No Crabs Friday

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We are simply inundated with 2009 H1N1 flu patients. Some of them are quite sick. The vaccine is now becoming available, however, the supply is limited. This causes hardship on parents who are worried about their child contracting this particular flu and frustration on our part trying to schedule patients. It is a potential bloody boondoggle of humongous proportions (like that medical terminology?). The biggest worry is that the virus will mutate and turn into a killer like the 1918 pandemic.

So far 2009 H1N1 (previously known as Prince Swine) has spared us old geezers. It is the classic Sci Fi thriller where all the young people are wiped out and the old people are left to wonder.

Hope not.

Friday Crab Blogging

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Sardonyx

An inquisitive reader directs us toward an interesting play on sardonic (see "grin" in Friday Crab Blogging here). Sardonyx is a type of Onx from Sardis, an ancient Lydian city in Turkey. While tempting, it does not appear to be related to Sardinia, the island west of Italy, given the difference in times of ascendancy. But, who knows? The Phoenicians were shuttling between Ionia and the western Mediterranean at that time. (Did you know that Phoenicians traded on the high seas? I didn't.)

I found this onyx cameo carving, the Gemma Agustea from the early part of the first century CE (contemporary with Jesus Christ) to be fascinating. Firstly, the effect of transparency on the robes is a deft stroke. But the bottom collection of figures is quite curious. Not only is there a man in a fedora pulling someone's hair, but there are clearly soldiers raising a Roman Standard (Aquila) as echoed in this iconic sculpture depicting events on Iwo Jima.

This should morph into a discussion of the three symbols below, the presence of an eagle and their use in political cajolary:

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Roman Standrd

Nazi Standard

American Standard

But I'm way to weary this morning. Maybe another time.

Absolute Scary and not even Halloween

Sometimes browsing can lead to things you know should not exist, like the paramilitary organization called "American Police Force" recently investigated in Montana.

Click through the screens and be scared, very scared. Just ask W. Smith.

Of course, it is a parody, right? Right?

Friday Crab Blogging

Guest Crabs from across the Sea

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Now the following purports to be a crab, but I have my doubts

Does it not look like my favorite vector chowing down and feeding its own parasites?

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I really like this crab by Dharti. It has sort of a sardonic grin. But, wait, do I really know what sardonic means? Somewhere I read that if one was great, or aspired to greatness, being sardonic was a necessity to avoid hubris. There, two ten cent words: sardonic and hubris:

From here:

an ancient belief that ingesting the sardonion plant from Sardinia (Greek: Sardō) would result in convulsions resembling laughter and, ultimately, death.

Maybe Sir Author Conan Doyle said it better:

His muscles were set as hard as a board in the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction of the fibres had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin.

Hubris has some interesting sides:

The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's downfall.

These things resonate now with my reading of "Dune." I see connections to Star Wars stuff. The "spice" of Dune morphs into "Nostrilia" with its "huge, diseased sheep" producing stroon.

Ngaio Marsh

I've been reading some "trash" from what was probably the golden age of detective fiction, the 20's and 30's. I found the following passage by Ngaio Marsh demonstrated that sometimes these writers can show their stuff:

Mrs. Candour had wept and her tears had blotted her make-up. She had dried them and in doing so had blotted her make-up again. Her face was an unlovely mess of mascara, powder and rouge. It hung in flabby pockets from the bone of her skull. She looked bewildered, frightened and vindictive. Her hands were tremulous. She was a large woman born to be embarrassingly ineffectual. In answer to Alleyn's suggestion that she should sit on one of the chairs, she twitched her loose lips, whispered something, and walked towards them with that precarious gait induced by excessive flesh mounted on French heels. She moved in a thick aura of essence of violet.

Ngaio Marsh – Death in Ecstasy (1936)

I'll let you decide if she was one of the bad guys.

Our Complicit Press

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From here:

BIG CREEK, Ky. — A part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged and had his hands and feet bound with duct tape, said an Ohio man who discovered the body two weeks ago.

The word "fed" was written in felt-tip pen on 51-year-old Bill Sparkman's chest, but authorities have released very few other details in the case, such as whether they think it was an accident, suicide or homicide.

An accident? A suicide? Let's see, he stripped after he bound himself with duct tape. Move along, rubes, no more Harry Houdini for you.

Anything by our Fourth Estate to mitigate the subterranean beast of 'hatred of the other' that permeates certain strata of our society. Bill Sparkman could easily have been a health care worker. Or an African American. The question becomes that, if we can't exorcise this demon, which we probably can't, how do we live with it? It is a corollary of "the poor are always with us."

Friday Crab Blogging

A Kadinsky Crab

I first thought Kaitlyn had drawn this as a crab, but, her real crab is below.
Consider the imagination that puts a rainbow on the carapace of a crab.
Ryan is more traditional but his does look like an M&M.

I asked Amiyah if this was an apple. "Of course not," she replied, "its a heart!" Go figure.

I have absolutely no idea what this is. Perhaps mountains on Ganymede?

Afghanistan and Vietnam

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Those of us of a certain age well remember the debacle of Vietnam. My brother, for one, was a Naval Medic attached to the Marine base in Danang. He also experienced front line duty, as in jungle patrols. It was not good, to put it mildly. In our misguided effort to keep the "Communists" (e.g. Chinese) from toppling the dominoes of Southeast Asia, we managed to facilitate the slaughter over a million Vietnamese in addition to getting over 50,000 of our own troops wiped out. In spite of a massive effort on the part of the youth of the world, the War went on for long after it was obviously over. Years later the "threat" from Communist China has turned into our major source of cash, used in large part to line the pockets of those who recently brought the World close to financial ruin (see the current New Yorker for a blow-by-blow article: Eight Days by James B. Stewart.)

Why do I bring this up? Well, I heard the ambassador from the current Afghanistan government to the United States speak on the situation there two days ago. Ambassador Said T. Jawad is an extremely well spoken gentleman. He is, as can be expected, a strong friend and supporter of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. His lecture gave a cogent, and compelling argument for the continued involvement of America, the principal NATO force there, in the civil war between the Karzai government and the insurgent Taliban. Yes, I believe him when he states that the Taliban are interested only in winning, and they will do anything to accomplish that goal, particularly engage in terrorism. I also believe him when he states that Taliban infiltrate the country from Pakistan and that the goal is to win the hearts and the minds of the peasants. I also believe him when he says .....

Wait a bloody minute. Where have I heard this mantra before. Was it a certain Mr. Nixon who declared that we would hand the job over to the Vietnamese? We would have "Vietnamization?" That if only America sent 50,000 more troops, they would turn the tide?

Etc., Etc., Etc.

Yes, the Taliban are terrorists. Their methods are brutal and they frequently employ intimidation to control peasant populations in rural Afghanistan. And yes, they finance their movement using money from the poppy trade that makes the heroin that shoots into the veins of Europeans and Americans. We do, and we should, despise them. But, no one has ever been successful in subduing rural Afghanistan, including Flashman. Ambassador Jawad made an important observation. He acknowledged that the structure of most of Afghanistan had been tribal up until the Soviet invasion. But, he observed that there have always been such power structures, e.g. the tribal leader who was an absolute ruler, but that they would not survive, much as the kings of England would not survive, unless they gave something back to those they ruled. While he didn't say so explicitly, he intimated that this was in many cases "security." (Well, one could make an argument that our involvement in Afghanistan is principally because we hoped to guarantee American security by removing the source of terror attacks, Al Qaeda. Life has a way of coming back on itself.) In any case, when the Soviets invaded, this structure was destroyed and that of the war lord took its place. (An interesting book involving war lords is that about the Taiping rebellion in China in the 1860's, God's Chinese Son.)

In any case, it is quite possible that, in spite of our good intentions, in spite of the cogent arguments made for our involvement there by Ambassador Jawad, that, just as in Vietnam, we are doomed to failure. After all, the British controlled India for hundreds of years but had their ups and downs with Afghanistan (see history). I guess it is too soon to see if America, following in our friend's footsteps across the pond, will be any more successful in changing the course there. I certainly hope so. The civilization that Ambassador Jawad outlined seemed one that would appeal to a reasonable person from the West, whether it will to all Afghans remains to be seen.

The picture at the top is the Fort in Western Afghanistan attributed to Alexander the Great on his eastward journey.

Friday Crab Blogging

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Yes this is a crab. We questioned its source.

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This is also a crab, but there is ambiguity.

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The little man gives you some perspective on the size of crabs here on the Eastern Shore. "One crab - One meal" that's our motto.

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I think Daniel is into Pokemon.

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A little color for the blog.

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This is one of the finer portraits of my brother, aka Dr. Zeus.

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Friday Crab Blogging (a little late)

Wheeeee!!!


Two little dots can convey a lot of character.


A case of the dueling Tyrannosaurus Rexi

There is a quality to this drawing that is amazing: the asymmetry of the background color which may be intentional or may mean the artist was interrupted for his kindergarten immunizations (more likely). Note how he/she brought the color completely to the edge in the left upper corner. (I had to think about whether it was left of right because it was possibly on the right side of the crab, it was facing us, but we don't know.)

Friday Crab Blogging (way late)

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I assume that Biagia has a fixation on a character from Pokemon.

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My motto before coffee...

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Gus likes the Easter Bunny look but the claws give it away.

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I like nine legs. I like triple symmmetry.

Survivor

From here.

Oh, my!

The Character of our Discussion

As a physician, I obviously have a lot of feelings about the current health care "debate" going on in America. Over the years, I have spent a significant amount of futile time ranting and raving about this topic. This discussion has now been taken out of the hands of health care professionals; usurped by Sarah Palin and the gun toting crazies at the town hall meetings. Indeed, in one way I am glad; I find it hard to have a discussion with a kitchen table.
What is disturbing to me, and to a lot of my friends, is the character of this current discussion. It does not bode well for the future of a democratic government that decisions which should be made with logic and compassion should be thrown open to so much vitriol. It is as if we were watching children in a sand box arguing over a toy.

I suspect that some of this is a result of such influences as television (although I don't have one, I hear tell of lots of screaming) and instant communication via texting or cell phone. There is a great leveling going on here with these devices. Some would say that this is a democratic process.

However, because everyone uses health care doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is an expert on how to organize it. This is particularly true when people seem unable to discern that what they are fed via the media is or is not wasted garbage (the second day of my freshman English class in college one of the other students questioned the professor's use of "wasted garbage" by asking him if that wasn't "redundant." That's when I also learned meaning of the phrase "stunned silence.")

I will concede that our form of government is putatively a democracy, though the fact that our Congress is an elected body and the election is determined largely by money makes it much closer to a plutoarchy. But it is not a democracy like ancient Athens where all citizens supposedly had immediate input to a decision. (And, of course, Athens was anything but egalitarian given that only a minor portion of the population was in the position to contribute to political discourse.) Of course it is impossible for individuals to have direct influence on a government that represents 300 million people. You'd never know it by what I'm listening to.

John McCain weighs in with:

"There's more interest and involvement in this issue than I've ever seen in many years on a domestic issue," McCain said afterward. "There's obviously strong feeling and emotions on this issue and I think the town-hall meetings are a very important way to get people's viewpoints and allow them to deal directly with their elected representative."

But strong "feelings and emotions" should not be the basis of policy. I keep thinking about all those meetings portrayed in "Reds" both in America and in revolutionary Russia. They did get pretty feisty. I suppose Democracy in action is a messy thing.

In one way I wish we could just change the system by fiat. But, again, I guess in the long run it is better to have it the way it is going. The only problem is that Barack Obama may cave in completely out of political expediency (2012 you know is just around the corner) and then, well, then it gets pretty nasty.

As the Chinese curse says, may you live... of course you know the rest.

Friday Crab Blogging (a little late)

Sentiments expressed before the Kindergarten Shots.

They're all crabs in the end, even if they are a little ghoulish..

I thought this might be a Kookaburra bird until I read about them (interesting article, BTW). I suppose it is more like an Australian parrot, e.g. an eclectus parrot. But, in the end, they're all crabs.

Daisy is in transition from stick figures to providing clothes. I am not sure what the rainbow represents and whether it is attached to me or not. And, she is correct, I frequently have an SEG.

Friday Crab Blogging

I think that there is crab trap on the left but, then, it could be lost pocketbook. The anchor is a good touch.

Rachael informed me that she was "crabby." In addition, I had to "Deal with it."

This is my one and only workboat. Pretty authentic with cabin in the back and little smoke stack. Take a look at the watermen. They are a vanishing breed.