damned bad potatoes. They have a way of ruining what could have been a delicious lamb stew. Three bites, and the bitterness overtook me... I knew there was something wrong. And then the upset stomach for the next couple hours really made it obvious.

And the thing is, I know what to look for, soft, yielding, green flesh. And I was being careful, but apparently noooo... bad potatoes can be stealthy.


At least it's just an upset stomach.

animal metabolic problems always show up in medical data bases. i was looking up dialysis for my case study last year and ran across articles on dialysis for cats.

How did "Acute Renal Failure in Horses" make it into MD Consult's reference library? Why are papers from The Veterinary clinics of North America. Equine practice even in there??

If you have too much money, spend it on this:

I really wish the woodpeckers would stop jackhammering at the house.

Oh that Rush game starts at 7:30 PM if you need a time to decide.

It's kind of interesting what kind of information we are willing to put on facebook or similar sites. Even if you don't put on to much information it can still be sold as a commodity by the owners of facebook. Not like they really care about your actual identity but the demographic information and the activities you do can be used for some purpose. They don't need to actually see your page to ge this information either, I'm sure they have all our stats and such databased on some nice little spreadsheet. All our names are replaced by numbers but the info is still there. Not to make you paranoid or anything but as a means for market research facebook's strategy is brilliant! No more annoying polls or phone calls, just need to get your mark to make a personal page on a "social networking" site.

Sounds too smart for a morning Al post.

Alison, to answer your question, which was unfortunately placed, it's because I originally wrote the new version here when the damnyouparas.com server was on central time (so I would subtract an hour from posting times.) Now it's on eastern time, but they haven't upgraded to a version of PHP that would let me automagically correct for that.

In short, my posts were an hour late because of a bug. But it's fixed now (I think).

I guess I'm going to have to concede the point on this one. While that video wasn't necessarily a politician, and while I guess the US Director of National Intelligence isn't really a politician per se, it seems that non-satirical people are indeed capable of that level of circular logic about very serious matters.

1) Waterboarding has been approved at the highest levels of the US government:

When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.

These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.

"Waterboarding would be excruciating," the US director of national security, in overall charge of intelligence, said in the interview in the New Yorker magazine, speaking of the simulated drowning technique that many regard as torture.

"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture," he said.

When asked to define torture, McConnell replied: "My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain."

But [McConnell] told the magazine flatly: "We don't torture."

Actually, I already do all of that, but I'm less concerned about what they're trying to sell to me than what they're trying to sell about me.

Clearly, I'm not so uncomfortable with it that I'm deleting my account yet. That said, that it takes so much to delete one's account is somewhat disquieting.

(Your point about using browsers without adblock is well taken, though. Using the computers at the hospital -- often with just IE6 and, hence, no tabs -- drives me insane.)