Squash The Pain

So the recent Newsweek cover story on pain comes down to this: try to shut down nerve pathways as soon as possible after an injury in order to decrease the chance of chronic pain.

In other words: treat pain aggressively in its initial stages. After that? A multidisciplinary approach is best.

And the 0-to-10 pain rating scale? It still sucks:

Complicating the issue even further is pain's inherently subjective nature—we may say we "feel each other's pain," but really, we can't. Doctors don't have any good way of measuring pain from one person to the next. The best they can do is ask patients to rate it for themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the greatest agony of their lives. This is absurdly imprecise. Patients are usually honest (and fakery is fairly easy to spot), but they can exaggerate. A person feeling a 4 may claim a 7 to get aggressive treatment, and a person feeling a 7 may downplay it as a 4 in hopes of looking tough.

However, the author then writes this:

Gender matters, too. Women have up to twice as many nerve fibers in the skin as men do, so they feel some types of pain more intensely. (This doesn't mean they're weaker; it means that, all other factors being equal, their 10 is off a man's chart.)

Can you guess the gender of the writer from that?


At any rate, here's my pain scale: "It hurts" to "It hurts less" or "It doesn't hurt anymore".









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.lucidmovement.com/

You're Wrong

This marvelous list of cognitive biases has been making the rounds of late:

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

Try and see how many match the ignorant and fear-mongering logic of 'if we leave Iraq, then terrorism will grow and spill out into the world'.


From the excellent book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me):

By understanding the inner workings of self-justification, we can answer these questions and make sense of dozens of other things that people do that would otherwise seem unfathomable or crazy. We can answer the question so many people ask when they look at ruthless dictators, greedy corporate CEO's, religious zealots who murder in the name of God, priests who molest children, or people who cheat their siblings out of a family inheritance: How in the world can they live with themselves? The answer is: exactly the way the rest of us do.
Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision: Did we do the right thing, marry the right person, buy the right house, choose the best car, enter the right career? Yet mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information we need and assessing issues clearly. It prolongs and widens rifts between lovers, friends, and nations. It keeps us from letting go of unhealthy habits. It permits the guilty to avoid taking responsibility for their deeds. And it keeps many professionals from changing outdated attitudes and procedures that can be harmful to the public.

Prediction: after this "Worst President in History" leaves office, he will seclude himself at his dust ranch in Texas and hardly be heard from again.

Seriously, can you see Bush helping build houses with Habitat For Humanity?

"I didn't bend that nail, see. It was already bended. *smirk* Look, if you take that bended nail out, then some terrorist nail's gonna move in. *smirk* Listen, ten years from now you'll thank me."

Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.waymarking.com/

Speaking Of Geeks

Order your Infallible Aether Oscillator today!

Geek Nursing Allure

Geek nursing doesn't get any better than having a patient barely kept alive by 8 or 9 drips, continual dialysis, and a ventilator. I floated to help out in the ICU last week and licked my lips at this entree of geekitude.
Being a geek myself, I've often thought of moving over to the ICU to play at that higher level of care. What stops me? The time and the pay.

The ICU nurses at my hospital get payed the same as I do working out in the ghetto (med/surg floor). This is absurd! Sure, the ICU is a focused place and once you've been trained to jive in that, then perhaps it's not all that different. In fact, for the most part the ICU is much easier than the floor. Having one or two patients is much better than 7 or 8. It's a lot safer also.
But sometimes there are patients like the one above which keep an ICU nurse busy the entire 12-hour shift with nary a break. The dialysis machine keeps clotting, the drips need adjusting, the blood pressure is always on the edge, the ventilator keeps alarming... That code blue button gets eyed three or four times.

To keep up on all that an ICU nurse is required, and hopefully wants, constant training and upkeep of skills and knowledge. This means the nurse has to come in for this training on their days off. Sure, they get payed for it, but that's a lot of one's time. At my hospital they're also required to take an on-call day every few weeks, and it's very rare to not be called in.
Maybe, for me, this will be cool when all the kids are grown and out of the house, but for now... NOT!
Hand-in-hand with that goes the pay. I cannot fathom working and training so much for so little. It's just insane.

I guess for now I'll get my geek fix for now by floating there every so often. But there's still that strange allure...









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.oddweek.com/

Caves Of Mystery

People, what needs to be placed first on places to explore? Giant Mars caverns!

There's got to be lost cities of Barsoom in there.


Speaking of Barsoom, how's the John Carter of Mars movie coming along?

Not very well.









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.humanbeans.net/whatscookinggrandma/

New Addition To The Family

The Chocolate Lab of the Rockies

I hope this dog likes spaghetti!











Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.newmediamedicine.com/videos/

Radiology's Lament

From MIT's Technology Review (via):

MIT researchers are developing a new kind of x-ray imager that uses information that traditional machines ignore. By looking at how tissue refracts the rays, not simply at how it absorbs them, the researchers hope to increase the resolution of mammography, enabling doctors to detect smaller tumors earlier.

The basic physics behind x-ray imaging hasn't changed in more than 100 years. Most hospitals have gotten rid of film and gone digital, but their images still record the same kind of information: how a part of the patient's body absorbs the rays.

...

Hundreds of interference images are then combined with the hundreds of absorption images into a single picture that a radiologist can read. Berthold Horn, a member of MIT's computer-science and artificial-intelligence laboratory, is developing algorithms to process the x-ray images. "The computer becomes an integral part of the imaging system," he says.

Similar filters are used in x-ray astronomy, in which the objects of interest--the stars--are very, very far away. Horn and Lanza were the first to apply this technique, called coded-aperture imaging, to nearby objects. They have already employed it to improve the resolution of a gamma-ray imaging technique used on lab animals, and they believe they will see similar results with x-ray imaging.

I think it must be maddening being in the radiology field. You're using 100-year old technology while living in the wonder of the computer age, and you know it can be done so much better.

"Where's my medical tricorder and sensor cluster!," the modern radiologist ululates! (yes, I own a thesaurus)

Speaking of Star Trek, when I first heard they'd fired Scotty's ashes up into space I thought "That's cool!"

But they didn't. They shot them up into a low orbit so they'd come back down again (and almost got lost in the mountains of New Mexico)!

WTF?! Why didn't they shoot them off to travel into space for eternity?

Now here it is, your url of the day:

http://www.thebeststuffintheworld.com/

The Result Of Crazy Parents

If you're a maniacal mom who says things like this all the time, you'll more than likely produce a kid like this.









Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://cocacolaoldads.blogspot.com/

Open Letter

To: News Media

From: America

Re: Paris Hilton



Dear News Media,

You seem to be under the illusion that we care if Paris Hilton goes to jail, that we care what toothpaste she'll take with her, that we care what color her sheets will be, that we care about her at all...

We don't.

Please, please stop.

Oh Dear Lord and Baby Jesus, please stop!




Thank you,
Everyone.








Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.acrobots.net/

Blog Of Note

This is a cool blog, Art Jumble.

Especially with art like this:

The Dark Ring

This awesome photo is probable evidence of dark matter. Dark matter cannot be seen directly so astronomers watched this galaxy cluster to see what gravitational lensing (radiation bent by gravity of nearby objects) would bring up. It's actually two pictures: one of the galaxy cluster, and another of the gravitational lensing superimposed.

Bad Astronomy Blog explains it better:

...Einstein postulated that gravity from matter bends space, like a bowling ball on a bed bends the mattress. Light will follow that bend in space the same way a marble rolled across the bed will curve from the bowling ball’s dip. If there is some massive object out there in space, and some galaxy beyond it, the light from the more distant galaxy will bend as it passes by the intervening material. We see that as a distortion in the shape of the galaxy. This is called gravitational lensing, and can be used to map out the location of dark matter. So even though we cannot see DM directly, we can see its effects.

Now here they are, your urls of the day:
Rest In Hell, Jerry Falwell.
Tinky Winky Says Goodbye.
Also, The Dept. of Evil

IV Beeping

Staff and patients alike joke about how hospitals are the worst places to get rest.

Here's what a patient often hears at night in a busy hospital:

7:15 pm "Hi, I'm *Night Nurse* and I'll be with you all night."
8:00 pm General Intercom: "Visiting hours are over!"
9:00 pm "It's time for your HS meds," "diabetic finger stick," "dressing change," etc."
10:00pm "I gotta get your vital signs", "Need a sleeping pill?", "Goodnight, get some sleep."
10:30pm IV beeping.
11:00pm "Oh sorry, new admission coming into the neighboring bed."
12:00am IV beeping, "Sorry, gotta take off some tape"
12:01am Intercom to nurse: "We're ordering pizza. You in?"
1:00 am "Hi, I need to do a lab draw", IV beeping.
1:10 am General Intercom: "Code Blue, Room 910!"
2:00 am *finally all quiet*
2:01 am IV beeping.
2:02 am "I need your vital signs again."
2:10 am IV beeping.
3:00 am "Are you Mrs. Haversham? Sorry, wrong room."
4:00 am "Good morning! Lab draw! Cover your eyes, I'm turning on the lights!"
5:30 am "Hi, I'm Dr. *Surgeon*. How'd you sleep?"
5:45 am IV beeping, "Gotta take you down to x-ray."
6:00 am IV beeping, "Vital signs!"
6:15 am IV beeping.
6:20 am IV beeping.
6:30 am "I'm sorry, I have to change your IV."
6:45 am IV beeping.
7:15 am "Hi, I'm *Day Nurse* and I'll be with you today. How'd you sleep?"










Now here it is, your url of the day:
Isaac Asimov's The Last Question

Genio Loci Ignoto

Elitist pipe-dreamers, visionary thinkers, or both?

There's a new book out about the history of the Esalen Institute, a Big Sur retreat for humanistic studies, called Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, by J. Kripal.
(found via grow-a-brain)

It's an interesting place, visited over the past fifty years by many famous scholars, philosophers, new-age gurus, religious leaders, etc.

Excerpt from the book:

Thompson, it turns out, sometimes picked verbal fights with the homosexual bathers. One night, he returned to the property with his girlfriend and two hitchhiking soldiers from Fort Ord (a base just north of Monterey). Thinking it was safe to go down to the baths in such a crowd, Thompson ventured down the dark path. But some of the bathers jumped him, the soldiers and his girlfriend ran away, and Thompson was left alone to slug it out. As the story goes, most of the slugging was done by the bathers. The men beat Thompson up and came very close to throwing him off the cliff that night. Bloodied and bruised, he got back to his room in the Big House, where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open.

Not long after this incident, Bunny would read one of Thompson’s early published essays in Rogue magazine, “Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller,” in which he described the folks of Big Sur as “expatriates, ranchers, out-and-out bastards, and genuine deviates.” Such language did not go down well with Bunny. She may have been in her eighties, but she was also tough. According to Anderson, she then “made one of her rare trips down to Big Sur, in her black Cadillac with her Filipino chauffeur, for the specific purpose of firing Thompson.” Exit Hunter Thompson.

Yes, the place was not Hunter-friendly; it is for Joseph Campbell types. BTW, Hunter was hired there as a security guard!


Its European counterpart is the Eranos Foundation in Switzerland, also located in a gorgeous location. Like Esalen's, Eranos discussions have been centered on humanistic studies with attempts to meld Eastern and Western thought, however Eranos is much more the professor while Esalen is the grad student.

Joseph Campbell attended them both, but Eranos was also graced by the likes of Carl Jung, Henry Corbin, Adolf Portmann Paul Radin, Denis de Rougemont, Huntington Cairns, Maud Oakes, D.T. Suzuki, Olga Froebe (founder), Mircea Eliade, Erich Neumann, Karl Kerenyi, Vladimir Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, Georges Dumezil, Marija Gimbutas, Gerald Sykes, Mark Van Doren, Alan Watts and others.

Esalen's thinkers also include Watts, plus Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Gregory Bateson, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Paul Tillich, Ansel Adams, Arnold Toynbee, Timothy Leary, Linus Pauling, Carl Rodgers, Chunglian Al Huang, Buckminster Fuller, Ida Rolf, Richard Feynman, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, and George Harrison to name just a few.


As you can see, Eranos' people smoked fine tobacco and Esalen's people smoked everything else.

OK, just kidding. They both smoked a lot of the same stuff.


Here's Michael Shermer on the place:

People have and share such experiences and impart larger significance to them because we have a cortex big enough to conceive of such transcendent notions and an imagination creative enough to concoct fantastic narratives. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made--our genes, proteins, memories and personalities--then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos.

There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one, with its awe-inspiring account about who we are and where we came from. "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself," began the late astronomer Carl Sagan in the opening scene of Cosmos, filmed just down the coast from Esalen, in referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life. "We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness.... Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

That is spiritual gold.

Now here it is, your url of the day:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

Big Pimpin', Big Pharma Style!

Here's how Big Pharma rolls (NYT article):

Yet childhood bipolar disorder is an increasingly controversial diagnosis. Even doctors who believe it is common disagree about its telltale symptoms. Others suspect it is a fad. And the scientific evidence that atypicals improve these children’s lives is scarce.

One of the first and perhaps most influential studies was financed by AstraZeneca and performed by Dr. Melissa DelBello, a child and adult psychiatrist at the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. DelBello led a research team that tracked for six weeks the moods of 30 adolescents who had received diagnoses of bipolar disorder. Half of the teenagers took Depakote, an antiseizure drug used to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorder in adults. The other half took Seroquel and Depakote.

The two groups did about equally well until the last few days of the study, when those in the Seroquel group scored lower on a standard measure of mania. By then, almost half of the teenagers getting Seroquel had dropped out because they missed appointments or the drugs did not work. Just eight of them completed the trial.

In an interview, Dr. DelBello acknowledged that the study was not conclusive. In the 2002 published paper, however, she and her co-authors reported that Seroquel in combination with Depakote “is more effective for the treatment of adolescent bipolar mania” than Depakote alone.

Anyone can follow Big Pharma's Bag o' Tricks (TM)*:

1. Make up a disorder.
2. Select a drug that 'fixes' the made-up disorder.
3. Push the 'fact' that since the disorder now has a drug that fixes it, the disorder is real.
4. Ask people which they'd rather have: a) the terrible disorder or b) cured of the terrible disorder but having to put up with a few 'pesky' drug side-effects.
5. Market the drug by word-of-mouth so as to not incriminate yourself.

Hooray! You just made sales of Havidol increase by 300%!

You're on top of the world, kid!



*Warning: following Big Pharma's Bag o' Tricks may cause you to develop permanent loss of conscience, moral bankruptcy, and chronic large-bowel infestation of Scientologia Lunitica.










Now here it is, your url of the day:
100 Worst Cover Songs

This Week On STV (Sleestak TV)

This is a test. For the next sixty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Sleestak System. This is only a test.

If this had been an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions on how to kill Chaka.

This concludes this test of the Emergency Sleestak System.

Now here it is, your url of the day:

Dynamite!

Gumming Up Evolution

Remember the recent polar bear cub in Germany that was shunned by its mother and its care taken over by the zookeepers? It got attention because one activist group spoke out and said we should let it die because that's what nature intended. That comment received much aghastment (new word for ya!). I thought it was ridiculous. It didn't happen in the wild. It was a zoo. Nature's 'intents' certainly aren't 'natural' in a zoo.

But it did raise this opinion article which I found interesting:

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and a whole host of other medical conditions too numerous to mention here were all once fatal to humans. Many are now treatable to the point that sufferers can extend their lives well beyond what would be their natural lifespan otherwise. In many cases, this allows people to survive long enough to reproduce, thereby passing on their inferior genes to a new generation. Medicine has always been about helping the human condition, but in fact may be having the opposite effect in the long run - survival of the individual may not be as important in the grand scheme of things as survival of the species. Evolution itself encourages adaptive traits while weeding out maladaptive traits, but medicine (and in particular, modern medicine) bypasses this process and promotes the idea that each and every human life is of equal value, even though (from a strictly Darwinian viewpoint) this is palpably false.

...

I believe that society currently holds two contradictory views:

1. It is wrong to attempt to create better humans through selective breeding, forced sterilization, genetic manipulation, or any other form of eugenics. (We should not play god).
2. Genetically inferior humans who would surely die if left to fend for themselves should be given whatever aid they need to survive, and should have the right to reproduce if they so choose. (We should play god).

Humans are stalling evolution?

There is something to this line of thought but again, we, ourselves, live in a kind of zoo where nature is disconnected to a fair degree.

In the hospital setting there are many variations of keeping humans alive when they should be allowed to die. These often involve quality of life issues, particularly with newborns. Quite often newborns with severe birth defects are unfortunately kept alive by amazing technology and with no hope of any quality of life. They live in suffering.
Other issues include those unfortunate elderly who have no advance directives and are kept alive to suffer also, only because one or two family members can't bear to let them go. But this doesn't speak to the evolution point as much as the newborn one does.

At any rate, the idea that we improperly keep people alive who should be genetically 'weeded out' leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It does, however, provide a very complicated debate.

Comedian Hell

The Five Most Annoyingly Unfunny Comedians:

1. Colin Quinn (AKA "The Black Hole")
2. Sarah Silverman (Just write, don't talk)
3. Carlos Mencia (Grad student of Asshology)
4. Dane Cook (Best friend of crickets)
5. Chevy Chase (you'll never get off this list, Chevy!)

A much better site: Merlin's Lists of Five Things.

And a site that squishes me like a bug: McSweeney's Internet Tendency.







Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.etymologic.com/

Mysterious Kitchen Allure

It never fails, whether it's a patient with Alzheimer's or someone going into D.T.'s, they all want to get out of bed because, "I've got to go to the kitchen!"

You pump them full of Ativan. You tie them down with restraints. You make them repeat after you 30 times, "This is a hospital. I am a patient in a hospital. Hospital, hospital, hospital." Two seconds later they have their legs over the side rails wanting to "go to the kitchen."

"Why?" you pleadingly ask. "Why do you want to go to the kitchen?"

But they never give you an answer. "Here, just untie this. I have to go to the kitchen."
Walk into the room at the start of your shift and it's "I gotta go to the kitchen." Check on 'em five minutes before the end of your shift, "...kitchen!"

Sometimes you think you've got a clue. They'll ask for scissors or a knife. "Aha! You want to go to the kitchen to get a knife!" you exclaim in pure Elementary-My-Dear-Watson tone.
But no.
It doesn't matter where the scissors or knife come from. They just want them to cut the restraints so they can get to the kitchen.

Maybe the kitchen is where the alcohol is! Right? Yes? Aha? "You want a drink and it's in the kitchen!"
Nope.

"Is it food? Are you just hungry?" you ask. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.... good one! Hand them a sandwich and watch them saw at the restraints with it.


They never tell you. They never say what's in the kitchen or why they have to get there.

Never.


*cue music*

When my eyes are open
Or even when they're shut
I think about you, kitchen
I'm in a kitchen rut

I don't care what they say
My heart knows what's right
You're just around the corner
There's your glowing light

*chorus*
Lend me your scissors
Lend me your knife
Nurse-person, please let me go
The kitchen is my life


-from "Just Around The Corner" by beajerry
(Am I good enough?)







Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://galaxymap.org/ or http://www.exosolar.net/start.html (via MeFi)

Getting To The Point

BILL MOYERS: Your persistence and his inability to answer without the talking points did get to the truth, that there's a contradiction to what's going on in Vietnam in there's a contradiction. Yeah, exactly, that there's a contradiction to what's going on in that war, that they can't talk about.

JON STEWART: That's right. There is a there is an enormous contradiction, and it is readily apparent, if you just walk through simple sort of logic, and simple rational points. But the thing that they don't realize is that everyone wants them to come from beyond that contradiction so that we can all fix it. Nobody is saying, "We don't have a problem." Nobody is saying that, "9/11 didn't happen." What they're saying is, "We're not a fragile country, trust us to have this conversation, so that we can do this in the right way, in a more effective way."

BILL MOYERS: Why aren't we having that conversation? Well, that's a very good point, Why is the country not having this conversation, the kind of conversation that requires the politicians who are responsible for the war to be specific to the concerns of the American people. I mean, they do come out and a kind of gauze goes up.

JON STEWART: Because I don't think politics is any longer about a conversation with the country. It's about figuring out how to get to do what you want. The best way to sell the product that you want to put out there, but not necessarily for the products on you know, it-- it's sort of like, when a dishwashing soap you know, they want to make a big splash, so they decide to have more lemon, as though people are gonna be like, "That has been the problem with my dishes! Not enough lemon scent!"

A great interview: Bill Moyers with John Stewart.

A Jester's function is to poke fun and pop people out of their subjective ruts. The Daily Show is the King of Jesters these days. But it's rare to have a sober interview that occurs outside of the bubble of existing media and looks at it objectively.

This is illustrated by the interview Stewart recently did with Sen. John McCain (talked about in the Moyers interview). Stewart desperately, perhaps too desperately, tried to get to the bone of the debate about the Iraq War while brushing off McCain's talking points. The interview disintegrated after awhile with Stewart and McCain just talking over each other (which Stewart acknowledges to Moyers).

One may point out that trying to get past a politician's talking points has always been damn-near impossible, but the current political/media atmosphere has raised things to absurd levels. This absurdity is the wave The Colbert Report enjoys surfing.









Now here it is, your url of the day:

Scenario: Jeffrey won’t be still in class, disrupts other students.

1973: Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by Principal. Sits still in class.

2007: Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.

1973 vs. 2007

My Ignorance Is Justified

From The Dilbert Blog:

It turns out that being ignorant is almost exactly like being a well-read student of philosophy who can quote from the work of the masters. How lucky is that?

Scott Adams is a riot.

Cold CPR Please, And Hold The Oxygen

From Newsweek:

...once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed.

...

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

So, in my next CPR class we'll be taught to only do compressions with very cold hands.

Webslingin'

Tomorrow at 3pm I hope to be dizzy from webslingin' fun.

Spiderman 3












Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.throttling.us/

Honest John's Diagnosis

From Disney's Pinocchio:



Honest John:   Oh, you poor, poor boy.
           You must be a nervous wreck.
           That's it! You are a nervous wreck!
           We must diagnose this case at once.
           (TO GIDEON) Quick, Doctor, your notebook.
           Bless my soul.
           My, my.
           Just as I thought.
           A slight touch of monetary complications
           with bucolic semilunar contraptions
           of the flying trapezes.
           Say, "Hippopotamus".

Pinocchio:   Hi-ho-hotamus.

Honest John: I knew it!
           Compound transmission of the pandemonium
           with percussion and spasmodic frantic
           disintegration.
           Close your eyes. What do you see?

Pinocchio:   Nothing.

Honest John: Open 'em. Now what do you see?

Pinocchio:   Spots.

Honest John: Now, that heart.
           Ooh, my goodness!
           A palpating syncopation of the killer diller
           with a wicky-wacky stomping of the floy joy.
           (TO GIDEON) Quick, Doctor, that report!
           This makes it perfectly clear!
           My boy, you are allergic.

Pinocchio:   Allergic?

Honest John: Yes, and there is only one cure.
           A vacation on Pleasure Island!













Now here it is, your url of the day:
http://www.monsterlibrarian.com