I missed the first presidential debate (see #58), and was away at a belly-dance-festival-cum-vendor-orgy during the second. I managed to record the second, however, and I watched it Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning - just in time to watch the third debate (I don't know why they call it a debate! It isn't!) last night (Wednesday evening).
I guess because I had just finished watching the tape of the second, I was painfully aware that both guys were saying exactly the same things in the third as in the second debate. Déjà vu all over again. I was thinking "This is a waste of time. I'm not going to learn anything new. I've got better things to do" and yet I kept watching.
So, being me, I had to think about why I kept watching, and I'm a little ashamed of my conclusions. You know how some people will watch the absolute boredom of car races, hoping for an accident, afraid to look away? That's why I watched. I was hoping for a flaming bloody car wreck. Disappointment - I didn't get one.
Bush said his wife told him not to scowl. She should tell him that smirking is not an improvement.
===========================
Earlier in the evening, a promo for Fox News at 10 said something about citizens in Kingston being worried about "a mysterious outbreak of a rare fatal disease, at 10". (Jay used to hate those promos. The reporter would say " 20-car pileup on the Northway at 11pm", and he'd say "If they know it's going to happen at 11, why don't they act to prevent it?" He objected to they way they phrased it, making it sound like the accident was happening at 11, not the "story at 11". "It's ONE WORD! Why can't they say 'story at 11'"?)
Anyhow, Fox news was going to overlap the debate, so I decided to tape it. I was going to just push the record button on the kitchen VCR at 10. Naturally, I forgot. So I watched a different network news at 11, and they didn't mention it at all. Drat! I spend a lot of time in Kingston. What disease?! Now I have to read the newspaper. Blech.
Very interesting. It's Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)! According to the paper, everyone who has any information is being very closemouthed about it (patient confidentiality and all that, not to mention protecting the local restaurant economy and the hospitals...), but in the past few months at least four people have died of CJD. Relatives of the victims and reporters are trying to find out what they might have had in common, but medical records and other information (including names of other victims and what other cases might exist) is impossible to get.
There are several variants of the disease - among which are inherited, spontaneous, acquired from tissue transplants or contaminated surgical instruments, or from ingesting contaminated neural tissue ("mad cow"). "They" are saying this is not the mad cow variant. No, excuse me, "they" have said it "has not been identified as mad cow" - that's a different statement! One commonality is that two of the victims had back surgery at Kingston Hospital in the mid-1990s.
Jay had back surgery at the Kingston Hospital in 1997ish.
I'm going to have to read up on CJD. Can it cause a high-grade oligoastrocytoma? It is known that some cancers are triggered by viruses, so why not prions?
No comments:
Post a Comment