Update from gimp central (Warning: Viewer discretion is advised)

Yesterday after school I went directly to the doctor, arriving about 2:45. I got home around 8. That should tell you how well things went.

First I saw my internist. He felt my leg, which, I must admit, has endured less abuse than Angelina's leg, and said the could feel where the muscle was torn. As in he could feel the ends of the two separate pieces of muscle. Good thing I don't get squeamish, because that's pretty gross. He sent me down to radiology to get an ultrasound to try to determine the size of the tear and to see if I had any blood clots. (By the way, I've heard that blood clots are dangerous, but isn't blood supposed to clot?)

I got to radiology at 3:15, got in a gown and sat, alone, in the waiting room until 4:50. The good news is that I got to watch several episodes of Barefoot Contessa, so I'm ready to whip up hors d'oeuvres of mini grilled cheese sandwiches and spinach-fontina crisps, a gourmet dinner of lemony chicken breasts with brown rice and green beans, with dessert of french toast bread pudding and a sticky caramel tart, (though if you scroll down a bit you'll see it would probably take me half a day to assemble the ingredients).

Finally got into the ultrasound room, which had a very comfortable table/chair/bed for me to lie down on. Having never been pregnant I'd not had an ultrasound before. It was painless and took about 10 minutes. The technician then went off to go over the results with the radiologist (this immediate evaluation is charmingly called a "wet read" in reference to reading x-ray films immediately before they had time to dry. So wet pixels and all, they read the ultrasound and told me that I had a small blood clot and that I should call my doctor ASAP.

To give an idea of my current slow motion world, I called the doctor's answering service as I left radiology and had him paged, and he called me back 10 minutes later, and I hadn't gotten to my car yet.

The doctor told me I had to go on blood thinners and called in a prescription. There's a pill, which takes about 4 days to reach full effectiveness, so in the meantime I have to give myself an injection every day. Not surprisingly, not every pharmacy has self-injectable blood thinners, so I spent a half hour running (not literally) around getting the medicine. The doctor, though he didn't say so, was clearly unhappy that I had been active without blood thinner.

Once home, I got to shoot up this stuff, which was not as hard or as painful as I thought. I now have to live in fear of getting a cut or a bad bruise. And by then I was too beat to go to the supermarket.

This morning, we still needed the groceries, so I went to Acme. It took me an hour to collect about 15 things scattered around the store. On the way out I asked the manager if I was allowed to use the electric scooters they keep near the entrance. She said, "Sure. They should be all charged up and they corner very well." I can hardly wait.

At this point, my main problem is that every routine little thing has become arduous, so by early evening I am exhausted. My leg is very stiff and kind of sore. I'm not even to get into how crabby I was at school. We'll have to see how well I hold up for the rest of the week.

I am so f-ing bored

I'm not going to go on and on about how tired I am of sitting on the couch with my leg elevated, but let me say one last thing about it. I am tired of sitting on the couch with my leg elevated.

It doesn't help matters that my dad scared the crap out of me on the phone today, telling me I should beware of fatal blood clots. I try to make a point of avoiding blood clots, especially the fatal kind, except when I get a cut and then I want a non-fatal blood clot. I know that lower leg blood clots are a serious matter and tend to happen on airplanes if you don't move around enough on a long flight. I never heard of it with a muscle pull or tear, but if I'm suddenly dead tomorrow I guess we'll all know why.

At least I got a bit of work done today. I felt ingenious because I took an ottoman from a living room chair and put it under the dining room table so I could put my leg up on it there. It's weird to have one's whole day revolve around trying to not stand up. I guess it could be worse; I could have a pulled or torn glute that would make it impossible for me to sit down. And wow, what if I had both and couldn't stand up or sit down?

Respiration Wars

I am a TV pacifist. This has become increasingly difficult recently, what with all of the different kinds of wars offered to you on a daily basis.

What kinds of wars? Storage, Parking, Prom, Swamp, Border (oh wait, that's a real war), Cupcake, Monster Bug, Shipping, Design.

I've wondered from time to time why "war" has become such a commonplace descriptor of relatively peaceful, even mundane activities, and I've decided it's just plain laziness. The Storage Wars show can actually be kind of fun, but you'd have to work hard to come up with a snappy title that somewhat describes what actually happens. Some people bid sight unseen for the contents of a storage locker. Then the winner inspects and appraises the contents. That's it. Anything in there sound even remotely warlike? Of course not, but war is a convenient if almost crazily exaggerated shorthand for a competition.

I'm not going to assert that this represents a metaphor for societal trends, but there has been an escalation of rhetorical bombast in both the political and entertainment spheres. The political part is mostly perpetrated by Republican hardliners who feel the need to cast everything they don't agree with in terms of something not just undesirable, but so-horrifying-you-should-buy-a-gun-and-then-go-hide-under-your bed. This is needlessly extreme and annoying, (wait, is Obama a Nazi or an Islamic terrorist or a socialist? All 3?), but is much more easily accomplished than building a logical case based on sound policy. Similarly, in entertainment, bombast is usually found in the realm of so-called reality shows, because even artificially manipulated reality just isn't compelling enough to attract viewers. This requires either a truly creative message or, failing that, sensationalism.

Personally, I detest laziness and excess in communications, so it makes reading the TV listings kind of disheartening.  I wish I could see a path to a more articulate and less over the top communications, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting.

Living la vida lenta

I don't mind moving slowly. Sometimes it's nice to saunter along and consider everything going on around me. What I don't like is not having any choice in the matter. If I try to take more than about a third of my normal stride length I get a shot of pain in my leg (note to self: maybe I can find a way to make a drinking game out of this). Even driving hurts.

Today I was in the supermarket. I had never really paid attention to how big supermarkets are, but if you're moving at quarter speed they're huge- I am so not going to Target or Costco while dealing with this injury. It was kind of frustrating how long the whole thing was taking, but my overwhelming feeling was one of complete boredom.

I'm seldom bored. It's pretty hard to find something in which I don't have at least a passing interest. But walking all the way down the bread aisle to get to the peanut butter was excruciatingly dull. I think if bread makers can't make their product more interesting looking (c'mon guys, can't you come up with any colors other than brown and white?), they definitely need to jazz up their packaging. Otherwise, by the time people like me make it past the 20th kind of whole wheat bread (and we need this why?) they'll be ready to kill themselves.

After shopping I realized it was taking me as long to walk back to the car as it usually does to walk from my house to the supermarket without using the car. I had to step aside on the path so that an old lady with a shopping cart could zip past me.

Moving this slowly sets up a whole new set of decision points during the day, most of which are along the lines of "Is it worth going all the way over there to do that?" It's amazing how many little things I do every day without thinking about them that I now have to consider. Do I really need that drink of water? Should I have that water or will it make me have to get up an extra time to go to the bathroom?Should I go upstairs to change clothes now or should I wait until I have more reasons to make the trek? Should I even try to get to the phone before it stops ringing? It's amazing how many of my routine actions require rethinking. But amazing doesn't make it interesting.

TMI from Uncle Gimpster

I highly doubt that anyone is really interested in the details of my (or anyone else's) injury, but it's pretty much all I've got going on right now, so read on if you like. Not quite two days since getting hurt, there's not that much clarity. My calf is noticeably swollen, which indicates a real injury, but it's not black and blue, which means it's probably not a tear. Aside from the walking very slowly thing, the biggest problem at the moment is that if I don't keep my leg elevated it swells more.

I've had stuff like this before. I once played in a weekend-long softball tournament with a pulled quad and then woke up Monday morning with my right thigh twice the size of my left. A calf strain is a different problem, because there's no room to swell on that part of the body and so if swelling is attempted it pulls the skin over my shin so tight that it feels like it's on fire. I'm already trying to picture myself teaching and keeping my right leg 3 feet off the ground at the same time. I'm not sure what it'll look like but I'll definitely want the video.

Part of the problem with getting hurt at my advanced age is that you start to lose the total confidence that whatever you hurt will get better. When you're young, you just assume that something will hurt for a while and then eventually will heal and you'll forget about it. When you're older, there's always the sneaking suspicion that whatever hurt this is will never go away.

We don't come by this conclusion randomly. A few years ago my shoulder was aching even though I hadn't injured it in any way. I asked my doctor why my shoulder hurt and he replied,"Because you didn't die when you were 40." I tore a muscle in my back over 20 years ago and though I rarely notice it, if I lift something too heavy the wrong way, it still barks at me.

It's not the worst thing in the world. It makes you more careful and gives you incentive to take better care of yourself. But unfortunately it makes you re-examine what you're doing whenever you hurt yourself. I'm not going to stop skiing or anything. I'm a good, careful skier and it was a freak injury that will probably heal 100 or 99%, so though I'm probably done for what passes as this ski season, I'll be back at it next year.

Uncle Mister Papa

So I got hurt skiing yesterday. This is frustrating in many ways, not the least of which is that I've been skiing for over 40 years and have never gotten hurt. This one wasn't even one of those "the fall didn't hurt at all, it's the stopping that hurts" kind of thing. I was skiing on some bad snow and my skis caught on something and spun me around. I slid along the ground for a bit and then my skis caught on something and popped off. I didn't feel a thing. Until I stood up and I couldn't put any weight on my right leg.

Fortunately, it wasn't a knee or ankle. It was my calf. It felt kind of like when you get one of those awful leg cramps, but this wasn't a cramp and it wasn't going away. Fortunately, I was able to get back into my skis, which were damaged by whatever made them pop off, and make my way to the lodge and back to town. So I can walk, but try walking without tugging on your calf muscle and see it's pretty lopsided. I can't let my right leg extend behind me so that part of each step gets shortened abruptly, and it gets irritated if I don't keep it up, so I'm spending most of my time sitting up in bed.

This is just awful. I like being outside in this place more than any other and I normally walk around the lake every day. Now it takes me 10 minutes to walk to the lobby of the hotel. I'll give my family props for trying to cheer me up by calling me Mister Gimpy or Papa Gimpy, and even getting my cute little niece to call me Uncle Gimpy. But there's not much they can do. I can't ski, sled, skate or walk, so Uncle Gimpy it is.

In-room "Coffee"

Note the beautiful translucence.

Have I been missing out?

Am I the only one who didn't know that the procedure by which doctors determine the severity of sinus infections is called the SNOT-16?  Sinonasal Outcome Test-16. You can look it up. Not to be undone, gastrointerologists are re-naming their test for levels of nausea the... Nah, just making stuff up now.

Xeno's butter dish

You can't get purer than nothing

In the course of my journey through pop music I've noticed a new type of song, joining whiny boy rock and 100%-rhythm-and-blues-free R&B and overwrought ballads as a radio staple. It's a genre I call "I recorded this in the janitor's closet during coffee break and then finished it in Garage Band" music. The voice is autotuned, the instruments are all synthesized, there's nothing real in the entire production.

There's a certain purity in something so blatantly artificial. It reminds me a bit of the kinds of work we did at advertising, where groups of really smart, creative young people work really hard developing stuff that ranges from pure bulls--t to forgettable, like when the Sprite team had to develop TV commercial designed to convince people that Sprite tasted better than 7-Up.

Talking about taste is always fun in the soda biz, because Sprite and 7-Up are both lemon-lime sodas that taste almost identical. But around that time, Coca-Cola, which makes Sprite, was getting hammered by something called The Pepsi Challenge, where people were given small cups of Coke and Pepsi and more people preferred Pepsi. This turned out to be somewhat deceptive, because you don't normally drink 1 ounce of soda, and while Pepsi is slightly sweeter than Coke and therefore tastes "better" in small doses, for a full 12 ounces, people prefer Coke. But not to leave any stone unturned, some research guy, knowing that Sprite is slightly sweeter than 7-Up, did a scientific blind taste test. The approximate results were as follows:

Which soda tastes better?

Sprite                                   10.1% 

7-Up                                      9.9%

No difference/no preference   80% 

This led to the development of a commercial where a cute kid walks into a store and asks to trade his 7-Up in for a Sprite, because Sprite tastes better. This was a legit commercial, shot on film in a real store on Bleecker Street int he West Village, and designed to run in prime time and on major sporting events. We then brought it, as is done with all commercials, to the network Standards and Practices department for approval. These are the people who decide whether an ad meets the network's standard of truthfulness and they have the power to block anything from going on the air, and they ruled that this ad was deceptive. Remember, you can say your product is "best" as long as all products are the same, but you can't say "better" without proof.

In came the lawyers. There's always pressure at this point because the company has spent a lot of money for time to run their new commercial and they don't want to use it to run the same old one for the 100th time. The company and ad agency lawyers negotiate with the Standards people to see what can be done to get the ad to meet the guidelines. Occasionally a spot actually has to be pulled (cue loud sound of money being flushed), but most often things can be hedged. Sometimes the wording can be changed, but in this case we needed a way to say "better" or there was no point to the ad.

Let's talk statistics a bit. Let's say those numbers that I made up for the percentages were out of 1000 people (I have no idea what the number of samplers or the precise percentages are). That means that 800/1000 said no preference, which is pretty overwhelming, and 101 chose Sprite and 99 chose 7-Up. Two out of a thousand is not very much. If, however, you ignore the 80%, you have 101/200 (50.5%) versus 99/100 (49.5%). Depending on how many people they asked, that can be a statistically significant difference, which means roughly that there's a 95% probability that the difference can't be explained by random chance.

Using that logic (which is pretty widely accepted), we were able to get the Standards folks to approve the ad if, while the little boy says, "Sprite tastes better than 7-Up," we run what they call a "super," some white type superimposed on the lower part of the picture. The super began with "Among those stating a preference" and had some reference to the majority lack thereof.

Next discussion is how long he super must appear on the screen. There are standards and practices for that as well- 2.5 to 5.0 seconds depending on the length. Finally, we were told that the background in the lower part of the screen was too light, and there wasn't enough contrast to actually see the super. Back to the studio where we superimposed a grey shadow behind the superimposed white type. And the spot aired. For about a month until a new idea was developed and we started all over again.

That, my friends, is purity.

Superb Owl, etc.

I can't remember the last time I paid so little attention to the Super Bowl and the accompanying ads. I guess hype fatigue has finally gotten to me. I really really didn't care who won (I know in Philly I'm supposed to hate the Giants more but I'm from New York, of course) and I instinctively knew that the ads wouldn't be worth my time.

Anybody else checking out the dating service called ChristianMingle? Tagline is "Find God's match for you." I get banner ads for it all the time. I know that the Internet is doing this to me because I'm not allowing web sites to collect any browsing information, and they even warn me that the ads I see will not be as relevant as otherwise. So this is their backup plan, to barrage me with possible the least relevant ad possibly imaginable to show me what a miserable online existence I shall endure unless I submit.

Because I have felt out of touch the past few months, I've decided that I will listen to only top 40 radio for the foreseeable future. So far, this has been only a limited success, because of the 30-or-so songs I've heard in the past few days, 6 have been something called "Ass Back Home." by Gym Class Heroes and 4 times each for "Lonely Boy" by the Black Keys and "Set Fire to the Rain" by Adele.

I'll hold back on any detailed comment for the moment, but I will say that for the most part it was all listenable aside from the repetition. I do remember when I was in my young teens that when a new song by a band I liked came out that I did want to hear it over and over, but at that point I didn't have instant access to new music in the same way we do now.

In the course of a related exploration, I happened upon a phenomenon called "Moving Like Bernie." Go to Youtube and search if you want to know more.

History Lesson

I know this is kind of eccentric, but I always read the supermarket circulars. I'm not really sure why, since I don't ever make a special trip to the market based on what I see. I guess it's left over from my marketing days. This week, the Acme circular had a special insert celebrating Black History Month. 

I'm not an expert on Black History, so I'm counting on Acme to choose items of historical significance. Here, offered in no particular order and without comment, are the products by which Acme celebrates Black History Month:

• Honey Nut Cheerios
• Hamburger Helper
• Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
• Glory Foods Seasoned Greens
• Hunt's Pasta Sauce
• Peter Pan Peanut Butter
• Bisquick
• Glory Collard Greens
• Fresh Baked Fruit Pies
• Pillsbury biscuits
• Marie Callender's canned soup
• Green Giant frozen vegetables
• Chef Boyardee canned pasta
• Hunt's Tomato Paste
• Colgate Toothpaste
• Wesson Canola Oil
• Softsoap Bodywash