Disjointed Digression

So I was driving home today and I got behind a BMW Z3.

Those are not all that rare around here, especially if you consider how many I used to see in the Dell parking lot where the sales people parked. But I digress. This Z3 had a vanity license plate from out of state that said FLUFBUT. As I wondered what the Hell flufbut means, and why you’d want it as your license plate, my eyes wandered up to convertible top. Along the bottom of the plastic window was duct tape. Not just a strip, but what looked like three layers. As my eye wandered up to the red light to see if it was green I noticed that on the window part there were 2 strips of what appeared to be clear packing tape. What struck me about this was that here was a car that cost quite a bit, with a baffling vanity plate, but a vanity plate nonetheless which indicated money, yet it had a decidedly broke-ass fix on the window. I was half tempted to follow them to wherever they were going and ask the driver “What the hell does FLUFBUT mean?”

Here’s a headline that makes you wince Cops Raid Wrong Place, Kick Man in Groin.  Apparently the police burst into the wrong apartment, denting the front door and using flash grenades that left two large stains and “subdued” the two people in the apartment. 

From the article:
Police spokesman Hal Dalton said something must have gone amiss in the briefing beforehand. “We don’t know how the mistake was made,” Dalton said.

Silvia Bernal, 30, told The (Annapolis) Capital that about 15 officers burst through the front door of her apartment while she was cooking dinner about 8:20 p.m. She said the officers kicked her husband in the groin while she fled into a bedroom and barred the door with her body.

Then she said both of them were taken to the ground and handcuffed. The Capital said a police officer went outside and realized they had raided the wrong residence.

Dalton said they were supposed to have raided a different apartment and said the incident was regrettable.

What kind of threat do you have to pose to a police officer for him to kick you in the nuts to take you down?  My guess is that the cops were so pumped up that anyone in the apt was a threat in their minds, so the took everyone down and asked questions later.  At least they didn’t shoot first, then ask questions. 

Also from the article:
When officers and the city’s tactical squad went to the right unit, they said it was empty.

No shit? What criminal would see their neighbors apartment getting raided, and say “Sucks to be them, I wonder if they meant to come here?”  I bet they took off as soon as they saw the police cars gathering in the parking lot.

I know not every police officer is represented by this behavior, some really are here to serve and protect, but it seems that more and more often we are seeing stories about police doing things like this… 

As they said in Hot Fuzz “there is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork.”

Before Queue was diagnosed with Lymphoma, Candy was in the process of getting me a birthday present… Loki the munchkin kitten. 

Loki is by no means a replacement for the Cat Daddy, the Monkeymanx, his Royal Manxness Queue.   Candy, wanting to spoil me, and I think she secretly wanted a kitten, heard me talk about these unique (aka mutant) cats called munchkins. They are normal cats in every way except one, they have short legs. They are kinda like the dachshund of the cat world. But I digress…

We now have a kitten running around terrorizing the house, living up to his name! The first few days after we got him (he was seven weeks old) were a bit tough. First he had fleas. We made sure we put anti-flea stuff on Zaida and Queue, and picked off as many fleas as we could find on the poor little guy, even going so far as to bathing him. We put some anti-flea stuff on Loki as well, and cleared up the flea problem.  We took him to the vet the second day we had him, and found out he had intestinal parasites. We were told that is actually really common in kittens. The parasites were affecting his poo, in a similar fashion as Queues which made us worry that he too had cancer. The vet told Candy that the kitten did not have cancer, and as a rule kittens don’t get cancer. So we had to drug the little guy. After two weeks the parasites were not gone, and we had to get more drugs. Finally, this week he seems to be getting better.

Loki loves to play; he loves to attack things like his toys, the rug, a sock, his own tail, our feet, Zaida, and Queue. Yes Loki, 1/5^th the size of Zaida or Queue will attack them, because he wants to play. Sometimes Zaida plays with him, sometimes she runs, other times she gives her mean growl/snap to send him away. Queue on the other hand wants no part of it. It’s kinda odd because Loki seems to look up to Queue, and wants to be near him but for the most part Queue ignores, or hisses at Loki. Every once in a while Queue will just sniff Loki and not hiss, so I think there is hope for them to get along.

Other things that Candy got me for my Birthday were: a big bag of candy and Battlestar Galactic seasons 1 and 2 on DVD.

So a few months ago, Candy noticed that Queue was having a problem when he went to the bathroom. I don’t want to gross you out with details, so I’ll just refer to this as his poo problem. Candy took him to the vet. The vet said that they were not sure what his problem was, and they would like to try putting Queue on a steroid, but the vet went on to say, Queue has a heart murmur, and a steroid could cause a heart attack, if the murmur was not just due to Queue being ten years old. To make sure, the vet would need to do a sonogram. (I think I’ve mentioned that before). The vet gave us a few other options to try. First we changed his food. That had no effect on his problem. Then we tried some pills, at first we were crushing them up into soft food for him. Then we changed to another type of pill that he could taste in the soft food, so we broke out the pill shooter. Much to our surprise, the pill shooter worked very well. Queue didn’t like it, but no one got hurt. I would wrap him in a towel so just his head was poking out, hold him like a baby, and Candy would force the pill shooter into his mouth past his protesting tongue and pop the pill in. Queue would swallow it immediately.

Unfortunately the pills did not help. Candy took him back to the vet, and we decided to get the sonogram done, the vet also let us know that they would sonogram his stomach area, so they could diagnose his problem better.

Candy took him to get the sonogram done, while he was there, they found that he had fluid in his chest cavity. They extracted some of the fluid and sent it to a pathologist (I believe). Oh, and the heart murmur was not a problem, it was a “dippy septum”. (I might be getting the medical terms wrong, sorry I never took biology.)

The sonogram showed that Queue has a thickening of his intestines. Not really  a growth or mass, but a thickening. The fluid they extracted was lymph fluid. In the words of a Magic 8-Ball “Outlook not so good.” So now we had to take Queue to an internal specialist. I went with Candy to take the poor manx to this new vet. The main reason I went was because the word cancer had come up a few times in conjunction with the thickening and lymph fluid.

The new vet was very nice and took Queue to another room to extract some cells from his lymph nodes. After examining the cells, and consulting with another specialist there, the vet was 75-80% sure that Queue has lymphoma. Cancer of the lymph system. Since the lymph system is all over the body, it could pop up anywhere. It appears to have popped up in his intestines. She could not be 100% sure with out doing a biopsy on part of Queue’s intestines. Candy and I didn’t want to traumatize Queue with surgery. So we decided to treat him for cancer. The doctor gave us three choices (I might not be remembering these correctly, but here goes):

1) Chemotherapy that uses similar if not the same drugs as human chemotherapy. The drawbacks to this are cost, and having to take Queue into the vet once a week (an hour trip each way). Also Queue would be lethargic for a few days after treatment (as lethargic as a cat gets) and would just be getting back to normal when it came time for another treatment.

2) The vet told us of one drug that seemed to work as well as the chemo in this situation, and all we had to do was inject Queue once a week with a steroid (I forget the name it’s something like dexamethodrine).

3) This option was just something to treat the symptoms (at least that’s what I took from it.) It would most likely not do anything to the cancer, but would probably clear up his poo problem.

We opted for the Steroid injections. Queue has been on these for two weeks, next week we take him back to the vet for a check up, and to see where we need to go from here.

Everything I’ve read online has given a time frame of four to nine months of life from the diagnosis of lymphoma.

What is odd (and I’m not complaining in the least here) is that other than his poo problem, Queue shows no signs of being sick. No loss of appetite, no vomiting, no less energy, if anything he has actually put on a little weight. I’m sure that will change as his condition gets worse, so I’ll enjoy my time with him as much as I can.

Update: Candy and I don’t want people to have the wrong impression. After seeing the specialist we are more hopeful than hopeless. Since Queue is still acting fine, has no additional symptoms and we have started a course of treatment, we have a positive outlook on the future. The time frame we were given is just an estimate and is in no way written in stone. The Specialist even said that she has another feline patient that has been on this treatment for over 2 years now and is still healthy and has a good quality of life. So thank you all for your concern, but at this time we would much rather hear and/or read the “it is so good to hear Queue is doing well” then the “oh I am so sorrys”

As you may recall I blogged about movies I was looking forward to.

Two of those movies (Spider-man 3 and Fantastic Four 2 more on FF2 at a later time) have yet to come out.

I have seen Smokin’ Aces and 300 though.

Smokin’ Aces. 

I saw this when it came out, and I’ve been too lazy or too busy (take your pick) to write a review on it.  I have seen a re-hashed  commercial for the Smokin’ Aces DVD recently where it reads part of a review “Blam! Blam! Expletive! FBI, plot twist, Expletive!Expletive! Blam! Blam! Blam! Expletive! Expletive!”  Which pretty much captures the basic premise of the movie.  Action, lots of guns and violence.  Some of the actors/actresses listed on the cast are almost just cameo appearances.  I actually thought Ben Affleck was not too bad in this movie.  It was an OK movie, but not great.  The way I describe it is “Tarantino light”.  Personally I think the movie had too many characters (all of whom were as flat as a pancake) and not enough story.  From the trailer, I thought that more would happen, and that there were more locations involved.  Since its out on DVD now, rent it for a few hours of mindless violence.

300

The movie is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.  Since I enjoyed the graphic novel, which is based in history but not 100% historically accurate, I figured I’d like the movie.  300 focuses on 300 Spartan warriors that defend the pass at Thermopylae against 10,000 invading Persians.   The movie was made using a lot of CGI backgrounds and computer enhanced colors/images so that it would look as much like the graphic novel as possible.  There are quite a few side by side comparisons on the Internet, and most show that the movie captured the look and feel of the graphic novel.  The movie is very much an action oriented macho fest.  Candy liked it “because of all the hawt guys!”  I liked the movie quite a bit for different reasons.  I saw it opening weekend, and was very tempted to go see it more times.  In the words of a SNL sketch “It was better than Cats, I’m going to see it again and again.”  If it’s still playing near you, go see it!  If not, buy the DVD, I know I will!   It is that good!

Grindhouse

 I went to see Grindhouse on opening day.  Grindhouse is more than just two movies back to back.  There are also fake trailers included, which are fun and funny.  I went into Grindhouse not expecting much.  I was rewarded with a very fun time.  The two movies “Planet Terror” directed by Robert Rodriguez, and “Death Proof” directed by Quentin Tarantino are very b-movie-esque, very cheesy and very different from one another.  

Planet Terror 

A movie about zombie-esque cannibals running amuck in Texas. It’s mostly a zombie movie with a couple of twisted love stories and some sibling rivalry to boot.  It has the classic Rodriguez over-the-top-way-beyond-believable-but-I-still-like-it-even-though-it’s-totally-impossible thing going.  I’m not going to give away anything, but its good messy fun!  There are some gross-out scenes.  Since Candy and I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, we were eating lunch and watching the movie. “Oh that’s gross!” <chomp> <chomp> “That’s disgusting” <chomp><chomp>.  It’s a fun movie, just don’t think to hard about it… Oh and IMO Rose McGowen looks hot in Planet Terror.

Death Proof

Tarantino, he loves his dialogue. The only problem is, as I understand it, in “original” Grindhouse cinema they dialogue was crap.  There is a lot of dialogue, some of which seems to be pretty pointless. There are also a lot of shots of downtown Austin (Guero’s, Texas Chili Parlor and the beloved Alamo Drafthouse Cinema!) Of course there is some good old fashioned stunt driving that as far as I know used very little to no CGI.  Even though I liked seeing stuff from my hometown in the first half of Death Proof, the movie doesn’t really get good until the second half. 

I recommend seeing Grindhouse at the theater, but make sure you have 3 hours to spare, it’s a long double feature.

Hot Fuzz

 On Sunday, we went and saw Hot Fuzz (thus the headline .) Ever since my buddy Beav got me to watch Spaced, I’ve loved damn near everything that has Simon Pegg and is written by Edgar Wright.  Hot Fuzz is no exception.  The story is that Nick Angel, police office extraordinaire is  too good.   He is so good that he puts the rest of the force to shame, so he gets reassigned from the    London Metro police force to a small village called Sanford.  In the beginning Angel is as strict as Judge Dread (although he is not judge, jury and executioner.) He has to re-adjust to the slow life of Sanford, where one of his major duties is rounding up a goose that has escaped.  When a rash of accidents happen that don’t look like accidents, he is the best man for the job. 

This is one of the best action movies I’ve seen in years.  They tell you what is going to happen in the beginning of the movie, just not how or why.  There are homage’s to some of the cheesiest cop-buddy movies out there.  It’s fun, its funny, and the action is a blast.  Even if you haven’t heard of it (or of the other movie these guys did Shaun of the Dead) go out and see it, you will not be disappointed.

The other day, Candy and I were walking out to the car on our way to get some food.  We saw a neighbor cat, an orange tabby, whom we call Mr. Orange (I believe his real name is Scotty) hunkered down, ears flat back against his head and growling.  The object of his ire was another orange tabby from a few buildings over. The tabby from a few buildings over was all puffed up, growling, and appeared to have the upper hand. Candy decided that we need to do something!  She rushed back into the house to get the water gun that we use to discipline Queue and Zaida.  In the time that she was in the house, the cat from the other building was moving into position to strike a blow.  Just before the fur actually started flying, Candy came out, green and orange plastic gun held out in front of her, stalking with determination toward the two cats.  As she got into range, she started shooting the water gun, and shouted “This is Mr. Orange’s turf! Go back to your own building! Get out of here!” over and over.

I’m honestly not sure what scared the “foreign” cat more the yelling or the water gun, but the cat trotted off.  He didn’t go very far, and we got into the car.  Since the “foreign” cat was still hanging around somewhat close, Candy handed me the water gun, I rolled down my window and tried to shoot him, even though he was out of range.  Candy, turned the car so that she could grab the water gun back and do a drive by on the cat, saying”Go back to your building!” 

From the What the Fuck!? department:

I recieved a spam email that had the following in it:

“Child involve scanning stream. Clock loss permanent restarting.
Quotthe passed, smallquot bhuvanesh requested times.
Everyday average rating rate buying stores.
Mixed know visual front laid need, warm raised betai!
Sensible parser implied content child.
Indexing onsite repair recovery prices, vat conditions connection. Almighty both provide web james johnston. Annum perl, cgi frontpage virus, filtered unlimited accounts mb.
Anonymous promote requires instances activated delivery determined. Advice finder suites utilities!“

I believe that it also had an image attached (which is what they want you to see.) No idea what the email was trying to sell, I deleted it already.  For some reason this text they put in the body cracked me up.  Espeically “Sensible parser implied content child.” to me that sounds like something a programmer might actually say! I know they put it in to try to defeat spam filters, but I still find the random words strung together kind of funny.

It makes me think of the infinite monkey theorem.  And that somewhere some spammer has monkeys randomly picking words to make these emails.  Poor monkeys…

So here I am again.  Trying to blog.  I’ve had a lot of things happen in my life recently and I haven’t had time to blog. 

First and foremost, Candy and I got engaged.  The actual wedding date has yet to be decided, but we’ve taken that first step of spending eternity together. 

Earlier this month, my mom had a minor heart attack, and had to have heart bypass surgery.  Candy and I drove down to Beaumont to see her before and after the surgery.  She was doing good.  But then when she went back in for a follow up, her stitches opened up again and they had to pack the wound with gauze and are now using a “wound vac” on it to help her heal.  She is in good spirits and getting better. 

Not like this matters much, I’ve been playing a lot of games, mostly World of Warcraft (still). 

I just wanted post something while I was thinking about it, and to test out Live Writer from Microsoft.

{Now Listening to Guns N’ Roses -  Sweet Child O’ Mine}

Yesterday, at work one of our copiers would not copy or scan pages from the tray on top. You know those trays that suck in the paper and spit it out below, and in seconds a copy comes out of the copier. Being more of a computer guy than a copier guy, I went and looked at it. And couldn’t figure it out, because if you made a copy the old fashioned way “on the glass” it worked. I looked at it opening doors, cleaning the little glass strip that scans the pages from the tray. But I couldn’t figure it out. I also made a rookie mistake, which I’ll come back to later.

So I called the copier repair guy. I figured he’d show up today, but yesterday at 4:30 he arrived. Well, he gets to looking at it, commenting on how weird it is that it will copy the other way, etc. I tell him the few things I tried, and he nods and checks some things then turns to me and says “Did you threaten it?”
Now, I took this as a joke. Seeing how I like to joke I went along. “Yeah, I did.” I respond. Then there is a pause. I can see I have inadvertently taken the wind out of this guy’s sails. I’m guessing he didn’t have anywhere to go from there. I guess no one had told him yes to that. I figured that he was going to have a follow up, or good punch line after the threaten remark. But I guess not. Now there is a slight awkward silence.
I’m feeling kind of bad. Then I get to feel stupid. He turns off the copier, and turns it back on. He runs a paper through the tray and it copies fine. It turns out that one of the scanning components had not returned to “home” position and restarting it will make it return there. With that, he’s done.

From the What the Fuck!? department…
Ran across this article last week: Shock at women goading toddlers

A few British women were starting a fight club. For their toddlers. Apparently they didn’t adhere to the first and second rule of fight club. They were busted with a video of them trying to get a 2 year old and a 3 year old to fight.
You know most mothers try to keep their kids away from things that would hurt them, most mothers discourage or even punish their kids when they fight. Apparently these mothers thought that they would turn their kids into gladiators at an early age. Personally, I think they have it all wrong. Didn’t they See Conan the Barbarian? First you tough up the little shits by forcing them to do hard labor for like 15 years, then you put them in the gladiator ring with knives and axes, and big fucking hammers.

Seriously, what the hell kinda of mother tries to get their child to beat up another kid? This is another reason, that people should not be allowed to have children, unless they pass multiple stringent tests.