Attention Deficit David

Die Hard with a Tulip

You'd think after the exemplary care I got from Herr Doctor Preggnantsthein yesterday that I'd have been a bit more forceful about not going back to the clinic. Really, a $150 office visit to get no treatment? I can do better just laying on the cold floor of the bathroom.

But doctors orders are doctor's orders, and the good doctor told us that I should come back to the clinic if I were to get a fever.

I got a fever.

A mild one, mind you. Just 38.7, but still, Abby got me a cab, and took me over there. This...was a mistake.

We'd figured that the quality of care could not possibly get worse during the day, perhaps the odd semi-treatment I'd received was just because they were closing and the Hippocratic oath machine was empty for the day. But no, it seems the standard of care remains the same—lousy.

We entered the clinic to be told to sit in the waiting room. So we wandered over to the big area with lots of comfortable looking chairs near reception. This is not the waiting room we were told by a nice Dutch EMT who told us to follow the signs to the waiting room. All very well and good except we don't speak Dutch.

Finally finding

the cramped icky space, we took a seat and very soon were seen by Doctor Casual, dressed in a nice turtleneck and jacket—not at all like, you know, a Doctor.

In the exam room he looked up my records from the night before and made some faces when he read the description of my condition. I see here you were very sick, he said. I'll skip over the conversation here about my bowels and vomiting and get to the point where we tell him the Doctor the night before said to come back if I got a fever. He asks what my temperature is, and then says he wants to feel my pulse. Oh, yes, you have a fever he says while touching my arm.

Uh, is that how "pulse" is supposed to work?

Then he says he'll check my abdomen again to make sure it's still not appendicitis (still not) and tells me that they don't give out antibiotics even for bacterial issues. So, no antibiotics.

He also tells us that it's not possible to get food poisoning from a good restaurant or a hotel. This is of course in a country with Mad Cow and e Colli outbreaks on occasion, so I sort of had hoped he'd have had some idea of how cross-contamination works—hell the desk staff at my hotel had a better grasp.

Did I mention that he didn't wash his hands either? But that's okay, because you can't get sick from the feces I was smart enough to cover my fingers with before entering the clinic. That'll show him.

After telling me that there's nothing he can do for me, he says either "be patient" or "be a patient." We're not sure which he said, but the general gist was "well, suck it up." Which is fine and all, and was my plan except we were told to come back here under these circumstances, and really if I were going to spend another 80 Euro I'd rather have done it with a nice meal or a prostitute over in the red light district.

We went back to the not-waiting room, where they were unable to use the printer (saying the Dutch version of "PC Load Letter?!? What the fuck is PC Load Letter" while putting paper in entirely the wrong part of the printer. There are monks sequestered in cloisters in Outer Mongolia who are more capable at putting paper in the printer.

Then she couldn't use the credit card machine, putting our card into the slot where the Dutch SmartCards go, but credit cards do NOT. So we paid cash.

While walking away it occurred to Abby and I that this could not really be a medical clinic, that the real doctors and staff must be tied up in the basement, while an international gang of criminals pretend to staff the center as they drill through the bank vault next door via the ancient bomb-cellar at canal level. They only didn't expect John McClain to come through the door with food poisoning and save the day.

Yippie Kay Ey Mother Fucker.

Bicycles, Canals and Food Poisoning

Well, what an interesting 10-hours or so it's been here in Amsterdam. Started with an upset stomach at around 7pm local time and then escalated into full-blown food poisoning. Worst I've ever had too, and that includes a bout with it in San Francisco that left me in the care of the hotel doctor, full of antibiotics and meds.

While Amsterdam has a lot of great things, one thing they are sorely lacking is a good 911 system. When one calls it, after having passed out from low blood pressure, they find you a nearby doctor to go to. That is NOT what I want. Taking a cab to a clinic when I can't stand up? Priceless.

But off to the clinic I went, where they didn't give me antibiotics, didn't have any anti-nausea drugs on hand, didn't give me fluids and mentioned that it was 11pm, and they were closing so... you don't have to vomit and poop at home, but you can't do it here.

Another cab ride back to the hotel, more moaning and laying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom. Abby's a frigging saint, running around to get me stuff, dress me, undress me, put me in bed, help me off the floor, and so on. We exchanged a few "this clinic sucks" looks as I lay under my coat on the exam table with my teeth chattering, while I was told I didn't have a fever, and that it was impossible for someone of my build to have been dehydrated enough to pass out.

Course I was, and I did.

The pregnant doctor was nice enough to shake my hand and say "good luck" while I left (not nice enough to have washed her hands anywhere). Now my body clock is off from so many hours being in a semi-conscious state, so I'm writing in the bathroom, trying not to wake up Abby.

Not exactly how I expected the vacation to go. Now I'm starving and thirsty and trying to hold out till sunrise to go get some crackers or something somewhere.

The sort-of great Mojo bar taste test

Jenni is fucking nuts. No really, I know she's nuts, because she and I have been in a friend-induced Mojo Bar taste test, and she likes things I don't like. Clearly since I'm much better than her in all regards, her tastes are broken.

Well truth be told she and I had similar reactions, but I know she reads this blog so I thought it would be good to rile her up first. Also for fair disclosure, Abby threw out some of the wrappers, figuring that a pile of ripped paper wrapper in the kitchen were junk, not science. So I'm not 100% sure of what I ate.

Due to voluminous amounts of travel and reduced amounts of bike riding, I tested just a sub set of these bars, provided by Daniel, based on this thread: http://turnings.phrasewise.com/2008/02/18/the-great-mojo-bar-taste-test/

So here's the deal— I got both dipped and non-dipped bars. I've been eating Clif Mojo bars for a while, all the non-dipped bars taste just about the same, so I started with the dipped.

The Peanut Butter and Jelly bar started off being awesome, what with the dipping in chocolate and all, but I soon found it cloying. Something about the "jelly" stuck to the roof of my mouth. It's not jelly. Its a jelly-ish paste of fruit. It's like fruit cement. And after a bit, it became too much for me.

I also had a chocolate dipped flavor that was not peanut butter and jelly, but was some other fruit, and that I liked. In fact I liked it so much I, as Jenni did, went right to the Vanilla dipped ones, figuring "hey, Vanilla is good." Vanilla, in this context is NOT good. It's bad. Very bad. It's like eating mucus, hard thick mucus, with a slight vanilla tang. It's like a sinus infection of confection.

I then went for the non-dipped bar with pretzels. I LOVE pretzels in things, I mix them with peanuts, chocolate, lamb, asparagus, rice, ice cream, coffee, and orange juice. (I am lying about some of the mix items.) I do NOT it seems like them in this bar. Or perhaps I don't like the bar that surrounded the pretzel. I can't tell because it was a mouthful that went right in the trash. This bar has called my mother a whore, and I shall never speak of it again.

I also liked the honey nut ones, they're fine. The rest are still in my kitchen waiting for a nice long ride.

Oh yeah, unlike Jenni I'm also not really impressed the product are 70% organic. If your label reads "70% non-carcinogenic" it's not such a bonus. 30% is a lot of volume in a bar. E for nice effort, T for nice try.

Mouseflot goes awry

So our attempt to relocate the mice has had a bit of a tragic setback. After successfully moving a number of mice to the garage (or the same few over and over) we left the humane traps out for a few days while on vacation with what the Internet assured us would be a good amount of food.

However (you knew there had to be a however, right) we came home and I found one dead mouse in the trap, and the completely eaten carcass of another alongside him. It was like a very small horror movie. I've taken to calling the traps Moushwitz.

I was actually really upset last night when I found them, I did a lot of cursing. If I had wanted to kill a mouse, I'd have left out an inhumane trap. I can't imagine however much more inhumane death than, you know, being snacked upon by your brother.

Abby and I were trying to find something funny in all this tonight as I re-set the trap, putting some more peanut butter into it. Abby mentioned the cartoons where two people are trapped somewhere, and one of them turns into a big turkey in their mind.

Flashing back though to the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup ads of old I said "you got your mouse in my peanut butter" then added "and you got your peanut butter in OH MY GOD YOU'RE EATING ME!"

Announcing my new blog

One blog's not enough for a guy as scatterbrained as I am. Announcing

http://www.frequentflyergourmet.com/

A big bone of conversation

The restaurant was exactly what I was looking for, yet another great OpenTable.com pick. Wil and I were in New York City, the night before our first AUPN Aperture Road Tour date. We'd finished packing in the morning, loaded all the gear into the truck, gotten it all brought to our rooms (that requires some hefty tipping) and he hit the shower while I went to look for candies or something to put in to the gift bags for the 75 people schedule to attend our class.

I wanted to find a nice place to eat, to thank him for all his hard work. The original plan was to also include one of our instructors, Brett, who flew across the country to pick up the class system so he could use it in the coming weeks, but he was grounded at Dulles, the result of bad weather.

So we went to BLT Steak (BLT stands for Bistro Laurent Tourondel), an upscale steak joint on 57th street with magical specials and an impeccable wine list. (They also have Hendricks gin, which I think makes the perfect gin and tonic.)

The specials seemed tempting, and while I would normally have gone for the seven-pepercorn crusted strip steak with a tomato citrus relish, my eyes instead alighted upon the Kobe beef. For a moment I was tempted to order the actual Kobe, the Japanese variety that's head-and-shoulders about US breeds, but a $26 an ounce, I wasn't quite up for it. Instead I opted for 10-ounces of some of the most incredibly perfect Top Cap steak ever. Probably overdoing it, I also ordered the grilled octopus salad which featured a set of grilled octopus tentacles that were illegally-good. Like a small crime had been committed in my mouth.

We were pursuing the menu when the Wil asked about the Portherhouse for Two that was on the menu, 40 ounces of beef designed to be shared by a couple (or a small Colombian family). "Do you have a porterhouse that's just for one?" he asked.

"Well," joked the waitress, "if you can finish it, I suppose it's for one." She had done it, thrown down the gantlet. It was on.

Before anything is served though we get an amuse/appertiser, which was an incredible tourine of duck liver paté followed by the most delicious popovers I have ever had.

Let me digress here, a romantic time-travel aside while I mention that the popovers served at one of the fancy restaurants my grandfather took me to in Florida when I was in grade school often served popovers. I fell instantly in love with them and to this day they still signify comfort and a first understanding of what it was like to fall in love with food.

Anyhow, when the massive (it's like the size of my thigh) steak comes it's accompanied by two sides, hasbrowns and onion rings (essentially a massive pile of onion rings shaped like the old toy for infants where circular rings are piled up around a wooden dowel).

The Kobe beef was beyond descriptoin, and the excessiveness of the meal was surpassed only by the sheer prettyness of most of the people in the room. Out of habit of years of giving the comfy wall bench seat to my wife I made the mistake of letting him take the view of the room, leaving me to pivot around in my seat on occasion and gawk, less subtly with each sip my my Syrah-Grenache.

During our meal a pair of men and a woman who turned out to be the Czech born wife of one of the guys, began to talk to us about the best steak places. The closest man, who looked like a cross between someone in the Sopranos and someone at a jewish family reunion mentioned that he used to go to Peter Luger's when he was a teen, and eat steak there four nights a week, so Wil's display of bravado did not phase him.

After we finished our meal, they got theirs, and I asked what the man was having. "Veal," he replied. "I cant' do steak any more, I"ve had two heart attacks."

"I wish you'd mentioned that before" said Wil, obviously having missed my requests that he perish from this earth after aiding me in my presentation classroom setup.

Misadventures In Advertising

Misadventures In Advertising, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Here I present to you what has proven to be one of the most egregious mis-advertisements I've seen in a long time. This is an unaltered, untampered with bowl of Raisin Bran, poured out of a box of very expensive (relative to the stuff from Post or Kellogg's) cereal from Whole Foods.

Notice the pretty picture on the box. Notice the raisins in the pretty picture on the box. Now, notice that there are almost no visible raisins in the bowl?

This was the fourth of five bowls I got out of this box. The average number of raisins per bowl? Two. That makes this cereal more like a box of Bran than a box of Raisin Bran, eeh?

On the front of the box, under the picture it says "Serving Suggestion." My guess is that Whole Foods is suggesting that I go out and buy some fucking raisins to put into their worthless bowl of Bowel Flakes.

A Very Obsessive Thanksgiving To You

I'm not often obsessive, thankfully the gene that turned the houses of my parents into dueling junkyards usually only appears in me as a desire to get things done right fucking now when they're bothering me.

On Thanksgiving though, that approach doesn't usually work, resulting instead in a big pile of food that's ready at the wrong time. So for the last few thanksgivings I've turned to computer assistance to help plan my meals. It's been excel the last few years, but this year it was iCal.

Behold! A day's worth of cooking in order, timeline based! Now you too can play along with our home cooking game, Schlanderson Thanksgiving®

How the 2004 Election Was Stolen

Rolling Stones article about how the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Looks like we "didn't elect" Bush in 2004 either.

Full article.

This country makes me utterly and disgustingly sick sometimes.

Here are some fun facts about the fraud in Ohio (the parenthetical numbers are footnotes in the original article)...

The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)

In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)

and a fun one about the voting machines.

Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)

and this gem about vote counting fraud

They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

Total Has Left The Building

I'm not sure exactly when, or exactly why (though I have my suspicions) but Total cereal has changed. This might not be alarming at all to most, it's just a cereal after all. But Total cereal is, or rather was, a cherished part of my life. I loved Total and now it's changed.

I suspect it was when General Mills recently committed to using only whole grains in their cereals. A Wikipedia entry even alludes to this, indicating that "whole grain corn and rice bran have been dropped as ingredients".

The taste is different, flatter, less interesting. The texture of the flake feels more like that of a cheap imitator, the kind you'd find in the no-frills aisle of Pathmark. There used to be a nutty undertone to the flake, a sort of complex flavor that's just replaced with a single taste.

This makes me terribly sad because it's unlikely that General Mills will ever order his food soldiers to change Total back to the way it was, after all part of the switch to whole grains is a cost saving measure disguised as a health-concious change. If everything you make is made from one grain, you get a lot better pricing from your distributors as you buy a higher volume of that one item.

The cereal that's so happily been a part of my healthy breakfast (and sometimes lunch or dinner) is gone, and I'm not sure how to mourn.

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