moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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WRITER'S LINKS
Absolute Write Paypal donation button:

Absolute Write is one of the leading sites for information on writing and publishing, especially the scam versions thereof. It has a broad, deep online community with an enormous message base going back years. Now it needs help. See the details and discussion here
Preditors and Editors
Everything you wanted to know about literary agents
On the getting of agents
Writer Beware
Miss Snark
Writer's Net

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(and my Wish List)

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Health in the USA - Words Fail (Repeated from Earlier)  

Health Care Horror post, from 2006, though original story is 1998. I'm worried this lady isn't around any more

CONSUMER WATCH
Home » Protecting Patients » Patient Told To Reuse Colostomy Bag For 5 Days
PERMALINK: www.consumerwatchdog.org/ patients/ articles/ ?storyId=16193

Repeating the whole story here, because the link's changed at least once already, and might get lost. As a fellow colostomate, this is a particular horror for me.

CONSUMER STORY — May 06, 1998
Patient Told To Reuse Colostomy Bag For 5 Days
Consumer Watchdog
Michelle Leasure - Baltimore, MD
As told by Michelle Leasure:

I am a disability advocate and work for an agency that not only serves the disability community, but is staffed by people with disabilities. I have several disabilities, one of which is an incontinent ostomy. I do not have control over my bowels, and must wear a colostomy bag to contain my waste. Under Maryland law, ostomy supplies are 100% covered by insurance agencies.

When my employer changed insurance providers on September 1, 1997, I could no longer get the supplies I required to live. I have had my ostomy for three years and this was the first time I had ever had problems. I fought with my insurer for two months before I received any supplies, and at that time the supplies were incomplete. Many of the doctor-prescribed items were denied as unneeded, so I was forced to purchase them myself.

At the time, my salary was $500 a year above the poverty level and I soon found myself in financial trouble as a result. When the few supplies I got at that time ran out, my co-workers and myself went back to battle with my insurer, and it was January before I received more supplies, again not all that I needed.

I was told by my insurer that I was expected to use disposable bags for five days each. Now pardon me for being so graphic, but it's necessary. I work in the public arena, and I was expected to (and this is verbatim) "wash the bags out in the public restrooms that I frequent, walk (I use a wheelchair) to the sink with my ostomy exposed, and finish washing the feces out into the sink, then reattach it to my flange." It would be the same thing as asking a mother to empty a diaper, rinse it out in the sink and reapply it to her baby for five days.

I have systemic lupus, so I also have a compromised immune system. To even ask anyone, let alone a person with immune problems, to use public restrooms in such a fashion, is sheer and absolute insanity.

In mid-April, I finally received a full month supply of ostomy products, but I had been out from work for 2 1/2 months, living in my bathtub, because I had not had the supplies for that long. I even spent a week in a nursing home as a result of this and had another stroke, requiring a hospital stay, because of the stress from this battle.

I am a person who could get the medical benefits I require from Medical Assistance if I were to quit work and go on welfare. The bizarre thing is, I want to work--and I am paying into the system, but cannot get the services I'm entitled to and work so hard for.

I was supposed to have corrective surgery to fix the bilateral spinal implants that "fell out" of their socket and are currently free-floating in my right side. I actually have to push them back inside my body several times a day and night. My insurer has only one doctor they will allow me to see that can do the work on the implants and he is unavailable to see me until the end of May. That is just to see him--I have no idea if he will be able to schedule the surgery then, or if I will have to wait another six months. I cannot stand the discomfort much longer.

I have been told that because of the ERISA loophole my insurer is protected from legal liability for delaying and denying the medical care that I so badly need. I am convinced that if I were able to hold my insurer legally accountable I would be getting more attentive care.

Labels: colostomy, health, health insurance, insurance, medical, medical insurance, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 3:50 am

 
Best Pirate Event Evah  
Possibly the best use ever of ITLAP Day (Which I keep calling ISLAP* Day): from the Arkansas Times' Arkansas Blog.

Way to go, matie!
Posted by Leslie Newell Peacock on September 19, 2008 09:36 AM
www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/ 2008/ 09/ way_to_go_matie.aspx

"What do you do to make a bunch of soulless nutcases abandon their post at the Convention Center? Send in the pirates!
Yep, the cuckoo Phelps hate group walked the plank this morning after a happy bunch dressed like pirates and holding signs saying 'God hates shrimp -- Leviticus' and 'God hates cotton-polyester blends' stood opposite them at the corner of Markham and Scott streets. The group, made up of Central Arkansas Pastafarians, waved swords and growled 'Arrghh!'" …'

* International Speak Like a Pirate Day instead of Talk Like a Pirate.

Sorta-kinda related: International Free Hugs Day, inspired by 'Juan Mann', will be held in 90 countries on 19th October, 2008, according to the story below. No details yet — the website I can find is not operating.
(Recent news on Free Hugs Man: www.smh.com.au/ articles/ 2008/ 09/ 20/ 1221331273987.html)

Labels: Australia, humour, people, religion, society, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 8:00 am

 
elisem: the day after Fourth Street happens to be Mammalversary  
Have been thinking again — dangerous, that — Chris and I were together some 6 years (after knowing each other about a year); he's been dead a bit more than 6 years now. (I'll be coming up to being 'widowed' longer than knowing him pretty soon.) He's been one of the most important things in much of my life for coming up to 13 years. It seems a long time.

Labels: politics, statistics, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:10 am

 
USA Presidential Election statistics  

Nixonland - Rick Perlstein - Book Review - New York Times

Bring Us Apart
by George F. Will
Published: May 11, 2008

"Perlstein considers it significant that before the 1972 election, in which Nixon carried 49 states, James Reston wrote that “barely over one in four adult Americans will have voted for the winner in 1972. ... The consequences of that kind of a minority presidency are hard to foretell.” Actually, such “minority” presidents are not unusual. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan carried 44 states and defeated President Jimmy Carter 489-49 in electoral votes, Reagan won the votes of 26.9 percent of American adults. The winners of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections received 24 percent, 24.1 percent and 28.2 percent, respectively."
…
Perlstein’s thesis is that America became Nixonland because of “the rise of two American identities” in the 1960s — actually between 1964, when Johnson won 61.1 percent of the vote, and 1968, when the combined votes for Nixon and George Wallace were 56.9 percent. Perlstein says Nixon’s legacy is the “notion that there are two kinds of Americans. …”

Labels: books, politics, statistics, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:57 pm

 
Fun & Fantasy in Bloomington, Minnesota  

Just In Case someone is reading this, here's some information about something you might enjoy, if you're able to be there.
Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (see www.4thstreetfantasy.com)

I’ve heard tales, … I know people who traveled to [it] … It is a place where conversations have depth, and plant seeds of thought, sometimes even seeds of creativity. A place with music which opens up vistas that words cannot. A place of companionship, small and comfortable, but varied and lively.
One unique thing about programming at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention is that there’s just a single track of programming, that way we’re all part of the same ongoing conversation.
I’ve gotten together many of the people who made Fourth Street Fantasy Convention happen before, and asked them to help me make it happen again.

From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep, intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the fantastic. In 2008, it will return.

June 20 - 22, 2008 at the Holiday Inn Select Airport Hotel in Bloomington (Minneapolis), Minnesota.

One of the people whose Livejournal I look in on a fair bit is having a party there, with readings and a book launch. Perhaps that will tempt you along, if that's physically possible.

Labels: information, links, science fiction, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 7:33 pm

 
Back to the 'Fifties, again  

The path down which so many of us worry 'WorkChoices' leads — part of a story about working in the USA ('Tales From Kafka Station', below, from the Undulant Fever blog).

This is one of the reasons I get so croggled that there's an idea that one would vote for the Liberal Party (of Australia)'s policies "because I'm worried about my (grand)children". I actually saw someone write this in a printed newspaper during the previous election. His (yes, it was a male) whole argument in his letter led, as I read it, to one point; except the final sentence was the exact opposite of what I thought. The mental sensation was very like being abruptly spun around physically.

Apart from the harmful things that those policies (or sometimes the lack of any policy) do to the environment, which will detrimentally effect those following generations, they affect society in a way that is of detriment to the majority of people in it, in things like working conditions for instance. Again, I'll repeat that it's not the 1950s that John Howard is reviving, it's the 1850s.

undulantfever.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 10/ tales-from-kafka-station.html

Tales From Kafka Station
10/20/2007
But I think the major part of it may be that this is part of a tendency among Big Business (not just the Postal Service) that's been growing for years, to deliver -- subtly or blatantly -- a message to employees that "Your Life Belongs To US!"

Forced overtime. Cancelled days off. Restrictions on use of leave time. And all growing more and more frequent, more and more the "standard" model of a working environment, more and more what American workers expect to find in the workplace, more and more what's considered normal.

What I was told in that office was just a step away from actually being forbidden to see a doctor on my day off, because in the eyes of management, every day of an employee's life belongs to them.

That's not an employee/management situation.

The name for that is slavery.

In Australia, following the British law, most official employment in the nineteenth century, gradually changing through the twentieth, was under the Master & Servant Act. Many of the concepts were very similar to so-called 'modern' work ideas; stripping away the 'playing-field-levelling' and protections built up with so much time & struggle.

"Much of the labour law which has evolved in the 20th century … stems from an experience-based perception that the market constraint is not a sufficient protection." – Keith Hancock, senior deputy president (1992-1997), Australian Industrial Relations Commission

Labels: history, industrial relations, IR, politics, society, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:59 am

 
Health Care Horror: Patient Told To Reuse Colostomy Bag For 5 Days  
Health Care Horror: Patient Told To Reuse Colostomy Bag For 5 Days
This is an updated address for the page. It's a particularly pertinent horror story for me, and a reason to resist several so-called "reforms" to the Autralian health-care system.
www.consumerwatchdog.org/ patients/ articles/ ?storyId=16193

This story is also mentioned as one of the examples in
Making a Killing
HMOs and the Threat to Your Health
Chapter 5
www.makingakilling.org/chapter5.html
Getting Away With Murder
Why You Can't Sue Your HMO

PATIENT STORY

Patient Told To Reuse Colostomy Bag For 5 Days

Michelle Leasure - Baltimore, MD
As told by Michelle Leasure:

I am a disability advocate and work for an agency that not only serves the disability community, but is staffed by people with disabilities. I have several disabilities, one of which is an incontinent ostomy. I do not have control over my bowels, and must wear a colostomy bag to contain my waste. Under Maryland law, ostomy supplies are 100% covered by insurance agencies.

When my employer changed insurance providers on September 1, 1997, I could no longer get the supplies I required to live. I have had my ostomy for three years and this was the first time I had ever had problems. I fought with my insurer for two months before I received any supplies, and at that time the supplies were incomplete. Many of the doctor-prescribed items were denied as unneeded, so I was forced to purchase them myself.

At the time, my salary was $500 a year above the poverty level and I soon found myself in financial trouble as a result. When the few supplies I got at that time ran out, my co-workers and myself went back to battle with my insurer, and it was January before I received more supplies, again not all that I needed.

I was told by my insurer that I was expected to use disposable bags for five days each. Now pardon me for being so graphic, but it's necessary. I work in the public arena, and I was expected to (and this is verbatim) "wash the bags out in the public restrooms that I frequent, walk (I use a wheelchair) to the sink with my ostomy exposed, and finish washing the feces out into the sink, then reattach it to my flange." It would be the same thing as asking a mother to empty a diaper, rinse it out in the sink and reapply it to her baby for five days.

I have systemic lupus, so I also have a compromised immune system. To even ask anyone, let alone a person with immune problems, to use public restrooms in such a fashion, is sheer and absolute insanity.

In mid-April, I finally received a full month supply of ostomy products, but I had been out from work for 2 1/2 months, living in my bathtub, because I had not had the supplies for that long. I even spent a week in a nursing home as a result of this and had another stroke, requiring a hospital stay, because of the stress from this battle.

I am a person who could get the medical benefits I require from Medical Assistance if I were to quit work and go on welfare. The bizarre thing is, I want to work -- and I am paying into the system, but cannot get the services I'm entitled to and work so hard for.



More ...I was supposed to have corrective surgery to fix the bilateral spinal implants that "fell out" of their socket and are currently free-floating in my right side. I actually have to push them back inside my body several times a day and night. My insurer has only one doctor they will allow me to see that can do the work on the implants and he is unavailable to see me until the end of May. That is just to see him -- I have no idea if he will be able to schedule the surgery then, or if I will have to wait another six months. I cannot stand the discomfort much longer.

I have been told that because of the ERISA loophole my insurer is protected from legal liability for delaying and denying the medical care that I so badly need. I am convinced that if I were able to hold my insurer legally accountable I would be getting more attentive care.

Old URL Address link: www.consumerwatchdog.org/healthcare/st/st000308.php3

Labels: colostomy, health insurance, insurance, medical, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:48 pm

 
War Prayer  
Checking out some things about TV series Babylon 5 (parts of which reflect current subjects of interest) [In-depth analysis:
www.midwinter.com/lurk/toc.html;
www-theory.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~aaa/B5.Ref.html;
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5],
I was intrigued to find episode title "The War Prayer" (www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html) came from a short Mark Twain (Samuel Longhorn Clemens) story. Pertinent whenever & wherever someone is whipping up bellicose feeling, e.g. India v Pakistan, etc, etc, etc. He also is an interesting writer in several ways. Here we are rather fond of his comments about Australia when he visited. Will have to look them up for you.

This is a short biography, with links to several stories:
www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Twain
and a more 'literary' discussion of him, especially his skepticism: www.yorku.ca/twainweb/filelist/skeptic.html

The War Prayer links (It's been used recently too, about current subjects:):
www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/war_prayer.html
http://mez-at-the.blogspot.com/2002/10/checking-out-some-things-about-tv.html
www.libertystory.net/LSDOCTWAINWARPRAYER.htm
www.classicalfencing.com/sorrow/warprayer.html
www.classicalfencing.com/sorrow/sorrow.html
www.spcworks.org/msg7-3-00.html
www.westbynorthwest.org/winter01/warprayer.shtml
www.fcpj.org/warperspectives.asp

Labels: history, literature, USA, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:45 am

 
Anniversary Exchange  
(from the ABC's Foreign Correspondent guestbook)
Name: steve
Visit Time: 19:49:14 10 Sep, 2002 EST
Remarks September 11 will be a day that I will never forget. As I sat watching from relative in Melbourne I found myself crying and angry at the appaling loss of innocent life. It makes me angry when I read people justifing these attacks because of American foreign policy...

Name: Mezza
Visit Time: ? 10 Sep, 2002 EST
Dear Steve,
it is disappointing, after a whole year of repeating it, that people can't or won't understand. "Justify" is not the same as "explain".
People were asking (11/9/2002): "Why did it happen?"
Then when you say anything other than: "They are evil; they hate us because we are good.", you are accused of supporting them!
This thinking has killed millions over the last couple of thousand years (if not longer), causing untold suffering, destruction & waste as each side proclaims God or History or Righteousness is on their side. I've considered trying to shut all the dogmatic fanatic types of all ideologies/theologies into the world's largest high-security enclosure to let them beat each other to death with rocks while the people who can live together peaceably continue with their lives outside, but it seems impractical, alas.

Subject: Re: Anniversary Exchange
On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 14:41, Alex wrote:
> I liked that response. Very Henri Barbusse.

> The guy was French. In WW1.
> In Flanders. Wrote a book about people drowning (literally) in mud.
> Wrote, EXTREMELY CLEARLY of the average soldiers hatred of the
> politicos that put them there. Wrote that he wanted to see the
> politicos "locked in a cage naked, killing each other with lumps of
> wood." This was a sentiment echoed by Erich Maria Remarque in "All
> Quiet on the Western Front" ... again lumps of wood.
>
> Remarques book is very well known because of the film, and because
> of being burnt by Hitler. Personally, I found Barbusse' book to be better.
>
> Sadly not enough people have read either book, but I found the
> vitriol in your sentiments to be particularly reminiscent of the time.
>
> I personally, would gas the whole f...ing lot of them.

On 11 Sep 2002 at 16:02, MC Pye wrote:
>> Henri Barbusse?
>> Had a quick look up of his details -- he was born 1873, so in his forties
>> during The War To End Wars. Different to many of the young idealists so cruelly disillusioned during WWI.
[Here is a translation of his most famous book, Under Fire (Le Feu). See also a few notes on the group he was involved with after the Great War, Le Clarté, and his contribution personally to the art of World War I, and as an inspiration for others, e.g. the painter Otto Dix]

>> Interesting about lumps of wood. I originally (quite a while back)
>> had image of the hardliners in Palestine/Israel being walled off in
>> a rocky/sandy quarter, where large lumps of wood are rare & rocks in glut.
>> Have since broadened to fundamentalists of all descriptions, whether
>> communist of whichever faction, Hindu, Christian, 'economic
>> rationalist', etc. Whoever puts resulting truly awful human
>> suffering & destruction of natural world lower than some ideal.
>> Some suffering is virtually unavoidable without having a
>> "With Folded Hands") (Jack Williamson story about ultimate 'Nanny State') world.
>> Why in hell make it worse?

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Amongst My First Reactions to sitting, glazed with horror & seeking a path through the pity, foreboding, terror, of the late-night 'adult themed' drama which unfolded across my television screen over the evening & early morning (here in Australia) of September 11th & 12th, 2001

The bitter ghosts of so many ruined cities now have their smoking mirror in the body of the United States. A sunny summer day is split by the hard rain of glass & rubble, a blue sky broken by smoke. How many shattered families [in other cities] will hold up faded photos, bloodied clothes and say "Do you see how it feels"?

Irony: woman interviewed on the New York street is saying 'we won't kill mothers and children' - do you think she's forgotten or she doesn't know?

But vengeance is a poison pleasure, I struggle to abjure it for the comparatively little injuries done to my land, my city, my home - that way starts the slide back down to tooth & claw; the little rolling stones down the scree slope that build into a tidal wave of rock killing & crushing. Justice is just us.

Here in small-hours Sydney the starry sky has clouded and cold rain is glazing the city. Here we are field mice in the grass while hounds attack a giant boar; our futures can be crushed in sideshow 'collateral damage'. Flicking across television — CNN, ABC, BBC, radio reports — is looking at a cracked mirror through a broken window. Heroism has happened today, a glint of gold always in the dirt & blood, a seed of hope like mountain ash that quickens in disasters - but life creates enough [disasters] without help. The maze of shadows deepens and we hope in fear that the kind & strong among us can keep their guiding lights to help us go beyond it, not back.

My friends' theories centre either on one of the USA's own anti-government /anti-corporate groups or a Middle Eastern-based one. Well organised & co-ordinated, striking some key points quickly before alerts can go out, then a follow-up to catch crowds, rescuers, &c. Very media-savvy. The recent assassination of the main Afghanistani anti-Taliban leader is now perhaps making a part of this pattern — he might have been used as a rallying point against whoever is found to be responsible.

Suspect John Hunt/John Howe/Michael Howard/John Howard's visit might end early. Hope he doesn't get ideas - never did find out if that Olympic security Act got its sunset clause despite Ric Birch's personal assurance.

Will try to sleep now, and later work once more on my fossils of human fault & foible, justice struggling to be born.

Labels: anniversaries, history, memories, politics, USA

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:25 am