Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The headache isn't completely gone, but drugs helped a lot. It got to the "so much pain I think I'm going to throw up" stage before I realized I needed to give in and take the damned drugs, so it was an uncomfortable wait for them to take effect. Midrin would have been better than codeine (and I would be asleep now), but obtaining Midrin requires having access to a doctor for a prescription. I would have preferred to use the correct tool, but without health insurance I'll go with the nearest thing I can get.

Another language nit: I heard an advert for some snack/diet/energy bar that included the line, "Only one net carb!"

One what? First, is there some subtractive phenomenon here so that the snack has more gross carbs than net carbs? Although I've heard that the "negative Calories" thing is largely a bogon, I could see using "It takes this many calories to chew something with this texture" as an excuse to report "net Calories" different from the total caloric content, but how do you subtract carbohydrates? Are they in the form of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) which are technically present in the package but evaporate between the time the wrapper is opened and the time the food reaches your mouth? Or are they looking at how the particular carbohydrates in question are metabolized? "By the time you've finished digesting this, the carbs have been converted to energy and fat by your body."

Secondly, ah, units please? Maybe the preceeding paragraph is irrelevant because they really did mean "one carbohydrate" -- i.e. whatever the quantity, only one substance in the carbohydrate category is present. But assuming they're not being that sneaky, my guess is that they meant one gram of carbohydrates -- but they didn't say that, so it could just as easily be one ounce, or one millislug (ew ew ew, metric prefix on an English unit, but I wasn't sure how else to scale that unit to a reasonable size), or even one cubic inch, as long as it's "one" of something.

So in the end, I've got an idea of what they might have meant, but they actually said nothing (or at least nothing meaningful). My guess of what they probably meant could be way off, and if I complained they could simply say, "Well we didn't say that."

Sorry; I'm too out of it to write something deep, too tired to do more important tasks, and too cranky to be cute, so I'm falling back on nitpicky language/science peeves. But as long as I'm playing that game: how many of y'all recognize the unit "slug" and know what it is? It's not a commonly used one, but it seems my friends include a disproportionately high number of people likely to know it.

Finally, I figured I'd have a shot at a meme swiped from ame_chan, the "mix CD" meme.

The instructions: "On the whole 'Ten Things In A Box' meme theme - if you had to give someone a burned CD with no more than, say, 16 songs on it, that you felt described who you are (or at least certain facets of yourself) what would those songs be?" (I'm going to include instrumentals as well as songs. And, as anyone who's seen my answers to anything like this in the past expects, I'm going to repeat ame_chan's caveat: "Well, for today, anyhow :-) these things have a way of shifting over time.")

1. The Dufay Collective, the ubiquitous saltarello
2. The Doors, "Riders on the Storm"
3. Jethro Tull, "Bouree" (or possibly a recording of Bach's version)
4. The Beatles, "In My Life"
5. Jimmy Buffet, "Treat Her Like a Lady"
6. myself, "All Come Free"
7. The Homespun Ceilidh Band, "Edna Michael's Waltz" (written by Mike Stoddard)
8. Jimmy Buffet, "He Went to Paris"
9. Frank Zappa, "Camarillo Brillo"
10. Tom Lehrer, "The Masochism Tango"
11. Klaatu, "Howl at the Moon"
12. 10cc, "The Things We Do for Love"
13. Molly Hatchet, "Fall of the Peacemaker"
14. Nazareth, "Love Hurts"
15. Aerosmith, "Dream On"
16. Focus, "Hocus Pocus"

Wow, it feels strange to only have one Beatles tune on there, and no Kinks or Heather Alexander. I had to bump a couple of tunes off to make room for more important ones I thought of later, and I'm not entirely certain this is the order I'd put them in (part of the problem is that I've got four tunes that each want to be either first or last, and deciding which two to use was tough; and some of the transitions are perhaps a little odd). And without "Tiger", "Dum Dum Diddle" (both by ABBA), and "Goo Goo Muck" (The Cramps), important parts of me are completely unrepresented. But I ran out of room. One CD just isn't enough.