New Hip + 10

Ten days ago, on 9 January, I showed up at Memorial Hermann’s Ortho Hospital at five goddamn o’clock in the morning, taking my last steps on a hip that looks like this. It was still dark.

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I was no small amount of nervous. Sure, I had much more invasive surgery 8 years ago, when the initial repair happened, but it was on an emergency basis; I had no time to ruminate over it. This time it was a countdown for a month and a half, since we’d decided to push it off until after the holidays.

I can’t decide if it was disconcerting or calming that, for them, it was just another Monday. Total hip replacements are a dime a dozen now; the procedure itself usually takes less than 2 hours. So we were there, and we did a brief amount of paperwork, and then I went upstairs for prep.

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I joke that, at this point in the process, I was probably cleaner than I had ever been, and this is because for scheduled surgical procedures in this era of infection, they have you scrub the bejesus out of yourself the night before with super-strong antibacterial soap and a sterile, hospital-issued sponge — and then get up on the day of the procedure and do it again. The stuff was harsh, and my skin felt weird, but I guess the weirdness tells you it’s working.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE, because as soon as I was upstairs in a prep area, my first task after stripping was to — you guessed it — wipe my whole person down AGAIN with antibacterial wipes.

I say that; ACTUALLY the first memorable task for ME in that moment was this:

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For about 18 months, I’ve had a lift in my left shoe, owing to the gradual but serious bone loss at the top of my left leg. That’s why I’ve limped; that’s one reason I’ve needed a cane since Christmas 2021. And one key change on deck for January 9 was the re-levelilng of my legs, so this little bastard gets to go into a landfill somewhere. Good riddance.

What followed as the usual rigmarole of blood draws and IV lines and etc. I had few moments to myself, but it did seem proper in 2023 to commemorate with a final pre-surgical old-hip selfie:

IMG 3718

Then? Well, then things get fuzzy. The anesthesiologist came in and started prepping me for the spinal block, and the main nurse came back and hit me with a couple things in the IV, one of which was Versed which, among other things, interferes with memory. By this point Erin was with me, and tells me I was saying I wanted to remember as much as possible, but nothing is really clear past the moment I expressed anxiety about the process of the spinal block. There are fragments. I think I remember being wheeled down the hall and into the actual OR, but it’s really fuzzy.

From my perspective, I blinked, and I was waking up in the recovery area, mildly confused. The same nurse saw me and said “Yep, it’s all over! You did fine!” I should note that, surgically speaking, it really WAS a blink, because as mentioned above a THR is now routinely a sub-2-hour process. That blows my mind, but I could see a clock from my bed and it was only about 10:30AM at this point, and by then I was lucid enough to, well, look at a clock and remember the time.

I ate ice chips for 90 minutes or so as they monitored me, & especially my blood pressure, and by noon they were wheeling me into a private recovery room where Erin was waiting.

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Now the full court press started: a THR is now an outpatient procedure, so the goal was to get me out the door before EOD. However, for that to happen, a series of medical providers had to visit, and I had to meet certain postsurgical milestones.

I was visited by — in keeping with the happily-still-lingering season — THREE POSTSURGICAL GHOSTS:

  • THE GHOST OF PUTTING ON YOUR SOCKS WITHOUT BENDING OVER: an occupational therapist, who walked me through the aides I’d be sent home with (more later) to work around my immediate movement limitations;
  • THE GHOST OF PERPETUAL EXHALATION: a pulmonary person of some sort, who instructed me on the World’s Worst Bong aka the Incentive Spirometer — instruction I didn’t actually need, since this wasn’t my first rodeo with an I.S (it was, however, fun the be able to peg the thing; turns out I do still have some residual cardio fitness);
  • THE GHOST OF “FUCK IT LET’S MAKE HIM WALK:” a physical therapist, who got me up and WALKING (using a wheeled walker) while I’m pretty sure my lower half was still drunk — I know for a FACT I was still tipsy from anesthesia because I was struggling to articulate myself with her, which made the whole thing frustrating despite also being successful.

BTW, let me tell you it’s super weird to stand up on a new hip joint and realize that, while you DO have pain — after all, they just CUT YOU OPEN AND EDITED YOUR SKELETON — it’s an entirely different pain, and the pain that’s plagued you for a year from the joint’s deterioration is now gone.

And the whole while the milestones loomed. I had to

  • Eat. To that end, I was given the World’s Saddest Sandwich and chips, which was weirdly cruel since with drugs still in my system the combo of “untoasted white bread” and “cottonmouth” was deeply unfun. Even so, eating post-surgery is required because of the number of people who have postsurgical nausea problems. I do not.
  • Drink. Same song, different verse. I drank SO MUCH WATER that afternoon, owing I suppose to my assiduous adherence to the presurgical protocol of no food/drink after 9pm the previous night. Normally, I drink a LOT of water, so I was definitely dehydrated — which, of course, complicated the final milestone…
  • PEE, because postsurgical kidney function is a thing, too.

I didn’t pee until probably 3:30, but once I had it was as if someone with a mighty clipboard had made the final tickmark, and the Great Medical Machine began the process of disgorging me back to the real world.

The chief complicating factor of this entire affair was the fact that, owing the scar tissue from the entry points of the initial 2014 repair, my surgeon had to do a posterior approach instead of the more modern and apparently less invasive anterior approach. This is all fancy medical jargon, but what it means is “where do you unzip Chet to swap out the parts.” With anterior, the incision would be just inside the relevant hip bone, and down into your groin, but, as stated, this was off the table.

Instead, we went posterior which was through, well, my posterior. (It actually wraps around to the outside of my leg, but that’s the term.) With this approach, enough of the muscular structure is disturbed that there is a real risk of dislocating the implant early on, so my main admonition is DO NOT BEND AT THE WAIST, TWIST, or OTHERWISE STRESS THAT JOINT for at least 6 weeks.

I follow instructions super well, so that’s what we’re doing. Plus, it comes with benefits, such as an insurance-provided long-handled claw grabber that I promise I have not goosed Erin with more than once or twice.

However, in the immediate surgical aftermath, when worries were highest, Erin realized that our sporty little VW was very low to the ground indeed, so she called our neighbor and local Taco Saint Mallory. They have two taller vehicles, so Mallory braved 5:00 traffic to drive over and pick me up in their Grand Cherokee, which was much more comfortable. Then, upon arrival at home, we realized that Mal had also brought a Giant Bag of Tacos in his capacity as a Taco Magnate — along with a paloma for Erin, which was well deserved indeed.

The long and short of it is that the whole affair lasted about twelve hours — the nighttime pic above was taken at 4:53AM; I was at home in my lounge chair by 5PM, taco and Athletic Brewing Free Wave NA IPA in hand. Hilariously, by about 6 I had nodded off in the chair and spilled about 15% of said near-beer, but on a day that could’ve had a shitton more unpleasant mishaps, I’ll take it.

DominosDominosDominos

In the Netherlands, Dominos delivers pizza using scooters.

They have recently started using electric scooters instead of gas scooters, which, of course, are silent.

There’s been a lot of talk globally about the silence of electric vehicles being a safety hazard, of course, so they modified the scooter to make noise.

All of this is fine. All of this is reasonable. Where it goes ENTIRELY OFF THE RAILS is in what they chose: a human voice that says Mmmmm Dominos Mmmm Tasty while in motion, and just mutters DominosDominosDominosDominos when “idling” at stoplights.

I am not making this up.

This is FANTASTIC

James Austin Johnson — new guy on SNL — showed up on Fallon, and did a 4 different impressions of Dylan that are completely spot on:

(The fun bit starts at 6 minutes.)

Wallride FTW

I’m not a motorsport person, but I AM a videogame person.

A NASCAR driver (Ross Chastain) just did a Mariocart wall-ride to come from way behind and put himself into the championship. It’s completely bananas.

The principle here is pretty simple: speed is limited by your traction. The rest of the drivers were held to their track by their tires (and aero downforce) alone. By putting his car against the outer wall, Chastain was able to floor it because the wall itself kept him on the track — though obviously at significant cost to the right side of the car.

Here’s coverage; in a postrace interview, Chastain explicitly cites using the tactic in the GameCube NASCAR game as a kid, and figuring it was worth a hail-mary move given the circumstances.

Here’s a longer video showing the move from a variety of angles — this is probably better, because from several you can see how WILDLY faster he was moving in the crucial moments.

The surprising youth of the American founding fathers

Kottke ran a re-run post today noting the ages of the American founding fathers on July 4, 1776.

  • Marquis de Lafayette, 18
  • James Monroe, 18
  • Gilbert Stuart, 20
  • Aaron Burr, 20
  • Alexander Hamilton, 21
  • Betsy Ross, 24
  • James Madison, 25

This is less shocking in a post-Hamilton world, wherein we were all treated to a more vibrant, active picture of several of the Founders (even so: Miranda’s original cast had actors older than their characters for Lafayette, Burr, and Hamilton at least), but it’s still striking. Several others, of course, were more “adult” ages:

  • Thomas Jefferson, 33 (& not for nothing: Daveed Diggs‘ actual age at the Off-Broadway premiere)
  • John Adams, 40
  • Paul Revere, 41
  • George Washington, 44
  • Samuel Adams, 53

And of course:

  • Benjamin Franklin, 70.

McKinsey: Just Plain Evil

I remember, when I was younger, being impressed by the “smart people for hire” model of high-end consulting, including and especially McKinsey.

Then, you know, reality intervened. McKinsey has been close to or part of some truly egregious and fucking EVIL things in the last couple decades. The first one people mostly know about was Enron, but it just keeps getting worse.

  • McKinsey helped the Sacklers create the opioid epidemic, and then helped structure the bankruptcy settlement hat kept the Sacklers’ billions of ill-gotten gains safe.
  • McKinsey helped ICE create the kids-in-cages concentration camps.
  • McKinsey helped the Saudi government hunt down dissidents.

The list goes on, but the current example is this: McKinsey is helping a giant nonprofit hospital gouge indigent patients by convincing them they owe money that they explicitly do not. McKinsey advised Providence to train its staff to avoid truthfully answer poor patients’ queries about whether they were eligible for free care.

One of the most haunting details in the Times’ report is the story of Vanessa Weller, a single mother in Alaska, who delivered a premature baby at the Providence Alaska Medical Center. The baby died five days later, but Weller was pursued for $125,000 in medical bills by Providence. As a manager at a local Wendy’s, she was entitled to have her bill erased. Instead, she was relentlessly chased by bill-collectors and her credit rating fell from 650 to 400.

Providence professes to be shocked, shocked, that all this happened. Providence CFO Gregory Hoffman told the Times that the news that his company had failed in its legal obligations after paying a consultant to teach them how to do this “very concerning,” adding that these victimized patients “have our attention.” McKinsey made at least $45,000,000 for designing Rev-Up.

The Times has more.

Working for or with McKinsey is, at this point, morally indefensible. To collaborate with them is to be an enemy of the people.

Kenneth Starr: Dead.

Starr, mostly of note for the sprawling, obscenely expensive and politically motivated investigation into then-President Clinton in the 90s, had a career well beyond that debacle.

For example, he worked in California to support the anti-marriage equality measure Prop 8; he defended Jeffrey Epstein; and he represented mercenary firm Blackwater in a lawsuit brought over the deaths of four civilians in Fallujah. What a guy!

He further covered himself in glory by providing support to child molester Christopher Kloman, a retired schoolteacher ultimately sentenced to 43 years in prison instead of the “community service” suggested by Starr.

It’s hard to say whether his worst final act was the defense of Trump in his Senate trial, or his role in covering up a sexual abuse scandal for the football team while serving as president of Baylor University, but I think we can call it a tie.

Starr died today in Houston, at 76, following complications from surgery.

How conspiracy-mongering and deliberate ignorance hounded Cecilia Lewis out of TWO jobs

Go read this long piece at ProPublica right now.

The GOP’s hysteria about critical race theory — which, again, is a graduate-level / law-school topic, not something EVER part of K-12 instruction — is completely unhinged, which is exactly the way the GOP likes it. The lie runs ’round the world while the truth is still lacing its shoes, and the Gish gallop of bullshit wins the day for them.

Their pantswetting fear of the 1619 Project and ongoing crusade to make absolutely sure no student is told the unvarnished racist truth of our country’s history is just another step down the road to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

I mean, it’s a stone cold FACT that the nation was founded on slavery. Slavery is IN THE CONSTITUTION. When slavery ended, the whites in power waited about 30 seconds before encoding a system of racial apartheid into the country’s laws that persisted until the 1960s. What came after is a legacy of structural racism that is STILL part of everyday American life. You cannot understand America without understanding — or at least trying to understand — the African American experience in this country.

Seriously. Go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations and tell me he’s wrong.

The Republican party is opposed to acknowledging ANY of this. They are the white grievance party now; they openly court white nationalists and place them in positions of power. And their mass of amped-up numbskull followers rally around school boards and engage in ridiculous and vindictive campaigns like the one that caught Lewis.

SCOTUS to Constitution: Drop Dead

In Egbert v Boule, decided yesterday, the conservative majority ruled that Federal agents are allowed to invade your home and assault you with impunity just as long as you live within 100 miles of the coast or a US border.

Conveniently for law enforcement, 60% of the US population lives in that now Constitution-free zone.

ACLU coverage of the case here, not yet updated for the decision. I expect SCOTUSBlog will be on it before long.

Do you like watches? I like watches.

Before I was absorbed into Apple Watch Borg, I was a longtime devotee of mechanical wristwatches. There’s something beautiful about them; a mechanical movement is the culmination of tech first used hundreds of years ago. A clockmaker from the 17th century could look inside my Omega and recognize the techniques even if he wouldn’t be able to understand how we got the device so small. It’s a lovely, lovely thing.

But most people have no real idea how they work beyond “uh, I wind it and it keeps time.” I sure hope you are just as delighted as I was when you look over, and hopefully read, this spectacular explainer about how mechanical watches work. It demystifies words like “escapement,” and details clearly, from a very simple and easily understood baseline, how a watch works.

Make time. This is what the web is FOR.

(As a bonus, allow me to point out some other topics the author has given the same treatment — it’s amazing. Gears! Cameras and lenses! GPS! The internal combustion engine! It’s deep-dive paradise! Creating these beautiful, interactive pieces is a hobby for the author, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider becoming a patron anyway. It’s beautiful work, well done, and authoritative, that helps explain the complex topics around us. In this, he makes the world a better place.)

Your Long-Awaited 2022 MS150 Recap!

FRIENDS!

Over the weekend, I completed my TENTH MS150 ride to end Multiple Sclerosis. I say that, and it’s true that this is the tenth time I’ve been REGISTERED for this ride, but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have had their way with this event over the years. To wit:

  • 2013: YEAR ONE. I ride a two-day event ending in downtown Austin, but I do it SLOW because I am FAT.
  • 2014: Sure, why not do it again? I’m a little slimmer but still very slow. My team masses up just outside downtown to roll across the finish line together, which is EXHILARATING but also a giant PITA for our friends and family waiting at the ACTUAL finish.
  • 2015: The weather conspires to take the first day of the event, which is fine because I do not ride, owing to certain medical misadventures, but I still raise money — by now, the mission of the event has taken root in my head, and so fundraising tops $5,000.
  • 2016: Participation on the weekend is lower because of threatening weather, but my team saddles up for day 1, the hundred mile route into La Grange. Day 2 is cancelled during Saturday’s ride, which (unfortunately?) opens the door for a seriously epic bash in the campground. Fun was had, but the hangovers were definitely earned.
  • 2017: AT LAST a return to the two-day ride plan! We didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last ride to finish in downtown Austin.
  • 2018: I’m a lot stronger, which is fun, and my pals and I knock out the first day in a hair over 5 hours. Day 2 ends at Circuit of the Americas, a huge Formula 1 track outside Austin. This is NOT a great endpoint, but any port in a storm.
  • 2019: COTA again, but by now acknowledged as a stopgap. This is my strongest two-day effort, and the only time I felt up to doing the “challenge” route through the state park outside Bastrop. I’m really bummed about that — I probably could’ve done it in ’17 and ’18, but confidence is a bitch sometimes.
  • 2020: The ORIGINAL plan for the 2020 ride, released in late 2019, was a reimagining of day 2 entirely. The day one routes and endpoint (La Grange) work well and were retained, but day 2 would bring the ride back east and forsake Austin for College Station. Texas A&M was VERY welcoming, and set up a plan for riders to finish ON KYLE FIELD. The logistics of ending this event in a place like that, which was already engineered to entertain 100,000+ people, were VERY attractive. And then COVID happened. Initially, the ride was pushed to the fall and reduced to a one-day event going to College Station, but that was just wishful thinking. COVID eventually forced a full cancellation.
  • 2021: With COVID waning a bit, they tried to do the one-day College Station plan again, but weather eventually forced an 11th hour cancellation. Even so, I hit a personal best on fundraising of over $17,400.
  • 2022: Now, finally, we get the full two-day College Station plan. It was, by all accounts a HUGE success!

So if you’re keeping track, out of ten rides, I’ve actually done a 2-day effort only 6 times. Two we lost to due to COVID; one I sat out entirely for medical reasons; and once we lost day 2. Oh well!

So, Chet, how’d it go this year?
Great question! Let me tell you.
You ride a whole bunch! I’ll bet you just ate this up with a spoon, right?
Well, funny thing about that. It’s true I AM a pretty dedicated rider, and usually notch 100-140 miles in any given week including back-to-back efforts on the weekends, especially this time of year, and largely to prep for this event. But this time around, a crash back in March utterly derailed my training at a critical time. I lost several weeks of those back-to-back efforts, and came into the ride at a lower level of fitness than I wanted.
Wait. Crash? What?
Yeah, not a big deal in the larger scope of things — nothing broken, gnarly roadrash, sprained shoulder, etc — but I had to lay off a while. Had it been a month further back, it would’ve made all the difference.
Quit bitching. You did the ride, didn’t you?
Damn right. It was just harder than I expected.
Define “harder”?
Well, we still kept a solid pace though the start of the hills on day one, but it was slower than in prior years owing to (a) a shared lower fitness with my immediate cadre of pals and (b) the fact that 3 folks made the choice to do the ride on mountain bikes as training for an ultra-endurance event called Leadville later in the year. The gearing on those makes it VERY hard to maintain speeds that are not especially fast on a road bike, but owing to point (a) this was less of an issue.
Who are these weirdos you rode with?
Aha! There’s a picture! L to R: Your Humble Author; Amish Mechanic; Everyone’s Favorite Bulldozer Rep; She Who Questioned Her Choices A Bit; Person I Don’t Know Well Enough To Have A Funny Name For; The Charming Axis of Bradford & Cody; The Amazing Returning Cory. (It amuses me to note that there are 5 A&M degrees represented across only 8 folks, but one person is double dipping.)

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Ok, so then what?
Well, as expected, things got harder for me once the hills hit in Bellville, or about halfway. You can see the elevation graph below; that’s where the Hill Country starts. I am a flatlander, and I am 52 and mildly overweight, and so these are hard for me. But that’s not what made the day suck.

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What DID make the day suck?
Cramps. I am not, historically, a person who cramps up. I ride thousands of miles every summer in Houston’s tropical humidity and heat, and it really never comes up. I only recently started carrying salt-supplement tablets, and I mostly have them to give to OTHER people. I’m careful about on-bike hydration and nutrition — any long effort is at least partly an exercise in body chemistry; you MUST eat and drink a LOT to ride 100 miles — and so I figured this was a solved problem for me.

Around mile 60, it becamse clear that no, this was NOT a solved problem for me, and that the rest of the day was going to suck out loud.
That sounds bad.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. The weird thing is that, according to Strava for Day 1, I actually covered the second half of the ride in SLIGHTLY less time than I did in 2019. I have no idea how that could be true, because I felt like CRAP and could only occasionally really put my legs into it; most attempts at any real power would bring back the cramps. But I didn’t sag. I don’t sag.
What DIDN’T suck about the day?
The company. Even once I was mostly riding alone, I still ran into my friends on the regular — with the exception of the very HEAD end of folks, we weren’t THAT far apart on the route, and so we’d see each other at rest stops, or pass one another and start riding together again. The suck is ameliorated in good company.
I’ll bet it felt good to stop!
Absolutely, but in this case it was very much in the way that it feels good to stop smashing yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer. I was so wrecked that I gave SERIOUS thought to bailing on day 2.
But did you die?
Reader, I did not in fact die. A coke, a beer, a giant jug of electrolyte recovery drink, and a huge plate of Mexican food led directly to about 10 hours sleep, and that helped a LOT. I wasn’t exactly bright eyed and bushy tailed by Sunday morning, but I was no longer in danger of quitting. After all, I had 70 donors watching me via LiveTrack!
So tell us about day 2.
Traditionally, day 1 of this ride, at least for stronger riders, is about seeing what they can do. Put your back into it, and drop the hammer, and test yourself. Day 2, on the other hand, is about riding with your teammates and friends, and for that I was GRATEFUL. I rolled out with a small set of pals — mostly the folks enumerated above — and we put some speed out for about 15-20 miles before a few of us decided to drop back and let the stronger ones surge ahead. That triad of folks — me, my pal Bruno, and Eric Cody from day 1 — really ended up doing most of the 80 miles into College Station in some flavor of together. Some of the time it was Bruno pulling me, and some of the time it was me and Bruno pulling Eric, but it was definitely cooperative.
Did the cramps come back?
NO, thank God. I had limited power until lunch, but figuring I was probably low on fuel we DID stop at the lunch stop and eat. We don’t normally do this — we skipped lunch on day 1, for example, as we nearly ALWAYS do — but on Sunday, I needed it. This made a huge difference for the back half of the day; I was finally able to put down a little power, and felt good about finishing the ride. Also, lunch pics with BRUNO and ELLENDROTT!

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Anything else?
Yeah, impromptu breaks helped, too.
“Impromptu?”
Yeah, the Society I guess lost the usual day-2 lunch sponsor (HEB), and as such had no drinks other than water or Gatorade at lunch. Eric and Bruno and I, though, REALLY REALY wanted (and had ANTICIPATED) a Coke. (You have NO idea how good a Coke can be on a hot day like that.) As luck would have it, a stopped freight train not long after lunch left us idle for a few minutes in front of a gas station, and so…

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Let’s talk about momentum
That’s where we find ourselves after the Cokes. We were over 50 miles into what we thought was an 80 mile day, so definitely on the downhill side. (Turns out, it was 85 miles, the extra 5 wasn’t on our radar until later.) Plus, the elevation gains for this ride were actually mostly behind us, which we knew, and which made us feel a LOT better.

Screen Shot 2022 05 03 at 11 23 57 AM

How about that finish?
It was, as expected, pretty damn awesome. A&M has every right to be proud here; they rolled out the red carpet for us. The ride literally finished on the football field. We did a “victory lap” around the field, and my name was announced (in my capacity as a top fundraiser) while Erin and other friends already finished cheered for me. That was pretty darn nice, and WAY better than the ending experience at either COTA or downtown Austin.

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And what about the REST?
Well, there is one other thing. This year, I topped $100,000 in lifetime fundraising for this event. If you’re reading this, there’s a very very good chance you’re a part of that. Your support means the world to me, and it WAS that support that kept me rolling when things were going poorly for me on Saturday. I thank you, and the Society thanks you.

Ken Paxton is a craven, evil, jackass

The new anti-trans opinion from the office of our criminally-indicted AG here in Texas directs the Texas Department of Child Protective Services to treat gender-affirming care as child abuse.

Caught in this fascist dragnet are innocent families doing their best to raise their children with love, including the Briggle family in Denton. The Briggles are interesting here because, in the wake of some bathroom bill nonsense 5 years ago, they invited Paxton to dinner on the theory that perhaps actually KNOWING some trans people might matter. He even came!

Spoiler: It did not matter to Paxton. It does not matter to Paxton that trans children are at DRASTICALLY higher risk for suicide and self harm. It does not matter to Paxton or Abbott or any Republican that steps like ones they’re taking INCREASE those risks. No, none of this matters to them because they do not actually care about trans people one way or another.

All they care about is riling up their increasingly reactionary and dangerous base. They need an inflammatory issue to drive voter turnout, and the vanishingly small minority that is the trans community is a convenient target.

This is, I think, even WORSE than them being simply bigoted assholes. I mean, I think they probably ARE bigoted assholes, too, but the absolutely craven and monstrous disregard for the lives of real, actual people here is breathtaking, and it has real-world consequences.

If you vote for this man, or any of his cronies, you are dead to me.

Our Increasingly Gibsonian Future: Robot Dogs Hunt Migrants at the Border

I am not kidding.

DHS’ choice of vendor sparked additional concern. While most police departments leased their pups from Boston Dynamics, which forbids customers weaponizing any of their tech, DHS chose Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics. Late last year, the company debuted a version of its robot dogs equipped with long-range guns capable of hitting targets at a reported 1,200 meters.

OH NOES! WRONG MAGIC WORDS!

This is fucking hilarious:

A Catholic priest has resigned after a church investigation found he performed invalid baptisms throughout most of his more than 20-year career, according to Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix.

Father Andres Arango, who performed thousands of baptisms, would say, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” But Olmsted explained the words “We baptize” should have been “I baptize” instead.

Apparently, as a result of the incorrect pronoun, God doesn’t consider these folks properly anointed, and the “victims” will need to get baptized again. BUT THERE’S MORE:

The error also means that because baptism is the first of the sacraments, some people will need to repeat other sacraments, according to the diocese webpage for frequently asked questions. CNN has reached out to the diocese for comment on other sacraments.

Grown adults in the United States are taking this seriously. Jesus wept.

Guess what? CSI is a lie.

That’s the takeaway from this well-sourced piece by Radley Balko that is entirely worth your time.

We’ve all seen stories, both in life and in fiction, about how bad guys got caught by fiber analysis, or bite analysis, or ballistics reports that conclusively prove that a given recovered bullet came from a specific gun, or whatnot. Turns out? None of that is backed by science, and when examined in blind tests the so-called pattern-matching experts tend not to do any better than a 50% accuracy rate. The root of the problem is that these “sciences” have typically been invented by law enforcement to achieve conviction, and those same organizations are DEEPLY unwilling to re-examine the accuracy of these kinds of evidence because, for them, convictions are FAR more important than anything so quotidian as justice.

The current exemplar of this attitude is the assistant general counsel of the FBI crime lab, a guy named Jim Agar, who is actively telling analysts

how to circumvent judges’ restrictions on unscientific testimony. He even suggests dialogue for prosecutors and analysts to recite if challenged. Most controversially, Agar advises analysts to tell judges that any effort to restrict their testimony to claims backed by scientific research is tantamount to asking them to commit perjury.

People are in PRISON over this stuff. People have been EXECUTED. It’s only been with the advent of DNA that the unreliability of pattern-matching evidence has really come to light, which is definitely good news — except one remaining are of pattern matching is not nearly as likely to be disproven by DNA: firearm tracing.

Guns work at a remove. You can shoot someone without being near enough to deposit DNA. And in the absence of DNA evidence to disprove an unethical prosecutor’s pattern-matching-backed theory, you might be up shit creek. Especially since, as the Agar memo shows, law enforcement organizations care far, far more about winning cases than they do about accuracy. Even at the FBI.

“We could be heroes.”

Take a moment today to remember Bowie, who would have turned 75 years old today. In retrospect, his passing two days after his 69th birthday in 2016 was the point at which everything turned to shit. Next came Prince, and after that, well, Trump and COVID.

There’s lots of ways to remember him. If you have to pick one, you can do a lot worse than “Heroes.”

Another great option is his final album, Blackstar, released on his birthday the year he died. At the time, I thought it was easily among his strongest albums, and the six intervening years have done nothing to change my mind. Listening to it now, understanding that he knew he was dying as he wrote those words, gives it a weight beyond the text.

“Public health is invisible when it works”

Hey, there IS good news re: COVID. Read here.

The tl;dr is that vaccines WORK, and that we probably got a break on omicron. But there’s data on both points that is reassuring.

Does this mean unmask and lick strangers? No, absolutely not. Just keep being careful, and the graphs will keep looking good.

GenX, drifting well past the midpoint

An unexpectedly sad aspect to the common activity of “whoa! I haven’t thought of $song in years… whatever happened to that band?” is, well, discovering someone who lived in your stereo at some point died a while back.

The first time I remember this happening was a year or so ago, when I randomly heard “How Bizarre” on the radio, and it stayed on my mind enough to Google OMC once I got home. I discovered that Pauly Fuemana, the frontman and singer from OMC, had died in 2010 of a degenerative nerve disease.

I was reminded of this after falling down the Google hole while listening to “Fade Into You” thanks to a BoingBoing post. The song was everywhere in the mid-90s, and honestly it’s never really gone away. Lots of folks probably think of Mazzy Star as a one-hit band, but they had much broader success — just nothing at the scale of “Fade” (but few songs are).

It remains beautiful and ethereal, thanks in part to Hope Sandoval‘s lyrics and delivery, but we ought not overlook her songwriting partner David Roback; all of Mazzy’s output is credited to her for lyrics and him for composition. Roback and Sandoval were the creative center of the band (which, we should note, released three albums AFTER So Tonight That I May See).

So here we are at the point of the post: David Roback — whose career included two other critically-acclaimed LA bands — died last February of metastatic cancer. BrooklynVegan has a roundup of musician responses, which will give you an idea of his influence and reach beyond Mazzy Star. He was 61.

Definitive Proof of the Dangers of Jam Band Music

Phish concert spreads COVID across the entire country.

Over Halloween weekend, the Vermont jam band Phish played a series of concerts in Las Vegas. Several days later, one attendee posted to Facebook that he had tested positive for COVID-19 — and more than 500 replied, most saying that they or someone they knew had also tested positive after attending the concert.

I’ve always thought that Phish a contagion, but this is not how I expected that to manifest.

Marty, just stop

Variety is reporting that Scorsese is planning to direct a Jerry Garcia biopic starring Jonah Hill.

  1. I mean, at least it’s not DeNiro.

  2. Maybe tell a story about something other than boomers.

  3. Realistically, what was the last great Scorsese film? Dude’s been phoning it in for a long time, despite the awards he gets because of the reputation he created with the undeniably great films of the 70s and 80s. I mean, he deserved an Oscar, but he didn’t deserve it for The Departed, which was him coasting through a remake of a Hong Kong film.

This is positively soviet

The GOP really, really hates talking about racism, so in New Hampspire, it’s now illegal — at least in the classroom:

The New Hampshire state legislature passed House Bill 2, the Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education, earlier this year and Sununu signed it into law in June. The bill text says the law “prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race in state contracts, grants, and training programs.” It goes on to describe “divisive concepts” as a number of different things, including ideas like New Hampshire or the United States being “fundamentally racist or sexist” or anything that indicates “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The passage of the New Hampshire law was part of a broader trend that’s been playing out in red states as Republicans fear-monger about the academic framework called Critical Race Theory, manufacturing outrage about the concept for the better part of the past year.

End Fraternities.

“Research on fraternity men has continuously found that they are much more likely to commit sexual violence than men not in fraternities.” More than three times as likely, even though, as one study showed, their prior histories of sexual violence were equivalent. So what was responsible for the increase? According to the report, “It appeared to be the fraternity culture itself.”

They are just as bad as we have always known them to be. End them.

Dept. of Deeply Nerdy Statistics

COVID has produced the longest delay between same-actor Bond films EVER: almost 6 years.

In looking at this, a pretty amazing stat popped out: On average, starting with the release of Dr. No in 1962 and continuing through the last Timothy Dalton film in 1989, a Bond film was released about every 20 months for 27 years. That sounds insane but the numbers don’t lie. The first three came out a year apart, followed by a 20 month gap between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Then we settled down to something between 18 and 24 months for Moore’s run — sometimes less.

Even recasting events didn’t blow that up too much. There WAS a then-unprecedented 30 month gap between Connery’s almost-last outing (You Only Live Twice in 1967) and the sole George Lazenby film (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969) — but Connery’s return film came out not quite two years later, and then Roger Moore’s debut (Live and Let Die) dropped less than 600 days later.

The shift from Moore to Dalton didn’t even create a delay: The Living Daylights opened a hair over two years after A View to a Kill, so more or less right on time.

The largest gap between films came in the handoff between Dalton’s last outing and the release of Goldeneye: almost six and a half years. The delay was due to what can best be described as inter-corporate chicanery. Dalton was actually on a 3-movie deal, and they were on track to do the film by 1990 when the project hit “development hell” owing to legal problems between MGM and the Broccoli family (who have always held the film rights to Bond). MGM was in talks to be acquired, but the deal was getting dicy, and the new owners had plans to generate quick cash by selling international broadcast rights to the 007 films on the cheap, so the Broccolis sued, and while all this was going on Dalton’s contract expired.

Long story short: Goldeneye wasn’t released until 1995, with a new Bond, which was fine because in those 6 years the world had changed quite a bit.

Once they had Brosnan, though, they moved pretty quickly; his films have an average interval of about 2.3 years, or not much different than Moore or Dalton.

The gap after Brosnan, though, is big: the 3rd largest of the set, at 3.99 years. It appears no single factor can be blamed. Eon Productions had (finally) acquired the rights to Casino Royale in 1999, but then they needed to find a good Bond and a good director, and that took up some time.

Craig’s films came slower: on average, 3.7 years counting almost-6-year-gap for No Time to Die, but closer to 3 if we ditch the outlier. If NTTD had dropped on its original date in 2019, Craig’s average would still be high at 3.25 years; only once is the gap less than 2 years (and it shows, since Quantum of Solace is terrible).

Craig’s tenure overall has been on a slower pace: prior to COVID, there’s been an average 3 years between each of his films.

It turns out, though, that the gap between films has been increasing over time, even when we take out gaps due to other factors (like the MGM/UA thing):

  • Connery: 1.5 years (which factors in Lazenby; Connery’s first 4 were all only a year apart)
  • Moore: 1.9 years
  • Dalton: 2 years
  • Brosnan: 2.3 years (omitting Goldeneye gap)
  • Craig: 3.25 years (omitting DAD->CR gap and crediting back “COVID” delay)

Overall, there’s been a new Bond film about every 2.5 years for almost 60 years. That’s kind of amazing.

Differential Upgrades!

Jason Snell has put together a great guide for iPhone users that covers, starting with an iPhone 7, what changes you’d experience if you upgraded to a new iPhone 13.

This is a GREAT idea, because while there are exhaustive reviews of the new phone every fall, the upgrades year over year are incremental. Comparisons between your 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 year old phone and the New Hotness are almost never done, and yet: Snell did it.

(Via Daring Fireball)

You just assume you’ll have more time. You’re wrong.

Houston is a funny old town. People say that it’s the smallest town of 7 million they’ve ever seen, and they’re not wrong. I’ve got dozens of stories that prove the point, but none as good as this one.

I ride a lot. If it was anything else, Erin would’ve had an intervention by now. It had been a thing for a while, but after my second MS150 I had a taste of a level of fitness I’d never had before, and I decided to keep pushing at the same pace. (That pace — 100 miles a week, give or take — has turned out to be the pace of my cycling life ever since.)

As part of that, I joined a ride out of a local shop that ran every Tuesday and Thursday evening. I gauged my gains in speed by how long I could keep the front group in sight. At first, it was “oh, about 10 minutes,” but I got stronger and stronger and was eventually able to hang with them a pretty long way into the ride — sometimes, all the way to the cutoff between the short version of the route and the long one. I always took the short one, to get home and have dinner with Erin, and it seems like a minor thing but the very idea of holding on until Brompton was like winning the Tour for me at the time.

Then, as I guess most of you know, my crash happened, and I was out for a while.

The funny small-town part of this comes in now. I was at an Easter party thrown every year by our pals the Britton-Dansbys, in line for food, when a guy I didn’t recognize started chatting with me about riding. “You ready to ride again?”

Uh, what?

It took me a minute to figure it out, but my interrogator was Dan, a guy I knew from the Tuesday/Thursday ride. Dan is a gruff but profoundly kind guy, and a terribly strong rider, but I couldn’t figure out why he was at Andrew and Nicki’s house. Turns out, Dan was a Chronicle writer, just like our hosts.

And more than that: it wasn’t just Dan. It was Dan, and also two other guys from our ride: Dane and Andy. And it turned out that, unbeknownst to any of us, we’d been attending the same parties at a couple different Chronicle-connected homes for YEARS without realizing it. Dane was less regular, but when I got my legs back under me I rode with Dan and Andy and couple other guys twice a week, every week, for years.

Andy was a quiet sort, but like Dan unfailingly kind and encouraging — I was never on his or Dan’s level, but they’d hold back and let me catch up before putting the hammer down again. Cycling is suffering like that. It’s what we do. It makes you stronger, and at that time in my life the encouragement I got from these guys was priceless.

I remember, very clearly, the Tuesday ride after Bowie died and left us Blackstar. Andy was a fan, too, and at every stoplight we were chattering about how amazing the record was. Normally pretty reserved, his enthusiasm here was striking and disarming and pure — the kind of vibe that just makes you feel better for being near it, you know?

Time passed and I shifted my midweek rides to workouts — more time efficient, more impactful — and the Tuesday/Thursday ride petered out. I’d still see Dan and Andy and the other guys on other rides, but nowhere nearly as often as I’d have liked. We’d run into each other at the Odell parties, or Easter or Thanksgiving at the Britton-Dansby house, and every time I’d think to myself I should make more time to see Dan and Andy and oodles of other people that you meet, but never seem to see often enough. People get busy. It’s a thing. There will be time later.

There’s no more time, though, for Andy. He died on Saturday. He would’ve turned 47 in December.

Hug those near you. Reach out to those you wish you knew better. Sometimes, cliches are true: nobody knows how much time is left, for anything at all.

Andrew Dansby wrote the obit. If you feel so moved, Andy’s wife has asked that donations be made to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a cause already close to my heart.

The reaping is upon us

Thinking about Watts, and I realize that in 5 years, most of these will be gone. I mean, let’s be honest: At threescore and ten, you’re in the zone of statistical danger.

  • Bill Wyman the long-retired Rolling Stones bassist, was born in 1936 and turns 85 in October.
  • Mick Jagger turned 78 in July, and has concert dates scheduled next month.
  • Keith Richards is a year younger at 77, and is presumably also planning to play those shows.
  • Ronnie Wood is still the new guy in the Stones, even though he joined 46 years ago. He was born in June of 1947, so he’s a sprightly 74, and will presumably join his mates on the bill next month.
  • Paul McCartney, bass & co-lead-songwriter for the Beatles, turned 79 this summer. He released a solo album last December.
  • Ringo Starr, the Beatles’ drummer, turned 81 this year.
  • Brian Wilson, the only one who mattered in the Beach Boys was born in 1942; he turned 79 this summer. Was still touring when COVID hit.
  • Eric Clapton, noted racist and occasional guitarist, was born on the 30th of March 1945, and so rings up at 76.
  • Bob Dylan turned 80 this year.
  • Steve Winwood was the kid of the 60s bands; he was only 19 when “Gimme Some Lovin'” was a hit for the Spencer Davis Group. Even so, math’s a bitch, as he’s now 73.
  • The Kinks’ Davies brothers are in this group, too: Ray was born in 1944, and just turned 77. Baby brother Dave is 74.
  • Roger Daltrey turned 77 this year.
  • Pete Townshend is a year younger at 76.
  • Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel both turn 80 this fall.

We think of these as 70s bands, not 60s bands, and yet they’re not much younger:

  • The surviving members of Zeppelin are getting up there, too. Jimmy Page is a contemporary of the folks above, born in January of 1944. Plant was famously younger — too young to enter some of the venues Zep played early on — but he turned 73 last week. John Paul Jones is only a year younger, so 75.

  • 70s stalwarts Aerosmith are in statistical danger, too: Steven Tyler is 73; Joe Perry turns 71 next month.

Pink Floyd are actually older as well:

  • Nick Mason, b 1944, currently 77
  • Roger Waters turns 78 next month
  • David Gilmour turned 75 this year

“You’re my fucking singer.”

Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones for 58 years — and, not for nothing, Shirley’s husband for 57 — has died at the age of 80. Initially a jazz player, he was coaxed into what would become the Stones by Mike, Keith, and Brian, and stayed there holding down a stalwart rhythm section for the rest of his life. Mick, Keith, and Charlie are the only members present on every studio record, from 1964’s England’s Newest Hit Makers through to Blue & Lonesome in 2016.

The Rolling Stones have been a novelty / nostalgia act now for a long, long time; my guess is that in the utter SEA of excellent music now available to folks who enjoy this sort of thing, it’s absurdly easy to overlook boomer-era bands entirely, and a young person just getting to know the musical world wouldn’t be insane to have done so. Their glory years are long, long behind them — their last relevant studio record was (arguably) 40 years ago (Tattoo You, which gave us “Start Me Up” and “Waiting On A Friend”), but they’ve kept touring. Their “No Filter” world tour was interrupted by Corona, but was set to resume next month in St. Louis. Ominously in retrospect, earlier this month they announced that longtime associate Steve Jordan would be handling the drums for this leg as Charlie underwent an unspecified medical procedure. (The buried lede here, of course, is that he was still playing live at 79; the last pre-COVID show was 2 years ago this month in Miami).

Their footprint is enormous and inescapable, and I’d argue more interesting and long-lasting than either of the other two “great” 60s bands (the Beatles and the Beach Boys). It’s hard to say what will happen now; obviously they continued after Bill Wyman retired almost a quarter century ago, but this is different. Mick is 78. Keith is a year younger. Nobody would blame them if they packed it in after these shows.

(Oh, and the headline is from here, in case you didn’t already know.)