I went to the urologist, and he told me that he couldn't find my kidney stone on the x-rays. Heck, he couldn't even find me for a half hour in the radiology waiting room when my chart was accidentally switched with that of an 80-year old black guy. Fortunately, I found the stone for him after I got home!

Ha ha! I showed that really, really small stone who was boss! I've already had 2-and-a-half liters of Coke to celebrate!

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Kidney stone watch: Day 8

Early last Saturday morning, I woke up to extreme, vomit-inducing abdominal pain that migrated from left to right across my lower abdomen over the course of 4 hours. At the time, I assumed that the pain was associated with the pint of beef lo mein I had eaten the night before. By noon, I felt fatigued, but healthy again. I was completely wrong.

Despite the occasional feeling of constipation or urinary retention, everything seemed normal until 8PM Wednesday night, when the pain returned with its friends. It felt like I was being kicked in the groin over and over and over again. For 8 hours. When the groin pain was finally joined by a stabbing sensation in my right side, I cried uncle and went to the hospital emergency room. The attending physician diagnosed a kidney stone before I had even completed describing my symptoms.

I was completely unprepared for this diagnosis. I know three people who have had kidney stones in recent years, and somehow I'd missed the reports that kidney stones felt like someone would be using my testicles as a speed bag. I had assumed my problem was food poisoning or intestinal strangulation or maybe even appendicitis. But not kidney stones. I had no idea my kidneys hated my guts so much.

The hospital gave me some pain killers that made me so sick to my stomach that I begged for the stabbing pain to return. I was proscribed Flomax to enlarge my urethra and make passages of the stone easier. Then I was given a funnel-shaped "strainer" to catch the stone when I passed it out of my urine. I've spent the days since pissing like a hose into a funnel that functions like a shower head, spraying urine all over my bathroom floor.

Of course, this all happens during the one week this month when I had a chance to work up to 60 hours making good money sorting Magic cards for a friend's hobby shop. So instead of making enough money to pay my July bills, I pick up a mighty hospital tab and a huge sleep deficit. Awesome.

My new urologist tells me that he has no doubt I will pass this 2mm kidney stone, theoretically in time for my second appointment on Monday when he will analyse it and tell me what caused it. (Yes, I know you think it was Coke. Everyone tells me they think it was Coke. I get it. I drink a lot of Coke.) But no stone so far. I was feeling so good yesterday afternoon that I assumed I must have somehow passed the stone without noticing. That idea was murdered during an aborted trip to Lowe's to pick up material for ongoing kitchen repair for my mother's rental property that must be completed by the beginning of August. No pressure.

So here I sit, drinking as much fluid as I can stomach, trying to flush out a stone that seems to like me far more than I like it. 2011 sucks.

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The FDA has announced "concern" over the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA), widely used in food industry packaging for the better part of a century. BPA is a synthetic estrogen that provides plastics with added resiliency, making bottles that resist shattering. The FDA has long approved the use of the chemical, but now the agency finds itself under pressure from consumer safety groups arguing that BPA can disrupt fetal brain development and lead to increased obesity. In short, it seems that BPA can make you stupid and fat but at least you'll be more resiliant to damage.

Tests performed recently by the Canadian government agency Health Canada reveal that aluminum cans of Coca-Cola contain 0.18 micrograms (µg) of BPA per liter. The chemical leaches from the epoxy lining of the cans themselves after canning and mixes with the delicious and entirely wholesome Coca-Cola within. No wonder North America is obese: it's not our soft drinks, but our soft drink containers conspiring against us.

Canada's recommended safe level of consumption is 25 µg per kilogram of body weight per day, meaning that you would have to drink more than 138 liters of Coke PER KILOGRAM each day to consume concentrations considered unhealthy. That's over 31,108 12-oz. aluminum cans of Coke per day for the average 80kg (176lb) American. Before you panic over the FDA's announcement, compare that to the USA's advised safe level of 50 µg/kg/day!

Recognizing the severity of the situation, baby bottle manufacturers and distributors have already willingly begun turning away from using BPA in their products. That's a sound start to prevent the clearly overwhelming deleterious effects of consuming Coca-Cola on the development of your unborn baby's brain. But I suggest that it doesn't go far enough. In the interest of product safety, I recommend that everyone install an industrial Coke dispenser in their own kitchen so that they may drink Coke as nature intended: directly from the nipple. That way you can consume your American allotted 273 liters per kilogram per day safely and without fear that the chemicals in our cans are making us obese.

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For the past several days, the air has been full of the sickly-sweet, headache-inducing smell of plant sex. The masthead of the local paper went from a pollen count -- representing the number of pollen particles in a cubic foot of air -- of 17 (which qualified as "Low," the bottom of the indicator scale) to 214 (nearly 100 points over the "Extremely High" mark at the top end of the scale). In fact, the pollen count indicator is a scale from 0 to 120. To indicate just how inadequate that is, today's pollen count was 1,089, nine times greater than the cut-off for the top of the pollen count scale!

Now, I ask you, what's the point of an indicator scale that can be rendered useless overnight? Why cap a scale if levels of "Extreme" exist above the scale? If the scale for hurricanes was capped at 75mph, then 2005's New Orleans-destroying Hurricane Katrina would measure the same as 1979's New Orleans-dampening Hurricane Bob which is remembered more for being the first "male" hurricane than for the destruction it's gusty drizzles didn't do.

Personally, I prefer my scales to have a little more bite. For example, the Richter Scale for earthquakes scales by a power of ten for each increase in level, allowing the highest level to represent total destruction. DEFCON 1 represents a Failsafe, On the Beach, or Red Dawn scenario. And "Two Thumbs Up" means I really ought to see the movie.

What does an "Extremely High" pollen count indicate? That I might have a headache. That kind of indicator I don't need; the headache itself will work just fine, thanks.

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Last week was Spring Break for my brother, the middle school science teacher. He woke me up everyday at 10AM. As a result of rising at that ungodly hour for an entire week, I am now sick as a dog. So far as I'm concerned, this qualifies as empirical evidence that waking up before noon for prolonged periods of time will inevitably kill you. (Just test it yourself and see if I'm not right.)

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Sometimes posting to a blog is like being in a food fight: throw enough pie and someone's GOT to get hit in the face. (This column is going Larry King style, baby!)

• Bravo Channel is showing both The Princess Bride and Back to the Future today. Could those be two of the best movies ever made? I say yes!
• Huge underdog University of Georgia today beat (nay, CRUSHED!) the mighty Auburn Tigers, destroying any hopes Auburn had of running for the national title. Go Dawgs!
• Television advertising execs just don't understand: the current Bellsouth ads use the song "Stuck In The Middle With You" to promote that product. The song was written about sitting between recording executives. Can telecom execs be that different?
• Of all the cars I've ever owned/driven, the one I miss most is a 1985 Ford Crown Victoria LTD Country Squire Station Wagon.
• Recent studies say that happy people are sick less often than people who are optimistic or active. That means that a cynical asshole like me will likely outlive the rest of you bastards so long as I'm happy being a cynical asshole. Hooray for science!
• Julia Roberts' single sexiest film role was as Tinkerbell in Hook. Does that say worse things about her or me?
• The National Football League has a patent on confusion; it is simply impossible to tell who is any good from week to week. Some may call this parity or equality but I call it exciting. Chicago: undefeated. Dolphins: incompetent. Final score: Dolphins 31, Chicago 13. I say this, I sure look forward to December 31, when the Dolphins play the currently undefeated Colts.

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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I just heard that Miss Deaf Texas was struck and killed by a train in Austin yesterday. Initial reports claimed that she was crossing the tracks, ignoring the train's warning horns. There is a valuable lesson buried in this story, I just know it.

In a seemingly unrelated story, national networks recently broadcast the story that a blind teen in Chicago must take and pass Driver's Education classes before she can graduate high school. In Chicago the tracks are probably safer than the roads; blind drivers aren't so good with stoplights.

Even more bizarre is the story of an eighteen year old who became a quadriplegic in a Lubbock juvenile detention center after an employee dared him to attempt a back flip off a picnic table in December. (Yes, everything is stranger in Texas.) Of course, the teen is suing the state, because he didn't know better than to try to flip backwards off a table. Please note that he was in juvie because he assaulted a teacher, yet he's willing to blame another authority figure for his debilitating spinal injury. Go figure. At least we don't have to worry about this fellow hitting the road anytime soon. (Unless, of course, he falls out of his wheelchair.)

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I was so looking forward to returning from Ohio to get to work on a shockwave animation I've been working on in addition to updating the D and D pages. But instead I've caught a cold -- did I mention the 5 hour line in frigid wind for the Top Thrill Dragster? -- and all I'm looking forward to now is sleep. NyQuil is my friend.

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Has it really been 5 days since I posted here last? Damn, time flies. (Been a bit under the weather, I suppose)
Anyway, I've found a few MORE flaws in the overall site (which I haven't fixed yet) and I finally got the Thorgils characters online. More to come....

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