Stupidest Boyfriend Ever.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Exubera. What Kind Of Wuss Finds This Product Appealing?

Never underestimate the whininess of those who have to inject insulin. Year after year I have had to listen to 400 pound mouth breathing, saliva dripping cretins go on and on about how fate has dealt them the cruel fate of being a diabetic. I'm not talking about the type I's here, who were born with a whacked pancreas. The type II diabetics though, have destroyed their pancreas with years spent eating ho-ho's on the couch watching re-runs of The Jeffersons while doing things like taking the riding mower to the mailbox to avoid the possibility of exercise. Now they are sick and they are not going to let you forget it. I wonder what any woman who's ever been through childbirth thinks when they hear the lazy diabetic sloths complain about the pin pricks they have to put themselves through. Hell, I knew a chick once in college who cut up her legs with razors for fun. Granted, I think she's in an institution now, but she's living proof that the little pinch of an insulin injection is very low on life's list of things to complain about. Especially if the alternative is a diabetic coma.

Pfizer looks at their wussiness however, and sees a marketing opportunity. Introducing Exubera, a breakthrough in insulin therapy for diabetes treatment, and by "breakthrough" I mean "no advantage in blood sugar control over what is already on the market." The Exubera difference is that you inhale your insulin instead of putting it under your skin. Here's a picture of Exubera in action:



Now who wouldn't want a piece of that when the alternative is discreetly slipping away to use an insulin auto pen? Especially when this bong DOESN'T WORK ANY BETTER.

Users of Exubera will also be taking their insulin, which needs to be dosed precisely, and introducing the variables of sneezing, coughing, breathing rate and lung congestion into the equation. They will have to be monitored for any decrease in lung function, and they will be trusting that the industrial-regulatory complex that brought us Baycol, Bextra, Duract, Posicor, Propulsid, Tequin, Rezulin and Vioxx has taken the necessary safety precautions to avoid the possibility of something like an "Exubera-lung" syndrome surprise in the years to come.

Exubera won't eliminate insulin injections for everyone who uses it. Some people will be sucking on that plastic tube AND injecting insulin.

Did I mention that Exubera DOESN'T WORK ANY BETTER than what's already on the market?

So if you're a whiny-ass, limp wristed wussy who's on insulin therapy, by all means be sure to ask your doctor about Exubera. I have a feeling you won't be running to the office though. You'll probably be taking your riding mower.

I've Discovered My Life's Ambition. I Must Learn To Eat Grass.

I almost wrote the Unabomber once. I wanted to learn from him, not how to make bombs, blow stuff up and not get caught for years, but how he managed to live out there in that little cabin of his in the middle of nowhere, Montana, and not starve to death. If you work in retail pharmacy and tell me you have never fantasized about putting as much distance as possible between you and every other human on the planet, I know you're lying. Consider that I never particularly cared for humans in the first place, and you can see why if you take out the violence, Ted Kaczynski was living the life of my dreams.

Unfortunately I have to eat, and the skills I have that would enable me to live off the land are very close to zero, which led me to ponder picking the brain of the Unabomber. I figured he probably didn't have much to do these days, but in the end, I decided it's probably a good idea to try to avoid things that get you on lists compiled by federal law enforcement. So the idea went dormant, along with my plans for becoming a chess grandmaster, learning the bass guitar, and writing a Broadway musical based on the life of Iggy Pop. Until today that is, when I saw a herd of cows.

"God damn cows" I said to myself as I drove past, consumed with jealousy as I went past them on the way to work. Even knowing I would be slaughtered in the end, I would totally trade their life of leisurely standing around a field all day for mine of listening to the great unwashed masses sing the praises of stool softeners. Then I realized. The cows were standing around all day.....eating grass. Not only eating grass mind you, but meeting all their energy and nutritional needs while doing so. Grass is everywhere. If I could unlock the cow's secret. I could live anywhere. I could live.....in a cabin....in the middle of nowhere.

To those of you who say cows don't have much in the way of energy needs, I would submit the buffalo, also an eater of plants, or the antelope. Of course I would have to keep the historical human ability to keep predators at bay, which is the weak point of most herbivores, but we put a man on the moon for Chrissakes, are you telling me we can't figure out how to digest a friggin plant? If the chlorophyll turned me green, I'd still be OK with that.

This day I have seen the future, or at least the key to my future liberation, and it is grass. At least until they start charging for air.

A Shameless Plug For My Favorite Newspaper Column.

News Of The Weird. It's All True. It's All Weird. Click here and read it regularly. Just in case you need more than the word of someone who calls himself the Drugnazi, I'll cut and paste a couple teasers.

First the frustrating:

Wheelchair-confined Richard Paey committed almost exactly the same violations of Florida prescription drug laws that radio personality Rush Limbaugh did, with a different result: Limbaugh's sentence, in May, was addiction treatment, and Paey's, in 2004, was 25 years in prison. Both illegally possessed large quantities of painkillers for personal use, which Paey defiantly argued was (and will be) necessary to relieve nearly constant pain from unsuccessful spinal surgeries after an auto accident, but which Limbaugh admitted was simply the result of addiction. (In fact, if Limbaugh complies with his plea bargain, his conviction will be erased.) Paey's sentence now rests with a state Court of Appeal. [Tampa Tribune, 2-8-06]

This next part isn't from the News Of The Weird. It's from the public domain:

"Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
-- Rush Limbaugh. October 5, 1995 show transcript.

I'll bet Rush talks a lot about how he's grown as a person since he uttered those words. Evidently just not when I'm listening.

News Of The Weird usually isn't frustrating though. It's usually just entertaining. Like this:

In a May dispatch from Atlanta on Southerners’ notoriously unnutritious, fat-laden cuisine, a Chicago Tribune reporter watered readers’ mouths with descriptions of the “hamdog” and the “Luther” (prized dishes of Mulligan’s restaurant in Decatur, Ga.), which are, respectively, “a half-pound of hamburger meat wrapped around a hot dog, which is deep-fried and served on a hoagie topped with chili, bacon and a fried egg,” and “a half-pound burger served with bacon and cheese on a Krispy Kreme doughnut.” The 11 states from Washington, D.C., to Florida, west to Texas, have the nation’s highest mortality rate from strokes, but, said a University of Mississippi professor, “Food is a strong emblem of identity for Southerners,” uniquely shared across racial lines."

There's nothing I can add here. This one stands on it's own.

A Tribute To Phar-Mor, A Company "Phar" Ahead Of It's Time.

Ambition. Greed. Hubris. The inevitable downfall. Millions of dollars of investors and employees money vaporized. Before Enron, before WorldCom, before Martha Stewart was making tastefully colored shank cozies in the federal pen, there was Phar Mor and basketball playing midgets. Today the drugnazi recounts a tale of corporate greed that seems to have found it's way to the moldy backroom of history.

I almost took a job with Phar-Mor when I graduated from college. I was familiar with the place from periodic frat boy expeditions to the local store in search of incredibly cheap crap. Before the spawn of Sam Walton had spread to most of the country, Phar-Mor had mastered the concept of "Stack 'em deep and sell it cheap" Their drugstores were the size of an above average grocery store, packed to the gills with rock-bottom priced shampoo, school supplies, music, videos, dildos, and every type of over the counter medicinal remedy. (I made one thing in that list up, can you tell what it might be?) Their pharmacies were pill pushing sweatshops, but they offered the highest salaries around, which was all I was looking for in an employer at the time. Micky Monus, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the company, was a business genius, building a 300 store empire that offered low prices for customers, high salaries for employees, and profits for investors.

Is anyone's "too good to be true" detector going off yet?

Turns out they offered two out of three. Profits existed only in a fictional set of books kept by Monus and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Finn. Millions of dollars that were being borrowed to finance the chains growth were being used to pay off suppliers in a pyramid scheme that collapsed in 1992. Phar-Mor filed for bankruptcy. Finn was sentenced to 33 months in prison. Monus' first trial ended in a hung jury. Rumors of his alleged mob ties only gained credibility when a juror in that trial admitted he was offered a bribe in exchange for a not guilty vote. Monus was retried, convicted, and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. Phar-Mor went out of business in 2002 and people had to start paying full retail price for dildos once again.

Unlike Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers however, Mickey Monus wasn't fraudulently accumulating dollars just to see how high he could run up his personal scoreboard. He had a plan. He was going to become a titan of the sporting world. He took around 10 million dollars that he pilfered from Phar-Mor and used it to finance The World Basketball League. An organization which, and unlike the part about the dildos I'm not making this up, limited the height of it's players to 6 feet 5 inches.

This is the part that fascinates me. On what possible level was a height-restricted basketball league supposed to work exactly? Was there something about shorter men that was supposed to make me more likely to buy a ticket? Seems to me that the shorter the players, the closer you would have to sit to see the action, thereby limiting the number of good seats available. You couldn't promote it as a way to see the stars of the future, because as tall as a 6 foot 5 person may seem to you and me, Shaq scrapes them off the bottom of his shoes at the end of every day. Yet something about the concept made Monus risk everything to try and make it work.

A friend of mine shoplifted a Nirvana CD during one of those college Phar-Mor shopping expeditions. I feel so not guilty about never turning him in.

My Brushes With Greatness.

When I was in 6th grade, Ted Kennedy shook my hand. He was running for president at the time, but I was more interested in one of my classmates who had just sprouted a pair of boobs, who was standing next to what I learned later was Ted's brothers grave.

In 2000, Eddie Vedder pointed out a shirt I was wearing to a crowd of probably around 30,000 people. The shirt said "Nader For President" (Special note to Al Gore: I'm sorry.......so so sorry. You have no idea how sorry.)

Those experiences pale in comparison to tonight though, when I filled a prescription for an honest to God famous person. HIPPA privacy laws work against me here, but I'm surprised there weren't paparazzi around trying to get a picture of famous cellulite to make the trailer trash feel better about themselves. While I was counting and pouring and licking and sticking, I thought of what might happen if I "accidentally" filled the Rx with some sort of poison. Sure I would most likely end up in jail, but my immortality would be secured as the answer to a trivia question. If I played my cards right, maybe I could end up with some sort of book deal. Then I would be famous! ME! People would be looking at ME when I went to the drugstore!

Fortunately for me, and the famous person, I saw where this cycle was headed, and meekly handed over a bottle of 30 hydroxyzine to a personal assistant.

From The "Actual Conversation With An Actual Customer" File

Me: Giant Corporate Pharmacy, may I help you?"

Customer: "Yes, I'm calling for two reasons. First is to get a prescription refill, second is to tell you about a letter I got from Blue Cross saying they would no longer cover it"

Me: "So you have new insurance?"

Them: "No."

Me: "OK......You're paying for it yourself?"

Them: "No, I want it billed to my Blue Cross"

Me: "The same Blue Cross that sent you the letter?"

Them: "Yes"

I paused for a few seconds to see if it would sink in. It didn't, and another little piece of me died.

Other People's Stupidity Can Be The Bridge Of Understanding Between Cultures

I used to work with a tech named Brenda who was dumb. Just dumb as a goddamn rock. She had a good heart and really did try, but many a time her lack of brainpower made me want to beat my head against the wall until there was nothing but a bloody pulp above my shoulders. She really liked turtles, and I once tried to get her a job at the zoo to get her out of my face forever. Then I felt bad because a turtle never has really done anything bad to me. (Brenda's not her real name, I have a policy of not dragging people into the blog unless they deserve it, like Lloyd DuPlantis Jr. of Gray, Louisiana, a pharmacist who says that birth control pills are "the most dangerous chemical on the market" because he would rather tell an outrageous lie than to admit he hates women.)

The other pharmacist I worked with at the time was from Vietnam. He came over sometime in the 80's after having grown up there. One day we were talking and he tells me that it's conventional wisdom in Vietnam that the average American GI who was there during the war was.... hmmmm.....I think the phrase translated to something like "not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer", and that many people there have trouble understanding how the US became the only superpower when the only Americans they've ever seen seemed barely capable of walking upright.

"Well we didn't send a representative sample of people over there" I say. "The only people who went either wanted to go or were too thick to get themselves into college at the time."

The pharmacist had no idea what I was talking about, so I explained the concept of the student deferment. That anyone in college back then was exempt from the draft while they were a full time student, thereby creating a loophole most people, but not everyone, would be qualified to take advantage of.

The pharmacist thinks this over for awhile, then says "but that would mean of the people we have working here, only Brenda would get drafted"

"Now do you understand?"

"Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh......"

Brenda was probably somewhere at that moment trying to figure out why a customer had given her 12 dollars and 38 cents when the total purchase was only $7.38, completely unaware of her small contribution to bringing two very different worlds a bit closer together.

Why Are You So Angry All The Time Drugnazi?

Two quotes from today's news hunting and gathering:

First this:

each year more than 10 million children die worldwide before the age of five. Preventable or treatable diseases, such as diarrhea, measles, pneumonia, malaria and neonatal illnesses, cause most of these deaths.

And now this:

A technology-transfer research team at the European Space Agency's Noordwijk centre in the Netherlands is designing next-generation garments such as a T-shirt that gauges the quality of your golf swing.

There's a clue as to why I'm so angry all the time.

From The Jihad Watch: Why We Can't Stop Until They Are Dead And Covered With Many Tons Of Dirt

A comment left on my earlier pep talk to those standing against the tide of Christian fascists raises the eternal point to be made about these people. Namely that they devote far more of their efforts to "protecting" egg and sperm than to protecting actual real babies who are vulnerable and dying of easily preventable causes every day. This seems a bit illogical until you realize their crusade is not about protecting cute little babies at all, it's about the eternal authoritarian quest for power and control.

Skeptical? Take a look at a story that ran in the Washington Post awhile back and you'll get a clue as to their real agenda. Under the headline "Forever Pregnant" we see that your tax dollars are financing a call to:

ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

Sooooooo.....we want to protect babies and we have a couple choices. We could do what we know works, address the situation of the 17 million women who have no health insurance so they could get proper prenatal care when they actually ARE pregnant, or we could issue a call that will open the door to government looking over the shoulder of every woman between 13 and 45 who's a few pounds overweight. If you're a power hungry Big Brother wannabe, which of those options do you choose? Ask yourself how long it might be until "asking" all women to treat themselves as pre-pregnant becomes "telling" them to.

"Put down that cheesecake woman. It's all about the children. This message brought to you from the department of Health and Human Services"

Interesting as well that there was no companion call for me to protect my swimmers from the rivers of scotch that are sometimes flowing through my bloodstream while they're being manufactured, especially since the scotch makes it more likely the swimmers will be put into action. Evidently sperm must be made of some sort of natural super Teflon. Either that or the "pre-pregnancy" thing is a ploy to control women. Tell me which one of those scenarios is more likely.

So my friend, the Christian fascists may have been weakened, but as you can see they are still very dangerous, just as the weakened Nazi's were still very dangerous on D-day. Don't let up on them until they're gone. In the name of cheesecake, don't let up.