People familiar with Adobe PostScript will recognize the source of this label misprint.

Looks like they ripped out my old apartment building in Columbus and replaced it with something bigger and better. Good thing, too, since it burned down at least once, while I was living there (hmm, now there’s an old Usenet post I should resurrect here; I used to use it as a great counter-example to the “ban guns because they make domestic squabbles fatal” argument).

The concrete canyon Brian and I lived in before that is still there, though, and probably unchanged. Trigger-happy towing, unsafe parking, and next door to a neighborhood pool; a bunch of kids once broke into my car just to steal the change from my ashtray so they could get in. Cute girls running around, though, and our storage closet was big enough to hide a dozen illegal immigrants in. Two dozen if they were close friends.

America’s Largest Community Of Brick Homes hasn’t changed a bit. Nearly 50,000 houses based on four floorplans, so you always knew where the bathrooms were at your friend’s houses. Not the easiest neighborhood to deliver pizza in, especially in Dominos’ 30-minutes-or-free days, but the tips were always good.

As for the first home I remember, Old Powell Road is almost unrecognizable. They got rid of the sharp curves that used to send cars into the abandoned gravel pit (that, along with date-rape attempts, was the most common reason someone would knock on our front door after dark), the formerly-toxic landfill appears to be capped and made pretty, but it’s still sparsely developed. The house is long-gone, but I knew that already.

These days home looks like this:

hole in arm closing
biopsy was negative
springtime is bike time

Disappointing. Why? Because the series up to this point has been straightforward action/comedy with a dollop of fan-service and plenty of cartoon violence, and they inexplicably turned serious on this disc, dropping the comedy and making the combat bloody and lethal. Previous incarnations of the Burn-Up franchise are reported to have had the same problem, but it really looked like they’d decided to keep this one light.

Nope. Of the four episodes on this disc, only the first matches the tone of the previous stories. In episodes 10 and 11, Our Heroines take on a pair of powerful, brutal “replacements”, and the losers end up on life-support, while shadowy figures pull the strings. There’s some good character development mixed in, and they partially redeem themselves with the final episode (despite the baggage left over from the two-parter), but based on the first two-thirds, this wasn’t the sort of series where you expected to see one of the good guys lying in a pool of her own blood. And I counted at least two arms being graphically broken in ways that don’t heal quickly, which was two too many.

I don’t get it. I thought they’d done a nice job of setting up a world and characters that would support several series of light-hearted action, with sexy heroines and a slapstick supporting cast. I assumed that was what they were shooting for, but even though the last episode leaves room for more adventures with these characters, they left the shadowy string-pullers pulling strings.

So, either they ran out of ideas, they didn’t really want to continue writing an episodic comedy, or they were seeing how an “edgier tone” would play with the fans. Well, I’d have bought five discs like the first one, or at least three like the second one, but I don’t want any more like the story that dominates the last one. Not even with Maya in a bikini.

The latest claimed advance in stem-cell research is natural breast implants. On the one hand, their response to touch and motion would be realistic, and, being grown from the patient’s own cells, they would be free from the risks associated (true or not) with other methods of bust increase (which I will not refer to as “enhancement”, based on extensive familiarity with their unclothed appearance).

On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that they’d look any more realistic than current implants. If, as the article suggests, they’d be grown outside the body and installed in the usual way, patients seeking significant size increases would still end up with their nipples in the wrong place.

On the gripping hand, they’d pass the flashlight test, a first for breast-implant technology.

…about Terry Schiavo. It seems to be one of the most important issues in the country, judging from the amount of ink, pixels, and heat that it’s generating.

After reading up on the facts of the case (well-referenced and presented with a refreshing lack of bias), I think the key point is that the medical experts agree that her brain scans consistently show that there is little or nothing remaining of her cerebral cortex. That is, the portions of the brain responsible for everything we associate with a functional living being are just plain gone (sorry, Rachel, but your analogy fell apart the moment your arthritic dog licked himself).

The only debate between the doctors is whether she has a small amount of isolated living tissue in her cerebral cortex or whether she has no living tissue in her cerebral cortex.

I’m not familiar with any existing or promised medical procedure that promises to grow a new brain, and even if one existed, that person would have little or nothing in common with the previous occupant of that body. Unless you believe in miracles, Terry Schiavo can never wake up, because she’s not there any more.

Since I don’t think the courts have any business basing their decisions on the likelihood of a miracle occurring, they must balance the medical testimony against the emotional appeal of the family. The judge chose medicine, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

I don’t actually care if the family manages to win the right to keep her body running on life support for another fifteen years. I think it’s a pretty morbid way of coping with loss, but they’ve apparently got the money to do it, so who am I to interfere?

I do care about politicians and pundits suddenly pretending to care about her. It reminds me of the old VH-1 Earth Day commercial “we’re not doing it because everyone is doing it, we’re doing it until everyone is doing it”, one of the more blatant lies in the history of environmental activism.

Update: The American Council on Science and Health speaks up.

…shame none of the witnesses were, either: man beheaded with axe on London street.

Sadly, it sounds like the witnesses weren’t the sort who’d have done anything even if they’d had the means. At least half a dozen people stood there and watched for several minutes, and all they did was politely ask him to stop chopping up his victim.

So, yesterday afternoon I went in for some quick outpatient surgery. Nothing major (or ahem life-altering), just some quick drainage work, and then I’d be able to drive myself home. I figured I’d stop at Costco on the way back and pick up some steaks to grill.

That was 1:30PM. At 2PM, the surgeon finished looking at my “right axillary abscess” and said he wanted to take me across the street to the O.R. and do the (still simple, still minor) procedure under general anaesthesia. Not having spent much time under the knife, I didn’t immediately translate this to “you ain’t driving home, son”.

After getting me into one of those silly gowns and inserting an IV, the nurse asked who was going to pick me up. I explained that everyone on my list of possibles was at least 70 miles away and stuck at work for several hours, and found myself being admitted for the night.

Then they told me it’d be at least 5:30PM before they started. Then 6:30PM. At 8:15PM, I was finally knocked out with a clever assortment of chemicals, and woke up at 8:45PM with a well-packed bandage under my right arm. I got about an hour’s sleep last night, and finally got out of there around 10:30AM this morning.

The point of this story? When I left the house to start this little adventure, I stuffed my iPod Shuffle into a jacket pocket, figuring I might need some entertainment for half an hour or so while I waited for the surgeon. It saved my sanity. Except for the relatively short time that I was otherwise occupied, I was able to stay entertained with an assortment of music and Japanese talk radio.

Being partially color-blind, I couldn’t decipher the red/orange/green LED that signals remaining battery life, but it never ran dry. It warded me from the chatter in the hospital hallways, the burbling of my roommate’s oxygen supply, the dreadful basic-cable offerings on TV, and the small stack of relentlessly defeatist newsweeklies that passed for reading material.

And since the Shuffle correctly syncs play count with iTunes, I knew which talk-radio shows to delete when I got home this morning, making room for more.

Oh, and everyone I ran into wanted one. Most of them found the price as attractive as the product.