Listeria + Hysteria = Lysteria!

It has been almost a year since I've posted. Just like a doctor: always running behind.

In that time, my friend Brendon has finished his Play-A-Day project, and has started up Lysteria. Since he is one of the few (the proud!) who might actually read this post, I've decided to compose an ode to that most forgotten of undercooked-food diseases, listeria.

The disease was named in honour (English, you know) of Joseph Lister, the man who made it less likely for you to die of sepsis after surgery by promoting the then novel idea of sterilizing the surgical arena and instruments. His name also helped popularize a fledgeling oral antiseptic called Listerine, which all but invented "halitosis" as a medical concept.

If I ever do something that radically changes the practice of medicine, and in 100 years, my name is associated most widely with bad breath, I swear I will haunt the bejeebers out of somebody.

Primary symptoms of listeriosis are the same as for influenza or dengue fever: muscle aches and, of course, fever. Occasionally gastrointestinal symptoms can occur, but take note! "Stomach flu" is gatroenteritis, not influenza (or dengue fever, for that matter). I don't care how many times my mother called that illness I got after eating unrefrigerated leftovers as a kid "stomach flu".

Listeria can be deadly. A recent outbreak caused by contaminated milk in Massachusetts left 2 men dead. If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: watch your dairy products, people.

A completely different, but infinitely more puzzling condition is the similarly-named "Liszteria," a passion for the famed pianist and composer, Franz Liszt.

Well, that's my yearly post. See you in 2009!

Pox Be With You

So there really haven't been any maladies to grab my attention over the last few months. Leastways, not until I saw the headlines (and heard the radio reports) Wednesday morning. Herpes? Yes!

But not what you're thinking.

Herpes gladiatorum, or Mat Herpes, is a skin infection that wrestlers get. It's caused by the Herpes simplex 1 virus, so it behaves like a cold sore: blistering, painful. Very contagious. Getting this can put you out of competition for a week or more.

And because of a couple dozen cases of said malady in Minnesota wrestlers, the Minnesota State High School League has suspended wrestling practice or competition until February 6 in order to get things under control.

The same condition is found in rugby players, but (as rugby players do) they have given it the much more entertaining name of Scrumpox. The name is so adorable, this blogger took it for his own.

My advice? Don't rub up against other people unless you really have to.

Capital Funishment

A couple of weeks ago I went to a conference in D.C., and Joy and the kids came along for the ride. While I was learning about the latest in lipid-lowering strategies, the family studied espionage. While I heard about perioperative cardiac risk stratification, they learned about the history of the postal service. (Actually, more interesting than you might think!)

I walked about four blocks to the convention center and got coffee at a different place every morning. If you count two Starbucks locations and the Starbucks-owned Seattle's Best Coffee as different places. Memo to Starbucks: Seattle's Best Coffee is the most egregiously misnamed entity since Greenland.

In the afternoons we did stuff as a family. Of course, we did the Mall.


I've been to D.C. on three previous visits, and I've always wanted to go up in the obelisk. This time, we actually did it! As we were waiting in the queue to go in, a lovely German tourist asked the park ranger what there was to see in the monument. He answered very politely, but when she wandered away, I noticed him chuckling with a mixture of amusement and disgust.

"First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

[Caution! Link contains content not suitable for work nor the children staring at you from this photograph!]



We hiked the circuit from the Washington Monument to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to the Jefferson Memorial to the FDR Memorial to the Korean War Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam Memorial and finally the WWII Memorial. Sebastian, our little boy who loves swords and guns and lasers, but hates violence, seemed especially interested in and moved by the meandering, park-like FDR Memorial. Soon after this photo was taken, he climbed up on some huge blocks bearing FDR's words "I hate war," and spontaneously broke into The Star Spangled Banner, hand on heart and all.


About the time we got to the Vietnam Memorial, it started to rain. Which is a little strange, because both times I've been there is has rained. Hmmmmm. But I did snap this quick photo of a rainbow ending at the Washington Monument.

The next day, we went panda hunting at the National Zoo.



After our panda feast, the kids stayed overnight with my sister Lisa, who generously carted us all around. We went to Mount Vernon with her on our last full day in D.C. There, we learned that the Father of our Country died of quinsy (coincidentally, our Malady of the Month).

Mount Vernon is lovely, especially the view from the veranda overlooking the Potomac. But the house is surprisingly small for a guy who was twelve stories high (see that "First in war..." link).


On the flights out and back, I got a good start on Joy's Christmas stocking. Lobachevsky's Die Frau has kindly offered to guide me through the turning of the heel. Obviously, she has seen me knit.

Tire Swingifuge

My eight-year-old, Sebastian, had a wild ride on a tire swing today. It wasn't the kind of tire swing I remember from my youth. You know, the kind that your dad made out of an old tire and hung from a tree in your backyard. The kind that sometimes looked kind of interesting from indoors, but when you got out there it was all hot and smelly and full of mosquito hatchlings?

No, this swing was some kind of modern engineering marvel made from sculpted tire parts, complicated rope systems, and, I believe, solid fuel booster rockets.

Sebastian's friends convinced him to climb aboard the swing and proceeded to spin him around and around and around and around until he was, by his estimate, as far off the ground as my chin is. Then they let him go.

You know what happened next. For each turn they wound him up, he went in the opposite direction in increasingly rapid rotations. By the time he finally stopped spinning, he weren't feeling too good.

When I went to pick him up, he had noticeable swelling and petechiae (not really a whole malady this month, more of a physical finding) around his eyes. Usually we see this when people are vomiting or coughing vigorously, but it can happen anytime you experience increased pressure in your face.

I think any plans he had on being a fighter pilot are on indefinite hold.

Hail-y enough for you?

My neighbor, Patrick Kelley, has a webcam and has posted a time-lapse version of Thursday's storms. The big stuff starts to fall around 11:20. The evening storm part is also pretty cool.

You can see my car at 1:10:41 and 4:42:35 - going to and returning from my auto body repair estimate. While I was in the Cities, I took my grandfather's baritone ukelele to Hoffman Guitars to see if they could repair a crack in the body which has been there for a couple of years. Signs point to said crack arising from child-initiated trauma, but so far no one has copped to the charge.

I was inspired by this video, which Lobachevsky (or Tromvestite, as Bleeet has dubbed him) posted on his blog. Amazing. The young man's name is Jake Shimabukuro, and he is a rising superstar in the ukelele world, if there is such a thing.

And superstars love hail. Hey, speaking of hail, it occurred to me on Thursday that estimating hail size is a little tricky. First of all, hailstones have a tendency to deform or explode on impact. And since you don't want to go traipsing out into the storm and risk getting nailed with one of those puppies, some meltage must occur before an accurate measurement can be taken. Looking out my window, I would swear some of those hailstones were bigger than baseballs. Hitting my roof, they sounded like medicine balls. But the largest one (mostly undeformed) from my freezer is 2.5 inches in diameter. Technically tennis ball sized. Or between raw oyster and stink bomb sized, depending on your scale.

The Mini and the house got dented. A window got broken. Our insurance agent got a headache. We got to spend some quality time as a family in the basement, burning candles, playing a board game, and listening to the radio. No one got seriously hurt. Blessings got counted.

I looked hard to find a website with hail-related maladies, principally trauma, I assumed. There is this, which, frankly, isn't very impressive. There are plenty of sites that focus on crop damage from hail, but this is not a horticultural blog. Yet.

In honor of our recent visitation with hailstones, let's go with chilblains for our Malady of the Month. It's almost got "chill" right in the name.

Blog-stortion

...as in, "What is the word for forced blogging?" Runners-up include: blog-beaten & black-blogged. You would think, what with writing a whole play-a-day and all, Bleeet would have plenty to keep him otherwise engaged. Apparently not.

Kudos to Circe for getting quoted in another blog (page down to January 19). Also, nice work on Cinderella! We hope to be able to catch the FACT version of West Side Story.

Bleeet was positively charming as a wicked stepsister in the aforementioned Cinderella. He was too sexy for his, uh, frock.

Okay, so, Malady of the Month...Black Hairy Tongue. Enjoy!

(and check this out, for some tongue-tastic fun)

bor-bo-ryg-mus (n.)

"A rumbling sound produced by the movement of gas through the intestines."

See what Cecil has to say about it here.


blog-bo-ryg-mus (n.)

"The name a desperate man comes up with (after trying a half-dozen others, rejected as previously taken) when he thinks too long about the word B-L-O-G and his synapses misfire in just the right way, connecting to one of his favorite words from med school (when all he really wanted to do was post a comment on bleeet's blog)."


The linguists will note that that I did not choose blogborygmi, the plural form. There will be no play-a-day to be had here. Perhaps a malady-a-month? June smells like podagra.

Many thanks to bleeet for posting his comment on my picture. I was deeply moved, man.

Many thanks to Tromvestite for mentioning me in his blog. Twice! Rock on, trombone guy.

Of course I attended bleeet and Mrs. bleeet's shindig yesterday. Lovely house. Lovely lake. Bamboo flooring? Nice! I like the grass in front, too - beats the dirt you had there before by a long shot.

So, at the second party (there's always a second party!) I asked Tromvestite where he worked. You see, I knew what he did...but I couldn't remember if he'd gone to work for the giant nonprofit corporation that ate his previous place of employment or if he'd gone somewhere else.

Gamely, he answered my question, and this led to a stimulating discussion of how we see ourselves: are we best represented by our vocations or our avocations? Good, thought-provoking stuff.

Then I went down the rabbit hole and read Tromvestite's post from 6/13, a full 4 days before, which nicely prophesied our conversation. No fair, man! Preconversing like that is just gonna throw off the witty repartee curve for the rest of us!

So, that's my post. It only took me an hour. And it is very late.

Your tummy has spoken.