Got home from the hospital late Friday in time to attend a family dinner (which was very nice with all the trimmings) but have not been up to much.  Way too tired.  Slept most of Saturday, except to fix some problems that the kids had had with the DVD player in the bedroom (they’d put the audio in the video and vice versa plugging it into the TV) and in pulling some movies off video-on-demand on the TiVos.  Everyone is now in Harry Potter mode, and the family got through movie #2 last night.

The doctors have radically reshifted the orals I’m taking: augmentin and minocycline (which I never heard of before).   I hope this works.  This round really was punishing, and the doctors were giving me all sorts of lectures, warnings and you-better notices right and left.

For one thing, it’s now absolutely critical from a bunch of directions that I get on the lose-weight-and-exercise wheel.  That I cut back my carbs radically, along with portions and so on. This version also cuts back on the sodium intake…I can cut sugar a lot easier than sodium.

The stress of my weight is messing up my circulation in my lower legs, and making healing and control over bugs much harder.  It’s adding to a colossal amount of other stressors in my present life (which they are telling me I have to do something about) (easier said than done, but if you’re dead there’s not much stress then, neh?) to increase my blood pressure, tear up my kidneys, screw with my cholesterol balance (not enough of the good stuff), and make me a candidate for a diabetic condition (I was on a 1800 calorie diabetic diet in the hospital). And it’s pressure further on the whole CLL thing, and my ability to fight infections, and so on.

The kidney stuff is not helped by the amount of banging around by infection and the antibiotics, and the kidney doc (remember, I only have one) said that the rises in creatinine stuff that he saw mixed in with the results of the various tests and exams they ran say that it’s unlikely that I’ve done permanent damage to the kidney, but the kidney’s not happy with the strains.

I also have to rig some sort of a good way under my desk to properly put up my legs and keep them elevated.   That will be a trick, but it will be essential to getting my circulation going properly down there.

None of this is looking easy to implement; the high stressors stuff the hardest.  On the one hand, it’s not as bad as I was imagining in the hospital – on the other, it’s  going to be hell on wheels to do this, fron a number of directions.

Post from Nate Silver pointing out how people are economizing: no dry-cleaning, no Starbucks, brownbagging lunch, buying generics, cutting out bottled water and bringing water bottles, cancelling subscriptions (magazines and newspapers), and so on.

The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed.   This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without mentioning the reluctance many GOP types felt about elevating the Lietenant Governor to the job.  Allegedy, he’s a not-very-head-screwed-on-tight sort who is ambitious without ability, and has a bunch of his own personal skeletons rattling around.

Then again, I was on the road today, and heard a snatch of a couple of conservative talk dudes rolling on the floor over Senator Ensign having to get his parents to payoff the family of the woman he was having an affair with.   As in they thought it was freaking pathetic – which it was.  No way Ensign comes back from that politically, either.

And then there’s the whole Sarah Palin thing, which is beyond anyone’s understanding.

Locally in Illinois, the next set of statewide races for the Senate seat and Governor’s chair are suddenly defined by all of the people who are stating that they don’t want the jobs.

From a new WaPo article about details on how Governor Sanford elaborately jerry-rigged up an Official Trip To Argentina to see his ’soulmate’ in Buenos Aires, we have a new euphemism to go along with ‘hiking the appalachian trail‘ – to ‘go Dove Hunting‘.

Growing up as a boy in Dayton,  I got familiar with the Great Miami River, which rolls wide and broad through the city – and never gets more than 25 feet deep.

Apparently a guy was out fishing the other day with a pal, and decided out of the blue that he was going to swim across the river – broad, but not all that deep, and not the cleanest water.  In any event, he didn’t make it, and drowned in the river.

Odd that he’d decided to do such a stunt like that, and you can only guess how zoinked he might have been on something to want to do it.   Or that if he was willing to swim the river and had his wits about him, that he’d drown in a relatively shallow, slow-moving river.

Apparently he had a spotty past; he was just out of jail for domestic violence charges, and might have been celebrating his bailing out.

Like nobody had ever heard of Russians using hookers to lure Western diplomats into compromising positions.    Sheesh.

The more I hear about the whole Senator Ensign story, the more I think that sex aside, the man should resign his office because he’s a crook and an idiot.    Getting your bazillionaire parents to pay off your mistress and her family?  Inviting the mistress’s family into your house after their house was ransacked by burglers, and proceeding to ‘comfort’ the wife all over your own house that weekend?  The mind reels with every new item.   Speaking of items, you too can buy your John Ensign for President boxer shorts at this location!

And finally, a high and horny Ohio couple are parked and busy in the front seat, and the cops find them in the act – with her two little kids in the back seat of the car.   Bleah….

Dick Durbin and some other Senate Democrats are saying – dudes, you Democratic senators who don’t wanna vote *for* a bill we ‘re putting through don’t have to do so, but fer pete’s sake, nobody lost their seats for voting to shut off debate and bring the bill to a floor vote.

The ‘close debate / cloture’ vote requires 60 votes.  An up or down actual vote on the bill / law just takes a simple majority to pass.

If that’s the deal, then Democratic Senators in Red states can vote to have the up or down vote, and we’re through with this 40-Republicans-can-choke-off-everything crap.

While I’m notorious in AH circles as someone who insists that a AH story be (1) A GOOD STORY and (2) have some historical basis, not to mention (3) be one simple Point Of Divergence, not a whole mess of them (I can deal with some cascade effects, but not simultaneous stuff) – I give a lot of latitude to someone who gets those points clearly covered.

Some famous AH works don’t fit those rules, really.  The most common is the time-travellers-come-back-and-yoink-with-the-past…such as THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH and ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME.  Both involved near-present types who introduce themselves and their tech into a ‘past’ world, but I can deal with the way it’s presented, even though the time travel in neither one is ever explained in a reasonable way.

Another failing in AH stuff is a sheer lack of imagination!  The number of things I have seen cross my desk as a Sidewise judge or in general that revolve around the following topics – to the point of making one want to slam the next one up across the room and into the recycling bin – drive me nuts.

Courtesy of Paul Riddell and the New York Times, an examination of the inanities and OMG-its-not-selling of the present-day jewelry industry.  Thanks, Paul!

Ritz Camera chain in the US likely to liquidate, as people are using them less and less in favor of digital photography which is then uploaded via the Internet to be printed up cheaply elsewhere.

The Federal Protective Service, tasked to provide security to US government office buildings (like the one that Susan and I work out of in downtown Chicago) is in trouble; the Government Accountability Office ran teams through and past the security at several such buildings, bringing in bomb materials.

Numerous US government web sites were downed or struggling under a 50,000 strong zombie PC DDoS attack thought to have begun from North Korean sources.   As a government web person, this is not a happy thought…

Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend.

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

Also check out Felix Salmon at Reuters,  Bonddad, Robert Reich, the Epicurean Dealmaker, Barry Ritholtz, Paul Krugman in the NYT op-ed area and his NYT blog for other voices worth listening to on high finance and economics.

Came down with a 101F fever on Tuesday morning after several highly stressful days, and I’m once again in the hospital with an attack of the leg cellulitis.    The docs are now trying a shotgun approach; a whole bunch of different bugkillers to try to kill the damn thing.   Words can’t express how unhappy I am to be here…

Betting ring on an Australian Navy ship alleged where one could win points/money on having sex with female sailors, with bonuses for daring locations and less attainable women (including gay women).

Some people do not learn.   Disgusting.

No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.

No, this isn’t an advertisement as such.  Both the US and UK versions of Amazon are running DVD sales, and I’m listing out my ooh-that-would-be-interesting list for my purposes (and your edification, in case you have similar interests).

Note that I have multi-region / NTSC and PAL reading DVD players in the house, and that the UK PAL stuff won’t be readable on normal US systems, and vice versa.  Personally, I hate the regions system.

UK:

• Complete Jeeves and Wooster (Fry and Laurie; I have only seen bits of this)
• The Palace (ITV drama series about an alternate royal family; we loved it and I wouldn’t mind having a cheap copy of this)
• The Chinese Detective (sounds interesting, but I really don’t know beans about it)
• Complete Gilbert and Sullivan (1982 series, I think this was done over here for PBS, and this puts back in stuff that was edited from the VHS version, which I had at one time; it was ruined in a flood – need to see if there’s a US version of this)
• Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (not for me, guys, but for future material for Mere, considering how much she loves British/Australian kids stuff)
• The Devil’s Whore (pay no attention to the title; historical fiction drama set during the English Civil War of the 1650s)
• Einstein and Eddington (historical drama around the time of WW1, and yes, that’s Albert Einstein and yes, this has Physics in it, and it looks cool.)

What is your understanding of the following terms (multiple definitions accepted for this):

• snogging
• doppus
• redding
• hailing