"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." - Marilyn Manson

Happy Geek, Happy Geek!
The rover Curiosity landed successfully on the surface of Mars and a whole room of brilliant nerds deep in the bowels of NASA HQ jumped up and down til the mechanical pencils flew right out of their pocket protectors.
I'm both impressed by their achievement and curious why this is worth the huge sums being spent on the project, especially when we've got dire financial problems here. Doesn't life on earth trump the remote possibility that there may be the elements of life on Mars?

Some really weird Olympic sports get TV coverage in the wee hours of the morning. Men's target shooting; don't think men in buckskin taking aim with a beefy .006. I watched thin little guys dressed in strange outfits that looked like Star Wars Storm Trooper wannabees firing what I think were air rifles made out of I-don't-know-what (clearly not metal) with more gizmos than a Mars rover.

Then there's women's hockey, which apparently doesn't need the adjective "field." The huge field wasn't grass, but some kind of hard surface painted BLUE, with a pink perimeter. The women - Japan vs. China in this match - wear skirts and put on plexiglass face masks for penalty shots.

Saw this on Facebook and thought it was pretty clever, and kids would get a kick out of it. Cut hot dogs into slices and push uncooked spaghetti noodles through. Throw the whole thing in boiling water and then add some sauce.

In the world of political correctness it's very bad form to criticize anyone's religion, unless that religion happens to be Christianity. Christians are, as a group, deemed guilty of great historical evils and continuing abuses against the dignity of humankind.
Remember Star Trek? (I hated that show.) The "First Directive" (prototokos, as in "highest," not first chronologically) was to have no impact on any life forms they encountered. Leave them alone; just observe. The show's writers were preaching there.
Christianity, with its inherent interest in seeing others understand and accept God's gift of LIFE through Christ, runs afoul of PC and the modern day First Directive when we send missionaries into other cultures.
I thought about that yesterday when Liz was giving her report about the two weeks she spent in India. Her senior project in the pre-med program at ASU involves improving the conditions for the mentally ill in rural India. She had powerful pictures of mentally handicapped children being cared for in a school run by a group of Christian churches in Bangalore. It's one of only three facilities like that in the country, all run by Christian churches.
India is majority Hindu, where karma is a primary concept. Whatever happens to you is predetermined, it is your karma. So there's no point fighting it. Dirt poor, with neither food nor shelter? It's your karma; accept it. Mentally handicapped? Karma.
Why has this happened to you? Because you did something wrong in a prior incarnation and this is your judgment. So not only should you accept it, anyone who tries to help you, including a parent, is wasting time and effort and fighting against cosmic justice. So in the case of mentally handicapped children who contribute nothing to the family's survival, it means being kept in a back room (avoid shame) and ignored.
The truth is, whether we're talking facilities for the poorest and outcasts in India or clinics and hospitals for isolated villages in Africa, or.... it continues to overwhelmingly be the Christians who fund and staff these programs.
Note: ironically, in India it's illegal for Christians to talk to non-Christians about their faith or give someone a Bible.

I worked on the Rambler's brakes this morning. Started about 7 and came in at 10. During that time it went from 84 degrees to 99 degrees. I only got the left rear done, and it's not really done. But it's OK because I'm going very, very slowly and deliberately. This is a weird system I'm not familiar with so taking it apart required both discovery and careful notation. Despite that care I think I have one spring in backwards, but I won't know until I begin working on the other side. The manual is woefully inadequate, and you can't imagine the filth I'm uncovering. I can look at the other side, but I can't see it because of all the grease, rust and corrosion. I had the same thing on the left, which is another reason it took so long. Everything that wasn't replaced got thoroughly cleaned.

"Not really done" = When disconnecting the brake line from the wheel cylinder the line itself twisted and broke. So I'll be ordering new brake lines.
The last guy in there didn't have a manual and didn't care. Things were put back in the wrong place. And the adjusting mechanism was locked up with rust so badly that it took several shots of PB Blaster and two large pair of channel lock pliers to get it apart.  (It wasn't lubed at the last reassembly.)

I'll be missing again tomorrow night. I'm going in tomorrow afternoon for an EP study. Like the angiogram of two weeks ago the objective is to learn more about the mess that is my ticker. In this case, why isn't it coordinated? (Doh!! Why should it be different from the rest of my body?) A cardiologist who specializes in the electrical part of heart function, aka an electrophysiologist, will insert probes into an artery in my groin and then guide them into the chambers of my heart. Like a Mars Rover he will then sample the electrical impulses at various points on the chambers' walls and zap them with micro-shocks to watch what happens.
Yeah, sounds weird to me, too.
All of this to discover exactly where my arrhythmia is located and what can be done about it. Maybe nothing, maybe yet more meds. Or, he could decide the solution is to insert either a pacemaker or a similar device that will regulate those erratic electrical impulses. If he puts hardware in my chest they'll keep me overnight, otherwise I'm there for 3 or 4 hours after the 2-hour procedure.

This is, by all accounts, even lower on the risk scale than the angiogram I had two weeks ago. It sounds freaky, but so do lots of the wonders of modern medicine. I'm actually sort of hoping they give me one of those devices because it will mean the problem is fixed. Except that I can't tell I have a problem, don't ever feel the arrhythmia. And the dr.s can't say if the bicycle crash was caused by the blockages, or this arrhythmia, or my shoe coming out of the cleat.

I'm not disgusted anymore. I'm back to the gym working just as hard as before and feeling no ill effects. This procedure will cost me another 4 or 5 days of activity but, in the grand scheme of things, if it keeps me alive it's a pretty sweet deal.
However, it sort of puts the kibosh on going out for dinner on our 41st anniversary tomorrow night.