About plants, clued into Ruschia lineolata ‘Nana’, or dwarf carpet of stars, by Erick Barros (who grows it) yesterday. The Wikipedia photo of the plant in bloom:
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Archive for July, 2023
And now for something completely different
July 12, 2023
Placeholder posting
July 11, 2023My WordPress bookmark was somehow corrupted overnight, so that when I tried to add a posting this morning, what I got was a completely novel, and utterly useless, page — and I was paralyzed until I could get various forms of help. My caregiver Erick Barros has shrewdly figured out how to undo all of that and bring me back to the status ante quo, but I won’t be able to get to actual work right now, so this is just a placeholder to say that I’m still not dead yet. Eventually you will hear from me again. Do not be alarmed.
Camilo
July 10, 2023My caregiver at home yesterday and today is a young Mexican man (working on a green card) named Camilo Torres. I was interested in his personal name, which turns out to have an interesting history. Its recent antecedent is a saint’s name. From Wikipedia:
Camillus de Lellis, M.I., (25 May 1550 – 14 July 1614) was a Roman Catholic priest from Italy who founded the Camillians, a religious order dedicated to the care of the sick. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in the year 1742, and canonized by him four years later in 1746. De Lellis is the patron saint of the sick, hospitals, nurses and physicians.
… De Lellis established the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (abbreviated as M.I.), better known as the Camillians. His experience in wars led him to establish a group of health care workers who would assist soldiers on the battlefield. The large red cross on their cassock remains a symbol of the Congregation today, worn on their habits, today a universal symbol of charity and service.
Wikipedia image of the saintDe Lellis was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in the year 1742, and canonized by him four years later in 1746.
In 1886, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him patron of all hospitals and of the sick. In 1930, Pope Pius XI named him co-patron, with Saint John of God of nurses and nursing associations.
The saint’s name then provided a route to its popularity as a masculine personal name in various Romance languages: Camillo in Latin, Camille in French, Camilo in Spanish and Portuguese.
The antecedent of the saint’s name was apparently the Roman name Camilius, referring to a temple servant or altar boy.
Today’s attachment ambiguity
July 9, 2023A tv ad just came by for the (self-injectable) type 2 diabetes medication Mountjaro, warning:
Mountjaro is not for people with type 1 diabetes or children — call this X
Now, there’s a perfectly sensible understanding of X, call it sense A, in which Mountjaro is not for children, and A is the one intended in the ad. And then there’s a rather odd alternative understanding of it, call it sense B, in which Mountjaro is not for people with children. Being the somewhat perverse person that I am, the peculiar B is the understanding I first saw, and laughed at loud at.
This is very familiar territory on this blog, under the heading of High Attachment (HA) in parsing (as in sense A) versus Low Attachment (LA, as in sense B). I will explain.
Well-meant advice
July 8, 2023My medical life has been very difficult recently, but I’ve now decided to pretty much stop describing my travails on my blog or on Facebook. Despite my imploring — begging — friends not to offer advice, however solicitous, loving, and well-meaning, on my conditions, I continue to be besieged by such advice.
To which I am them obliged to respond, explaining why their ideas have either been taken into account, are not relevant to my complex of afflictions, or are impossible for me to carry out for some reasons I then have to provide. Not to respond would be the height of rudeness to my friends, and just saying “thank you for your concern”, period, would be only a bit less insulting. Responding in a gracious way takes a lot of time and diverts me from the medical concerns that absorb most of my time.
That’s why I keep saying NO ADVICE. But concerned friends apparently just cannot help themselves, in their desire to be helpful to me.
I despair.
The news for penises: the Penuma
July 7, 2023(Well, yes, it’s all about penises — with photos, but not of penises, and some plain talk in street language — so not to everyone’s taste, and you should take that into account.)
The background, from my 1/26/16 posting “Huge News For Men!”, reporting on a GQ story. The story’s lead-in:
An enterprising L.A. surgeon [James Elist] has invented a silicone penis implant [the Penuma], which, because we’re sure you have a frient who’ll want to know, costs 13 grand and can nearly double your size. Amy Wallace grills the good doctor on how it works – and asks a few of his satisfied customers (and their mostly satisfied wives) how it’s working.
Comes in /perz/
July 5, 2023A very much not-dead-yet posting to hold this space while I cope with an avalanche of posting material, plus my suddenly much improved medical condition (which is totally exhilarating). In any case, an old One Big Happy cartoon (originally from 9/4/14) in which Ruthie asks her defiantly working-class neighbor James to name something that comes in pairs, but James hears the homophone pears (both nouns pronounced /perz/ in my variety of English) and just can’t get shift his perspective:
Note James’s multiply non-standard negative existential construction in his ain’t no shoes
Backup life
July 4, 2023If you’re a normal person and you run out of something in your household — toilet paper, granola, cleaning products, cheese, plastic trash bags, whatever — you just go out to a relevant store and pick it up. If you’re (essentially) housebound, as I am, in this situation, you have to plan ahead and get backup supplies delivered, so that replacements are to hand when you need them. (Even normal people might providently plan for the future and also save time and money on buying in bulk by laying in backup supplies.)
In any case, I’m obliged to live the backup life and have stocks of stuff hanging around — many of them piled up on what was once a sofabed in the study of my condo (which otherwise has very little usable storage space). At the moment, it has boxes or piles of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels, and wet wipes. There are similar stashes elsewhere in the condo. I spend a good bit of time ordering in this stuff, mostly through Amazon.
Evil empires
July 3, 2023An attempt to respond (despite my home health challenges) to a Facebook comment about my 7/2/23 posting “SUMC moments: Dutch treat”. That posting included a section on the evils of the Dutch Empire; Tim Evanson then wrote on FB:
Coincidentally, the Belgian Empire just apologized for the rape of the Congo this past week.
Now my response to TE: (more…)
Fresh disasters on the home health front
July 3, 2023Very brief account of last night’s adventures; I hope this will explain my absence from social media and my failure to respond to e-mail.