My streak continues: 5 consecutive nights in which I go to bed, fall asleep, and then at between 2:00 and 2:05 am, my eyes snap open and I’m wide awake the rest of the night, although too tired to get anything done. I’m still kind of impressed at the consistency of this effect of the drug on my system. There’s also a bout of late afternoon/early evening shakes, but that hasn’t been as precisely predictable.

So now I’m being a bad patient and stopping the medication prematurely. I’m kind of curious to see what happens tonight. Does my internal alarm stop going off altogether? Does the clock start to vary? It’s not a great experiment, because the fact that I’m currently so dang tired is a confounding variable, but I do want to see the outcome. Unfortunately, I’d rather not do further experimentation along these lines on myself, so I’m not going to play with the variables any more. Student volunteers? The cat? Nah, that would probably be fatal to me.

We’re only a few hundred comments away from a nice round 2,000,000 total comments on this blog.

Of course, that number is totally fictitious because we lost over half the comments when NatGeo took over from ScienceBlogs, and then we lost a lot more when we ported over to this site from NatGeo, but hey, the round numbers are an artifact of using base 10, anyway. The current count is 111101000001010011000 in binary, which ends in a bunch of zeroes already.

Here’s an interesting ethical dilemma for you. Doctors in Greece (it’s not at all clear how many doctors are doing this) have a way of dealing with anti-vaxxers.

Mass fake vaccinations have been taking place in dozens of vaccination centers throughout Greece, media reported on Sunday. The bribe fee for doctors and nurses is apparently 400 euros. the fee is paid is by those who do not want to receive the vaccines against Covid-19 but want to gain access to several activities or simply avoid the twice per week Rapid tests for professional and other reasons.

But then a hilarious thing happened: Doctors pocketed the bribe but administered real vaccine and not “water” in order to avoid getting into trouble should the fake vaccination come out, according to a report by Mega TV.

On the one hand, this is just wrong. Doctors are bound to respect the wishes of their patients, and pocketing the 400 euros compounds the wrongness. Of course, it would also be unethical in this case to do as the patient desires.

On the other hand, this is great from a societal point of view. I want to say “keep it up!”…that is, until I meet a doctor who does the reverse, and out of misplaced, wacky ideas decides to give me a homeopathic dose of a vaccine.

These drugs, man…sure, they are reducing inflammation and pain. But they’ve got little clocks built in to them, and the alarm goes off every night at 2am, man, and my brain starts racing. The gears are stripped, though, and everything is spinning and smoking and screeching and I think there’s a wobble, man, like some night my transmission is going to blow and my dorsal and median raphe are going to catch fire and my locus coeruleus is going to go sproing out my ears and my ventral tegmentum is going to snap its supports and end up dangling in my oil pan, or maybe dragging in the road throwing sparks as I careen wildly along some dark highway to an end I’ll be too stoned to appreciate.

This is not good, man, if the last few days are any guide, I’m now going to lie in a half-conscious state for a few hours with my ears ringing, flirting in and out of brief bouts of exhausted sleep until at 5am my normal, healthy, well-trained brain circuitry starts screaming at my cortex that it’s DAYTIME, THE SUN IS RISING, THE BIRDS ARE MAKING NOISE, THE CAT WANTS TO BE FED, I DON’T CARE HOW TIRED YOU ARE, IT’S TIME TO GET UP.

Two more days of these little white pills. Then I’m telling my dealer never again, just pith me now and get it all over with, man. I don’t think prednisone and I get along well at all.

I decided to blow off the work for the night and go to the movies. But now that the local theater coop has put in a second screen I’ve had to make decisions every time I go. Two choices! Oh boy!

The first option was The Eternals, the latest Marvel franchise entry. It’s another mob of superheroes, with immortality added on top of the ability to fly, to punch really hard, to shoot lasers out of their eyes^*. That did not appeal. I did not go. I will predict that the ending of that movie is going to be another CGI slam-fest. Plus it’s another example of dredging the bottom of the IP barrel to come up with an obscure comic book that they can pump up into a big blockbuster. I hope it bombs.

The alternative was Lamb. Yes! That looked weird and surreal, and it was.

The story: Ingvar and Maria are an Icelandic couple (the whole movie is in Icelandic, with subtitles) who run a remote sheep farm. It’s beautiful, even though much of it is shot in a gray fog and mist, with the Icelandic scenery peeking through. It’s lambing time! They deliver several normal lambs, and then one brings them up short — we don’t see the lamb for quite some time, but for some reason Ingvar and Maria are enchanted by her, naming her Ada and bringing her into the house to raise her as their child. A good part of the surreal nature of this movie is how the couple are perfectly comfortable with, and even loving as their own child, a baby who has the head of a sheep and the body of a human child, as is eventually revealed. There’s something about Ada that makes people fall in love with her. I’ll say no more, except that the movie culminates in a bloody revelation.

I entirely enjoyed it. No punching. One semi-magical mystery. Good acting. People who were human and interesting in an extraordinarily unusual situation. Also, less than two hours long, while The Eternals goes on for 2½ hours, and another prediction: I bet it ends with a teaser to persuade you to watch the next movie in the franchise.

Go see it. Send a message that we want more unique movies, rather than more of the same ol’ same ol’. I think most people would enjoy it.

---

^*No. Just no. Eyes don’t work that way. I hate it, it’s one of the worst conventions^** of these kinds of movies.

^**The worst is how “mutations” are handled. Somehow, single point mutations, or maybe insertions/deletions, are powerful enough to induce metaphysical powers that break all the laws of thermodynamics? I can’t accept it. Flies, mice, and cockroaches have comparable physiology and genetics to ours, so why aren’t there one-in-a-billion Drosophila variants buzzing around zapping everything with laser beams? Why aren’t there mice levitating? Why no rare cockroaches punching through walls with their super-strength? It’s all nonsense^***.

^***Nonsense is OK in the movies. The problem is when it overwhelms the human story. I enjoy Spider-Man or Captain America^**** because of the themes of responsibility and sacrifice that I can relate to.

^****But not Batman or Iron Man. They’re just rich assholes.

In my last post, I linked to a source in Newsweek. I should not have done that. Newsweek, like other such weekly news magazines, such as Time and US News & World Report, is garbage. It’s part of the grocery store media ecosystem, that collection of glossy magazines on racks near the checkout stand, living on impulse purchases by bored shoppers waiting in line. Newsweek is not to be trusted.

Writing in The Columbia Journalism Review last year, Daniel Tovrov depicted Newsweek, once one of America’s most distinguished magazines, as a shell of its former self. All that was left was clickbait, op-eds from the likes of Nigel Farage and Newt Gingrich, and a general sense of drift. “Nobody I spoke to for this article had a sense of why Newsweek exists,” Tovrov wrote. “While the name Newsweek still carries a certain authority—remnants of its status as a legacy outlet—and the magazine can still bag an impressive interview now and then, it serves an opaque purpose in the media landscape.”

Last week, Newsweek suggested one possible purpose: The legitimization of narratives straight out of the right-wing fever swamps. An op-ed written by John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, coyly suggested that Kamala Harris, who was born in California, may not be eligible to serve as vice president because her parents were immigrants. It was, as many pointed out, a racist attack with no constitutional merit, on par with the birther conspiracy theory that claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Within a few hours, Eastman’s op-ed was being brandished by President Trump, who told reporters he had “heard” Harris may not be eligible to serve.

I’ll avoid them more thoroughly in the future.

I didn’t know Leslie Cannold had an agony aunt column. Let’s take a look at it.

This week, she’s asked by someone if they should quit Facebook. Her answer is yes.

I’m inclined to say yes, everyone should quit Facebook (or is that Meta?) because it’s a determinedly monopolistic and rabidly self-interested company that does little good and a whole lot of terrible in the world. This includes commodifying our personal information, allowing misinformation to flourish and algorithmically encouraging the political radicalisation of users, all of which is like rat poison to democracy.

Why give your time, attention or custom to that?

I agree. It’s why I finally quit Zuckerberg, may he rot in hell.

But Cannold should have stopped there, because…

Having said that, I confess that while I despise Facebook, I’m still on it. Why? Because in the same way you are attached to the events page, I am served by being able to promote my writing to followers that right now I can’t reach anywhere else.

In part, that’s the fault of Facebook and the other big tech monoliths too, who have done all they can to gobble up competitors who did or might have provided something better like Instagram and WhatsApp while monopoly regulators did — and continue to do — nothing.

LinkedIn offers the best alternative to date. A different business model but the same gender breakdown of users and an events feature, though the average user age is older. However, if that’s not an issue for you and those you plan events will come with you, maybe give that a try?

Yikes. Step back and look at what you’ve written, Dr Cannold! You’ve just told someone else they should quit Facebook because it’s “a determinedly monopolistic and rabidly self-interested company that does little good and a whole lot of terrible in the world”, and then immediately said it’s fine for you. Way to totally undercut your own advice. It may be “rat poison to democracy”, but you’re going to continue to consume it while telling everyone else to eschew the warfarin.

I know I stayed on for far too long, because I had connections to family and friends there, but at least I wasn’t telling everyone else they should get off while making excuses for myself.

Every time. Every time these conservative defenders of all that is right and good try to explain what they’re trying to do, they end up smearing everyone involved. Remember the pious anti-feminists who tried to tell us that they are supporters of womanhood and femininity, so they have to accuse women of being sluts? Same thing now with the preachers of true manhood, like Josh Hawley.

Not that there's anything wrong with that… https://t.co/xygoyQoza0

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) November 1, 2021

I have to wonder who these men are that are so hurt and despairing that they have retreated into video games and porn? All you men out there who read this, and play games (OK, or watch porn, you don’t need to admit it): are you all just doing it because you’re oppressed and had your feelings hurt and don’t know what else to do while sitting around suffering with self-pity?

My exposure to multiplayer games is limited, but it does add to my appreciation of all those macho, aggressive players who called me a “fag” or “bitch” or used the chat to brag about their sexual conquests to imagine that they were all weeping and masturbating while they were doing it. Josh tells me that’s what they’re doing, and would he lie?

It’s not much, but at least our Hallowe’en display has a theme. Can you tell what it is?

You want to recognize our house. First tip is that it’s pumpkin-colored. Then look for the giant red-eyed glowing spider over the door, and the blinking lights of the smaller male climbing the wall to reach her. That’s us! We’re giving out M&Ms and peanut butter cups.

Also, as a nice touch, the decorative stonework planter is full of nothing but thistles. The person answering the door might be my witchy-wife, because I’m still clomping about in slow motion with The Boot clamped around my ankle.