Most of you who read my pieces know that I rarely write about pure politics, but rather put politics in the perspective of music, science, or other contexts.  This piece is different.

The conduct of the candidates for the Republican nomination and especially the audience at the previous two “debates” has been much than reprehensible.  It not only borders on being vicious, the conduct crosses the line to much more.

As is my wont, I shall use an analogy from another topic to explain why I use the term venomous.  I think that it is quite apt.

Lots of pieces have been written about why Hurricane Irene did so much damage as a Category 1 storm as it skirted the Eastern seaboard.  The answer is deceptively simple, but does not fit in with what we have been taught about hurricanes.

Before we examine Irene specifically, let us look at what a hurricane really is.  A hurricane is a rather intense form of a tropical cyclone, and we shall use just the term cyclone in general for all of these kinds of storms.  There are other kinds of cyclones, but for this piece the unqualified term shall mean tropical cyclones, except at the beginning of the main text where the term cyclone itself is defined.

Before we get started, the only reference that I am going to make to the story of the day is the date in the title.  This has been covered ad naseum elsewhere, often with distortions to fit a particular political perspective.

We last discussed the first side of the seminal album, Quadrophenia, by The Who, entirely written by Peter Townshend.  Since that time I have done more extensive research, and found some interesting things that I hope will be illuminating for everyone.  They were for me.  Without too many details in the introduction, I can say with a good bit of confidence that this record almost dissolved the band.

Roger put Pete in hospital with punches, Kit was almost banned, and the fraud that the management was doing to the band was discovered.  That was part of the genesis for the song “How Many Friends Have I Really Got” that was part of The Who by Numbers some time later.  But there is more!

I have a frank correction to make, and then what is more like a clarification as to the original characters who were combined to make Jimmy.  I also have a stupid one to make, about the name of the album itself.  Shall we begin?

Sorry to be late tonight.  I was occupied earlier this afternoon than I had planned and got a late start.  However, I wanted to produce a quality piece even though it did not post exactly at 9:00.

This the last part in our three piece series on anesthetics.  We have covered general anesthetics of the inhalation type and of the IV type, and now will discuss local anesthetics.  The primary difference betwixt general and local anesthesia is that in general anesthesia the patient is generally unconscious or at least highly sedated, whilst in local anesthesia the awareness of the patient is generally not impaired, although sometime they are sedated by other agents.

The term “local” is not as descriptive as one might think.  While it is true that very small areas can be anesthetized, often much larger areas are.  By the way, it is likely that local anesthesia is much more ancient than general anesthesia, for reasons to be explained later.

I apologize for posting late tonight, but a very rare event happened.  The International Space Station made a transit directly overhead at posting time, and I did not want to miss it.  Besides, my lovely friend wanted to watch it with me.  It was a spectacular sight, and the ISS was not bad, either, LOL!

Second, I was going to add a new crosspost site that is run by our friend ninkasi23, but never figured out how to make it so.  I trust that she will email or call me to help me over my stupidity.

I was going to write about the compilation album, Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy this time but we have already discussed every song on that record.  However, I will make a comment about the title.

Most people think that the title was just sort of a dirty joke, but it actually was a description of the band members.  I think that Lambert came up with it, but I am not really sure.  Here is the meaning:

At the time, and still, Daltrey was pretty fit, so he was Meaty, meaning all muscle and no fat.  Moon, of course, kept the beat, so he was Beaty.  Entwistle, aka The Ox, was a really big guy, and of course Townshend was always leaping about the stage, so he was Bouncy.  Now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Aunt Agnes was really my Great Aunt Agnes (my grandmum’s sister), born Agnes Roberts in the 1910s.  She was the baby, although Ma outlived all of her siblings.  Uncle Guy was a McBride, and a really nice fellow.  I never heard anyone say anything bad about Uncle Guy.

They lived a few miles south of Hackett near James Fork creek, the only all weather running water nearby.  They had a farm, and raised cattle and some truck.

Last week we started this three part series with inhalation anesthetics, and here is a link.  This week we shall discuss injected anesthetics, and finally shall finish up the series next week with local ones.

We should once again stress the difference betwixt anesthetics and analgesics.  In general (this rule is not 100%, but darned close), anesthetics render the patient unconscious so that surgical procedures can be performed with no physical pain during the procedure.  In addition, many anesthetics cause muscle relaxation which makes surgical procedures less traumatic.

Analgesics, on the other hand, are not designed to render the patient unconscious, but rater to moderate the sensation of pain caused by many reasons.  A few analgesics can be used as anesthetics, but in general depress the medulla such that respiratory difficulties often result.  

I thought that I was done with it, I really did!  I was really better the past few days.  But depression has set in again.  I hate it!  I want to be normal, get a job (all of you know that I do have a brilliant side), and get back with my family.

Not likely.  My garden is ready to pick, and I have not the energy to do anything to make it so. Melancholia is a curse that I have lived with, off and on, for half a century now.  For a couple of weeks I was over it, but that was just because of a fantasy.

Now, never concern yourselves that I will do anything rash.  I will live until I die, and will not die from my own hand.

Freaks and Geeks is one of the few TeeVee shows with a predominately child and adolescent that ever had much appeal to me.  Part of the appeal was that the program was masterfully written and directed, and another part is that the acting was really very good.  It ran only for one season, 1999 through 2000, and even then not all of the 18 taped episodes were aired.  It was an NBC show and was the precursor for later, more successful shows like That ’70s Show.

Even though it aired in 1999 and 2000, it was set in 1980 in a made up suburb of Detroit.  The production team did a really good job with getting the period right, in particular the cars that were often used as unifying devices in several episodes.  I have to tell you a personal reason that I immediately liked the show.  As a really big admirer of SCTV, the fact that Joe Flaherty was cast as the father of the protagonist made me watch faithfully.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

This is an installment about my fifth grade teacher and Boy Scout leader.  I was a bit hesitant to write about this, as I am not sure that he is quite dead yet, but my doing the maths places his age at at least 80 years, give or take a couple.  The last part of the post may be disturbing for some, and is not suitable for little ones.

I attended Hackett School from the end of first grade through the seventh grade.  The school was quite dismal at the time.  In all fairness, the district has greatly improved over the years, I am told, so any comments about it are strictly from those days from around 1964 to 1970.

Anesthetics are as essential to modern surgery as are sterile fields and antiseptics.  There are a couple of reasons for that, the most obvious being that the patient most likely could not survive the shock and pain of any but the least invasive procedure with out them.  Interestingly, the use of anesthetics in the modern sense is quite recent, dating only from the mid 1800s.

There are two major divisions of anesthetics, general anesthetics and local ones.  General ones cause a more or less complete loss of sensation and consciousness, whilst local ones cause a loss of sensation for only a relatively small part of the body and leave the patient conscious.  In addition, general anesthetics fall into two wide classes, inhalation ones and intravenous ones.  We shall discuss, in general terms, inhalation general anesthetics tonight.

Sometimes I wright about bands that are not my favorites, but that had several nice songs.  10cc is one of them.  I own not a single record of theirs, but always thought that they were pretty good.  Not spectacular, but pretty good.  I am a casual listener, and until I began my research I did not even realize that they from the United Kingdom.

I should have known because of the song Rubber Bullets, but they use them here as well.  They were really pretty good, and at their best could express emotion extremely well, to the point of causing tears now and then.  Nothing like The Who, but still pretty good.

What I intend to do tonight is just to give a short survey of 10cc, not a deep analysis like I do with The Who.  I am sure that many of you are bored with my long and ponderous explication of the work from The Who, so this is sort of a break from it.  Also, I am changing my convention for names of bands, albums, and songs.  As before, the name of the band will always be in bold, and the name of the album in italics.  Starting now, the names of individual songs will be in italics, but with “quotation marks before and after” to do a better job of distinguishing the songs from the albums.