The Special Snowflake Award

I don't always link to idiots, but this particular special snowflake is a rare treat. Female Authors Depend on their Husbands to Write Romance By Michael Kozlowski.

His premise is total misogynistic crap. He defends his article because all the quotes are from women and therefore his argument must be true -- despite the fact that a number of those quoted say the quotes are out of context and that their situation does NOT validate his point.

It upsets me that in 2014 someone who considers himself an industry insider and editor-in-chief of an online site can believe his own story and then throw out denials even as his examples, premises and methodologies are shown to be deficient.

-- Women writers aren't really writer's.
-- They are princesses supported by their husbands.
-- The man's job is to work, the woman's to make babies and rear them.
-- Romance has lots of women writers and readers and self-publishing, so there has to be a problem here.
-- Women's writing is a hobby.

He mocks some of the men standing up to say that their wives helped them and dismisses them as poor hobby writers, too. Without checking to identify, oh the ones with 30 published novels and multiple New York Times mentions.

Worse, this guy can't even write.

Sorry. You have better things to do than read this claptrap, but sometimes you have to know your enemy.

And for the record, I am not a best-selling SF author or tenured Physics professor. But Mrs. Dr. Phil does support me, and if it wasn't for her excellent work health insurance, I would probably be dead now, instead of sitting in a hospital bed getting treated.

Utter, utter horseshit.

Dr. Phil

HBO 2 -- Starship Troopers -- The Abyss

Second Session: Starship Troopers (conclusion)
Good thing our heroes are around or there'd be no happy ending for humanity. Also managed to eliminate the extra boyfriend via a brain smoothie.

The Abyss
Rather amusing movie to watch while under pressure in a tank. They're down 2000 feet, which would be roughly 66 atmospheres and not 2 atm. One of the techs complained that they adjusted pressure too fast -- I pointed out that the dialogue said eight hours to equalize, which is not unreasonable. And we do see Mary Elizabeth Mastratonio pinching her nose and blowing just like I have to. Movie has been out for a while, but James Cameron's fanatical devotion to details still holds up. I always worry what Bud's wedding band is made from -- gold and silver are too soft to hold up to the pressure door. Did they have titanium rings on the market yet? Or were Bud and Lindsey so much geeks that they used a pipe fitting? (grin) We ended the session with the psychotic SEAL lieutenant imploding and going crunch.

Heart and respiratory rates definitely drop while in oxygen under pressure. Normal resting pulse for me is about 59 for me. I know that last year in the hospital I regularly tripped the <50 bpm alarm when going to sleep and today, too, getting down to 49 bpm while "diving" as the team calls it. Looks like normal respiration at rest is around 23-26. In the tank can drop under 20, down to 15. There's a monitor I can see from my tank -- it has a clock display, too, if I line up my progressive lenses on my glasses to focus. Anyway yellow light for pulse rate alarm. Blue for respiration. Not quite sure where the trigger is yet -- I could ask but where's the science fun in that -- but maybe 15?

It is true that you sometimes hold your breath during exciting scenes. I think it was when the cable crane was coming down and then fell over the edge, I saw the blue light go to two bars and my respiration was 9. And I've SEEN this movie. (double-take-grin)

Waiting for Mrs. Dr. Phil to arrive and my discharge paperwork to get processed. Expect to blow this pop stand by 5pm or so. And back for Session Three and the uplifting conclusion to The Abyss tomorrow.

Dr. Phil

Home

9:20pm. Not quite dark in West Michigan in early June. Bug noises outside. Crickets. Bunches of birds atwitter -- real twittering -- in our stand of trees. The day lillies are growing lovely foliage. A huge skunk cabbage is smack in the middle of the bare patch of earth over the septic tank.

I'm home.

Not out of the woods, things could still go pear shaped, but there's a lot more optimism amongst the medicos than a week ago. If you're keeping score, we're at Plan J. No make that Plan K -- now I know how the hurricane and winter storm people feel looking at the alphabet -- as we've gone from a two-lumen PICC line to the actually installed single lumen line, and the other part of my Borg gear has been downgraded from a diffusion pump to a simple pumpless gravity fed IV on a stand. Sigh. So much for convenience.

But I'm home!

On the way home we stopped at Jimmy John's in Allendale, grabbed a couple of sandwiches and chips. Mmm, BBQ chips... flavor... salt.

There was a car in the driveway when we got home -- it was the IV delivery service with a big shopping bag of parts and tubes and cleaning stuff, then a big silvery block of ice packs and 500mL IV packs with vancomycin added.

Dinner. Then wait for the Spectrum Home Nurse to come and set up the first IV. Supposed to be 9pm, but as often happens it was closer to 10pm. Our address wasn't in her GPS. We've only lived here twenty years... In fact, the nurse is still here, working on her laptop in the dining room waiting the two hours for the drips to finish.

Clearly the system works, but I was really hoping for the diffusion pump. They keep telling me that the IV stand is portable, I can wander around the house, bathroom, etc. To which I cough (*bullshit*) and point out that I am 50% weight limited on my left foot right now and can only walk with either two canes or a walker. With what third hand am I supposed to carry/hold/move this IV stand? Idiots. 2 x 2 equals four hours of immobility a day. Probably nap in bed for the morning one, watch bad TV and write blog posts, as now, at night.

But I'm home.

And we'll endure. And hopefully improve things so that, for now at least, they don't want to take the foot.

Home.

Dr. Phil