Bits and pieces

Thomas Friedman explains why the idea for suspending the federal gas tax this summer is so dumb. Boo on Hilary for supporting it.

Being president ages a person, and some outfit called PopPhoto did some Photoshop work to show what the three major candidates might look like after four years in office.

I've written before (God knows why) about the history and technology of, um, indoor plumbing, so I naturally loved this video that Dooce linked to:



Catchy, huh?

Because with two young children, we had no choice

Very busy last week so I'm finally getting around to writing about the highlight of our Florida vacation: the dreaded Disney World empire, which we were forced to visit during a single-day side trip (Orlando is less than three hours from Ben's father's place). We started at Typhoon Lagoon -- more on that later -- but the bulk of the day was spent in the heart of darkness, the Magic Kingdom, which I hoped I would never have have to revisit (I was there once when I was about 10), but the other adults prevailed. We got in there just in time for the daily parade of gaudily costumes and made-up Disney characters on permanent floats accompanied by endless blaring lops of "It's a Small World After All." As I watched the massive blobs of sensory overstimulation, I tried to figure out how to describe it, but all I could come up with was "there are no words" and "this is the essence of America." Today I looked for some links to accompany this post, but Disney World's web site sucks rocks, and our own photos are still on the camera at home, so I found some dwarfs and a castle on wheels. Most arresting among the Google hits was this post by a mommy blogger who, with no irony whatsoever, describes the park as:

...a fantasy storybook world of beloved characters, timeless tales and bold adventures. I was lucky to stumble upon the Disney Dreams Come True Parade, a dazzling and delightful parade of Disney Characters on amazing looking floats, accompanied by a variety of favorite Disney music. One can't help but feel gay amidst the merry atmosphere.

The rides themselves are really dated -- animatronic dolls just don't cut it in the CGI age -- but the kids had a good time, so it was worth it. If I had to go back to Orlando, I would go to the newer non-Disney features, like Sea World or Universal Studios. The only other Disney-owned stuff that looked interesting was Hollywood Studios and maybe Epcot Center. But Magic Kingdom? Nevah again.

Typhoon Lagoon was fun because it's a top-notch water park. The Disney deep pockets and attention to detail in fake scenery paid off. Plus since it involved a nominal amount of exercise there were fewer people who were in desperate need of gastric bypass surgery than in the Magic Kingdom, which rents motorized scooters not only to the elderly but to lots of people who are simply too fat to walk. Again, this is an America that you don't see as much here in the more affluent and nutritionally conscious northeast urban areas.

Then the next day we went to another water park called Rapids that's just 15 minutes from Ben's father's house. Quite a contrast from Disney, which has the money to build huge artificial hills in flat Florida, so you can go down water slides that are flush with the ground. At Rapids, the major slides are elevated off the flat ground like a roller coaster, but since you're not belted into a vehicle that's locked into a track, this creates the risk of the centrifugal force sending riders flying off the ramp to a grisly end down the tarmac below, so most of the rides are fully enclosed in curvy Habitrail-like tubes. Solid metal tubes with no lighting, so you're hurtling downwards in sloshy pitch darkness -- pretty nauseating and not fun at all. The kids were too young for those rides anyway (I went on one alone just to see what it was like), but they had plenty of mellow open-air rides that were more like playground slides with water and a shallow pool at the bottom, which was more their speed anyway.

The other main difference between Rapids and Typhoon Lagoon was the demographics. Being part of a vacation destination, TL caters to people who have come from some distance away, so there's a bit more money and vacation time involved. Rapids caters strictly to the locals -- which meant a LOT of people with skeevy tattoos, including one guy with the word "FELON" proudly inked on his back in four-inch-high Gothic script. The highlight of that particular outing was when the kids noticed an ambulance and asked why it was there. I speculated that someone had fallen off a scary ride or had a heart attack, but we couldn't see anything. A few minutes later we were walking back through the park on our way out and the crowd suddenly parted to reveal the EMTs pushing a gurney carrying a man propped up (conscious) with this head wrapped in bandages. I thought he looked familiar and realized he was the same guy who has served us Sno-cones an hour or so earlier. Our route took us back past the Sno-cone stand (just a metal cart next to the building) and Becky cheerfully pointed out someone mopping back there. A closer look revealed the story: they were mopping up some quantity of blood that had emerged from Sno-cone Man's head after he had apparently slipped on some spilled Sno-Cone ice and gashed his head on the corner of his own cart. At Rapids, no place is truly safe.

Flooooorida

On vacation in Florida. Sunshine: excellent. Pool water: superb. Relief from feeding kids, grocery shopping, doing laundry, planning the days, generally feeling stressed for little reason: not so much. Ben, like his father and stepmother, is all in favor of not planning and just letting the days drift by, which is what you're supposed to do on vacation, right? Except I've turned into a planning and control freak who can't get myself to just lie in a chaise lounge by the pool for more than 10 minutes without jumping up to do something, get something else to read, write something on a to-do list, look up something in the Yellow Pages as I quiver from Internet withdrawal (this is being typed at the public computer at the club, reached via scenic golf cart ride).

This all may have to do with stopping the Prozac, which I did about two months ago because I was between doctors/insurance plans and my scrip had no refills. Two results: way more energy (no more fighting the urge for midday naps every day -- yay!) but also more ADD-ish behavior and am irritation/frustration level that has plummeted to absolute zero. As in repressing the urge (sometimes not successfully) to scream at family members for tiny or nonexistent infractions. When I get back, I'm finding a new shrink and figuring out if a different SSRI is in order. I love the energy but the rest of it we could all do without, obviously.

One thing that greatly reduces The Bitchiness is steady application of solar heat. So back to the poolside we go. Maybe a water park ride would calm me down...

A riveting tale

Bottoms up

It now appears that the dramatic sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was all about quality control and supply chain management. It seems that the builders used low-quality rivets in putting the hull together, so when the ship brushed against the iceberg, several hull plate seams popped open like Kirstie Alley's pants after a three-day pig-out. Harland and Wolff was building three enormous ships at roughly the same time (Titanic, Olympic and Britannic). A good rivet was hard to find, especially when you need 3 million of them per boat.

Interesting side note: the Britannic was originally to be called the Gigantic but was quietly renamed after the Titanic disaster. As notes on Snopes.com, "After the sinking of the Titanic, passengers were suddenly less concerned with size and luxury than with getting to their destinations alive, and the dignified name Britannic conveyed a sense of safety and reliability in a way that the attention-grabbing Gigantic could not."

Sox notes

• Jed Lowrie is the latest prepubesecent Red Sox rookie (click here to see a video of him). He made his major league debut last night and got two hits and three RBIs. I swear the kid doesn't shave. He's right up there in the Squeezably Soft department with Jacoby Ellsbury, who is also a fantastic player in all pahses of the game.
• The Sox are in first place, half a game ahead of Baltimore and Toronto. Youkilis is 4th in the AL in batting average at .385. Daisuke Matsuzaka is 14th in the AL in ERA at 2.70, which is worth mentioning only because he's one spot ahead of Boof Bonser (2.84) of the Twins, and I really wanted to have a reason to say "Boof Bonser."

Bugs everywhere... get 'em off...

So how's the family?

Becky: OK since Saturday, but fevers Thursday and Friday afternoons. The back story is that she's been having fevers (sometimes rather high, like over 103) for several weeks now. The adventures have included three visits to the pediatrician in a single week, plus gallons of ibuprofen (which works wonders in the short term, thankfully) and snuggling in bed with her when she feels ill. Poor kid. More detailed blood work with all sorts of fancy chemical tests, blood smears, etc., came back indicating basically "some sort of infection somewhere, but unclear where or what's causing it." Yeah well, I could have told you that. Among the tests was a Lyme Disease titer which came back equivocal (a bit higher than normal, but not enough to make a definitive diagnosis). So now we have an appointment with an infectious-diseases sepcialist after we get back from Florida (much-anticipated vacation April 20-27) and another one to be scheduled with a rheumatologist. Yours truly, as a medical wanna-be, has been scouring the web after some initial reluctance since I figured I'd scare myself silly. So of course I did finally start hunting and did in fact scare myself silly right from the get-go with Wikipedia detailing all sorts of genetic disorders. But now I'm wondering about Lyme Disease again, even though this all started when the weather was still quite wintry and hence a tick bite would seem unlikely. Part of the reason I'm wondering is because the local ticks are out and about rather earlier than I would have guessed, given the recent experiences of...

Sarah: Completely healthy, recovered from her tonsillectomy, etc. Saturday night she felt a bump at the nape of her neck. Hard to see among the hair, but Ben and determined that it was a tick, somewhat to our surprise given the still-cold weather. We tried to get it out with tweezers but only got part of it (yuck) amid much sobbing from Sarah. Doc says just keep bacitracin on the bite and monitor her for signs of Lyme Disease. Great. So then yesterday she and Becky helped Ben rake leaves and then tumbled into the bedroom where I was doing some work in the laptop in my favorite location in the house, recovering from a short but brutal cold. Suddenly Becky said to her, "What's that spot on your neck?" I looked up to see a tick meandering towards her hairline and leaped up with a tissue to grab it. Couldn't see well enough, so we ran into the bathroom with better light, caught the beastie and returned to the bedroom, where Becky pointed out ANOTHER little motherfucker crawling on the bed where Sarah had been sitting. Good Lord. It's early April, in the 40s, though warm enough in Sarah's opinion to merit wearing Crocs with no socks. So now they can never go outside without slathering chemicals on their shoes and feet at the very least, plus full-body bug checks when they come in. We love you, Leafy Suburb.

Dr. Mom had the presence of mind to catch both ticks and preserve them forever on toilet paper covered with clear packing tape. I whipped out the trusty magnifying glass, which we own due to previous adventures in pediatric entomology (see "lice, head: difficulty in purging"). More massive web searches for all things tick-related. Results: I think both were adult deer ticks, one male and one female. More research on tick prevention. Results: Our property has a giant neon sign in Tickese saying "Vacancy - Cable TV - Complimentary Breakfast - Rent by the Hour or Day." Lots of woods, a stone wall near the house, hordes of deer in the neighborhood, etc. The stone wall matters because one thing I learned is that the ticks hitch rides on deer to spread far and wide, but the bugs actually get the infection from mice, who stay local all their lives but are the actual carriers of the bacterium. And mice love to live in stone walls. Next possible moves: Damminix tubes, liquid garlic, Agent Orange maybe...

Me: recovering from cold, now exhausted because I couldn't get to sleep until 2:30 a.m. for some reason, so I had to read a few more chapters of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which is one of the best books I've read in a long time even though I do not care for the mystery genre. I still don't, but this has tons more creative and funny stuff going on than just being a gritty mystery involving an alcoholic cop. I'm curious to know how non-Jewish readers like it. Comments?

Weekly Red Sox check-in...

• The Sox are 7-6, in third place behind Baltimore and Toronto.
• Ortiz is awful (.070, last in the AL, and slugging .140) and J.D. Drew isn't (.353), after a torrid spring and a lousy 2007 (.270, 11 HR, 64 RBI) except the last few weeks of the season.
• Best story of the young season: A New York construction worker who happens to be a lifelong Red Sox fan buried a Red Sox jersey in the concrete of the new Yankee Stadium now being built, in an attempt to slap a curse on the Yankees. Pretty amusing — except the Yankees decided not so much, as they went to considerable trouble to locate and excavate the jersey using jackhammers, and they might press charges against the guy. I may regret saying this, but right now I honestly don't think we need to worry all that much about the Yankees this season, given what we've seen so far (the Sox just took two out of three against them).

Random link

Garfield Minus Garfield. Sartre would approve.