Tribond challenge

One of my coworkers does this every week through our work email, so I thought it might be fun for my blog. The game is easy. What do the following 3 things have in common? The theme is music, though the last one stretches that concept a bit. Could their be more than one answer? Yes. Will you get the one I had in mind? Maybe. Have fun and be creative! Answers in a few days...

1) Rod Morgenstein...Ian Paice...Phil Collins

2) Metallica...Spinal Tap...AC/DC

3) Uriah Heep...Jethro Tull...Molly Hatchet

4) Paul McCartney...Jimi Hendrix...Tony Iommi

5) Elf...Rainbow...Black Sabbath

6) Rush...Van Halen...Yes

7) Ben Vereen...Carl Andersen...Corey Glover

8) Kansas...Shooting Star...ELO

9) Stevie Wonder...Ray Charles...Jeff Healey

10) Pachelbel's Canon...To Kill a Mockingbird...The Macarena

To help you with the second item in #8, here is a video clip of one of their songs that I still really love to hear every once in a while. Maybe it will give you a hint.

All is well

Just to let y'all know that my surgery went fine and I am home recuperating. The knee hurts a lot less than I thought it would. My throat hurts more, which is either from having the anesthesia or catching my daughter's cold (or both, ugh). I would post some pictures but I haven't hooked up my scanner-printer yet to my new computer. Oh well. No need for more gross pictures.

Big day tomorrow

Well, tomorrow is the big day. I am scheduled to have my left knee scoped to have some damaged cartilage removed. Supposedly my OR time is for 1100, but they could be on Microsoft time for all I know (you know how it stays on "5 seconds remaining" for 5 minutes). I am pretty certain that all will go well and my recovery should be relatively short. My new computer arrived today so that will keep me busy for the next few days, getting everything set up. Wish me luck, and see y'all on the blogosphere soon.

What was Microsoft thinkin'?

One week ago I was perusing the Sunday paper and came across ads from Dell and noticed they were having some decent sales on all kinds of computers. Our current Dell computer -- a real workhorse at 6.5 years old with only one major crash from which we recovered -- has outlived any hope of working fast ever again as long as it has a 40 G harddrive which has about 2 G of open space left, and 256 mB of RAM which would cost $600 to upgrade to 2 G. It has been this way for the past several months, and should be sent to hospice, so to speak, to die a comfortable death. I had been reluctant to buy a new one, though, in part due to cost, and also in part due to we didn't really need one (as long as you could put up with webpages taking at least a one or two dozen seconds to load).

I checked out the Dell website, though, just to see what specific deals they had on a new desktop, and lo and behold, they did have some pretty good deals. I also noticed that if you ordered by June 26th, they would send a machine loaded with Windows XP. After that date, any computer order would be shipped with Vista, and if one wanted to have XP, one would have to buy a $150 downgrade. Well, that about sold it for me. I consulted with my wife, and she agreed we should order something new with XP. Neither of us had used Vista very much, but virtually every person I have talked to that has used it absolutely HATES IT and we did not want to have to deal with that headache.

Which led me to wonder, what was Microsoft thinking when they revamped their operating system to Vista? I have yet to meet anyone that likes it, and many people are actually buying downgrades to XP! That's like taking your cordless push button phone and going back to a rotary dial phone. As we said in the military, it seems like Microsoft "screwed the pooch" on this one and any attempts to make it look good would be akin to polishing a turd or putting lipstick on a pig. One can only hope their new OS after Vista fixes the mistakes they made.

So, my new computer (750 G hard drive, 4 G of RAM, 19" flat screen monitor, oooohhhhh baby!) should arrive tomorrow and keep me occupied for the next few days as I recover from my knee surgery (more on that tomorrow). Hard to imagine that the first PC my wife and I bought in 1997 had a whopping 2.8 G hardrive and 8 mb of RAM.

Four years of college, four years of medical school, several years of residency...

For all you outside of our great state of New Jersey, I would advise against having Dr. Santusht Perera remove one of your lungs. You see, he just had his NJ medical license suspended for removing the right lung from a patient who had a tumor in the left lung. THEN, he told the patient that he had a tumor in the right lung, the one that he had removed. THEN, he altered the medical records (a HUGE no-no from a medicolegal standpoint) to make it look like he wanted to operate on the right lung all along. According to the story "His lawyer, Michael J. Keating, is on vacation and not available for comment". Good move, I would say. There is a legal phrase, res ipse loquitur (forgive me if my spelling is incorrect), which translates to the facts speak for themselves. If this does not fit that definition, I don't know what does.

Following Layla's advice, I caught a good chunk of Larry King's interview with Motley Crue the other night. Interesting to see how these guys have grown up, to some extent, and matured. They are all middle aged now (Mick Mars is 57!) and are joining the hair band revival shows touring the country.

An interesting medical note from the interview that I was not aware of, was that Mick Mars suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, a very painful inflammatory condition that affects the spine, mostly afflicting young men starting in their late teens to twenties. It kept flashing across the bottom every few minutes, but I did not hear any mention about it (though I did not catch the whole interview) so I thought I would mention it here.

Turns out Mick was diagnosed at the age of 17, has been on all sorts of pain killers throughout the years just to function, and had a hip replaced in 2004 at the age of 53. If you watch the interview, or any Motley Crue videos for that matter, you will notice the lack of movement on Mick's part, due to the very stiff spine he has developed. To give you a picture representation, below are x-rays of the lower spine. The one on the left is a normal lower spine x-ray, the one on the right is one of a person with anklyosing spondylitis. You can just see how stiff that spine must be...

You don't want me blogging about you...

Imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up and saw the news that one of the great comic minds in our time, George Carlin, had died of heart failure at age 71. Imagine my greater surprise, as if I were in some low budget 21st century techno thriller, that I had linked to one of his routines in my blog just the night before, a routine which contained the following quote: "...thanks to our fear of death in this country I won't have to die -- 'I'll pass away.' Or, 'I'll expire', like a magazine subscription." Your life, George, was much more than a magazine subscription. Much more. You may have made us pissed off as hell, but you also made us think and laugh at ourselves at the same time, a rare gift. Rest in peace, George.

Some classic Carlin. Sit back and listen...