In A Dragon Based Economy, Geography Doesn't Matter

In a Dragon Based Economy, apparently geography doesn't really matter.  Or "everything you wanted to know about the Game of Thrones season premier, but we're too afraid to ask".

Dragonstone is near Jamie's feet, Kings Landing is 1/2 way to his sister & lover Cersei

I call it a "Dragon Based Economy" because that what John Oliver called it on Colbert's Late Night show twice last week.  "We're talking some serious dragon money" - when Last Week Tonight bought 5 wax presidents from a closing Ohio Presidential museum.  Game of Thrones is one of the Main anchors that brings in subscribers (and pirates) to HBO, along with Real Time (which I watch, every time it's on), The Leftovers (which I couldn't care less about), and Ballers (which I can't give even 1/2 a sh*t about no matter how hard I try).  Westworld was a good series, and in my mind, Needed to STOP when it stopped.  There's Zero Need to continue with Samurai Westworld, Outer Space Westworld, or Ancient Roman Westworld...  but the bean counters and non-creatives at HBO apparently disagree with my perspective and want to keep raking in the cash from zombified viewers.

Another Danish actor steal jobs from good Americans & Brits

Now, why do I state that "geography doesn't matter"?  Well, the newly usurping & murderous Lord of the Iron Born Euron Greyjoy (putting the "Ew!" in "Euron") shows up with an armada of "1000 ships" at Kings Landing, in an attempt to gain favor with Queen Cersei (and ask for her hand in marriage... ew!!! I think I just tasted some of my own vomit), but his massive fleet somehow doesn't run into the even more massive fleets of Greyjoy deserters, Unsullied warriors, 2nd Sons (I'm actually a 2nd son myself, heh heh), and the Dothraki Horde - not to mention 3 massive and very hungry dragons that have been flying air cover for the invading fleet - that Daenerys Targaryen is leading to the island of Dragonstone.  Dragonstone, per the maps of Westeros, is near the eastern mouth of the long bay that eventually leads to Kings Landing.  The Iron Islands, Pyke, are on the Western side of Westeros, north of Casterly Rock.  THERE IS NO Northern Passage, as global warming has not yet melted the ice caps north of the Seven Kingdoms as it already has in Canada and Russia on this world in this age, where Polar Bear mothers now have to swim for more than a 100 miles with their newly born cubs to reach the pack ice, where upwards of 90% of the cubs are drowning, exhausted, as they used to only have to swim a mile or 2 at most.  At least I got to see a Polar Bear in the zoo when I was a kid, before they all become extinct.

But human driven climate change aside, Ewwww-Euron's 1000 ships would have had to sail Down around the Southern end of Westeros, past Dorne, and then northward UP the Narrow Sea, side-by-side or just ahead / just behind Daenerys's even bigger fleet was sailing through, with 3 circling and hungry dragons who would have obliterated the 1000 Greyjoy ships just as they torched the slavers ships in Slaver's Bay several seasons ago, until the slavers finally surrendered and Daenerys took their ships for her crossing of the Narrow Sea.  I've included a handy screen shot from the episode where Cersei is standing in the middle of a courtyard painted as the map of Westeros, for your reference, above.  Both fleets could no co-exist in the same Narrow Sea at the same timer even within a few days of each other, due to their MASSIVE sizes and the remarkably slow pace that sail driven sea travel has when flying just one or 2 sails, and not a massive array of studding sails, spanker sails, royal, sky, moonraker, and top sails as Only Euron's flag ship tried to set (with aerodynamic inaccuracies, sorry special effects folks who were concerned more with style than substance).  "That which is dead can never die" ... no..  how about "that which is dumb cannot get dumber", or "that which is repulsive cannot get even more repulsive".  So Euron's travel to and appear in Kings Landing was not logistically possible, unless he somehow teleported or owned a T.A.R.D.I.S. with enough capacity to move his entire fleet instantaneously without running into Daenerys's fleet.

Sure, "The Twins" where they Freys slaughtered and then got slaughtered themselves ("poison is a woman's weapon") apparently divides the northern part of the Seven Kingdoms from the southern part, perhaps for lack of any small boats that could traverse the water way southeast of "The Twins", I can understand that.  But the waterway that "The Twins" crosses Does Not extend all the way to the west coast of Westeros, so there's no way Euron and his massive fleet could have sailed down it.

Geography aside, the Season 7 premier was pretty good.  Several other poignant observations I made in retrospect are as follows:

1) what's scarier than a whole horde of decomposing white walkers who can't be killed with steel weapons?  A horde of decomposing white walkers who have in their ranks ancient Giants whom they've killed and then resurrected as blue eyed white walkers before the giant corpses could be burnt.  Undead zombie giants are Far More Lethal than undead foot soldiers or undead calvary.  An undead giant could lob a spear the size of a telephone pole with a big nasty pointy end, far into the air (like the height of "The Wall" as happened several seasons ago when the Wildling Free Folk attacked "The Wall" with Giants at their side)... and such a spear could impale one of the precious 3 dragons, perhaps killing it.  Then... the Night King resurrects the dead dragon as a undead dragon...  and it kills the other two remaining dragons.  That would be Game Over, for Game of Thrones.  

What's worse than one white walker Giant? Three white walker Giants!

2) if you were not watching with closed captioning on (as we do in our house, with hearing impaired viewers  and for clarity), you would not know that the massively gray scaled hand that tried to reach out to Samwell Tarly was indeed the hand of Jorah Mormont (former Lord of Bear Island, then reluctant slave trader to keep his wife comfortable and provide "the lifestyle to which she was accustomed", then kidnapper of Tyrion and rebuked suitor of Daenerys).  Seems that Jorah made his way to Old Town to seek a cure for grayscale from the Maesters, but Westerosian medicine still didn't have a cure for that ailment.

3) if you've stolen the keys to the forbidden & locked up Maester reference library, and you have only a few seconds to lift an ancient book from the bizarrely chained shelves (was Old Town seismically active?), make sure you pick The Exact Tome that has the history of the Last Winter in it, that shows Precisely where a whole mountain of Dragon Glass is on the island of Dragonstone (at the mouth of the bay that leads right to Kings Landing)... it just seems rather far fetched to me, as I am old enough to remember going to the library Before there was a searchable internet, and you had to use the card catalogue, or the headache inducing microfiche, and you spent hours and hours searching to find just one or two gems that you could include in a bibliography.  There was no Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos,  Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Infoseek, or Webcrawler back when I was in school.  If you wanted to find a book in a library, you had to search for it, long and hard, and hope you got lucky and it wasn't checked out when you finally located it.  Samwell Tarly grabs it The First Pick, while under pressure of being discovered a few seconds later by the next Maester who walks in.  Sure... let's keep suspending disbelief.

Voted most likely to be killed by White Walkers by his Free Folk High School

This should be a good season.  Let the white walkers come... depose the angry Cersei who has no allies (let Arya do it, gleefully)... make a bunch of weapons out of Dragonstone's Dragon Glass cache... wipe out the Greyjoys from the surface of the sea and have their octopus god devour their rotting remains... let the alternative lifestyle Dorne and Greyjoy girls enjoy themselves together... sacrifice the Free Folk & their leader Tormund Giantsbane to the white walker hordes just as corporate America does to the middle class without blinking an eye... have Brienne take out The Mountain as she took out his little brother and then she and Jaime can get together... let Samwell Tarly save the day with his book-learnin... and let Jon Snow get it on with his 1/2 sister Daenerys once the Starks and Daenerys armies band together to fight the White Walker horde.  I can't care about Baelish, Bran, Sansa, Qyburn, Podrick, man-bun Thoros or one eyed Beric very much at all.  Sure, Martin can kill off most of the main characters and elevate any of these lesser roles if he wants to... but... that would hurt the franchise at this point, and HBO wants to keep making money.  Please just let it be one or two more seasons... and not 4 or 5 more, or it'll go on far too long as the books have.

Dark Money - Jane Mayer

For the first 2 days of my drive across the Pacific, Mountain, and Central time zones, I listened to the 15 CD set of Jane Mayer's comprehensive book Dark Money.     Listening to the book-on-CD, it 

- kept me awake

- pissed me off

- educated me on how Charles Koch once ran for Vice President of the United States and lost miserably, on the Libertarian ticket

- how the Koch brothers recruit other multi-millionaires and billionaires to unite against anyone who opposes their 0.01% agenda

- explained how Sheldon Adleson funded Gingrich to the tune of 42 million dollars of attack ads against Romney that ultimately helped Obama defeat the embodiment of "corporations are people my friends"

- described how the Koch brothers reverse engineered the successful 2008 Obama campaign's data analytics of voter rolls, so that after the 2010 census, local and state districts were gerrymandered so effectively as to nullify the popular vote.  North Carolina was their laboratory, and it proved so successful, that even though Obama won the popular vote in NC in 2012 by more than 2%, the state went for the Republicans by having sparsely populated red districts overwhelm more heavily populated but under represented urban, educated, and poor democratic districts.

- told me how the Koch brother's father made his fortune building refineries for Stalin and Hitler

- spoke about how Charles Koch was raised by a militant German nanny, brought over from The Third Reich, until he was 5.  His nanny returned to The Third Reich after Hitler invaded Poland and France, so that she could be closer to her people and rejoice in her country's victory.  She also used to severely physically punish Charles, and enforce daily castor oil & enemas if 8am bowel moments were not produced punctually.  

- detailed how the Kochs, and all of their 0.01% friends, firmly believe that all you need to do in America is work hard, and you WILL BE successful, even though nearly all of their wealthiest friends inherited all of their wealth and they never lived in poverty or fell upon a temporary period of struggle without sufficient means to meet basic necessities even once throughout their lives

- revealed how even though David Koch suffers from cancer, and donates heavily to various cancer research foundations and hospitals, Koch Industries fights every worker's comp & injury claims from anyone exposed to benzene, leaky butane pipe lines that explode, or coal wash pond toxins; that leukemia you have, you got that on your own, pal.

- went into extensive detail how the Kochs hired private detectives who ineptly tried to smear Jane Mayer after she published a 10,000 word magazine article on them by inaccurately stating she plagiarized and misquoted her sources (this is my third Mayer book, she's fastidious in her research and thorough reporting).

- detailed how the Kochs pay college students to take courses in "free market" and "Austrian Economics" through charitable grants, in an effort to try and recruit a larger army of like minded followers

- described how the Kochs are actively reshaping tenured professor ships by funding the publishing of poorly researched and non-peer-researched publications that support their agenda and spread disinformation that "think tanks" then quote to further confuse the masses

- repeatedly described, at every level of their operations, how the Kochs try to obfuscate, and secretly attempt to conceal their profile, their operations, their purpose / intentions, using misleading names on foundations, and labelling voter suppression efforts and entitlement roll back initiatives as "voter wellness" and "election reforms".

After I finished this book-on-CD series (lucky I had a 6 CD changer in my 2007 Mazda, so I could drive for hours without having to change any CDs) I called my Godfather and talked to him as I drove along I-10 in Florida, passing multiple Florida State troopers in the median who all drove Chevy SUVs or low profile Cameros or Chargers, and discussed how great of a study Mayer's work was.  He and I had a great chat on the morning of the 13th, and it was refreshing to speak to another like-minded, well informed adult about American politics and how the richest 0.01% are carving out the country in their own graven image and laughing at the rest of us, all the way to the bank and the ballot box.  

It'll be interesting to see how 2016 turns out, with self-funded Trump, only-evangelicals-love-me-Cruz, boy-in-a-bubble-Rubio, and semi-reasonable Kasich do next Tuesday.  Hillary Clinton has a good chance of beating them all, especially if it is  3 way race with Trump stroking his ego as an independent.  I am not sure Bernie can deliver a victory for the Democrats, since so many Americans don't understand what a Socialist Progressive is, or how Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Head Start, Pell Grants, the VA, Worker's Comp, the EPA, the Voting Rights Act, the Interstate Highway System, Municipal Water Systems, City Parks, Public Beaches, the National Park System, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health are all agencies that were created by, or further the cause, of Progressive Socialism in the United States of America.    The "great good" of all of us, not just those who have inherited the most money.

Hobbit 3 - The Battle Of Five Writers

This morning I wasted $7 and 2 hours of my life enduring the bastardization of a film loosely based around the Tolkien mythos, entitled The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  Eh, it really wasn't a battle of five armies.  And if you've read the book - as most Americans over 30 have - then you won't recognize most of the plot from the movie since it really doesn't have hardly anything to do with the book.  (and Jackson makes it actually 8 armies…  but I don't want to get into minutia) 

Peter Jackson did a great job in the Lord of the Ring Trilogy, sticking as close as he could to the 3 epic novels in 3 epic movies.  In the Hobbit movies, he drew out what could have been done in about 3 hours into 3 separate, painfully embellished films.  This last (thank goodness!) installment could have been wrapped up in about 30 minutes.  Instead, Jackson, and his fellow conspirators Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyen, and the increasingly annoying Guillermo del toro eviscerated J.R.R. Tolkien's beautiful little book, The Hobbit, and turned it in a misplaced love story, a personal blood feud, a father-son-angst conflict, and a mockery of the original Tolkien novel.  

To understand & appreciate how completely divergent The Battle of Five Armies was from the original Tolkien work, all one has to do is to look at the original Tolkien / Jackson ring trilogy epics, and then do a (1-X) calculation, proportionally.   So if in your perspective, Jackson got 98% right on the ring trilogy movies, in this final installment, he gets 2% right (1 - 0.98) = 0.02.  If he got 75% right in your perspective originally, then he's gotten perhaps 25% right on this last movie (1 - 0.75) = 0.25.  

There was no love story, between elves and dwarves or between anyone else, except for Smaug and his gold, in The Hobbit.  Yes, Tolkien wrote dwarves as greedy, and Thorin's grandfather as driven mad by the wealth, but Jackson and his cabal of co-conspirators created ridiculous plot devices that were not needed. 

The physics of a drawn bow, to propel an arrow through the air, are NOT purely the elasticity of the bow string, but the tension in that string and the elastic bending of the bow (as seen clearly in a simple long bow, or multiplied in a compound bow).  So when Bard (the Animated version was So Much Better!) uses his son's shoulder as the bow, that's a cute "father & son moment", but that arrow wouldn't have flown more than a few feet, much less several hundred feet, through the leathery hide of an ancient red dragon, through heart muscle, and killing one of the most vicious and formidable creatures ever to be characterized on the written page (think about it…  what other creature of mass destruction, pure evil & super intelligence have you ever read as much about in a beloved novel, and even cheered for (as I did, in the previous film, and this travesty as well)?  Jackson and his writers needed to spend less time launching water balloons with surgical tubing sling shots, and more time in Physics 101 class.

I half expected to see Paul Atreides (from Dune), riding along with the Northern Orc army - what's a matter Peter, were Wargs too hard to animate?  Or perhaps too deadly when matched against several hundred Iron Hills dwarves (who brought with them, no cavalry, but later, ram sheep conveniently appear)?  So many inane sub-plots and tangents…  I mean… it was great to see Radagast again… but the entire scene in which he appears… was not in the book.  Great to see Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith) as Elrond again… but in The Hobbit he never leaves Rivendell.  

There's so many things incongruent with Jackson's ham-fisted, market-driven re-writes of The Hobbit that it would take dozens and dozens of pages to describe, in even the briefest detail, and frankly, I don't have that kind of time to waste.  I am just delighted that Jackson cannot rape another Tolkien film, since the Tolkien family has not signed over rights to "The Silmarillion", and I hope in my lifetime, they never will.  

In The Battle of the Five Writers, J.R.R. Tolkien is soundly defeated.  Marketers rejoice, globally, and those who have never read the book will likely remain ignorant - reading takes time, and everyone lives connected to their digital devices, with the attention span of an impatient & unrealistic corporate board, expecting immediate results, gratification, satisfaction… which just leads to stagnation and disappointment, long term.  Much better to have video games, and plastic play toys, and to try and inspire fabricated dreams of interspecies romance, than to make a movie based solidly on the original work.  Pathetic & sad.

I was considering titling this "The Desolation of Smug", or "Jackson-itis" (the disease where you get infected with so much hubris, that you band together with other writer-directors [like del toro] who also show the same symptoms, and then you create an abomination, a bastardization, a remarkably ugly and painful vehicle that movie-goers have to endure while they were expecting 'this won't be so bad…  will it?'), but when I saw Jackson had teamed up with 3 other writers, the Battle of Five Writers sounded much better.

My name is Prince Oberon, you keeled my sister...

I watched GoT's "The Mountain and the Viper" last night, and I kept thinking near the end of the episode of Mandy Pantinkin's "My name is Inigo Montoya, you keeled my father.  Prepare to die."

I will not spoil it for you if you have not watched it on DVR or Amazon or HBO-to-go yet...  but I was a little disappointed at the ending.  No, I was very disappointed at the ending.  If you're looking for extreme violence, the "The Mountain and the Viper" will satisfy your blood lust.

Scattered, Unadapted, And Forgotten

When I first heard about Annalee Newitz's book "Scatter, Adapt, And Remember, How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction" I thought to myself "this sounds like a really cool book, I want to read this!" I had a Barnes & Nobel gift certificate, so I headed down to Aliso Viejo's B&N and bought myself a hard back copy.

I read it in August and September, intermittently at the beach, while watching the sunset, or absorbing UV and making vitamin D.  Chapter after chapter I kept hoping it would get better, or "pull itself together" into a unified cohesive theory.  Instead it devolved into a seemingly never ending series of disconnected interviews with academics.  I was sorely disappointed.

Perhaps my expectations were set far too high?  Maybe Newitz's writing style and my reading style are just not compatible in any sort of copacetic way? But I think it was her disclaimer in the first chapter that the book was NOT going to be an actual survival guide or manual for survivalists, but rather a commentary about what might, eventually happen, and how humans might try to cope with it future mass extinction events as a united "one big happy planet"could attempt.  And that kumbaya unification sounds so non-sensical and impossibly imagined in today's fractured and subdivided world that I found the theories put forth in the book laughably impossible.

This is the first book I've ever bought, and then given away to charity, without offering it up to my other family members or friends to also read & enjoy.  If you're looking for my copy, contact the Salvation Army of Orange County.

What I Learned From Mary Roach's Gulp

Last weekend, while sitting at Salt Creek Beach on Sunday afternoon with my lovely wife, drinking a subtly rum spiked adult beverage, watching the waves washing ashore, pelicans fishing in the shallows, tourists body boarding without wetsuits, and 100s of people passing by having a wonderful beach day, I finished reading Mary Roach's Gulp, Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  (for reference ISBN 978-0-393-08157-2).  It was interesting, hilarious, informative, and amazing well written.

I read it in hard back - since electronic devices in beach sunlight often have glare issues, and besides, I read slowly and would consume massive amounts of battery life.  I've found that Roach is now one of my favorite authors.  Her writing style "suits me" very well as an intelligent reader, and I thorough enjoyed digesting (pun absolutely intended) her work.  Gulp will not be the last book I read penned by her.  Next I will read Bonk, and then maybe Stiff.

Now, remember when you were back in grade school, or middle school, and you had to do a "book report" and turn it in for a grade?  I liked doing some book reports, as the material was sometimes enjoyable, but I loathed doing book reports on subjects which did not interest me.  Eating (and what the body does with and to the food we put into ourselves) has always interested me, and has, in fact, been a life long passion of mine as well as a subject that warrants scientific study.  Mary's done that research, handily, and thoroughly.

So what follows here, are the notes I took while (and after) reading Gulp.  These were not a "chore" they were things that I found fascinating, interesting, or just very cool.  They are not intended to be any kind of copyright infringement, but rather, a quick way to "index" and 'key word search" on a hard back book, via blog.  They are also intended to get other people to go out and read Roach's work, not dissuade them from doing so.  The notes below are by far NOT comprehensive (and they're pretty disorganized) but they are what I liked and found noteworthy.  =)

Things I learned from Gulp:

Aerobacter & H.eutropha bacteria slurry is proven inedible by humans (1968)

Only 5 to 10% of the air we breathe reaches the olfactory epithelium at the roof of the nasal cavity.

5 tastes humans perceive:  sweet, bitter, salty, sour and (I did not know) umami (brothy). 

Bad Olive Oil tastes (from the tasting wheel) include:  baby diapers, manure, vomit, bad salami, sewer dregs, pig farm waste pond.  Yummy!

Cadaver sniffing dogs are sniffing for cadaverine.

Liver is the most appealing dog food palatant, to dogs (and some humans, as well!).

The Inuit Games have indoor competitions like Ear Lift, and Mouth Pull.

Inuit eat a natural diet of raw organs - they leave the muscle tissue alone for the most part - far too tough, and has little nutritional value.  

For fruits and vegetables in the Arctic, Inuits let the caribou eat the lichens & moss, and then eat the caribou's stomach and contents after it's been partially digested.  A caribou stomach can be considered as "two servings of fruits or vegetables". 

Clara Davis did a study in the 1930s with orphaned babies to see what they would eat given choices, before learning from any adult.  Most desired by babies:  bone marrow, followed by brains and sweetbreads.   Shunned by babies:  liver, kidneys, 10 different veggies, haddock, and pineapple. 

Raw Narwhale skin ("Muktuk") tastes like a combination of chicken skin and pork rinds.  

Meat Industry vernacular includes the following terms I had never heard of before:

plunks - thoracic viscera, heart, lungs, trachea

melts - spleens

paunch - rumens

slunks - unborn calves (play THOSE in Scrabble!   Ha!)

trichobezoars - human hair balls  (ew!) and April 27th is Hair Ball Awareness Day!

Babies prefer milk that smells like garlic over milk that doesn't. (in scientific studies)

Human hair, is Kosher  (but ew!) and contains up to 14% L-cysteine, which is also founding bird skin (chicken soup).

Horace Fletcher (creator of the mastication practice of "Fletcherism", was a tedious person and a bad scientist.

Dr William Beaumont took advantage of Canadian Alexis St.Martin and his fistulated stomach, for decades.

Italian saliva scientists (like Erika Silletti) can't stand Dutch food, and go grocery shopping in Germany where they can pick up ingredients for home cooked Italian meals.

There are two kinds of saliva - stimulated and unstimulated.  Stimulated makes up 70 to 90% of the saliva a person produced in a day.  Unstimulated keeps down bacteria and fights disease, creating long amino acid chains (mucins) as well as regulating pH.  

The parotid glands are our faithful servants, making saliva whenever we eat, no matter what it is, trying to help us get it down.  

People affected by Sjögren's syndrome have damaged salivary glands and don't make saliva, suffer from chronic dry mouth. Their teeth wind up becoming soft and rotting out.

Babies have salivary lipase to break down milk fat, but as they get older, the lipase moves into their gut and out of their saliva.  

At the American Cleaning Institute, there are actually a Dr Luis Spitz, and a consultant Keith Grime!

Fabric Softeners work by partially digesting the fibers of your clothes, to make them less rigid, rounder, seemingly "softer"  (ew!)

Inter-museum Conservation Association conservators use spit when restoring clay works of art.  

Incubated Saliva smells worse than fishy amines (rank vaginal odor), dirty feet, or any other human by product that one can attempt to de-odorize.

Inuit parents and grand parents siphon nose snot from their children's and grand children's noses by oral suction - sucking the snot out of them.

Inuit nose rubbing is called "kunik"

When a Brahmin comes in contact with crow dropping, the ritual purification is "1000 and one baths".

The World Wide Web has far more mucilaginous strands that are not-safe-for-work (NSFW), compared to scientific references about the frothiness of protein.

Saliva kills more kinds and greater numbers of bacteria than does mouthwash.  Use mouthwash for the rinsing and taste, but don't fool yourself that it is killing more bacteria than your natural saliva.  It can't.  There are more strains of bacteria that live ON Other bacteria in your mouth, than the culture-able strains that live in most human mouths.  

In any crowd, approximately 20% of the people in that crowd will pick their nose.  Doctors, students, religious, managers…  it doesn't matter. (again, studied by scientists)

The medical perforative "quack" is derived from the German quacksalber which Merck used to promote as an antisyphilitic remedy.

In the New Testament of Mark, Jesus uses spittle to treat the blindness of a man, but in Luke and Matthew, they leave out that story entirely.  The spittle treatment was only partially effective, as Mark reported the man say "people who looked like trees" walking around.

There are three types of fingerprints:

loop - 65%, whorl (30%), and arch (5%)

There are 4 types of oral processing styles for semi solid foods like custard or yogurt:

simple (50%), taster (20%), manipulator (17%) and tongued (13%).  

A human's teeth can sense something as small as 10 microns.

When Tom Little was a child, he swallowed hot clam chowder in 1895 and burnt his throat shut, so that a doctor had to give him a fistula in his stomach into which pre chewed food was poured via a funnel. Beer however, was poured straight into the funnel, without chewing.  If he put the food straight into the funnel without chewing, Tom was not satisfied, and still felt hungry.  

A high-viscosity bolus travels down the esophagus at approximately the same speed as a fast tortoise; 0.22 mph.  

When patients suffer from dysphagia, and they have to chose between being able to talk, or being able to chew and eat, they usually opt to have their voice box (larynx) removed and become mute, rather than not being able to chew their food and swallow - so strong is the human desire to chew and taste and swallow!

The snapping of a chip sends sound waves at 300 meters per second. Humans prefer to hear it at 90 to 100 decibels as they chew.  (340 m/s = speed of sound at sea level)

An orca's fore-stomach has been measured to be 5 feet x 7 feet, unstretched.  A 24 ft killer whale was once dissected by E.J. Slijper, to reveal 14 seals & 13 porposies (presumably adolescents or very small young).  

Mary's wit shows clearly in sentences about seamen, sperm whales, suction and swallowing…  =)

An unrestrained 10 pound dog will impact your car's windshield with 500 lbs of force in a 50 mph head on collision. 500 lbs of force is also the compressive force exerted by a birds gizzard on what it swallows, as evidenced by René Réaumur in 1752.

Claude Bernard used to vivisection experiments on dogs in 1855, that were so horrific, bizarre, and unnecessary, that his wife Marie Françoise "Fanny" Bernard eventually left him in 1870 and founded an anti-vivisection society.

After a person dies, their stomach's acids continue to digest, and without the protective mucosal lining of the stomach being relined every three days, the stomach will begin to "digest itself".  In warmer climates, the heat accelerates the pace.  

Per anum and "per annum" are VERY different in meaning.  Just one little "n" in the middle  =)  "10% interest per anum" would be extremely hilarious!

pylorus = the stomach-to-intestine valve

A cow's rumen is the size of a 30 gallon trash can.

TLESR = transient lower esophageal sphincter relaxation  (burp)

A Liverpool woman in 1984 died when her stomach ruptured, after she only ate

2 pounds of kidneys, 1.3 lbs of liver, 1/2 a pound of steak, 2 eggs, 1 lb of cheese, 1/2 pound of mushrooms, 2 lbs of carrots, head of cauliflower, two slices of bread, 10 peaches, 4 pears, 2 apples, 4 bananas, 2 lbs of plums, 2 lbs of grapes, and 2 glasses of mile; 19 lbs in all.

Takeru Kobayashi nearly beat her record (and lived) by eating 18 lbs of cow brains in 15 minutes, in an eating competition.  

Dyspepsia - stomach pains after eating (typical American weekend & buffet syndrome)

Bristol Stool Scale - actually used "type" excrement

Defecography - "as close to pornography as medicine will come" - gastroenterologist Mike Jones

If you refuse to take a meal on an international flight (especially from Columbia or Bolivia to the US) you will probably be interviewed by the DEA when you land in the US.  Drug smugglers who have swallowed balloons of narcotics avoid eating and drinking to slow down the movement of their cargo through their digestive tracts.

alvine - of or relating to bowel blockages, coined by orthopedist Dr Gregory Alvine.

CH4 and H2 are explosive in concentrations higher than 4 to 5 percent.  Liquid Manure pits can be naturally topped with as much as much as 60% frothy methane.

Up to 80% of flatus is hydrogen (not methane).  Only 1/3 of humans harbor gut bacteria that makes methane.

NASA space suits recirculate the air inside of them 3 times each minute, including an astronaut's flatus  =P

Grumous = clotted or lumpy

glabrous = smooth and hairless

periblepsis = wild look of delirium

maculate = spotted

People (usually women) who hold in their flatus re-absorb a great deal of that 80% hydrogen into their blood, which they then breathe out through their mouths.

Pythons and Boas have cecums, just as horses, rabbits, and koalas do.  The constrictors use it to digest the remnants of their prey's vegetarian diets, using bacteria to break down the vegetable matter into nutrients, and…   hydrogen.  Daenerys Stormborn exaggerates her motherhood  =)

Beano gives away wind breakers as promotional items…  sponsors a hot air balloon in races, and has cans of beans in their break room at AkPharma.   

Michael Levitt has published 34 papers on flatus.  He's identified that it is trapped methane that makes floaters (not fiber or fat), he invented the hydrogen breath analyzer, and identified the 3 main chemicals that make flatus smell:  hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, and dimethyl sulfide, in most all humans (he reversed engineered them with chemical supply house gases, until the gas chromatograph signatures matched).  

Devrom's active ingredient is bismuth subgallate - and it does not irritate the gut, unlike the irritating bismuth that Pepto-bismol uses. Devrom absorbs flatus odor.  I think I may be giving out Devrom to my extended family in Chicago next Christmas!!!

Rural Sudanese eat fermented (decomposing) caterpillar, frog, and heifer urine.  mmmmm yummy!  Can we vacation in the Sudan, please!?!?

Hydrogen sulfide is detectable by the human nose from <1 ppm to 150 ppm.  Above 150 ppm it paralyzes the olfactory nerves, and can kill you.   Human flatus is generally 1 to 3 ppm H2S.

Rats who eat their own feces (autocoprophagy) grow 3x as fast as rats who are restarted from eating their own feces (collars and corsets had to be employed to keep the rats from eating it as it came out, before it could fall through a grated floor.).  Vitamins B5, B7, B12, K, thiamine, riboflavin, and essential fatty acids made in the lower GI tract of the rats.  

Cows can re-swallow their food as much as 40 times - Cecotrophy, pseudo-rumination.

Indonesian civets eat coffee beans that are then excreted, and gathered by Indonesian humans, to see for exotic coffees that are $200/ lb.  (another reason to switch to tea)

Only cnidarians (sea anemones and jelly fish) eat and defecate out of the same orifice.  (pronounced "nidarians").  

The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has a colon that is 28 inches around (a normal colon is 3 inches around)

Elvis did not die of an overdoes of anything.  Elvis died of constipation.  The drugs in his system were not fatal…  they did however, help to slow down the natural colon motility (peristalses). Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain and Tammy Wynette also struggled with "obstinate constipation" (as Mary called it).

Human papillomavirus causes anal cancer (ew) - it is what killed Farrah Fawcett.  (another reason Not to "go there")

The strains of bacteria in your gut that you're born with pretty much stay with you the rest of your life.  You get them from your mother, mostly, when you're being born.  

Having Clostridium difficile in your gut can be miserable, and cause chronic, severe diarrhea (like 10x a day, wearing diapers severity) in adults. It kills around 16000 Americans a year (4X as many as 9-11)  A fecal matter transplant, from a donor who does not have Clostridium difficile can make your life much more pleasant.   Two weeks after the transplant, the donor & recipient's colon microbial profiles are synchronized.   Fecal transplants have been being done since 1958, have proven to be very effective, but Insurance companies think they are too "icky" and won't cover them.  (better to let 16000 people die annually instead).  Drug companies don't make any money off of them, and have actually lobbied AGAINST such transplants.  

Toxoplasmosis infects rats guts, but needs to be inside of a cat's digest tract to reproduce.  So toxoplasmosis alters the rat's behavior to make it attracted to cat urine, so that the rat can be eaten.   Ingenious, that evolution is!

Hilarious near homophone:  "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" line "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" ~ "the girl with colitis goes by"  (akin to Jimi H's "excuse me, while kiss this guy!")  

Probiotics - unless they are shipped in oxygen-free packaging and administered directly to the gut without any oxygen - are not probiotic.  Natural human gut microbes are anaerobic, and exposing them to oxygen kills them.  

Most people eat about 30 different things in their diet - humans are creatures of habit.  While some of us have wily varying food stuffs that we eat and drink, most Americans have about 30 different foods that are their "go to" choices.

[and if Mary Roach or her publicist are visiting this web page and reading this...  please let me know if 

a) I got anything wrong

b) you'd like me to redact any of the information

c) you thought what I gleaned from the vast information presented by Gulp was 'weird']

Dis-Spirited Debate

Reza Aslan is the consummate gentleman. He incredibly, politely, and respectfully tried to speak with Faux News's Lauren Green on her "Spirited Debate" program, who refused to listen to anything Reza had to say, and who misunderstood what she didn't want to hear.  "Cringe Worthy" is how Slate puts it.  I'd say that Ms Green revealed herself for the biased Murdoch parrot that she truly is.  Have a watch for yourself, below:

"Why would a Muslim write a book about Jesus?"
Wow, don't bother doing a EEG doctor, the patient has no signals.
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth .  I am going to buy it in hard back, and read it this Fall.

Best Father's Day So Far

- Wake up whenever I want to, after 8:30am, to the sounds of birds chirping outside the opened windows - it's been in the 60s every night this month, and in the 70s every day.

- Have a nearly all-organic breakfast, with my wonderful wife.  (only the bacon bits, portobello mushrooms,  and the Fage Greek yogurt were not organic)  Scrambled local eggs, sweet onions, bacon bits, shrooms, and a bowl of Fage with local raspberries and blue berries.

- Drive down to Salt Creek beach, getting there before 11am (so that we have a parking spot), and do yoga, side-by-side, mats sharing a sheet to keep the grass off the sheet. Ambient temp 72F, light 5mph on-shore breeze, not a cloud in the sky.

- Walk back up to the car (a nearly 200 foot vertical climb) to exchange yoga mats for beach chairs and water.  Walk back down to the shoreline, just soaking up UV and the gorgeous weather.  Other people's toddlers cutely played in the surf nearby... we didn't have to take care of any of them. =)

- After an hour or so, walk down the shore, and back up to the car, and drive to A's Burgers in Dana Point, to have a delicious, lettuce wrapped double hamburger

- Drive home in the convertible, gather reading materials and adult beverages, apply more sun screen, and head down to the pool.

- Enjoy lounging at the pool, reading many chapters of my book, consuming Cruzan rum laden drinks, soaking in the hot tub, swimming with my wonderful wife.

- Sometime after 5pm, walk back up to the house with my wife, have a delicious dinner together, spend more quality time together.

Of the quarter century of Father's Days I've had, this was the best one ever.

The BBW I admire

As a Public Service reminder, this week is the American Library Association's "Banned Book Week" (BBW). Did you think that "BBW" was referring to something else? =) lol

It's truly ironic that the home schooler fundamentalists are some of the most frequent users of public libraries - where they ask my librarian friend Jill questions like "where's the REAL books about Dinosaurs, that show them alongside people?"

It's truly wonderful that my friend Matt makes it a point to take his kids to book stores frequently, and tells them they can get one book each, every visit.

It's sad that when we moved our household from IN to SC, and then from SC to AZ, that the movers said things like "you sure do have lots of books!" and "are you some kind of professor or somethin?" and labeled the boxes containing the printed materials as "buchs". In reality, we don't have THAT Many books, just enough to fill several shelving units, but not a whole library's worth.

The ALA's BBW brings to the forefront the underlying issue of religious beliefs and political affiliations attempting to dictate access to knowledge. I don't think it's possible to encourage awareness of the BBW enough.

(this was written several years ago..  but got stuck in my "Drafts")

Extremely Accurate Label

One man's holy book is another man's computer monitor shim / spacer.

Reich's Aftershock

I just finished Robert Reich's AFTERSHOCK book, written at the end of 2010, after the Republicans took control of the house and the Democrats lost their super majority in the Senate.  I've heard Reich for years on Marketplace and as a guest on various NPR and PBS shows, but I'd never read on of his books before.  AFTERSHOCK was part of the God father Book Exchange program I have with my Uncle Joe.  I gave him DEMOCRACY MATTERS and Gun, Germs, and Steel back n January when he visited Arizona, and he gave me AFTERSHOCK.  I need to drive up to my cousin's house and exchange the books, as GGS I've not yet read.

But back to AFTERSHOCK.  In the work, Reich postulates that if continuing trends of increasing the divide between rich & poor do not reverse, that an "Independence Party" will emerge that makes the Tea Party look tame by comparison.   They'll run a fire brand candidate who promises to limit immigration, tax those companies who lay off workers, and drastically reshape (and in the process turn even more anemic) the US economy.  In the future scenario, Chelsea Clinton and one of the Bush progeny lose to his upstart, and the next day, the stock market crashes like it's 1929.  as America begins a slide towards a third world economy.

While AFTERSHOCK was written after the Nov 2010 elections and after Citizens United, it was also published prior to the Detroit Automakers' rebound.  It doe not account for the ending of war in Iraq and withdrawal from Afghanistan, which are bleeding the US of talent, blood, treasure, and patience.  So it is a little dated.   It DOES accurately characterize the haves & have nots, the rich Walll Street bail outs while leaving Main Street to grasp for the lowest common denominator of mediocrity and regressivism.  Reich spends alot of time theorizing, but not too much time backing up his theories.  He provides cock-sure statements that are rife with unjustified hope that I find hard to swallow.  I WANT to agree with him, but he doesn't give me too much substance to back up his theories.  He's obviously a Very smart man, I just have grown too sardonic and jaded to give his plan for the future much chance of getting started.  Corruption and well funded greed are too significantly ingrained in American politics for the pendulum to swing back, in my life time.  Maybe in my son's or someday, my grand childrens' life times... il faut voir.

Children's Books, Stacked

For my friend Jill the Master Librarian.

This made me laugh when I saw it earlier this week.  =)

Scott Benson on Reading

I agree with Scott.

Rest Room Book Rack, Stuckup!

I so much want to get a copy of this, and leave it in the magazine rack in the hall bathroom for guests to see and browse while seated there.

Rejecting Constantinian Christianity

Over the last Christmas & New Years break, I finished reading Dr. Cornel West's Democracy Matters, Winning The Fight Against Imperialism.  I'd picked it up from Borders, before my local book store went bankrupt.  At first, I was reluctant to dive into West's book.  It was the 2nd in a series (preceded by Race Matters), and it had a whole chapter on 'engaging youth culture' and how much rap matters in the table of contents, but I know Dr West is a very intelligent man who speaks eloquently, and I've enjoyed hearing him on Real Time, Tavis Smiley, and when he refutes Bill O'falafel's rhetoric to his face with facts.  So I plodded through the book, determined to keep an open mind. 

I am very glad I did.  In Democracy Matters, West explains how he taught at Harvard when one of chief the architects of 2008 housing melt down, Lawrence Summers, became the president of Harvard, and how Summers tried to run West out of Harvard on a rail.  It helped to frame Obama's remarkably poor choice of Summers as White House financial adviser as particularly upside-down and insidious, as well as the wrongful arrest & "have a beer summit" with West's department head, Henry Louis Gates.  I had not known those aspects, and I am grateful to West for elucidating them. 

West speaks of American nihilism, socratic questioning, tragicomic hope, and prophetic witness, throughout the work, and explains the importance of each.  As a principal engineer, I try to employ socratic questioning and encourage all of the young engineers I mentor to embrace it, so it was timely to read West proclaiming its importance.  The blues, as well as ancient Greek comedies are excellent examples of tragicomic hope, which I can understand and appreciate quite well.  Prophetic witness, West delved into deeply.

I knew that West was a Christian, but within the book, West describes the differential between the  Constantinian Christian and the Prophetic Christian.  I could try to distill it down, but West does an awesome job himself here, in this clip (link here in case the embedded 90 second video below doesn't work on your computer for you below).


As a disenchanted former Roman Catholic myself, I COMPLETELY got this, and understood it, related to it, and "the light bulb came on over my head".  It's the Constantinian Christians I cannot stand., won't truck with, and spit out of my mouth, completely rejected (yeah, I had Catechism class for12 years, if you want to spar on Bible verses and Catholic Dogma).  I mistakenly used to think it was the Prophetic Christians with whom I had massive problems, but I actually can relate to Prophetic Christians very well.  They're the Jeffersonian "red letter" Christians.  They Do Not advocate mixing and weaving religion with government.  They're a dwindling, diminishing species in America, and around the world, while the nationalistic Constantinian Christians draw more and more blind sheep into their easily mis-lead flocks.  It was the Roman government after all, who tortured and crucified Jesus of Nazareth.  And when Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and then began to prosecute Jews and Muslims "in the name of The Cross", he began the long process of distorting, co-opting and mutating the teachings of Jesus to reinforce imperialism, oligarchy, inequality, inquisition, genocide, and cruelty in the name of The State.

I now understand Cornel West much better, and see his point of view with extreme clarity.  I agree with much of what he says, but not 100% of it.  His speaking/writing style is one where single sentences can often stretch into paragraphs richly seeded with vernacular and metaphor that requires a SAT verbal score greater than 700 to grasp and savour.  People who label Dr West as a "rabid liberal" misunderstand & misinterpret him.  West is liberal, much like Jesus was a liberal, looking out for the poorest, most oppressed, most persecuted in society.  West shines a bright light upon the New Gilded Age oligarchs and their bought & sold politicians in the 21st century - and I hope he continues to do so, for many years to come.

On pages 150-151, in 3 paragraphs, West sums it up for fundamentalist Christians quite nicely:
"Ironically, Jesus's message of love and justice promoted a separation of his prophetic witness from Caesar's authority - 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.' Christ said. Yet the nihilistic imperialism of the Romans was so power-hungry that it couldn't tolerate the growing popularity of the Christian sects. When the growth of religion couldn't be stopped, the Roman empire co-opted it. With Constantine's conversion, a terrible co-joining of church and state was institutionalized from with the religion and many of its victims, especially Jews, have suffered ever since. Constantinian Christianity has always been at odds with the prophetic legacy of Jesus Christ. Constantine himself seems to have converted to Christianity partly out of political strategy and imperial exigency, and then proceeded to use the cloak of Christianity for his own purposes of maintaining power.

Most American Constantinian Christians are unaware of their imperialistic identity because they do not see the parallel between the Roman empire that put Jesus to death and the American empire that they celebrate. As long as they can worship freely and pursue the American dream, they see the American government as a force for good and American imperialism as a desirable force for spreading that good. They proudly profess their allegiance to the flag and the cross not realizing that just as the cross was a bloody indictment of the Roman empire, it is a powerful critique of the American empire, and they fail to acknowledge that the cozy relation between their Christian leaders and imperial American rulers may mirror the intimate ties between the religious leaders and imperial Roman rulers who crucified their Savior.

I have no doubt that most of these American Constantinian Christians are sincere in their faith and pious in their actions. But they are relatively ignorant of the crucial role they play in sponsoring American imperial ends. Their understanding of American history is thin and their grasp of Christian history is spotty, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by Christian leaders and misinformation by imperial rulers. The Constantinian Christian support of the pervasive disinvestment in urban centers and cutbacks in public education and health care, as well as their emphatic defense of the hard-line policies of the Israeli government, has much to do with the cozy alliance of Constantinian Christian leaders with the political elites beholden to corporate interest who provide shelter for cronyism. In short, they sell their precious souls for a mess of imperial pottage based on the false belief that they are simply being true to the flag and the cross. The very notion that the prophetic legacy of the grand victim of the Roman empire - Jesus Christ - requires critique of and resistance to American imperial power hardly occurs to them."

Other reviews you might find interesting are here, and here.

Nicest Bookshop Around

I wish I knew where this was.  I would shop there often if I could.

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

One of the nice young engineers I mentor in Bangalore - Kamran - gave me a copy of Gandhi's Autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" when I was in India last May.  I read it this summer while flying on business, and finished it last month in the plane enroute back from a training class in New York.  While I enjoyed the book, and learned a great deal about Gandhi's life that I never knew about previously, sometimes he has a writing style that reminds me of movie credits... where he lust lists names and names and names of many "famous" people, as if he is trying to acknowledge or 'thank' them, who were well known in India at the time of the autobiography's writing, but who today, I have no clue as to who they are.  When I'd encounter such a paragraph (and sometimes the lists would go on for a whole paragraph) I'd just skip it - not my style to skip details.

But as a whole, it was a good book, and helped me to understand bot Gandhi's life and the country of India much more.  It was also helped me to understand Kamran's thinking somewhat more.  You see, this was just after (less than a week) Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbotabad Pakistan by US Seal Team 6, and at dinner one night, I mentioned how I'd read several books on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had a 'somewhat informed' understanding of the geopolitics and cultural difficulties of the regions.  Kamran did NOT want my understanding of his country's neighbors, and his religion (he is practicing Sunni) to be soiled by negativity, and wanted to expose me to more positive aspects.  Who better to instill an advocating perspective, than the father of India's modern democracy, Mohandas K. Gandhi?  I am glad I get to mentor such insightful and talented young people at work.

How Books Work

I saw this a few weeks ago... and it's really stuck with me.

Bibliocide

When I first saw this image earlier today, I laughed... but then the more I thought about it, I began to get depressed.   This infection of Reality Show obsession is endemic to American (and perhaps global?) culture today.  It dumbs down anyone who is exposed to it, and perpetuates the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire mindset.   Yes, I have watched 10 minutes of Jersey Shore, and I nearly wretched as I thought about how popular the show was and how inexorably stupid I found it.  It's not just Jersey Shore: 
Any "Dancing with the..."
"You think you can..." 
any variation related to the contrived Kardashian, Brett Michaels, or Simmons viruses
the "Survivor" popularity contest (not a true "Survivor survival skills contest"
Donald's Trumped up publicity train wreck
any pet whispering show other than the original Dog Whisperer, which actually makes sense
"16 and anything..."
"19 Kids and clueless about birth control as we imagine we are building Gawd's army"
"Americans at Idle"
 "The Bachelor(x)" unnecessary dramas
"Wife Swap" that does not include actually swapping wives

It once again reminds me of one of the corporate moves that my family endured in the 90s, where the movers labeled book cartons as "Buchs" and said to Dr Desert Flower and I "y'all sure got alot of books" as they rolled dolly after dolly after dolly of books out of the house and into the moving truck. 

Uncle Joe's Reading List

My godfather, Uncle Joe, is a retired pattern maker who lives in the South West Chicago suburbs.  A US Army veteran and former president of his local machinists union.  He worked nearly 40 years in a "small business" where he was the lead man in the shop, where he watched as the patriarch's idiot sons squandered the wealth and capabilities of the once reputable company their father had founded into a rudderless, nepotistic, inept debacle.  Had it not been for his union and benefits and funded retirement, my uncle would still be working away at a depressed wage as he approaches 70.

So it was with more than a few grains of salt that I accepted his book recommendations back in February at the Superbowl, where he and I watched together at my cousin's home (his son's house) here in Arizona, eating Brats, drinking beer, and discussing politics - he gave me hard cover copies of Jeff Sharlet's C Street, The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy and William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold The World, Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America.  I'd read Sharlet before and enjoy his work (link here) as he's factual, detailed, fastidious in his research, and has a conversational writing style that is easy to follow.  But Kleinknecht's title, on the other hand,  seemed a little over-the-top.  This book's cover did not lie.

Sharlet recycles a bit of his first work The Family and if you've not read Family, you might be a little bit lost at the beginning of C Street, but the work does stand on its own.  I particularly was drawn in to the long chapters on how infected the US Military is with radical Christian fundamentalists, pushing the crusading, xenophobic, end-of-days agenda against Muslims.  Frightening indeed.

Kleinknecht's premise was a good one - that Reagan's worshipers have forgotten, or have intentionally re-written the history of all the parts of this former B actor's life that don't sell well to the average-Joe American in an effort to glorify deify their former leader, when in fact Reagan
- accelerated America's slide towards mediocrity
- began the roll back of Johnson's and Nixon's civil rights and welfare initiatives
- drove the national debt ever higher with unfunded military spending increases
- presided over the beginning of the decline in corporate research spending
- began the practice of installing incompetent bureaucrats and kleptocrats into executive branch departments (like HUD, Labor and Education) where corporate and individual officials' greed went unchecked
- epitomized hypocrisy of saying he represented the common man while distancing himself from the common in his policies, actions, and political course
... but he lost me in the diatribes and tangential rants about this minor official or that minor personality who Reagan promoted or pardoned and didn't focus enough (in my perspective) on Reagan himself.  yes, to some extend a person is defined by the friends and company he keeps, but a US President has alot of company, and incompetent, dishonest, and evil people can be found in every presidential staff if you look long enough.  Granted, for Reagan's, you didn't have to look too hard, but as I was reading the book on air planes (ESPECIALLY during take offs and landings, when everyone else had to shut down their ipad and kindles... HaHa! ... and try giving an electronic book to your nephew after you've read it, and let me know how well that works for you) I kept thinking to myself "How is this much different from all the hateful; slanted, derogatory crap that Coulter, Malkin, Hannity and Beck have written about Clinton and Obama?"  Sure, Kleinknecht doesn't have a corporate leviathan like News Corp paying him as the Repugnican mouth pieces do, but that doesn't make his work more palatable.  Had he stuck more to his premise, and been less hyperbolic, I would have enjoyed his work much more.

Not sure what I'll be taking on my next trans-oceanic flight next month... but I am sure I'll have a book in my hands during take offs and landings, if I am not asleep.