Recent Comments

1. 12 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Well, I guess I’ll chime in. I’m very close to retirement from ED…meaning the Emergency Department…as a Physician Assistant. The 4-hour thing is no joke; getting and maintaining a stiffy involves a set of valves opening and closing, and if those valves have to hold pressure on the blood bags on either side of “Mr. Happy,” the valves can get damaged and this time will, indeed, be your last one.

   I’ve only ever seen this situation twice. The doctor I was working with called the urologist for instructions: put the biggest IV needles you’ve got into the blood bags in two pairs, one pair at the top, on either side, & one pair near the “mushroom.” Hook up some IV tubing and a bag to the top pair and just let the bottom pair drain into a basin. The medication you added to the IV bag while you were setting everything up will get carried throughout the organ by the natural circulation inside and the two pairs of valves will switch from open to closed, allowing you to switch from elated to deflated.

   Hopefully.

   Sometimes it doesn’t work well. Back in the day, the drug was terbutaline and even that gruesome procedure didn’t always work, so I hope it was worth it for you. I’m sure there’s better stuff, now.

   In one case, the procedure wasn’t working and the urologist advised us to just kind of rhythmically squeeze and release, to create some circulation and get the drug “in there,” if you will.

   Hmm. Rhythmically squeeze and release. By a nurse with a front end she was VERY proud of. (And rightly so, bless her heart.) And nobody understood why that wasn’t working, until after the patient went to the OR to get the pressure released.

   The other case I was involved with, the dude stayed home for about 12 hours, not 4, and never had “success” again. What really sucks about ED (the condition, not the department) is that most dangly-bits-havers are still interested in such things but just can’t finish the job. I hear it’s super frustrating.

2. 21 days ago on JumpStart

   Now that i think about it, that might not be Carla. The hot dog cart guy could have overheard Joe and Crunchy and known the answer “Goodfellas.” But it’s funnier if you decide that the hot dog cart guy is really Carla after all.

3. 28 days ago on Pickles

   You know, there are parts of fabric stores that are interesting and fun to poke around in. I like to draw and I use drafting tools when planning a workshop project. There are all kinds of adhesives and materials that are useful—put them in your brain, and maybe they’ll pop up when you’re looking for that perfect something. There’s also usually a section on woodcraft, and painting (acrylic, watercolor, that sort of thing) that might catch your interest. It will only be bad of your “Opal” has you hold her bag and wants you to stay there and render an opinion.

4. about 1 month ago on Frazz

   Natives of a planet with multiple moons have a few options, as I think of it.

   If there’s one dominant moon, that’s easy. Just use that for a local-calendar month.

   But, if you have a few roughly-equal sized moons, you can have more fun. Pick one to be the “chief god.” There’s your day or week. But then you can watch carefully over time (decades or more) and learn the rhythm of different alignments and eclipses, and make up all kinds of fun stories about what the gods are doing. Those would be great excuses for festivals and parties. And there would be one grand alignment of all the moons every long time. Oh, boy! That one should be a lot of fun! (Unless the priests decide the population has to be controlled by fear. Then it’s blood sacrifices instead of festivals, I’m afraid.)

5. about 1 month ago on Frazz

   Robert L. Forward’s novel, “Martian Rainbow” —which was otherwise kinda cardboard, with a deus ex machina to save the colonists—handled the difference between days and Solis in a neat way.

   A second stayed a second, to keep the scientists happy. They’re defined by SI, after all.

   But a “day” (the term “sol” hadn’t been coined in 1991) was handled by taking those extra 39 minutes and adding leap seconds to about half of the minutes of the day. Some minutes had 60, some 61. So for administrative purposes and daily living, there were 24 hours a day, each just a little longer than on Earth. An entrepreneur in the Colony developed thin-film LCD time-keepers, programmed with the new system, that folks could just stick to their existing watchface.

   Most people could then go about their day-to-day as before but in a lab where it mattered a second was still the SI unit.

6. about 1 month ago on MythTickle

   “You few…?” El Jefe, that’s The Well talking. Ignore it.

7. about 1 month ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Um…is anyone concerned that people in the TV can see and interact with Pig?

8. about 2 months ago on Non Sequitur

   I’ve had AAA for decades, with excellent service the whole time. They even provided the lawyer who defended my son (and themselves, admittedly) against a lawsuit after a collision. They’re not ALL bad actors.

9. about 2 months ago on Doonesbury

   Don’t feed the troll

10. 3 months ago on MythTickle

    “The dose is the poison.” <— every toxicology textbook everywhere.