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Thursday, April 27, 2006
a good weekend to chill out
the chief and his chick are visting this weekend. he's one of my college room mate and a groomsmen (and i was his best man). she's one of my best friends from the first week of freshman year--lived three doors down from me.
i like to take credit for their meeting.
should be great weekend. hitting the catur. might even make a return to the old stomping ground. here's what citysearch has to say about it:
"The joint attracts the lesbian crowd, ex-frat boys with cute dates, plus the requisite handful of pool junkies glowering at the amateurs."
a-walker is apparently back in town after a couple of years away. and j-watt and moe will be there. so about half of the enemy of my enemy crew will be styling and profiling.
i want to give a big shout to my new auto shop: my favorite mechanic is a woman. i took my car there for the 2nd time this morning and they're great. down the street on dekalb ave. always straightforward and the prices are fair, too. why don't most shops get that people walk suspecting they're getting ripped off? if you are smarmy and keep finding ways to charge the customer $700 every time they walk in, they walk out feeling horrible.
moe and i are dressing up for dragoncon this year. it's never too early to start working on the costume. the beav gave me this book for the holidays last december.
a much more eventful day two, albeit sans pics, as just about every place in vegas has banned cameras. blows.
finished up the day with a vendor banquet marked by a mediocre comedian and bland band. around the time he was making jokes about the pain of a prostate exam and how he didn't approve of his daughter's boyfriend's piercings i figured it was a good time to cut out and make some phone calls. when the band segued from Respect into Celebrate Good Times, it was time to let the soccer moms boogie down and head for a different scene. and by scene i mean anywhere else.
had enough of mandalay bay, so we gathered a crew and headed to the wynn. very cool lounge called lyre. good tunes and chicks in go-go outfits (complete with six inch clog boots) on the bar. the night includes chuck dancing by himself. rare form. the night ended with one of our chicks kicking david's beer out of his hand. up it went. down it went. glass shattering and soon enough we're being escorted out.
our cabbie tells us there are no drive-in's on the strip open in the middle of the night. of all cities, i figured i could get an in-and-out burger here. fukstix.
head back to the monte carlo. jimmy wanders off while we grab some food at the all night cafe. man, rarely has a ruben tasted so good at 4 am. come back figuring jimmy will be passed out in the room we're sharing.
not here.
gilbert and i go back to the casino downstairs, hoping that he's passed out under a slot machine and not on ice with his kidneys cut out. find him sobered up a bit and talking to random sketchy chicks. we grab him and pull into an elevator. he mumbles good bye to the chickies. one of them flicks him off as she walks away.
youkilis, sycamore '97 (and goalkeeper on my junior high soccer team, afterwards he clearly made the wise choice in sticking with baseball) is now starting at first base for the sox. pretty cool.
i don't really know kevin that well, but it's nice to see someone from the hood making it. last year i took the in-laws on a tour of my high school and there was a big portrait of kevin running towards the mound after the last out of the '04 series.
"The mental ease has translated into physical action. Youkilis entered Tuesday night's game hitting .300 with six runs, four doubles, six RBIs, seven walks and a .408 on-base percentage."
uhh, vegas is spectacle. no duh. but it's a guilded one. so far it's kind of like a crappy cruise ship. it looks nice in the lobby and from the port, but inside your cabin the room is small, the faucet leaks, and the comforter is stained.
slot machines in the airport are cool. sad. but cool.
gate d37 is where it's at
they've recreated the chrysler building at ny, ny. pretty cool.
was feeling well enough on sunday to hit the dogwood festival. unlike years past, couldn't turn this into a drunken stumble around piedmont park. not having h-rupp's pad as a pre-party launching point would have made it hard, even i had not spent saturday night in the ER.
bobby yang and his band was playing when we arrived. the band consists of cello, violin, and drums and plays instrumental classic rock covers. check out bobby yang here. they rocked ac/dc, zeppelin, u2. pretty sweet.
bobby yang
the walrus was pretty awesome. some people think fat people should cover themselves in public. no way. this dude owns his largeness. he rules his kingdom of obesity. and there's no stopping him. there's tons of hot skinny bucktown chicks and racked oiled-up midtown men. give me a 372 pound momma from gwinnet in a halter top with her back fat rolling out and folding over her daisy duke jean shorts. that is hot.
this weekend i found myself in the emergency dept for the second time in recent memory.
caught some kind of bug (i'm blaming the sweet tea at everybody's pizza in emory village, but really, it could have been anything). by friday night, just as mrs. wintermute and i are finishing the first part of my birthday weekend star wars marathon (episodes III - VI in order), it starts to hit me.
the next morning is worse.
manage to pull it together for the birthday bbq, and actually feel good all afternoon.
by 5:00, though, misery descends. by 7:00 my fever starts jumping and hits 103.5 by 7:45. phone call with some docs in the family confirms that it's time to seek some treatment.
can't find an open urgent care clinic, so we head to emory.
much better experience this time, despite it being saturday night. i think we got there early enough to avoid the parade of drunk freshmen.
on the way to emory, i scribble a chronology of my symptoms. i remember that variation is the enemy of good care. it takes five minutes. when i hand it to the registration clerk, she looks at me like i just gave her a mapping of the human genome. the triage nurse agrees that it's helpful, although she didn't look at it initially. the first responders who hook up my IV bag and take my blood tests can't figure out why i did it. the physician is also a bit surprised. he asks me what i do for a living.
hmm, big surprise that so many mistakes happen in hospitals. i get asked by four different people what my symptoms are. chances are, i leave 1-2 things out each time. i mean, i'm sick, i feel crappy, and i'm dehydrated. very easy to forget whether i took 4 does of tylenol or 2 or any at all. was my fever 103.5 or 102.5? writing it down helps reduce that variation. it helps ensure that everyone is treating me for the same set of symptoms. the staff seemed content to work off a paper-based system that does little to reduce errors or ensure consistency.
federal sting unfairly targets Patels...looks fishy to me
several months ago i blogged about a sting in north GA of convenience stores as part of a meth crackdown. the nytimes (article here) writes that ethnic bias steered the investigator. some interesting notes:
in this part of the state, (six rural counties), 80% of stores are white-owned or operated
in the sting, 24 out of 25 of the stores are indian-owned or operated
in the string 44 out of 45 people charged are indian
32 of those charged share the last name patel, but are largely unrelated
one witness' sworn testimony suggests that investigators purposely avoided prosecuting white-owned stores (from the nytimes article),"Other filings said prosecutors had several tips that more than a dozen white-owned stores were selling the same ingredients, but failed to follow up on them. According to a sworn statement from a witness, law enforcement officials tipped off a white store owner about the investigation and recommended ways to avoid scrutiny."
the sting aimed to clamp down on convenience store clerks who sell ingredients for meth, a major problem in rural areas. however, most of the clerks spoke limited english and claim to have understood the undercover informants who used street slang in the transaction.
thank god for the aclu. it has taken up the case and is challenging this completely bogus case.
as a patel, i can appreciate the it's likely the clerks dd not know what was happening. i have family members in the convenience store business. besides my cousin who owns the store (and speaks english well), the rest of the employees have very, very limited english skills beyond what it takes to complete a transaction.
several months ago, some dudes at hartsfield must have had this eureka moment.
"hey, let's put in more flat screen tv's at the gates so people won't get bored"
"yeah, that will be flipping sweet."
"but i've noticed a couple of hearing impaired passengers in the last decade or so."
"well, better make sure it's loud enough for them to hear."
my ears are getting blown out by cnn and the atlanta song. every story on cnn is now a developing story. does that mean that they haven't finished production? hey, get someone on the fender-bender on I-85, stat! what, nothing exciting about that? shit, slap "developing story" on it.
suddenly it's news.
the atlanta song sucks. the commercial sucks. playing it every 4 minutes in the airport sucks.
notice that bain has quietly washed it's hands of that fine piece of consulting work. don't think shirley is going to call them back for a follow-on project anytime soon.
i can't believe i was worried if it would be warm enough to be outside for my bday bash this weekend. it's going to be pool weather.
spring is here. the sun stays up late. it's back of the shirt gets wet weather by 10 AM. there's a film of yellow pollen on my car. today, the sox won. the braves won. the reds lost. not too much has changed.
even in st louis (where i am today), it's pleasant. got in the rental and jacked over to penn station for my fix.
mr. beavers his hooking up home opener tix at the ted next monday night.
