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For the best party of 66 years, I've been pretty good at dodging the docs and staying out of hospitals. But in the end, chaos and entropy always win and I'm now the proud owner of a pacemaker. This isn't a technology I've kept up with over the years, and I can tell you I was mighty pleased to discover that modern pacemakers are no longer the size of a 1956 Buick hubcap and are no longer powered by house current or nuclear batteries.
The rig I've got is a Medtronics Versa dual-chamber rate responsive pacemaker. It's a small (roughly the diameter of a fifty-cent piece and about as thick as two fifty-cent pieces) titanium widget with a built-in lithium ion battery and a couple of leads that run to my heart. What makes this a particularly nifty design is that it doesn't just sit there and keep my heart beating a 60 pulses a minute, but will set the pacing, depending upon requirements, to between 60 and 130 pulses per minute. The sampling rate, for those who like technical details, is 120 milliseconds. This means I could take on a whole dojo full of martial artists and still have plenty of blood flow to my brain. Actually, having enough blood flow to my brain will insure I won't try anything this stupid so you can relax, Steve. And you can even check the function remotely, using a small bit of comm gear that's connected to a telephone.
It took about an hour and a half to implant the device and fish the leads (the doc did this via an x-ray camera rather than using a fish tape); it was done under a local and just enough happy juice to make sure I didn't much care what was happening. I seem to recall discussing how to defuse a 750-pound variable time-delay fuse bomb with the doctor and his pit crew, but I suppose they've heard most everything. And who knows; they may need to know this someday. Sure hope I got the details right.
When you add in the cell phone charger, broadband WiFi antenna, USB port and the small keyboard that will handily fit in your shirt pocket, you have to admit that this is a pretty amazing device. You didn't really believe all of that, did you? No, I still can't get a broadband signal, and you can't really use a pacemaker for IM. Which is probably a good thing, if you think about it. I don't want any messages from Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin or space aliens. Oh, wait...Sarah Palin is a space alien.
My friend Steve Perry, aka Blind Whitebread Perry, took me up on putting Dial-up Blues to music, and came up with something much cooler than what I'd been doing with the piece. You can check out his recording here, and I think you'll agree with me that Blind Whitebread Perry is indeed da man.
Listen to the music, then check out Steve's blog. And then you can go out and buy some of his books. Good stuff; I've been enjoying them for more years than either of us care to contemplate. A science fiction writing martial artist who plays guitar: what's not to like?
My friend Dai Peters travels around the world, going to places that most people would be afraid to visit, and in various ways helping people to find better lives. She's one of my heroes; the sort of person who makes you feel better about the human race in general. I like to think of her as an "anti-Cheney". And while she has a number of talents, she has one that's particularly useful to someone who travels to the more remote places of the world: wherever she goes; Pakistan, Laos, Vietnam, Kenya or wherever it might happen to be, she always finds a high-speed internet connection, a connection that's a couple of orders of magnitude faster than my crummy dial-up here in rural Indiana. So this one's for you, Dai.
Got up this mornin', got on the internet;
Had my eggs, two cups of coffee
An' the page ain't loaded yet.
I got the blues;
I got them low-speed dial-up blues.
Called my ISP an' said, "There's trouble on my line."
'Cause I'm still gettin' e-mail
From nineteen eighty-nine.
Lord, it's so slow;
I got them low-speed dial-up blues.
Had me a good woman; she was mighty sweet,
But my baby was on Twitter
An' I was too slow to tweet.
I got the blues;
I got them low-speed dial-up blues.
Since my baby left me, life's just a livin' hell;
She went steppin' out with Willie
'Cause he got DSL.
An' I'm so slow;
I got them low-speed dial-up blues.
Can't watch no YouTube, can't make no call on Skype;
Can't get no satisfaction
No matter what I try.
I got the blues;
I got them low-speed dial-up blues.
I got them low-down, slow-down
Got no ever-lovin' bandwidth dial-up blues.
I put this to a regular old 12-bar blues progression in the key of A, but feel free to make up your own music if you're so inclined. Just make sure I get a check after you record it and it goes goes gold.
Sure, we've got zombies in Indiana. Like most travelers passing through the state, they're on their way to somewhere else. But unlike regular humans, zombies don't check out Mapquest and never seem to have GPS, either. And now we've got these hordes of lost zombies, lurching around the cornfields along with the alligators and armadillos that have been taking advantage of global warming to move north.
When the weather gets cold, I suppose the zombies will be competing with the 'gators and armadillos for a limited food supply, and since the traditional zombie chow is human brains, they may find the pickings a bit slim here in the Hoosier state, cold weather or not. If you know what I mean. Well, maybe they'll eat the 'gators and armadillos, but I'm not counting on this. 'Gators and armadillos may not be the fastest creatures on four legs, but they're surely faster than even a relatively speedy zombie. After all, the zombie record time in the 100 meter dash is around three minutes as I recall. A pretty ecological question, isn't it? It should be an interesting winter, particularly if the zombies should find a source of snowshoes. Or learn how to drive ATVs.
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Last weekend at the Salt Fork River Art Festival, I came across an artist who, in addition to her own work, had some kids' art on display. Here's Morgan's (four years old) depiction of "scared". This sure works for me, and looks to be about as scared as a person (or anything else) can get. I expect Morgan has a great future in art or graphics design if she happens to be inclined this way.
If you didn't catch Playing for Change: Peace Through Music on your PBS station, I strongly urge you to go here and order either the DVD of the PBS show or the DVD/CD combination shown above. The basic concept is brilliant: record and film a musician and then take the recording around the world so other musicians can join the jam session. Mark Johnson and his crew made this work beautifully, and the resulting whole seems far greater than the sum of its parts. Not that the parts aren't great by themselves, but having a talented singer from the US joined by a bass player from South Africa, a youth choir from Northern Ireland and a slide guitar player from Italy is hard to beat.
Even if you saw this on PBS, check out the website for more information on Playing for Change's foundation, various wearable and listenable goodies and the latest recordings. Trust me, you're gonna like this.
