Sorry, Wrong Number

This movie has the dubious honor of being the first I ever watched in a hospital, but it was a nice one anyway. It was also the first one I ever saw with Barbara Stanwyck, a reputedly very good actress.

And good she was indeed, but mostly it was interesting to see how different an old-Hollywood movie looked from today's typical fare. The action was more slow-paced, the acting more dramatic and theatrical, and the script so simple and yet effective.

Ah... the Golden Age of American movies...

Anyway, the whole plot revolves around a rich woman, played by Stanwyck, who marries "beneath" her and eventually becomes the target of an assassination plot, engineered by her husband to inherit her fortune and free himself of her dominating father.

Naturally, things don't exactly go as programmed, and our heroine is somehow clued in to her upcoming demise by an unlikely telephone interception. Will she be able to stop the killer before it's too late?

As I said, Stanwyck is really good, which is crucial since virtually the entire movie revolves around her lying in her bed, talking on the phone, and looking distraught. The rest of the cast, including Burt Lancaster as her fictional husband, is fine and supports her admirably.

All in all, an enjoyable film from a time long gone.

Grade: 7

The latest bad news from IPCC

That is from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's a long article, but worth your time. And very sad too. Some highlights:

Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world's governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
[...]
[T]he report also predicts that nearly a third of the world's species could be driven to extinction as the world warms up, and that harvests will be cut dramatically across the world.
[...]
Scientists have found that the seas have already absorbed about half of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity since the start of the industrial revolution, a staggering 500 billion tons of it. This has so far helped slow global warming – which would have accelerated even faster if all this pollution had stayed in the atmosphere, already causing catastrophe – but at an increasingly severe cost.
[...]
A report by the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, concludes that, as a result, of the pollution, the world's oceans are probably now more acidic that they have ever been in "hundreds of millennia", and that even if emissions stopped now, the waters would take "tens of thousands of years to return to normal".
[...]
It makes a host of specific predictions for every continent and warns that "impacts" could be "abrupt" or "irreversible". One example of an irreversible impact is an expected extinction of between 20 and 30 per cent of all the world's species of animals and plants even at relatively moderate levels of warming. If the climate heats further, it adds, extinctions could rise to 40 to 70 per cent of species.

And this is what saddened me the most, because I might never get to see it:

The Amazon rainforest will become dry savannah as rising temperatures and falling water levels kill the trees, stoke forest fires and kill off wildlife.

Will the world governments be able to agree on some kind of effective and decisive action?

Don't hold your breath for Bush jumping on the bandwagon...

A Quote By:

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on President Bush while voicing his concerns over nominee for Attorney General Michael Mukasey:

"For the last six years it is clear that we have had a president that does not understand what the Constitution of the United States is about. What this president believes, essentially, is that he can do anything he wants, at any time, against anybody, in the name of fighting terrorism. And he happens to believe that the 'war on terrorism' is unending; it's going to go on indefinitely. And I think it is very important that we have an Attorney General who can explain the Constitution to a President who clearly does not understand it."

Does GOP = Gay Old Party?

I saw this after reading about the umpteenth Republican legislator (or was it a priest/religious leader) caught in a gay sex scandal (and it's again the typical sanctimonious we-are-morally-superior-then-you prick) and I just couldn't let it go by.

Enjoy:

Will someone buy Bush a set of tin soldiers to play with?

I have this weird feeling that he didn't get to play soldier when he was a little boy, and so now he's making up for lost time, but since he's all grown up he needs to play with soldiers his size.

The problem is that he doesn't seem to realize that he's literally playing with people's lives here.

From a Raw Story article, this scary tidbit:

Last month, a national security source told The London Times that the Pentagon has "drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days."

According to the paper, a Washington source said the "temperature was rising" to launch an Iranian attack inside the Bush administration. This information comes on the heels of reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency last week that cited "significant cooperation" with Iran over its nuclear program, including the slowing of uranium enrichment.

The most recent report by the nuclear watchdog agency, however, said that Iran was three to eight years away from building a bomb.
[...]
ABC notes that there appear to be few targets such a weapon would be useful for in Iraq. It could be used on Taliban or Qaeda targets in Pakistan caves, though there'd be scant need for a stealth bomber.

"You'd use it on Natanz," John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org told ABC, referring to a site inside Iran. "And you'd use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly."

"It's kind of strange," Pike said. "It sends a signal that you are preparing to bomb Iran, and if you were actually going to bomb Iran I wouldn't think you would want to announce it like that."

Is he really going to do this? Are the Democrats in Congress really going to let him get away with this?

Bush's next lethal (and foolish) quest

This cartoon by Matson was too good (and, I fear, right on the money) not to post it:

Still home recovering

I ended up having surgery on the night of October 19^th, came home the following Monday, and I won't be back to work until November 12^th.

The surgery was done as an emergency when the doctor finally saw on a new CAT scan that my colon was not where it was supposed to be, but was instead flipped up next to my stomach. He also saw an anomaly around the stomach, but felt like that was just a fluke.

It turned out that the fluke was the real deal: my omentum had inexplicably twisted on its axis and a part of it had died as a consequence of the blood flow getting cut. The omentum had then inflamed the entire area and pulled up the colon to its new location. Once the part of the omentum that had died was removed, the colon went back to its normal location and everything else looked fine.

It's nice to know the problem is fixed, even though the recovery is quite slow. I hope I'll feel up to go to work in a week, because I don't really have a way of delaying that any further.

My biggest regret is that the surgeon went in thinking he had to do one thing, and it turned out to be something quite different, but at that point the incision had been made, and it's much longer than it would have been necessary if he had known what the problem really was.

I can't really blame him though. He told me he has no idea how this happened and has never seen anything like it in over 20 years of surgeries, unless in people who had previously had abdominal surgeries and therefore had some scar tissue, which could cause this kind of twisting motion. A nurse told me the same thing.

And then I also read on an internet article that since omental torsion was first reported in 1899, there have been less than 250 such cases. Also, this condition is so rare that its rate of successful pre-operative diagnosis is between 0.6 and 4.8%. That's very low unfortunately.

I guess I'll just have to get used to seeing this huge scar in the middle of my abdomen from now on. It won't be easy, but it could be worse.