Moon Over My ED

The full moon was on June 7 and even though there is no statistical correlation between the moon and craziness (as you can read on the Skeptic's Dictionary), my ER begs to differ. I swear there is something to this old chestnut, because crazy seems to come out of the woodwork. I'm not talking about people with clinical psychological illnesses. I'm talking about regular people who should know how to behave better!

Speaking of which, if your nurse is running (literally RUNNING!) toward a scene that looks like this:
Now is not the time to stop your nurse and ask for a cup of water.

Just in Case You Were Dumb

Ant Wars

Our apartment was invaded a few days ago by an army of ants. They surrounded and demolished the sugar container, snuck behind enemy lines into the dishwasher (to get at the aforementioned sugar container), went vertical into the cupboards, and have taken over the kitchen counters for their central command. We are at war people. So Joy has released all weapons at the little buggers, and has not ruled out the bug-fog "nuclear" option, if necessary. We have poisoned the food supplies (we are playing dirty) and are awaiting results.


Shock and Awe was never so artfully disguised.

A Fundamental Question

True or False: was Noah's Ark big enough to hold the dinosaurs? This was a question on a test in Creation Science at Liberty University. A student from Brown went undercover as a student to Liberty (Jerry Falwell's brainchild) and then wrote "The Unlikely Disciple." He took the core curriculum classes at Liberty and this was one of his test questions.

I admit, I've been puzzling over this one for 2 days. If I were an evangelical fundamentalist, I might think that of course it was big enough! God made it big enough for all 1.4-30 million species we currently have, so why not the dinosaurs? But then again, if the dinosaurs fit on the ark, they would be with us today. But maybe dinosaurs are remnants of the Garden of Eden, and as a final punishment to mankind after kicking us out of the garden, we also lost these fantastic species to the flood? On the other hand, does that mean that I believe that the people before Noah lived at the same time as the dinosaurs? Wouldn't running from T-rex's and feasting on brontosaurs merit a couple of verses in Genesis? Not to mention, there were other cultures there during earth's 6000 year history and surely they would have written about or drawn a dinosaur? So I'm going to answer......True! No wait, False! No True! I never get T/F questions right.

Facts I Would Rather Not Know

Thanks NPR for this gem about the Skull & Bones secret society: Magog is the nickname reserved for the most sexually experienced member of the society. Who was Magog in the 1940s? George H. W. Bush. (Now's an appropriate time for a full body shudder.)

Incidentally, George W. Bush couldn't decide on a nickname, so he was known as "Temporary."

Using the Power Of Journey for Good - Not Evil

Such is the genius of Glee! So this is kind of a commercial for Glee (a new show on Fox), but I've had their a cappella version of Journey's Don't Stop Believin' stuck in my head for 2 days now. I even broke down and bought it on i Tunes. The classic move on the show comes when a high school teacher plants some pot on the high school quarterback to blackmail him into joining Glee Club. As everyone knows, whatever the popular kids join will become popular (if you blackmail them, they will come...). I really hope this show doesn't get cancelled, because a cappella never sounded so good.



I admit, I'm kind of jealous our Madrigals in high school were never this good singing Puttin' On The Ritz. If only we had the quarterback!

Fun Facts About Chinese

Chinese has anywhere from 7 to 14 major language groups and perhaps over 8000 distinct dialects if you consider that nearly every county in China has it's own dialect and there are over 8000 counties. Oh, and people with different dialects by and large can't understand each other. Why is this a fun fact? Because when a hysterical Chinese patient ends up in the ER with no one to help translate, it means your day is going to suck.


And they tell us English is complicated!

Speaking of the Chinese, this article has some awesome gems about China's response to the H1N1 flu. Basically, this poor guy from Virginia goes on vacation to China and ends up spending the whole time quarantined in a hospital because his temperature was 98.9 F when he got off the plane. Did I mention his name sounds Mexican? And everyone that took care of him was dressed in full biohazard suits - even though he DID NOT HAVE THE FLU.

The best lines are these: "Patients get three meals a day -- their choice of Chinese cuisine (mostly chicken and rice) or Western cooking (chicken and rice prepared a different way)." And, "A hospital official asked him to sign papers acknowledging that he had been treated well..."

Now a picture of 2 quarantine victims escaping a Chinese flu ward: