Is there a doctor in the house? (Hint: No.)

 Here's National Public Radio:

Shall we do a bit of "fact-checking" as the Kidz Today call it? First stop, Wikipedia:

"Means graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2014 but dropped out of her surgical residency four years later and subsequently chose to practice functional medicine, a form of alternative medicine. Her medical license has been inactive since 2024."

Meaning "no, not an actual "medical doctor". Failed the OJT that is a critical piece of becoming a board-certified MD. 

I'm a "certified engineering geologist" because I 1) have a degree (two, actually, baccalaureate and masters) in geology, 2) passed my boards (two, actually, the state RG and CEG examinations), AND 3) worked under a licensed CEG for a period of five years to learn the important practical aspects of my profession.

Part 3 is not "optional"; it's considered an essential part of my licensure just as internship and residency is essential to medical board certification. "Doctor" Means couldn't hack it and fucked off into some sort of woo-woo bullshit at that point, which would be like me doing my CEG training as a sales clerk at Ed's House of Gems.

Wait. "Woo-woo bullshit"?

Here's Wiki on "functional medicine":

"Functional medicine (FM) is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses many unproven and disproven methods and treatments.^[1][2][3] At its essence, it is a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine,^[4] and as such is pseudoscientific,^[5] and has been described as a form of quackery"

So, yeah; woo-woo bullshit and "not an actual medical doctor".

So what does this not-an-actual-doctor-woo-woo-bullshit-artist "believe"?

Hang on; shit gets deep here. From the first Wiki piece:

"Means and her brother, Calley, co-wrote Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health in 2024.

(T)he book's central claim is that a single mechanism, which the authors call "Bad Energy", described as a common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles...cause(s) disorders as diverse as depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as "most other conditions"...

The book asserts that the underlying causes of this dysfunction are rooted in unhealthy modern lifestyles: "too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends-with trillions of dollars behind them-are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies."

The authors also assert that diseases such schizophrenia and depression are caused by..."leaky gut syndrome", and...claim that "researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition".

Oh, horseshit.

Also; fuck off, NPR. "medical degree from Stanford"? That's some real fucking sanewashing right there, you nimrods. Don't think that's gonna save you from Big Ballz and the DOGE Pounders.

"Bad Energy"? "Leaky Gut Syndrome"?

Why not "Demon Sperm"? Remember that weird Trump shit? Ohhellyeah. He's totally like that, and when you look at it that way his tapping this gimp for Surgeon General makes total sense. She's in the "wellness" grift just like he's on the "wealth" grift. Game recognize game.

This whacko has no more business being Surgeon General than I do claiming to be the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

There's a lot of "unhealthy modern lifestyles", yes.

None of them cause cancer. Or Parkinson's. Or acne. Or cure them.

Anymore than this freak can.

 

But she's a skinny sorta-blonde white chick that Trump would totally rage-fuck, so she's right in his ten-ring.

What a completely fucked-up country we live in.

 

He leadeth me beside the still waters and changeth my oil.

Seen today on the road home from the pandemic-grocery run:

Craig Audidriver: "What? You're kidding! I've only got forty thousand miles on this car!"

The Lord God: "Well, that may be, but the rotors are shot and the front pads have about two millimeters left on them, so maybe someone is telling you not to ride the fucking brake so much, K? Up to you, chief, but I'd recommend doing the front brakes before the next time you drive over to your side piece's place."

Craig: "My side...WHAT? How..?"

The Lord God:

Craig:

The Lord God: "You want I should rotate the tires while I'm at it?"

Scrappy Doo

The little re-purpose place Scrap used to be a "cool thing in North Portland" until it moved downtown.

It's still amazingly cool.

Because, well...

...because, well...

...because.

Well.

There's just so many freakishly weird and cool things that you can assemble in one place, but Scrap does a helluva job giving it a good shot. It it true that you can find pretty much anything at Scrap?

Next time you're in Portland?

Check it out.

Slayride

Here comes Drachma the Merkitty pulling what Missy has labeled as "Drachma's Christmas Slay":

You'll note that the idiot cat encourages the Girl in her pranking by plodding along with this contraption harnessed to him instead of tear-assing around the room in proper insane cat-tied-to-a-box fashion:

And...there he goes.

He really is a sweet cat. But...Jesus, cat, show some pride! How the hell can I convince my kids that you are really a small but vicious domestic predator if you keep doing stuff like this..?

Ich haff ein cunnink plan, Mein Herr...

From a 1530ish manual on military ordnance; rocket cats.

The work is by one Franz Helm of Cologne, who was an artillerist and ordnance specialist during the early gunpowder warfare period. And Franz had some ideas that seem to be some pretty outside-the-box thinking.

"Helm explained how animals could be used to deliver incendiary devices: "Create a small sack like a fire-arrow . if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited."

In other words, capture a cat from enemy territory, attach a bomb to its back, light the fuse and then hope it runs back home and starts a raging fire."

So far as I know there is no actual evidence that Helm, or anyone else, actually tried this.

Probably not a good idea, given that a flaming cat, or crow, is just as likely to run in panic towards the nearest cover; the nearest probably being your own mess tent.

Still.

I'll bet if John McCain was President he'd be willing to use Rocket Cats on the damn Russkies.

(Big h/t to TPM and Lawyers, Guns & Money for finding this bizarre piece of semi-military historical trivia...)

Another strand of seaweed alongside the road

Looks like I'm not the only one feeling sort of hung-down and aimless.

That was in the glory years, when the "Uncle Sam" billboard was a roadside attraction on par with South of the Border and the world's largest ball of yarn. I blogged a while back about this strange highway "attraction" off the I-5 freeway just south of Chehalis (it's at the link, trust me, you just have to scroll down a little).

This goofy contraption was the work of one guy, Alfred Hamilton, wingnut, entrepreneur, and ex-farmer. The story I've heard is that he was pissed off about government because of the seizure of part of his farmland to build I-5 and so he put up the billboard to tell the world about it.

"His two-sided "Uncle Sam" billboard dates back to 1971. Over the years, it has carried a litany of messages aimed at politicians Hamilton didn't like as well as homosexuals, Russia, abortion, communism, big government, the United Nations and gun control, to name a few."

The ghost blog Meet The Stress has a nice snarky little obit for Al, who, it turns out, actually threw up this sign because his wife found out that "...the state was spending more money on welfare than on schools".

Al's gone to the Free Republic In The Sky but his successors (kids? grandkids? who the hell knows) have kept up the great curmudgeonly tradition, proudly expressing Al's full range of thought, from "Right-Wing Nut" to "Thinks Mussolini Was A Pussy Who Didn't Have The Balls To Really Bring The Fascism".

But even Al's Freeper spawn seem to be losing their edge these days. Here's what they had up on the southbound side of the billboard when I drove by today:

Ummm...the Final Jeopardy answer is: "The Egyptian army and airforce"?

WTF, guys? That's IT? An entire wingnutoverse out there to help you with finding subjects for your forty-foot-high outrage over Those Damn Libtards And Their Dhimmitude and this is the best you got?

This is your 90-mile-an-hour-fastball?

(And I noted that the northbound side was even lamer; something about how "those Damn Eurocommies are coming for their people's pensions and was yours next?", like Al's GOP pals had left any of us with an actual "pension" instead of riding the fucking 401K bus to the Poorhouse.)

Suddenly I don't feel so bereft of inspiration. If this is the best the wingnuts in Chehalis can do, Jesus wept, people, this is just sad and I feel like Enid fucking Blyton by comparison.

Loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.

In case you didn't quite get what all the singing and dancing was about, it's an ad for something called a "vaginal rejuvenation" gel called 18 Again. The product website claims that:

"18 Again is very effective for tightening of the vagina. Along with tightening, it provides vaginal rejuvenation, improves strength and grip of the vagina, helps prevent infections, encourages natural lubrication, masks foul odour, reduces involuntary urine escape, improves blood circulation, delays effects of ageing and keeps the vagina healthy."

I have to say that this is perhaps the weirdest commercial product I've run into since the crotch-bleach stuff (which was also an Indian thing...is something going on in Mumbai that I'm just not getting..?) and the damn adult wet-wipes that got your beaver more wood or something.

I mean, thinking about this in a sort of cold-bloodedly sexual fashion I get how the whole "happiness is a tight pussy" pitch these people are making for their product could work. It plays into the human obsession with sex and bizarre ways to make it bigger, faster, harder, and better. When you think about it this gloop isn't all that much different from the old Johnnie Holmes pecker-pump gimmicks you used to see advertised in skin mags or skeevy scandal sheets.

Not to mention the subject of a gajillion jokes like the one I used for the title that got ol' Earl Butz canned.

(And just as an aside, now there was a deeply evil Republican bastard. We'll get back to him in a bit, I promise...)

I can see how people would buy this stuff.

But below the surface there just seems to be something deeply...wrong...about the whole idea of this goop and I can't quite put my finger on it.

Is it simply the usual lazy human nonsense of expecting a magic cream to do magic to your body instead of hard work? Buying a magic belt instead of sit-ups? Buying magic pills instead of laying off the cupcakes? Buying magic goop instead of patiently doing a whole bunch of Kegel exercises?

Or is it the other usual lazy human nonsense, the masculine nonsense of treating a woman like a product that has a sell-by date and is useless after that, worthless until she's "eighteen again", tight and taut and virginal?

I don't know which is sadder.

But I know the whole business makes me shake my head just like the ginzo-bleach and the dingus-wipes.

Sometime I think human beings are the strangest goddamn monkey on the whole goddamn island.

Sapiens, my ass.

Gimme Shelter

By now you probably know that I'm utterly intrigued by oddball bits of history. So it's hardly surprising that I was tickled by this little piece of Cold War memorabilia; a fallout shelter under a California backyard still lingering in the Sixties year it was last visited by its creator.

Apparently there are more of these things lurking down there; the author of this blog post links to one in Alabama, though who the hell would have wanted to nuke Alabama I haven't the faintest; even the stupidest Soviet would probably have suspected that the Red Dawn would break all the sooner for leaving that sump-hole of rural squalor to fester in the lower-lying swamplands of American rednecksylvania.

One cool thing the linked blogger above discusses is something called "Multi Purpose Food" or MPF. This stuff, here:

Now while I'm a child of the Fifties I was a child of the late Fifties and a fairly dim one at that. By the time I was old enough to go to grade school the whole "Duck and Cover" and scare-the-shit-out-of-the-kiddies atom bomb drills fad had pretty much passed (for all that that was only probably a year or two after the Missile Crisis), and I wasn't sharp enough to pick up on it when I was smaller.

I certainly don't remember being particularly frightened of Red missile attacks. Tornadoes? Now those were scary. (we lived in a suburb of Chicago annually smacked by one or two of the things, and my mother would go into a freaking panic every time the radio would broadcast a tornado warning and hustle us down into the cellar to huddle like some Londoners under the Blitz).

So I missed this whole "prepare for the post-apocalyptic world by stockpiling food and ammunition" thing, and so I missed Multi Purpose Meals and MPF. But you gotta love something described as a "...scientifically formulated mix consisted of 68% defatted or low fat soy grits plus dehydrated potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, leeks, parsley, and spices, and was fortified with vitamins and minerals. Ready after only minutes of simmering in water, a 64 gram dry portion provided most of a tasty, nutritious meal for one person at a cost of only 3-5 cents."

Yum!

Out There Up North

I spent most of last week drilling along a stretch of two-lane highway south of the little town of Oakville, Washington.

The actual work site was on the Chehalis Indian Reservation, which was more butt-hurt and dog-ass than most of the northwest Washington rez, and that's saying a lot since outside the Jamestown S'Klallam Rez the little dogpatches along Highway 101 that line the west side of the Puget Sound are among the saddest and sorriest of the firstcomer gulags we've made for them to slowly die in, we white-eyes in our impartial majesty.

To give you an idea, the first day went badly - the first day of drilling usually does, but this was worse than even the usual with a bad combination of caving AND "heaving" sand and gravel. To give you a notion I've worked in this business for twenty years and have never, never encountered heaving gravel. It was awful, and we fought with it the whole day and managed to achieve a draw at best - and I suggested to the flagging crew-boss that he save time by leaving his warning signs in place and just turning them end-on to the traffic. He looked at me like I had two heads.

"Did you see that trash back up the road?" he growled, and, yes, I had noticed the little hamlet of raggedy shack-islands ringed with rust-red reefs of derelict vehicles of all varieties. "Those bastards'd have these signs gone in sixty seconds." I scoffed at the notion that anyone would be so low-rent as to steal cheap warning signs, but the flagger just repeated that the hardcases laired in those shacks would have the entire signage away to sell the five pounds of aluminum in the uprights.

So we took in the signs for the night. What a sad old world.

Anyway, that wasn't really my point for this post, since you could really care less about my work. No, it was this;

These oddities are called, collectively, the "Godspodor Monuments", and stand just east of I-5 near the little town of Toledo, Washington.

According to the linked page at "Weird Washington" these gomers are the brainchild of one Dominic Godspodor, a wealthy "eccentric" (and you'll note that wealth moves you from "batshit crazy" to the more benign "eccentric"; as always, bags of money are the KY Jelly of Social Acceptability) who wanted to honor a bizarre congeries of things and people; Mother Teresa, the Native Americans (of "all tribes", according to the billboard that sits near these things), the victims of the Holocaust, the victims of drunk drivers, African-American slaves, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk, William Seward, and Lewis and Clark.

Whew.

The pillars you see in the picture are his tributes to the first three; don't ask me which is which, although I'm guessing that the one with the big Christ is NOT the Holocaust one or, at least, I hope so. That would be way too much like baptizing Anne Frank, or have the Mormons already gotten around to that?

I really don't know what else to say about these things, other than they're butt-ugly in a particularly up-in-your-face sort of ugly way. Every year I have passed it the site looks worse and worse; the field unmowed, the steel of the pillars rusting, the shoddy explanatory billboard sagging and faded.

While I have a certain amount of sympathy for the rich bastard's hobby, I have to wonder; would the half-million he spent on this gawdawful have been better spent building a factory of some sort on the Chehalis Rez, so some of all those tribes' modern survivors would have an honest job and a decent, living wage?

I suspect that Teresa and the Shoah victims would have been okay with that.

But regardless, there they stand; strange unattractive pillars in an empty field where the busy world rushes past them with no more than a puzzled glance.

Mind you, these things aren't exactly the oddest oddity along the I-5 corridor in Washington State; the "Uncle Sam" billboard south of Chehalis is a treat packed with wingnutty goodness.

And there's always Mima Mounds, Nature's contribution to Weird Washington.

But that's the State of Washington for you; ex boreas semper aliquid whacki. Eccentric monuments, wingnut billboards, and impoverished Indians crouching in the woods.

Makes me damn glad to be home south of the Big River.