Dramatic Medicine

People sit down to eat lunch and it's really not anything of consequence. Most people don't notice when people sit down in diners, restaurants, etcetera as it is so commonplace. One would therefore think that it would not have been a big to-do when David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, Franklin Eugene McCain, and Ezell A. Blair Jr. sat down in a Greensboro Woolworth's to eat lunch. This was not the case, of course -- it was 1960 and the segregation ran rampant in these United States -- clearly not so united at the time.

Yesterday's announcement of the iPad left me feeling disappointed.  There's no built-in camera at all -- let alone a forward-facing one for doing live iChats -- and the thing doesn't do voice and it doesn't multitask and it doesn't have a lot of storage.  "An iPlop in the toilet bowl," was my first thought in the flushing.

An article in the recent issue of Entertainment Weekly lamented the possibility that American television would soon be without soap operas if the trend toward canceling them continued much longer. A sad image lurked above of tombstones of shows canceled in the last twenty or so years. The entire article is devoted to describing the path that the shows have taken to getting canceled, starting in the early 1990s and ending with Guiding Light and As the World Turns getting canceled.

Late last night, New Jersey once again chose life over death by passing a medical marijuana bill.

When I was a teenager, the writer I put on a higher pedestal above all others was Hunter S. Thompson. I thought I surely wanted to be a writer in the sense that he was a writer: To get involved so deeply in the stories that I would actually become part of them, and to make sure that I always got the most exciting stories even if it meant risking my life to get them. Part of that path, to me, meant that I had to do things just like Hunter.

I am convinced our senses can heal us.  Chicken soup saves the soul.  Our eyes entertain the body.  Our ears bring us the vibrations of joy.  In my ongoing quest to find the right guitar amplifier, I thought I'd hit nirvana with Egnater Rebel 20 -- but their terrible customer support was so sour that they curdled my joy.  I am happy to report today that I have found my ultimate amp in the reissue of the Fender '65 Princeton Reverb!

We are fascinated by the ongoing rise of Fibromyalgia as the latest "must have" designer disease diagnosis so all those ghostly aches and pains and emotional ills and valleys can finally be validated by the medical community by writing a prescription; but the most disturbing trend is in the purposeful use of ADHD as a valid excuse for unrestricted bad behavior.