg and come back and let you know what it shows when it’s done.”

When I went back in the room, I said, “Well, good news. Nothing is broken.”

“Then why does it hurt so much?” he replied.

“Probably because you hit it with a sledgehammer,” I said.

Sometimes you just have to use logic with your patients, whether it is needed or not.

Grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Jelly Bean

4/2017

April 22 is American National Jelly Bean Day.

Jelly beans date back to biblical times, 1861, 1905, or the 1930’s, depending on who you believe. July 31 is Jump for Jelly Beans day, but that is nothing but silliness. Turkish Delight made in biblical times was very similar to jelly beans.

They are made of wholesome, natural ingredients including sugar, pectin, starch and flavors. They are gluten free, dairy free, fat-free, vegetarian-friendly, certified kosher and safe for those with peanut allergy since the retirement of the peanut butter flavor. They come in fruit flavors, sweet, spicy, tangy, sour and minty.

One ounce, about 25 jelly beans, have about 100 calories. So it would take about 1000 jelly beans to max out your daily caloric requirement. Eat away.

Jelly beans are a lie. They are neither bean nor made of jelly.

Jelly beans come in gourmet and traditional types and take about 7-21 days to make.

Jelly beans spawned the concept of jelly sandals in the 1990s, which later became crocks, figuratively speaking what gummy bears are to jelly beans crocks are to jelly sandals.

Magical Jelly Bean is a free software program that can find the product key or password for your Windows OS or Wi-Fi and Jelly Bean is an operating system for android cell phones.

Jelly beans have been integral to US National security since Ronald Reagan entered politics in 1965. In 1981, when Ronnie was being inaugurated, 3 1/2 tons of red, white and blue jelly beans were shipped to Washington DC for the festivities. If you’re interested, that is about 800,000 calories.

Easter demand alone causes an increase of production of 16 billion jelly beans. Enough to belt the earth with a triple row of jelly beans.

In the 1900s a jelly bean character was a dandy who dressed well but had nothing else to offer and was the subject of books by both F. Scott Fitzgerald and later, William Faulkner. Today the urban dictionary defines a jelly bean as a person that is tough on the outside but a softy at heart.

Important knowledge from your jelly bean loving grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Unlimited Petroleum Energy

7/2017

I was listening to the CEO of Ford talk about Ford’s plans to increase the development of their line of electric vehicles. It was kinda funny as they pointed out that Ford sold about 8,000 electric vehicles in the first 10 months of 2015 (as compared to 800,000 F150 series pickups). The interviewer and he agreed that this conversion to electricity had to be done because oil is not a renewable resource.

Wrong Kemosabe! Oil is not renewable because we do not farm oil. What I mean by that is that, currently, we just take oil out and don’t put the makings back in.

If we just cut down trees and never planted any seedlings, wood products would not be renewable. But, it is because we do.

The problem, as I see it, is that we put dead people in caskets and vaults or we cremate them. Now how are we gonna get anywhere doing that? What we need is a National Program to dump dead bodies into the California tar pits (we could make other “tar pit centers” across the nation) and let nature take its course. We only think we know how long it takes to turn dead animals into oil.

We haven’t actually tried it and proven that it takes millions of years.

From your renewable-energy-conscious grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.

Coffee, The Keurig Scam

7/2017

Keruig is the biggest scam in America today. I’m serious. This is faddism, pony tails, Birkenstocks and free love all rolled into one.

Let’s do a brief analysis.

Let us start with the old fashioned way of brewing coffee and call it the manual method. One pound of custom whole bean coffee-of-your-choice costs about $8. That’s 16 oz and depending on the type of grind, the strength desired and the method of brewing, it will make up to 10 cups of fine coffee per ounce. That averages about 160 cups of coffee for $8. That works out to 5 cents a cup. Depending on the method of brewing, this may take from 45 seconds to 3 minutes and the complexity of cleaning will vary, but hey don’t most of us have dishwashers? To any cultured coffee drinker and to many that don’t partake, the aroma of brewing the first pot in the morning is as much of an attitude guide as the first cup consumed.

The Keurig system requires a special cup-ette to be placed into the machine to brew one cup of coffee (I’m ignoring for the moment the screen adapter-cup-ette that turns the technologically “superior” Keurig machine into a complex expensive manual system and the jumbo carafe packet-cup-ettes). These special cup-ettes are sold as brand name Keurig or as an off-brand (H.E.B., Hy-Vee, Sam’s, Bubba’s Brew…) for $8-$14 a box containing 12 cup-ettes (I’m sure Neimann-Marcus has their own house brand for a little more but we’re talking about the average Joe here. No pun intended). Each cup-ette makes one cup of coffee that in the brilliant Keurig free choice software controlled system can be selected as 6-10 oz of finely brewed coffee. (And to think there are starving children in Africa that have no coffee on their warm mornings.) Using averages, let’s say $11/12 pack of cup-ettes, yielding 8 oz of coffee for each cup, or $11 for 96 oz of coffee. That an exorbitant 11 cents per cup. Still, better than Starbucks but twice as much as the manual method.

After a brief, well sometimes not so brief, brew cycle, one can walk away with a lukewarm cup of fine coffee. See here is the thing, in comparing apples to Keurigs, the manual method brewing cycle starts from cold water and coffee beans. Not from a “preheated”, primed, software booted machine. Let’s be honest, the Keurig takes about 2-3 minutes to start from cold. After that each cycle is much briefer, taking about 1-1.5 minutes to brew each cup. That’s 10 minutes in Keurig time as opposed to 3 minutes in manual time to brew 10 cups of fine coffee.

Talk about the ambiance of the aroma of Keurig brewing! Oops, there isn’t any. You have to stick your nose into the freshly Keurig-brewed cup to release those wonderful coffee endorphins in your brain, risking serious McDonald’s style burns as opposed to filling the house with the aroma.

The clean up seems much easier at the onset because there essentially isn’t any for the Keurig system. If one takes the Jimmy Buffett approach and doesn’t clean the machine regularly, there is a build up of yuck in the plumbing system that halts the flow of hot water from the warmer to the cup-ette causing the machine to take 5 minutes or more (sometimes complete failure to brew) per cup. Ah, but here comes Google to the rescue. There are myriad of DIY fixes involving something like sticking a paperclip up the ass of the machine to unclog whatever it is clogging up the system, risking one’s finger being impaled on the sharp needle puncture thingy that the instructions that came with the machine told you to never stick anything up due to that very same risk. But I have to admit that from the Emergency Room Physician’s perspective, one could suffer a greater burn size from a manually brewed, hotter pot of coffee being spilled into one’s lap than from the single cup of lukewarm Keurig-brewed coffee. So, for burn-risk versus puncture-risk, I give them a wash.

I won’t say much about the recall of the Keurig models.

Now we discuss the issue from the accountants perspective. Depreciating the cost of the initial investment for the coffee maker, not the brewing of the individual cup of coffee. Here are some average prices found today on the interwebernet.

Keurig $150
Chemex $40
Mr. Coffee countertop coffee maker $30
Enamel cowboy campfire coffee pot $20
Walmart “French Press” $10
Single cup drip coffee maker $4

Keurig and Chemex are American designed and American made. Way to go! Mr. Coffee is made by SunBeam, an American company, but is probably American designed but made in China. The Enamel pot, Walmart “French Press” and single cup drip cone are undoubtedly of Chinese ancestry.

Me personally, what do I prefer? Chemex. I have one of each of the above models, more or less, except the “French Press” style which I use whenever I visit my brother.

I do own a Keurig because the wife won one in a raffle and who’s gonna turn down a free gift?

Besides me.

Original research, from his private laboratory in the frozen Heartland by your Grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.