A great email forward from manthes…

I, ____________ (fill in the blank), being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by artificial means.

Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of peckerwood politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it.

If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and ask for a cold beer, it should be presumed that I won’t do so ever again. When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my spouse, children and
attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day.

Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn business, and pay attention instead to the health, education and future of the millions of Americans who aren’t in a permanent coma and who nonetheless may be in need of nourishment.

Under no circumstances shall any politicians butt into this case. I don’t care how many fundamentalist votes they’re trying to scrounge for their run for the presidency in 2008, it is my wish that they play politics with someone else’s life and leave me alone to die in peace.

I couldn’t care less if a hundred religious zealots send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me. I don’t know these people, and I certainly haven’t authorized them to preach and/or crusade on my behalf. They should mind their own damn business, too.

If any of my family goes against my wishes and turns my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back from the grave and make his or her existence a living hell.

Check out www.vangoghmuseum.nl

This is what happens here at the Danger Ranch when you misbehave.

OK, not really, but they were a lifesaver today. Here’s the deal. The Sinus Gods have been most displeased with me lately. After a few weeks of suffering their wrath I decided it was time to visit the doctor for some prescribed relief. Unfortunately it was going to be a week before my doctor’s office could squeeze me in - not a regular appointment but a whole week to be squeezed in a fly on standby. And it took five minutes of phone menus and 20 minutes of holding (with beeps, not muzak) to find that out.

Ever the responsible health care consumer, I looked for an urgent care clinic to avoid taking up space in the ER with a non-life-threatening condition. Even though I live within five minutes of three Level I mega hospitals, the closest urgent care was ten miles away in the far outer suburbs. People travel hundreds of miles for advanced medical care at the hospitals in my neighborhood, but I have to drive across town for some freakin antibiotics.

So with a chip on my shoulder I hit the highway at rush hour to try my luck at The Gashland Clinic on North Oak and MO-152 Highway. I brought a thick book and an MP3 player, prepared to hunker down for an endless wait amongst screaming and marauding suburbakids. But the experience was amazing. One brief form and barely twenty minutes after arriving at the strip mall I was out the door with prescription in hand! The whole process took slightly less time than the trip up there. No long waits, well-behaved kids, and efficient health care delivery. Now I know why the Northland is called God’s Country. Indeed!

Here are my first attempts at sharing some WordPress themes. These are some photos of KC landmarks that can easily be dropped into the default Kubrick theme in WP 1.5.

get the themes

I’m a little late to the Gladwell bandwagon, so I gotta catch up with this one before moving on to Blink. Bad blogger, bad.

1) Something to look forward to: The guy in front of me buying 5 jumbo packs of Depends. They filled an entire shopping cart. The guy was very spry and healthy looking. The situation reminded of SNL’s Oops I Crapped My Pants parody.

2) Why do they have home pregancy tests in the “impulse buy” aisle next to the cash register? Don’t most women know if they need a pregnancy test before they are in the checkout line? I doubt there are many instances where someone will see the thing and suddenly think “oh that reminds me - I had anonymous unprotected sex at America’s Pub last month, I should pick up a pregnancy test.”

Flickr photo
by pbinder.

I cannot go to the Plaza in the weeks before Easter. It’s the Easter bunny statues. They freak my shit out. The eyes are sinister. They watch my every move. They cast disdainful glances on the tourists and suburbatroids invading their briarpatch of faux-Spanish consumerism. Unlike the cows and teddy bears, these beasts return every year. I cannot use compound sentences when they are present.

Thanks to the Toast for this great set of MP3s from this year’s South by Southwest.

www.boredwithmusic.com/sxsw.html

Some more details on the photos that appear at the top of this site. The current one is sculpture called Rodin Rodannadanna that sits on the side of the Poindexter parking garage at 9th and Central.