Music Monday, Pteridophyta Edition

Reader, you may recall that internet radio station Pandora introduced me to Iron and Wine. Since loving Boy with a Coin, I bought the album The Shepherd's Dog and am now grooving on the lovely Resurrection Fern.

Though I couldn't dig up the band video on interwebs, here's the song paired with some enterprising You Tube user's photos:



On a weekend hike ran into a number of ferns, here's one for your nature lovin'pleasure:



On a completely unrelated note, I was torn after reading this article about the insane amounts of sodium in some of Denny's most popular offerings, subject of a new lawsuit in New Jersey. One on hand, don't we all know by now that most restaurant fare is packed with sodium and fat, let alone Denny's whose very specialty is cured breakfast meats? On the other hand, this is so beyond the pale, with some entrees having nearly four times the amount of sodium an adult should have in one day. But what next? Warning notices at the county fair? The deep fried Snickers you are about to eat is battered DEATH.

But labeling does work, at least, it works for me, if "work"= total buzz kill. Peet's recently started offering nutrition information and after studiously ignoring it for weeks I learned that my favorite breakfast treat, the Cream Currant Scone, has 480 calories. I conveniently blanked out the grams of fat. Needless to say, it's one thing to know theoretically that something probably isn't good for you and another thing entirely to see just how bad it is in black ad white. I haven't had once since. Too bad the fat-free oatmeal apricot hockey pucks don't look more appealing.

Oy and Then ...

Reader, preeminent African-American scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested on his own front porch for allegedly breaking into his own house last week. NOT GOOD. Then James Hannaham from Salon writes that the incident has made him "proud of America" because Gates was only arrested and not actually lynched by the police? Umm ... hooray? You can read more about this fiasco here and here.

Let's take a break from racial profiling and cancer to watch a clip from 30 Rock. This particular segment has got to be one of the damn funniest moments of this show and one of the many times I am absolutely mesmerized by Alec Baldwin:

Occam Applies/Public Service Announcement

What it is, reader!

Since I am scared shitless of cancer right now I took my pale, easily-burned, freckly ass to the dermatologist last week for a mole check. Interestingly when I scoured interwebs to find some cancer screening links I found several sites that were extremely meh about routine skin cancer screening, most notably Sloan-Kettering. But whatevs, reader! I'm all hypervigilant and am bringing my message to you come hell or high water.

So, back at the derm, you get nekkid and the doctor looks at all your skin, using some thingy that sort of looks like a mini telescope, asking about family history of melanoma (no), sun exposure (yes), and sunburns (hells yes).

He decided to biopsy a mole on my back and sadly since I have never seen it I can't tell you what it looked like, except it had "irregular borders." After slicing it off (getting the anesthetic was the only pain I felt) he threw it into a little jar. For a moment I considered asking him if I could see it so I could report back to you but then worried seeing my bloody disembodied mole might make me pass-outy. Work was expecting me and I didn't have time to linger on the fainting couch.

All is fine and I don't need to go back for two years unless I find something funky. Kind of like when Heather Armstrong from Dooce did, but hers is funnier. She's got lots of skin cancer stories that I am too lazy to link here but you'll see them in her post.

Getting Sliced by Occam's Razor/Public Service Announcement

What it is, reader! Hope everyone's weekend was filled with thrills and chills or you at least finished the laundry.

Reader, have you heard of Occam's Razor? If not, you're surely familiar with the everyday translation: the simplest explanation that takes all the facts into account is usually the right one.

This is the theory hypochondriacs struggle with but Occam's Razor was made for you: in the absence of any other symptom, a headache is not brain cancer, but simply the need for a glass of water, a better night's sleep, maybe an aspirin.

But once in a while, really not all that often, the simplest explanation is not the right one at all.

And so we move on to the public service announcement component to this post, oral cancer awareness! How FUN!! Oral cancers in the young and healthy are on the rise. According to the Oral Cancer Foundation there was an 11% jump in cases in 2007 alone, thought to be due to a strain of HPV. Remember HPV? We talked about HPV a while back, when it leads to cervical cancer but HPV gets up to other mischief in your noggin, when mischief = sucky cancer.

So, reader: ask your dentist to screen you (which s/he should be doing anyway), don't ignore sores in your mouth that won't heal or any of these symptoms either.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. DUH.

Disclaimer: Sorry if this post freaks your shit out.


I can haz oral cancer screening?

Thank You, Maker: Volume I

Dahlias


Hebrew National Hot Dogs (Sorry, couldn't help myself)

When Josephine comes running into the bathroom while I'm on the toilet and stands on my foot while I pet her.


Late afternoon sun

Chocolate covered frozen bananas

Those disgusting/compelling melty mints with the jelly center served in bowls at east coast diners.

How about you?

Free Professional Critic from the Shackles of Monopoly

Reader, saints be praised! The federal government is finally starting to get concerned over cell phone exclusivity. That's just fancy talk for the conundrum folks are in when they balance the lure of the iphone with the epic suck of AT+T coverage, to name a recent and high profile example.

The exclusivity doesn't make much sense when compared to other industries. PG&E will let the electricity flow no matter what kind of lighting I buy, even the cheapo Ikea lamps. The cable company will take your money no matter what brand of TV you have. You get the point.

I've had AT+T wireless for almost five years on the sadly misguided advice of someone who said the service was great! It is alas, terrible. I drop calls all the time, reliably, in the same places in San Francisco, which is a puny seven square miles. My work cell phone through Verizon never drops calls.

But then I went and bought an iphone which I love and continued my deal with the devil for two more years, dropping calls in these same places, but paying a lot more for the pleasure. What can I say? The iphone rulez.

You can check out known cell dead zones here.

And apropos of nothing, a video of polar bear Knut back when he was a stinkin' adorable little cub and his keeper, who has since died, sadly. That is redonkulous cute, reader.

Monday Miscellany

What it is, reader! Hope everyone had a safe 4th with all digits intact. Things were all good over here at Professional Critic. Though a minute ago one of my neighbors got hauled off by the popo as he was unable to stop screaming, "I'll kill you, motherfuckers," for the better part of a half hour in that slurred nearly incoherent way of the drug addled and/or deeply disturbed. It's a half way house of some kind so police visits are not at all unusual though not usually this dramatic.

In lighter news, I have started feeding my furry miscreants a raw diet. We started off with a chicken salmon formula, and since it is one of the more reasonably priced varieties, they wanted to have nothing to do with it. Now they eat THE BUNNY and everyone seems happier. It does take some getting used to, you know, seeing blood pool in their bowls but my main reason for doing this has been achieved: the poo no longer stinks. It almost doesn't smell at all. I don't understand why this is, but since the litterbox is in my kitchen, I'm happy. Oh yeah, the health benefits, yada yada, since the stupidly expensive kibble I was buying these fools wasn't good enough.

Here is the cute baby animal du jour, brought to you by our friends at Fuck You, Penguin, and it's a doozy:

I can haz bebeh otter?