Memes that made me laugh 320

 

Gathered around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

And now for something completely different, as they say in the classics!  Ernest Tomlinson, who died in 2015 at the age of 91, was an English composer of light music.  One of his better-known works was this "Fantasia on Auld Lang Syne", composed in 1976.  The fun part about it is that it includes many very short excerpts from other classical pieces - more than 120 of them.  (A list of included works may be found here.)  For a piece that's less than 20 minutes long, that's going some!

A commenter on the video's YouTube page says, "Only an insane genius could have produced this."  I'm not sure about the "insane" part, but it's certainly a remarkable piece of arrangement, if not entirely original composition.

Peter

So much for meat and water!

 

I'm sure most of my readers have grown used to vegetarians vegans anti-meat activists trumpeting that it wastes far too much water to produce a pound, or a kilogram, of beef, compared to just eating vegetables and fruit.  Turns out they've been fudging the numbers, to put it mildly.

From Sama Hoole on X:

The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012.

The crime they do: not reading the paper.

The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all.

Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline.

Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back.

So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units.

• Pistachios: 7,602
• Almonds: 3,816
• Walnuts: 2,451
• Dates: 1,250
• Cashews: 921
• Beef: 550

Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola.

The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of.

The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out.

I've no doubt the "greenies" will object that most of the rainwater runs off and feeds their vegetables, so it's by definition "greener" than beef anyway:  but that's splitting nutritional hairs, IMHO.  I'll continue to favor a carnivore diet, thank you very much!

Peter

A Texas cathedral???

 

I had to laugh at Japanese visitor Nobunaga's description of his first time at a Buc-ee's gas station.  A couple of excerpts:

I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people.

I was wrong to dismiss it.

The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it.

I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering.

. . .

I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church.

I did not need any of it.

I needed all of it.

I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there.

I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either.

But I did fill the truck.

And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.

There's more at the link.  Go read the whole thing.  You'll smile.

I was delighted to find that Nobunaga has compiled about 100 of his "discovering America" posts into a book, "A Samurai Loose in Modern America".

The blurb reads:

All of it. One samurai, one impossible year, one hundred field reports.

This is the complete collection: every dispatch from a man who woke up in modern America in full armor and decided to treat all of it as real. The free chips. The bottomless soda. The neighbors who will not let him pay. The stadium that adopts him in six seconds. The nurse named Brenda who undoes eight hundred years of his philosophy with a juice box.

The table, the counter, the street, and the crowd, gathered in one volume, each of the hundred stories now closing with a note from the samurai himself, written afterward, reporting how far the misunderstanding has been allowed to go.

He came to understand America. He failed, completely, and the failing is the book. He gets the small things wrong with total conviction and the large thing right by accident: that the only law of this country is that no one is ever unkind.

A hundred stories. Pull up a chair. The chips are free, apparently bottomless, and he intends to honor all of them.

It's free to read on Kindle Unlimited.  I think I'm going to enjoy it.

(BTW, Nobunaga isn't alone in his bemused wonder at Buc-ee's.  YouTube has a range of videos showing the reaction of World Cup visitors to the gas station, which they appear to treat more as a tourist attraction than anything else.  Go watch a few and have fun with them.)

Peter

Adventures with medicine, part XVIII and counting...

 

Regular readers will recall my misadventures with medical bureaucracy in May, and the follow-up (mis)adventures last month.  Yesterday, Tuesday, most of the results came together, with moderately satisfactory results and a certain amount of pain.

My new CT scan images and analysis were ready, and my pain management specialist (who made the necessary arrangements for them) discussed them with me.  There appears to be more going on "over my head" than I'd been made aware . . . it appears possible that the original surgery, twenty-two years ago, might have been - how shall I put this? - sub-standard.  Nobody used the word "malpractice" - perish the thought!  After all, given the passage of time, that probably couldn't be proved.  Nevertheless, it may be one of the reasons why two neurosurgeons, a neurologist and an orthopedic surgeon had all been noticeably reluctant to commit themselves to a potential solution to my problems.  Armed with this (strictly unofficial and off-the-record) information, I'm now in a position to ask very blunt, pointed, direct questions when I see the new neurosurgeon, and apparently he's one of the few doctors who's willing to answer such questions appropriately.  The next couple of months should be interesting . . .

That said, I had my second caudal epidural injection yesterday morning.  The first one (in March) gave me 2+ months of moderate pain relief, so I'm hoping the second one will be at least as useful.  That, plus wearing a back brace for all walking and driving, will hopefully keep me mobile enough to see the new neurosurgeon in Dallas before the end of August, and (with his help) develop a plan for short- to medium-term treatment in preparation for surgery.  It's a slow, painstaking process, but as I've been told repeatedly, spinal surgery is one of those "measure ten times, cut once" solutions that one daren't rush or mess up.

Right now I can't feel anything in my lower back, the result of the anesthetic used to perform the injection into the spinal cavity.  By Wednesday morning I'll be feeling it again, I'm sure.

Peter