Dolts Collide

As thousands of regular readers will know, our gracious host, Drunka, keeps us well informed of the silliness of the Rocky Mountain News – recall his most recent post on the “blossoming” of Rocky Mountain in-house “blogs”.

The latest from Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple proves that he is a complete dolt, and so too is the PCmag.com columnist he attempts to critique, John C. Dvorak.

Temple is overly anxious to convey a picture of laughter and frivolity filling his news room, yet fails entirely to pick up on the single matter of importance and stupidity in the piece by Dvorak.

Neither man has the slightest inkling of the meaning of the word disinterested.

Neither man is even the slightest bit familiar with the role of journalism.

Neither of them understands the words of Joseph Pulitzer:

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery."

Dvorak seems to dismiss Pulitzer as being the guilty party in promoting “boring journalism”. In his blatant and appalling ignorance, Dvorak writes:

“The problem is the word "disinterested." It's the hallmark of journalism today and translates to bored and boring. Besides not giving a hoot about the story, the disinterested observer is often hoodwinked and subject to public-relations manipulations. Apparently, nobody sees this as a problem.”

On the contrary, we all know that one of the greatest problems with journalism today is that it is all but bereft of indifference and there is precious little, if any, reporting. We are flooded with commentary and trivia and we are awash with personal opinions, with journalists all too often placing themselves and their boring tee-wee thoughts at the centre of everything they write. To wit: the example written by Dvorak.

Editor John Temple makes no mention of any of this in his post critiquing Dvorak. Perhaps it by-passed his brain while he was having an hilarious time in an editorial meeting. I think it's called letting vanity get in the way of intellect.

It would seem that neither man is sufficiently educated to hold their current jobs, let alone suitable people to be commenting on anything within the realm of journalism.

Journalism: A collection of facts with no analysis or opinion.

Disinterested: Free of bias and self-interest; impartial. Having no stake in an outcome.

And that ladies and gentleman is what’s wrong with journalism today, and that is what’s wrong with both Temple and Dvorak: dolts together, blinded by vanity.

Bald Eagle Webcam

High in a tree on his land in Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada. Doug Carrick, a 73-year-old retired accountant, set up a webcam up after noticing that a pair of eagles had nested there.

The happy feathered couple have been carefully incubating two eggs, with one now hatched, and the other due any time.

Best webcam is here – give it time for the picture to appear, be patient.

More information and video streaming here.

Update: please refer to comments; apparently none of the babies have survived.

The first link, above, suggests that a new nest webcam will be starting up “today”.

The second link, above, provides more information about the webcam exercise and about the bald eagle, as well as cam links.

There’s also a good blog about the whole thing, but it hasn’t been updated for a few days, so no details yet about what happened to the remaining babies.

Come the Rapture

American's are so much better prepared than us. Bumper sticker.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

This is fantastic news, and you can try this at home folks!

Have you spent years using primitive methods for knocking sense into yourself?

Or have others frequently offered their kind assistance to help improve the workings of your neurons and synapse?

Well, no more!

Proven scientific help is finally at hand!

New Scientist magazine (15 April 2006) reports that applying a small electrical current to the head can have “a profound effect on the way your brain works”.

Some wires attached to your head and a 9 volt battery will “boost verbal and motor skills and to improve learning and memory in healthy people - making fully-functioning brains work even better.”

It’s also showing promise as a therapy for the lesser functioning.

The hope is to develop a device that can be taken home with patients and may be incorporated into a stylish hat. Or perhaps a facial adornment?

Now, doesn’t transcranial direct current stimulation sound so much safer than do it yourself quackery brain surgery?

Yours

“World’s Best Ever Blogsitter”

Caz

Literary Interlude

I have never read Roth, indeed, I have never heard of him. No, no, not that Roth, the other one – the one you’ve never read or heard of either.

I’m talking about the great Austrian writer Joseph Roth.

Michael Hofmann, who has devoted many years to translating Roth’s body of work (and still going), offered the following except in a recent article. (The Age, 25 March 2006)

The paragraphs appear at the beginning of Chapter 8 of the book The Radetzky March.

It is, as Hoffmann says, moving and majestic.

Read it and be moved, or read it and be envious of the clarity and elegance of the writing.

“In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately stop up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well, or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap.

When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.”

Yours

“World’s Best Ever Blogsitter”

Caz

Presidential Penis Proportions

“Well hung, eh? Hmm…

According to two people who are familiar with Jones’s affidavit on the subject, Jones lists three “distinguishing characteristics” of the President’s erect penis: it is about five inches long; it has the circumference of a quarter; and it angles to one side."

— “Casting Stones,” by Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, Nov. 3, 1997”

Via – Gawker

So, is it even possible for the Presidential penis to have these proportions, or was Paula Jones being a snarky bitch? Yet, why would she be? She made a tidy profit of $850,000 from her glimpse of Presidential penis moment.

Yours

“World’s Best Ever Blogsitter”

Caz

Alcohol and You – Schematic

Birth Control

For most intelligent people, this would be a natural and 100% effective conception preventative.

Not so for Britney Spears, allegedly pregnant – again – to the guy with the corn row hair.

Mumps, Pumps and Yelps

In the World Stupidity Awards for 2005, the Canadian Government was honored with the “Dumbest Government of the Year” award, beating out stiff competition from Iran, the US of A, North Korea, and even the United Nations, which, though not a government per se, has been known to be remarkably dumb.

In more awards, who knew that the plucky little Denver Post was voted “best breaking news website”, by the Associated Press, no less. And who knew that Denver was the heartland of editors with a jaunty sense of humor?

In the edition of 26 April there were mumps, pumps, and yelps in the headlines – a feat few newspapers ever achieve.

Indeed, the headlining article for the day was Mumps Confirmed in Colorado.

The leading piece in the business section was Bush tries to ease pump woes.

Token illustrative pump pictorial.

Under community news items, a delightful piece – Broken glass lands in toddler’s boot, yelps follow – which commences with potty training (keeping the reader in much suspense), before we finally get to hear about the yelps and the happy ending. This riveting piece also reveals that there are real people in the real world who are still entirely comfortable in using the word “hip” in a normal everyday sentence.

“Now, toddlers in general aren't hip to the whole "I have to hurt you to help you"-routine."

See how easy it is? Perhaps you can integrate “hip” into your conversation sometime today? Go ahead, give it a try!

Poor Scotty, of “Dear Scotty” fame, seems to be up a creek without enough people wanting “advice like your best friend would give”. Jeeze wouldn’t you think that at least five people per week in Denver would be bereft of friends and in need of advice?

Well, Scotty’s going to have to start inventing advice questions – which would be highly unethical and no self respecting newspaper or magazine would tolerate such a shocking deception – so, for goodness sake, even if you have lots of real life friends, help Scotty by letting him help you with advice that you don’t really need – send in your questions, and try to incorporate the word “hip” into you problem.

If you can also incorporate the word trumpery into your Dear Scotty question, kudos to you! Trumpery is a mass noun (no plural) meaning:

1. Deception, fraud, or trickery. 2. Rubbish, junk. 3. Flashy but trashy finery in the home or on the body.

In a sentence you might wittily observe, for example:

"Maurice came to the party in such trumpery we all had a good laugh."

I think Scotty would be thrilled to receive a question in relation to something both hip and trumpery.

After that effort, you might just want to relax and remember your youth by reading all about how a Senior found his rhythm at Niwot High's prom!

Oh yes, the community news in Denver has a little bit of something for everyone.

Yours

“World’s Best Ever Blogsitter”

Caz

Cross Pollination Blog Experiment

Okay, we all know this can only end in tears, but have mercy – for my sake, if not for the sake of the happiness and harmony in the home and hearth of Mr & Mrs Drunka.

Yes, he is gone, he is gone, he is gone!

Drunka has abandoned his blog to spend two entire weeks in the real world – and up a creek, with a paddle.

Drunka himself foretold of this event way back on 20 April of this very year.

Drunka left yesterday, or today, or tomorrow, depending on your time zone, or when you read this post. He and his friends looked joyful as they tried on their matching safety outfits. [Drunka on the far left.]

What – you thought you could slack-off for two weeks? Aye, aye? Is that what you thought? Went out and hired a pile of DVDs; bought a dozen good novels to read; did you? Well, nooooooo, there is no interruption to services, so tear up that “to do list”.

For the better behaved commenters (meaning: anyone who comments – please, please, please spend two weeks visiting and commenting; but I’m not going to beg, okay, just do it of your own volition) refreshments and finger foods will be served in the foyer. And no making a mess! Just because it’s “open day” at Drunka’s place doesn’t mean we should run-amok – no running and no amoking!

Now, everyone behave and enjoy yourselves for the duration. What choice do you have? I’ve already locked the gates.


[Blogging is a strange little business isn’t it? Some people just can’t keep away from it. Notice how Drunka couldn't resist having “one last post”, and then another, and then another – his chubby little fingers refusing to surrender the keyboard.]

Yours

“World’s Best Ever Blogsitter”

Caz

Lookism; or, Hey, this pc stuff really comes in handy sometimes

Think there's any reason the News posted this picture on their front page:



Instead of, say, this one:



to illustrate a small but creepy story about CU police offering a $50 reward for the identification of people photographed smoking pot at a "420" rally last week?

Didn't think so. (The News also links to the cops' website, "CU's Great Smokeout Photo Gallery," which so far has posted 150 pictures, with many more promised. My libertarian instincts prohibit linking.)

Sorry, no more blogging, I promise. My mind is going.

Cliff notes

These are along the San Juan River in Utah.

The Buffalo is very different from the southwestern rivers the Drunkablog is used to, which tend to run through deserts. The Buffalo, in north central Arkansas, runs through wooded land. Fortunately the Drunkablog is an all 'rounder who knows how to thrive in any environment. For this trip he'll be sure to have his woollen spiral puttees:



And his multipurpose wilderness neckerchief:


Drunkablog (r., with pointed head) looking cool in camping hankie.

And of course he wouldn't be caught dead without his official U.S.A Dispatch Case:


It'll carry only one dispatch: "More brains."

But the Drunkablog really needs to brush up on his bark utensil-making:


A bark berry pail! How clever! Oh, the D-blog and his chums simply must go berrying! (The folding bark cup is from a dimension so alien the Drunkablog either ignores it or goes mad).

(Images from my falling-apart copy of the amazing Horace Kephart's Camping and Woodcraft (1917, and still in print--though, oddly, only in the U.K.), in which Horace taught his early 20th-century readers how to camp with style in a world without nylon.)

Update: The Drunkablog is signing off with this post so that his tiny peanut-shaped brain can concentrate on being sane and ready for this trip--a stretch under any circumstances, impossible if he's blogging. Luckily Caz is on hand to whip all you freaks into shape. Read her! Obey her! Kill for her!

Back in a couple of weeks.

Like flowers that bloom in the springtime

Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple boasted Sunday about all the blogs "blossoming" on the paper's website:

We were late to the game, but it's exciting to see how many different approaches we've taken since I started this blog [the Rocky's first, begun in April, 2005]. Monday we launch "Homefield Advantage," a new sports blog by Fed Pietila. It will be our 14th regular blog.

Let's break that number down.

There's Mark Wolf's blog, RockyTalkLive, which, not surprisingly, discusses "everything from politics to pop culture." Very safe.

And film critic Robert Denerstein's Film clips, which he started only in March but which already manages (faint praise alert) to look like a real blog. Denerstein updates fairly often, links well to others, and knows movies. Unfortunately his posts have lots of typos and other crud. He also gets hardly any comments, which seems strange in a cultcha-hungry town like Denver.

Including editor Temple's, that's about it as far as "substantive" blogs at the Rocky.

Huge potfuls of "lifestyle" blogs, though. Let's see: on shopping, videogaming, pack-ratting ("The Stuff Exchange"), fashion crap and (by the same blogger) American Idol. Nasty.

But that's only eight blogs. What about the other six? Need you ask? Sports blogs, every one. Basketball, baseball, football, hockey, one on what other sportswriters around the country are babbling about, Sam Adam's The A-List (a blog improbably offering "a different slant on a variety of sports topics") and, finally, a potentially neat one, sports cartoonist Drew Litton's blog Toons and Talk, which I'm willing to bet is the only blog by a sports cartoonist in the country.

Overall they're not exactly innovatin' the hell out of things at the Rocky. I'll look at the Post later, but I know without looking that they have a blog the Rocky should let "blossom" (that sounds so Maoist) as soon as possible: a business blog. Surely the Rocky could deploy somebody to compete with unamusingly full-of-himself Post business columnist and faux blogger (he links only to his own column) Al Lewis, couldn't they?

Here's the News' blogs page if you want to check them out.

Update: Faux. I hate that word.

Now it can be told

Drunkablogistas! The Drunkablog interrupts your syncope to make an important announcement (drumroll, please): While he braves the wilderness in his birchbark canoe, the Drunkablog will, for the first time ever, host a guest blogger at this site! (Well, a guest cross-blogger, anyhow.)

(Cut drumroll)

And not just any blogger. No, at GREAT personal expense and no little risk to life and limb, the Drunkablog has managed to secure the unique blogging talents of the smart, funny, beautiful, strong and antidisestablishmentarianistic Caz, of the great Avatar Briefs!

(Cut drumroll!)

Regular readers if any will recognize Caz from her frequent and hilarious (i.e., sick) comments on this blog. She's good, ye spalpeens.

She's also, oddly, Australian, a Melbournian (Melbournite? Melbourningian?). Doesn't the exoticness of this give you that old "bow down before the power of blog" feeling? Well, it does me. I'm old enough to have used carbon paper in a typewriter. Now here's Caz in Australia, and she's going to post her writing here, on this skank blog written in Denver, and do it almost instantaneously. That such a thing is possible is simply a miracle. Yes, the D-blog is a simp.

Anway, Caz will start posting here Friday, when the Drunkablog will be reasonably close to Final Packing Frenzy, and she'll post thereafter whenever the hell she feels like it, until the Drunkablog returns around the 13th, dead but triumphant.

(Cut the friggin' drumroll!)

Oh, here's the D-blog's birchbark canoe:

Still in drydock: The Drunkawife calls it the "Desert Storm" model. It's fiberglass, of course, and the Drunkablog just figured out today that it had, like, a bunch of leaks. So he got out the Bondo and "patched" them (now there's some goooood scare quotes) very carefully, meaning not very carefully at all, since he "inadvertently" (two-fer!) huffed some Bondo resin and ended up using most of the Bondo on his face. Pray for the Drunkablog.
Update: It's remotely possible that, besides Caz, the Drunkawife and people even stranger will post here too. Not likely, but possible. Many are called but few are krausened.

Beefalo River trip update

Sorry, Buffalo. E-mail received yesterday from trip member "Mingus Eye":

Gents,

It's raining like hell in Ponca as we speak. They have gotten an inch in the last 30 minutes. T-storms are predicted for several days in the next week, including our launch date. Let it pour mother***. YEAH!!!!!!!!

(Note: the Drunkablog does not condone cussing.) The river level on the Buffalo at Ponca bridge right now (10:08 p.m. MDT, April 25) is 2.85, .85 feet more than we need to launch, so things are still looking pretty good (though the river is dropping again).

The Drunkablog was doing pretty good too until just this minute, when he began to panic at how much he still has to do before he can cruise the river with an easy conscience. The D-blog manse is falling down; the tenants are revoltin'; there's blogging--sorry, serious blogging--to do; and I haven't even started packing or bought supplies (mainly freeze-dried farts) yet.

Mingus Eye will be here Sunday (he's driving the 1000 miles from Phoenix); we'll leave Monday morning for Gilbert, Arkansas (905 miles from Denver); arrive in Gilbert on Tuesday; put in on the Beef--sorry, Buffalo--Wednesday; take out the following Wednesday; drive THE SAME DAY 450 miles to Mason City, Illinois (can you imagine what it'll smell like in that car? We could die) so Mingus Eye can pick up his drum set; drive the next day from Mason City to Denver (1000 miles); and finally, Mingus will weave zombie-like back to Phoenix (1000 miles).

All that driving, of course, with gas over $3.00 a gallon. (Both my non-American and my un-American readers will scoff at this whining, but jeez, couldn't we for once hegemonize (de-hegemonize?) somebody and actually, you know, steal their oil?)

The "Beefalo" Story

Years ago my old friend Mingus Eye attended forestry school in Southern Illinois (a fair amount of the extreme southern tip of Illinois is covered by Shawnee National Forest). Southern Illinois (note capitalization) really is part of the South, closer to Kentucky (or Arkansas, for that matter) in feel and spirit than to the rest of Illinois. It's practically part of the Ozarks.

This means, naturally, that the people who live there are a little peculiar. No more so than people anywhere, of course. But it's impossible to talk about the area (or the Buffalo River area for that matter) without somebody bringing up how friendly such folks were in the movie Deliverance. Call it "you shore got a purty mouth" syndrome.

But honest, they're just normally weird down there. For example, in the tiny grocery store my friend patronized when he lived in Southern Illinois, he noticed a sign in the window one day. It read, simply: "Not baby beef!

Not baby beef?

What the hell did that mean? That they were out of "regular" beef but had scads of "baby beef?" That they had tons of regular beef but were fresh out of baby beef? Or did they mean that they didn't carry baby beef as a matter of conscience? Why, for that matter, did they express their attitude toward baby beef in such an unnecessarily cryptic, not to say oracular, manner?

Who knows. But it was that very opaqueness, that layering of meaning, that multiplicity of transgressive interpretations that intrigued us. "Not baby beef!" became a catchphrase, and "Beefalo" was just a natural extension--

Hey! Pay attention!

Speaking of English usage, have you ever heard the Australian term for an American, "seppo?" I've read Australian blogs for years and seen the term many times but only recently got around to googling it. It's rhyming slang: yank rhymes with septic tank which is shortened to "seppo." Quite creative. By the way, most Australians don't hate us. (Man, I almost forgot: Happy ANZAC Day, y'all!)

(Credits: Editor from fromoldbooks.org; friendly fellow paying you a compliment on your oral hygiene from freepressed.com.)

Update: We used to camp on Lusk Creek in Shawnee forest. Here's (somebody else's) picture of "Indian Kitchen" on Lusk Creek. (Don't tell Vern Bellecourt it's called that.)

Movieness

A few gems from The Film Snob's Dictionary:

Apparatus

"Comically obtuse blather-term used in semiotics-driven film studies to denote both the camera and the 'cinematic system of meaning'; stubbornly used by semioticions as if in fear that they'll be reamed with a cattle prod if the words camera or narrative pass through their lips."

Howard, Clint

"Cult actor with squeaky voice and enormous cranium, best known for his brief appearances in the movies of A-list older brother Ron." The authors also note that Clint appeared in the weird Star Trek episode 'The Corbomite Maneuver" as the deep-voiced little alien you want to crush with your shoe, Balok.

Siegel, Don

Director of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Clint Eastwood masterworks Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz. "Siegel elicits strong public endorsements from wannabe-toughster Snobs trying to make up for dermatological and penile shortcomings."

What a racket these guys have. The first in their developing series, The Rock Snob's Dictionary, is probably just as funny as Film Snobs; the last, The Spelunking Snob's Dictionary (to be published in November, 2065), probably won't be.

Panel finds problems in CU tenure process

The panel studying the tenure-granting process at CU will a issue a report that finds, among other things, that "some professors received the job protection without a full review of their work, that post-tenure evaluations aren’t rigorous enough, and that it’s too difficult to fire professors, even if their performance is so poor that students are adversely affected," the Rocky Mountain News says.

Where's Wardo?

The report also claims, according to the Rocky, that "The majority of the 95 randomly selected tenure cases reviewed by the committee . . . showed the university followed processes to the letter, said Howell Estes III, the retired Air Force general who led the investigation."

The majority? Retired Air Force General Howell Estes III? Not reassuring. The Rocky says the 180-page report contains 39 recommendations for changes to CU's tenure-granting process. No link yet, so no idea if the report names any of the professors granted tenure without "full review."

Update: The Post links to the tenure panel's report.

Update II: A CU provost calls the recommended changes "sweeping," but they ain't. Ward Churchill's case was not examined, by the way, and no names are named in the report.

Update III: Churchill comments on new charges of scholarly malfeasance: "Yo. Shutup." (via reader Keziah at Pirate Ballerina.)

Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967

Check out the hippie from central casting.


The subhead's great: "Why they act that way." Drunkablog
makes a guess: Could it be--Ell. Ess. Deeeeee?
An ad for The National Observer:


Marvelously patronizing. And do Cubans still think Fidel "is about the only bit of gaiety we have left?" (Trivia: Hunter Thompson wrote for NO.)

A letter to the editor about a piece the week before on (surely coincidentally) the dangers of LSD begins:

Although I am not privy to the "acid" experience, my mind was partially blown by your sensationalistic approach to LSD.

Partially blown.

Stewart Alsop begins a Speaking Out column titled "Why Juanita enjoyed the riot," about the recent unrest in Los Angeles and other cities (dubbed by the MSM of the time and known to this day as the "the long, hot summer"):

Reporter: What were you doing during the riot?

Juanita (a cheerful, rather charming 16-year-old Negro girl): That wasn't no riot. That was a rebellion.

OK, what were you doing during the rebellion?

Juanita (grinning with delight): I was out lootin'.

Alsop concludes:

In the years ahead many sins of omission and commission by the white majority must be expiated, and much money spent. For the immediate future, jobs are essential--this immensely rich country ought to be able to guarantee a job at a living wage to any adult who wants to work. . . . But for the short run there is only one way to make sure that next summer and the summer after that will not be repetitions of the ghastly summer now ending. Force must be used immediately and selectively, as soon as trouble starts. . . . Juanita and her contemporaries must be persuaded right at the beginning, before the "carnival atmosphere" has time to spread, that this riot will not be fun.

In other words, shoot Juanita.

An Ogden Nash poem begins, "I offer one small bit of advice that Billy Graham could write a whole column on/Never ignore any bit of advice offered by King Solomon." It was a bit of all over for Ogden by 1967.

The article on the Smothers Brothers is pre-censorship problems, but here's one of the jokes excised by evil CBS homonculi:

Dick: Tommy, today is Easter Sunday. Do you know what Easter is actually all about?

Tom: Sure. It's the day Jesus Christ rose from his tomb--

Dick: That's right. I'm proud of you. I honestly didn't think you knew.

Tom--and if he sees his shadow, he has to go back in again for six weeks.

The submarine rescue piece is by Peter Maas, and recounts the story of Swede Momsen, inventor of the "Momsen Lung" and the diving bell, the latter of which he used in 1939 to rescue 33 sailors from their crippled submarine off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Cynical, morose, whining--but what a writer!

Then I get to the actual article about the hippies, and it turns out to be Joan Didion's famous piece, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." Of course, now I remember that most of the columns collected in the book of the same name were originally published in the Post. Typical passage:

We sit down and have some anise tea. "meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newpaper photographs of mass murderers. [One] middle-aged man, [George] . . . is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and he stares at me without seeing me.

I feel that my mind is going--George is dead, or we all are--when the telephone suddenly rings.

I used to love Didion's depressive posturing; now it's kind of grating, though her new book, The year of magical thinking, about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, has gotten good reviews.

Finally, take Y.A. Tittle's advice:


First, put on a helmet to protect your tiny brain when you beat your head against the wall during withdrawal. Make sure it has the number 14 on it!

Fun fact: Y.A.'s full name was Yelberton Abraham Tittle.

Update: Yelberton. Abraham. Tittle.

Drunkablog finds long-lost twin brother

Case Report:

We report the case of a man who had an 11 year history of the delusional idea that he was transparent ("like a piece of glass"), associated with alcohol abuse. The intense fear he experienced when people seemed able to look right through him caused him to hurry along the streets, seeking shadows or darkness in order to hide his face as far as possible. He discovered that alcohol suppressed these symptoms and therefore, during episodes when his delusion was most manifest, he drank heavily.

Update: False alarm. Further down in the case: "He was never financially embarrassed, took pride in his independence and had built his own house." No way we're related.

(Case report from the very interesting Priory.com, a compendium of online medical journals, one of which, the impressively named International Journal of Veterinary Medicine, currently has an article on canine Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.)

PSA: Don't go near the water

For fear of jinxing it (I mentioned our Missouri River trip last year and we didn't go) I haven't said anything before now, but the Drunkablog and a few 'mates are doing a canoe trip in, now, less than two weeks. Eight days on the Buffalo River in Arkansas.

That's the plan anyway. At the landing where we want to put in (as the jargon has it), the Ponca low water bridge (do not attempt to go under bridge!), the river needs to be flowing at two feet. Less than that and it's dry in spots. Right now, the river's flowing at 1.59 feet. Not enough.

This matters because the upper stretch is the most spectacular, scenically speaking, and if we have to start farther downstream we'll miss sights like this:



Which would suck.

But I think we're pretty much committed to doing the trip; it's just a question of how far upriver we'll be able to put in. Rain, please.

(Credit: Waterfall on the Buffalo from the very nice site Ozark Backpacking.)

Update 3:50 p.m. Incredibly, this just in at Drunkablog World Headquarters (via e-mail):

Gents,

It's been raining in Ponca (about a 1/2 inch so far) and there is a 70% of T-storms for tomorrow and next Monday through Wednesday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Note: Exclamation points denote excitement.)