What if I want to copulate, or even just make out, with someone?
Heebie did say you should first fuck Valentine and only then do whatever you want.
Buck and I have a longstanding romantic tradition where on the thirteenth we check in to confirm that our Valentine's Day truce is still in effect, and no one's going to be busting out with any unexpected gestures or gifts or anything. It's a simple tradition, but it makes us happy.
"Whenever I feel bad about being single, I go do whatever I want all the time."
I never had much of a problem going and doing whatever I wanted all the time as a coupled person. It's the damn kids that prevent that. And that's doubly true if you're single with kids.
My mother has always sent me chocolate (this year perfume!) for Valentine's Day. It's always taken the pressure off.
Who'll say no?
Perhaps law enforcement officers, depending on locale. Maybe the hooker, too, if you're particularly snakebit.
2 is even meaner if you put a period instead of a question mark at the end.
I generally try to parlay my birthday's proximity to the 14th into a reprieve from the V-day nonsense. Of course, it's a moot point now that I'm dating a horse, since horses don't have stupid holidays.
1: Is this where I say that holding hands continues to be awesome?
Heh. I gave all sorts of dire warnings about this week to my honey. Between Valentine's Day and my fortieth birthday, this is a high stakes week for him.
(Except that it isn't, because we also arranged for a Valentine's Day truce.)
I don't wish you ill, Josh. Why do you wish me ill?
16: I thought that was one of the foundational values of this blog!
His horse is poisoning him against you.
5 is correct. Luckily, sitting on the couch watching TeenNick is more or less what I'd want to do anyway.
I'm a big fan of the Valentines Day truce. We don't even bother confirming it anymore. I know that if I were to break the truce, she would be sooo pissed off at me.
"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
Something Deus caritas est something.
I tried to extend the Valentine's Day truce to allowing me to go out alone to an improv workshop tonight, but once all the Valentine's and anti-Valentine's stuff hit on Facebook, I wasn't going to be able to actually ditch Mrs. K-sky. A mellow evening on the couch with Downton Abbey and Revenge it shall be. I ain't complaining.
Gallantry silences one, but one is about to run out to meet her again after she finishes her evening thing.
||
I've never been this up close to an insurance company literally killing someone by denying treatment.
Coworker has an oddball thing: some cells from organ A are located on the outer wall of organ B. They've turned cancerous.
The doctors want to treat it using standard treatments for Cancer A. The insurance company is denying claims, because they are saying this is Cancer B, and therefore treating it with these drugs is experimental.
The doctors and spouse have appealed and fought and gone to extreme measures, but she hasn't received treatment for about three or four months now, and she'll probably die soon.
It's so ghastly and cruel, I don't even know.
|>
It was extremely empty at the gym tonight for a Tuesday evening. Took me a second to come up with the almost certainly correct theory.
29: all the action's in the showers?
We got chocolates from the teacher after aikido class (eight dudes).
Which was nice, though I got an elbow in the mouth that I feared for a moment might have put part of my Valentine's Day-related equipment out of action.
If it comes to it, most chocolates you can just suck.
But it turns out you can still pull off a nervous smile?
I'm on my way to a romantic meal, but I'm keeping it real by listening to Rammstein in the car.
35: Have fun, kids! Slip her the tongue!
Also, Betsy Ross sounds upset. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.
It's either that or give her a wet willie. One way or another, get your saliva in her head.
What, spitting in her nose is too old fashioned?
29: all the action's in the showers?
Between this and "frenemeh", you're really on fire today, Sifu.
---
And, jesus, that's awful, Betsy. I'm very relieved to have only another two weeks of being uninsured left, though of course your story is a reminder that just having insurance isn't always enough...
||
Hey heebie, you should get this iphone/ipad music production doohickey, cuz it seems rad.
|>
Oh wait, it's just for iphone. Eh? Never mind.
36: Halford! You know it ought to be HATE BEAK for dates. Come on, man.
sorry for your friend betsy, that's just horrible. I'm in the pain specialist waiting room, paying for this visit out of pocket and then hoping to get a referral from my insurance-approved doctor later. in happier health insurance news, I have to pay $0 for my new year's hospitalization.
Very on-topic, even!-- the woman from Saturday night / Sunday morning replied to my email; we have a date!
Since no one at all in the whole world wants to employ me, even jobs so crappy the ads ask you to really consider whether you have the stamina and reserves of unassailable dignity and financial resources to undergo the horrors of employment before applying, I spent my Valentine's Day writing a really labored and special application for probably the greatest institution of higher learning in the whole world for the precise thing I work on. If you're going to die by a thousand cuts, might as well have one of them come from an actual sword. Yay!
Good luck, AWB. I can say in all honesty that any institution would be lucky to have you.
Less important: our V-day marathon of Downton Abbey is annoying the fuck out of me.
Also, yeah, I've heard the OP line before. I wrote out all the reasons why it isn't funny, but I deleted them. You're welcome.
Thanks, V-dub. Maybe someone will accidentally put my application in the wrong pile and I'll get to visit there.
the nurse had to weigh me and I am fat. who gets fucking bedridden with no appetite and gains weight? this is total bullshit. the doc himself is incredibly nice and thorough and actually takes my problem seriously and is prescribing OxyContin so I don't kill myself in the next 5 days. if that doesn't work then what the fuck infinity. also I'm fat and I hate everything. additionally he is putting me on topamax which has 1,000 stupid side effects including...making you fat, ha! ALSO IT IS TOO BRIGHT HERE MAKE IT STOP KYHXBAI.
best luck AWB! you absolutely merit an awesome job and it is a testament to the total idiocy of the job market that you don't have one.
why am I pointlessly obssessing over my weight when I am bedridden and ill with things no one understands? I blame the patriarchy.
Yeah, I just knew if I waited long enough I'd get blamed. Good luck to you both anyway. And to Betsy's friend. Jeez!
I mean, I look fine. I look like a doomed doskoyevsky heroine. it just turns out to be not that much fun. delicately coughing up blood into an embroidered handkerchief: overrated.
That "Die young and leave a good-looking corpse" thing is over-rated, Al. Keep on.
Well, I had a lovely Valentine's Day and was thanked by somebody for "a wonderful Valentine's Day," so ... actually, I don't know what follows from that. I just wanted to tell you reprobates because I am so unaccustomedly, revoltingly happy. We even exchanged modest but nicely meaningful gifts.*
* Of course, her gift to me was something that she knew I would like and my gift to her was something that I like and hoped she would interpret as a gesture of personal openness,** but the latter was because I could not find anywhere in goddamned Manhattan the little gift that I wanted to give.
** I am very self-centered. But trying to be good.
fuck Valentine's day and go do whatever you want.
I could do that, but wallowing in self pity helps nobody. Especially after reading #28; so glad to live in a still civilised country.
YES, WONDERFULLY CIVILISED, THE DUTCH.
I hope you feel better, Alameida. If it's any consolation, I too have gained weight when essentially never leaving my bed, but it wasn't much of a mystery in my case, since I was eating shitloads of ice cream and yogurt with granola.
That's one thing I miss about HD: the awesome, and relatively cheap, yogurt & granola. SO GOOD.
64: not always brave, true, but always civilised.
28 is incredibly sad. So sorry for your friend, Betsy.
62 however is delightful. Keep up the good work, Flip and Josh.
Especially after reading #28; so glad to live in a still civilised country.
So can all the British move in after Lansley finishes with the NHS?
28 is incredible. Have the insurance company examined this person? No. They're guessing, on a matter of life and death. Somebody should go to prison forever.
why am I pointlessly obssessing over my weight when I am bedridden and ill with things no one understands
because weight is a less frightening thing to worry about?
62: so unaccustomedly, revoltingly happy
Clearly, the Mineshaft has failed. Where's the entertainment potential in happiness?
I can only hope that someday soon, in an unguarded moment, you accidentally call her "Lunchy".
28 is terrible. Aren't there still some legal remedies at this point? Even in America, insurance companies can't literally kill someone without opening themselves up to lawsuits.
62 is wonderful. You should introduce Lunchy to us. Have her comment here as Lunchy.
I don't know what follows from that.
Yes you do.
They are talking of lawsuits, but it's very hollow, because she's still alive and suffering.
Not hollow in the sense that they won't follow through; just that it's not the center of anyone's attention at the moment and it's a sorry consolation prize.
74.1: Surely as a philosopher you're aware of the distinction between "killing someone" and "choosing to allow someone to be killed".
To commemorate Valentine's Day Sir K took a nice nap while I watched Frontline: The Violence Interruptors (a documentary by the same guy who made "Hoop Dreams") on PBS. I highly recommend both nice naps and that documentary.
Oh, I wanted to watch that but slept instead. Monday night's documentary, Slavery by Another Name, was powerful and pertinent to a lot that's going on in modern US prisons.
OT: Has anyone else seen the luxury vending machine at the Hudson Hotel? It looks really cool. I almost bought some licorice toothpaste.
78: But I'm also a consequentialist, so I have a deeply rooted sense that the distinction is bullshit.
78, 82: I always thought "choosing" and "allowing" were chimeras at best in that context.
If you don't stop being a consequenialist, I'm going to drive a trolley over this guy.
I do not negotiate with consequentialists.
re: 84
Is he fat? And an organ donor?
81: I haaaate the Hudson Hotel. It's ugly, unpleasant, and the only place outside of Times Square that exclusively seems to play host to obnoxious families of loud tourists. My exbf's brother gave him a gift certificate to eat there, and we had such an unpleasant experience that when, the next year, he gave another gift certificate, for the very nice Café Sabarsky, it took us a year to work up the will to go. (Café Sabarsky is amazing! The coffee is fantastic!)
Congrats on your VD date, Flip. Sounds really lovely!
Holding hands can't cause that. Nor can the toilet seat.
28, 76: So horrible. I don't know much about Betsy's state, but here while there might be a road to a lawsuit it would certainly lead through several (3, I think, depending on the insurance company) levels of internal appeals at the insurer and then another one at the state regulatory level before you can file suit in an actual court. Make sure the word EMERGENCY appears in all caps and bold face on every piece of paper that gets filed, too--the fact that she's still alive and suffering means there's (possibly) more to fight for here than just money.
My folks stayed at the Hudson on one visit here in the 1-2 year period after Number/Other-Number when you could get crazy cheap accommodations on expedia or whatever. We found it some combination of hilarious and terrible and appealing--I mean it does or did have a feel of chic about it, at least to us, but then there was also a window between the shower and the bedroom that cracked us all up.
The vending machine is funny. There should be more non-standard vending machines perhaps. Umbrella vending machines in NYC. Gun vending machines in Texas. Oh maybe a vending machine in Williamsburg with well-worn copies of books one ought to have read but hasn't really.
re: 92
The book machine is an excellent idea. Perhaps it could ask you a couple of leading judgmental questions before pronouncing on what you ought to read, and then dispensing copies? And every time it dispenses 'Catcher in the Rye' a little flash-up warning that 'your fingerprints and DNA have been recorded and forwarded to the FBI'.
Stylish hotels are pretty much the same under the skin -- distracted service, mediocre food, dim hallways, drunk tourists who pay less attention than they should to the man patiently waiting for them to get out of the way to the escalator -- but I liked the vending machine.
90: We were watching something-or-other recently and a youngish character made a joke about VD which struck me as false. I'd be surprised if The Kids Today have ever heard VD instead of STD.
I'm all about keeping the kids informed of the history of language as it pertains to things growing on genitals.
91, cont.: Oh, and one other piece of generic advice for Betsy's friend from when I used to do this kind of thing for a living: the fact that the insurer won't pay for it doesn't *always* mean that you can't get treatment. If it's needed, you can always do it and then figure out how to pay for it later. Medical providers can be surprisingly humane about payment plans and even debt forgiveness for people who can't pay. And then the worst case scenario is bankruptcy, of course, which is shitty but might be less shitty than the alternative. Good luck, anyway.
90: We were watching something-or-other recently and a youngish character made a joke about VD which struck me as false. I'd be surprised if The Kids Today have ever heard VD instead of STD.
This is correct. I'm almost 29 and only ever heard the phrase "V.D." from my parents.
92, 93: there's a vending machine at a used bookstore near us that dispenses plastic eggs into which other customers of the bookstore have deposited secret messages, which shut up okay it's a nice neighborhood it's not like you think
I wonder if the vending machine ever has that thing where the coil has turned juuuust enough past the copy of Catcher in the Rye you ordered that if you shake it a little, you also get the Ferrari rental to fall out.
93: In Williamsburg, some of the judgmental questions would be rhetorical. "Really?" Yes. "Really?" I said yes.
98: And that was the most awkward Monopoly night ever.
100: "God damn you! Give me that Ferrari rental, you heap of Philippe Starck's shit! Give me back my son Visa card!"
Oh, and one other piece of generic advice for Betsy's friend from when I used to do this kind of thing for a living: the fact that the insurer won't pay for it doesn't *always* mean that you can't get treatment. If it's needed, you can always do it and then figure out how to pay for it later.
This sounds very solid to me. If there's good potential for a lawsuit, then the doctor/hospital may be able to hold off on payment until a judgment. Much better to be using the proceeds to pay off medical bills than to remember her after she's dead.
I wonder what sort of poetry Wallace Stevens would have written if he had entered the sector during the era of employment-linked medical insurance, rather than property & casualty coverage.
92: There should be more non-standard vending machines perhaps.
I just ran across this link (10 weirdest vending machines) the other day. Can't vouch that they are all real. Encouragingly, a state college (Shippensburg) here in PA has a vending machine offering Plan B and pregnancy tests along with condoms and more "standard" health items. (Unless the recent spate of publicity changes that.)
I think they're already in palliative treatment. But maybe not; I don't really know under what circumstances they do chemo and radiation even if the cancer is considered fatal.
We're all pondering our own mortality.
I know, right?
I'm sitting at home waiting for the !%$@#!%$@#!%$@#!%$@# UPS dude to fail to show (hopefully) before I have to go to class.
Also I'm occupying myself by runnning multiple regressions in SPSS. I still hate SPSS, but I hate it much less than I did last semester. Go figure.
I never use SPSS unless somebody makes me (i.e. I'm only consulting and the person doing the actual work doesn't know how to use anything else).
I never use SPSS unless somebody makes me
Well right, ditto.
TOTAL INDEPENDENCE IS TOTALLY AWESOME!
except when it isn't.
I want someone to complain about.
I think I last used SPSS in 1974. It was very intuitive on punchcards... aka I how learned to love SAS.
114: oddly, the interface hasn't changed at all.
Anyhow for my own analyses I've been using Matlab, although I'm thinking I should switch to scipy because it seems like it skews hipper and younger. Or, rather, because I have too many programming languages in my workflow and it's confusing.
Statstalk: unfogged comes alive!
107: I'm still here being sick.
28: I feel like this is why I have to keep my anger inside of me where it can grow and fester. 'Cause when that shit happens in my life, I want to be talking Semtex, not lawsuits.
I'm not sure I've ever done the Valentine's Day thing. Maybe once? It's like going to the Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day -- lotta assholes and disappointment. Not as much vomit, probably. How did all that vomit get in my stomach last night, anyway?
It's too bad we can't all just down tools every time there's a feast day, like they could in the apocryphal middle ages. There'd be a lot more time and energy for boinking.
maybe a vending machine in Williamsburg with well-worn copies of books one ought to have read but hasn't really.
This is essentially Myles na gCopaleen's WAMAA Book Reading Service, mechanised.
They made us learn, um, I guess SPSS, one of those programs, in grad school in an almost explicitly "learn this so we can keep our reputation as a skientific program" hand-wavy, superficial way. I remember exactly nothing about it.
I never used SPSS on punch card, but I did use the mainframe one. You punched in your code and then walked across campus to get you print-out on very wide paper with green stripes.
I assume that, where 115 was sort of a joke, the syntax is still exactly the same as it was on the mainframe version? Sure looks like it.
And the dialog boxes have the "stick all the options on there someplace. It doesn't matter where" flavor of early winframe GUIs.
121: So far as I can recall, but I can't recall much. Windows SPSS arrives about two months after I learned mainframe SPSS.
122: Have you tried SAS's attempts at GUI? It is a good thing that it is pointless because otherwise it would be abominable.
Same comment about SAS. Why would you ever want a SAS GUI?
Well, at least that explains why so many people say they "know SAS" and can't even code a simple PROC CONTENTS.
120: I had a job doing that in high school. No idea what I was doing, and neither did the prof I was programming for. And the paper still got published.
126: You wouldn't. But somebody in marketing knows they are selling to people who think they do want a SAS GUI, so somebody made a really shitty one. It has a blackjack game that isn't bad if your employer removed the solitaire.
126: if you're going to use a programming language to analyze your data, why would you pick a horrible, ancient one that costs a zillion dollars?
I'm almost 29
Goodness. It's like we've spent a quarter of your life together.
Looking at R code online, it seems to be basically Stata code, but slightly fucked-up.
It's horribly lacking in semicolons.
130: What are some better languages that don't choke on datasets with billions of observations?
If you're someone who does statistics every day, you can get used to using a programming language. If you do statistics a couple times a month, using a programming language will never, ever, be intuitive, for the majority of people who otherwise have never had a reason to use a programming language. Those people, like myself, look desperately for anything with a GUI.
135: And use semicolons.
136: Stata.
136: Interesting. MY current clash is with databases and database people. What an odd way to view the world. Of course programming is also an odd way to view the world, so I can't really talk.
I am bummed that knowing how to make a good query is becoming a VERY IMPORTANT THING if you want to get along in the world. I resisted spreadsheets as long as I could, and now I have to learn inner and outer joins?!
knowing how to make a good query is becoming a VERY IMPORTANT THING
I'm happy to hear that. SQL is a wonderful tool for a lot of purposes.
Re: spss, stata, &c.: I thought R was what the cool kids were using?
We are all RDF-tastic at my place. Which is a pain in the arse when you end up going through convoluted loops to do things that would be an easy move in an SQL database. Or so it seems to me as a relative outsider [I'm running my first project that had to interact more heavily with the semantic web type stuff that my colleagues have been doing for a while].
If 140 is true, this may mark the first time ever that I number among the cool kids. So it seems unlikely, even though R really is great. (Cosma uses it! So it must be.) Getting better, too, as the graphics get increasingly powerful, especially for incorporating GIS data. Snarkout has been trying to steer me towards scipy, I think on grounds of greater speed, but I've yet to cave investigate.
You can't spell "Hitler" without 'R'.
I'm actually trying to debug a SQL query at the moment. It's run fine for years but, with one specific set of data, it's returning an extra row of data that I don't think it should.
I'll get it figured out.
Betsy, do not know where you are located, but it occurs to me that I should have mentioned that I do have an extended family member who has worked and advocated in that area of law for years, and is well tapped into the national community of law practice around "experimental treatment" insurance denials. He generally has good insight with regard to either local lawyers (for trying to force the coverage, not necessarily to recover $$ afterward) or more generalized support groups for folks in that situation.
It sounds like they have already tried a lot of this, but feel free to email (mypseud gmail) with any info or just your location and I can see if he has any pertinent potential contacts.
Can't we talk about sex or death or something?
Statistically speaking, it is probable that every one of us will die. Not sure what the probability of having sex is, though.
If you can donate your body to science, I don't see why you can't donate it to necrophilia.
143: I think 1430 is true. The definition of "cool kids" gets squirrelly when the modifier is "of statistics".
150: Louis CK concurs (can't find a link because of his stupid befriend-everybody-and-be-awesome-and-they'll-buy-the-thing strategy).
It's not SQL, it's the server or the layer that emulates one. There are lots of operations for which working SQL requires that you understand the server's defects and then code around them. In a shitty environment.
Really, a file system with support for structured records and indexing would allow much better ways around the common problems.
With the freedom that comes with my new job, I'm having my daughter design logos for some utility programs I'm writing/customizing. MOVR is gonna be a Luigi-like bulldozer with a face, and Chomper is going to be patterned after that ball and chain barky dog thing from Nintendo. I'm thinking I may need a scheduler program or script for keeping the batch processing going in the correct-sized spreadsheets. Do you have any ideas for a scheduler?
In the end, I spent valentine's day dealing with gastroenteritis. Fun!
It sounds like they have already tried a lot of this, but feel free to email (mypseud gmail) with any info or just your location and I can see if he has any pertinent potential contacts.
Done.
157: Did you eventually poop toast?
Nosflow, you'll always be my wittle pooptoast.
145.2: I'll get it figured out.
There you go! That's the spirit that has launched a cumulative 10 (100? [your estimate here]) billion man-hours of work to build mankind's current computing environment.
There you go!
I did get it figured out, actually. There was one spot in the query where it was referencing the wrong table in the join but (for reasons too long to explain here) that problem only caused errors with very specific data sets.
Non-specific data sets are easier to work with.
Ugh, all this is reminding me that I'm going to have to start using Access again soon.
155: 156: Thanks. Those are good ideas, but while I do have some freedom, I need to keep this in the "Nintendo-cute" box.
Non-specific data sets are easier to work with.
Touche.
It only causes problems in certain, relatively rare, situations.
(and now I'm imagining what a vague data set would look like and am very happy that I don't have to deal with that)
The cool kids in my book; the content vital, the aesthetics lame.
I get the impression that the first three-quarters of every popular stats language has been patched into R, and that most R programmers write chimerae. I try to sweep it under the rug with RPy, which helps. I suppose there could be a fork to a rigorously architected version -- APL is about due for a comeback.
169.last: In my experience APL a had a relatively high percentage of totally-whacked "I'm fucking right, and the world, and my employer, and you, and any possible future computer language designer are all dead wrong, and when I say 'dead wrong' I mean I'm willing to leave the impression that I might take action to insure that outcome" advocates. And so the following from the APL Wikipedia article reads to me as "Please don't hunt me down and kill me".
Perhaps accounting for its lack of mainstream appeal, APL's characteristics have always led to much criticism of the language. As always, such complaints may arise from misconceptions, have origins in distant APL history and no longer be relevant today, or they may have some degree of validity.
The cool kids in my book; the content vital, the aesthetics lame.
That looks like a very good idea.
NIST does boring, painstaking, necessary stuff. NIST writes scientific infrastructure. NIST is probably being defunded.
Under the hands of an APL programmer, any key may be lethal.
Deep in the warrens of NIST, an APL programmer...
I always feel so left out by the stats discussions. Whatever limited statistics I do is managed by klugey combinations of Python scripts and Mathematica notebooks.
173: Not one goddamn thing wrong with that. In my book, anyway.
I always feel so left out by the stats discussions. Whatever limited statistics I do is managed by klugey combinations of Python scripts and Mathematica notebooks my subordinates.
91, cont.: Oh, and one other piece of generic advice for Betsy's friend from when I used to do this kind of thing for a living: the fact that the insurer won't pay for it doesn't *always* mean that you can't get treatment. If it's needed, you can always do it and then figure out how to pay for it later. Medical providers can be surprisingly humane about payment plans and even debt forgiveness for people who can't pay. And then the worst case scenario is bankruptcy, of course, which is shitty but might be less shitty than the alternative. Good luck, anyway.
Worth trying if available, but for very expensive procedures (outside of the ER) hospitals and other medical providers will very often literally demand proof of insurance coverage or proof of personal ability to pay before moving forward with treatment.
176: Yeah. I stood in a line adjacent to a guy from Texas who had driven up to the Mayo Clinic in MN with a sick son for some treatment and was being told his piss-poor medical insurance would not cover the treatment. I don't think this was a case of elective surgery, either.
All I know is that he was really pissed and the nice lady kept saying variations on "I know, I know, but there is nothing we can do about that." He was mostly pissed at his insurance, though, and he didn't really take it out on the lady, who was at least offering sympathy.
I suppose this is the thread to say that my FIL was just diagnosed with colon cancer. Thank heavens for Medicare.
Sorry to hear that. I hope that it goes well for him.
We don't know much of anything but it looks bad.
Oof, sorry to hear that, LB. Somewhat relatedly, my dad turned out not to have stomach cancer after after all--it's esophageal cancer instead. So that sucks, but at least he's been much more like himself in the last month than he was in the month before. Generally, it's been a Miracles of Modern Medicine experience for me: I have no doubt he'd have died in December if not for the emergency surgery to insert a feeding tube, which is what's keeping him going now while his ability to ingest food on his own is still really low.
