Once, around a dinner table when everyone was remarking how delicious the dinner was, I said, "It tastes so good I hate to swallow," which pretty much exhausted my knowledge of digestion until just the past month.

Food, and eating, as far as I was concerned, pretty much began with biting and chewing, and that was it. Oh, sure, I knew what happened later, but didn't really much care, and while I must have learned something about the digestive tract and its functions in health or biology classes, I wasn't much of a student. Whatever my teachers had endeavored to impart to me never lasted, and I never gave it any thought after the test.

But that blissful ignorance wasn't to last.

Now that I think I'm all done writing about subserosal myomas, at least for now, I'm back to the more exciting topics of rectal bleeding and H. pylori. While I don't know anything about those, either, they're at least things that can affect me, personally. And, for the first time in my life, I have something other than myself to think about while I go about my business in the morning.

Like I said, I must have learned at some time what the intestines do, but I honestly had no idea what different things were done in the small and large intestines. As far as I was concerned, it was all just moving stuff along and grabbing what it could in the way of nutrients.

Now, I know a little better.

How exciting it is for me, now, to have worries about things that never before concerned me! Although I've yet to reach a point where I inspect my shit, and hope I never do, I can no longer take my morning dump as casually as I once did a ride in a car. When you're thinking about pistons and valves, it's hard not to listen for any little sign that something may be amiss in your engine, and it's now approaching that point with my intestines.

As far as I can tell, I'm still getting plenty of nutrition out of the things I eat. They also still taste good, unless I somehow screw up, but now that I know the large intestine mostly regulates water after the small has grabbed all the goodies, I can think about that.

Having new things to think about may not be exciting, but it gives me even more to keep an eye on.

There's a lot of arguing that goes on about the proper role of government, which just makes sense because there isn't a "right" answer, only opinions. Those who say government should do a lot of regulating assume the government knows best and those who say it should stay out of our lives as much as possible put, I think, too much credit on the humans it is meant to govern. Still, hardly anyone argues that the proper role of our government is to confuse us.



Yeah, that cute little car is mine, but that's not the point.

It used to be that streets didn't have these obnoxious lumps in them, and maybe they're just a southern California thing. There purpose, I think, is to slow traffic down, which reduces the slaughter and mayhem on our neighborhood streets. It also saves gas, so that's a good thing.

Years ago, when I first started seeing these, they were painted with diagonal stripes, which surely caught your eye. Then, a few years later, some more enlightened legislature decided that they might be catching drivers unaware so they added yellow street signs alerting us to the (speed) bumps in the road. Some time after the latest episode of slurrying the streets to make them look, if not function, any better, an even more informed legislature must have decided that while marking the bumps, themselves, with diagonal lines, that cost more than just writing on the street.

Why they chose to call them "humps," I cannot explain. It may have to do with us human's fondness for that which is new, or maybe the world "bump" was too difficult for many of our drivers to grasp. We'd gotten used to speed bumps, so maybe the thinking was to call them something different in the guise of updating or enhancing them, or maybe it was just to draw attention to them as being something new.

Either way, I think it's silly.

I have no idea how many fatal accidents there ever were on that street, but since it's the next block over, I'd think I would have heard the sirens or known about it. The number of lives saved, of course, approaches the infinite, in spite of the damage to done to all the cars that are now lower to the ground to save on gas mileage.

In any case, I guess I should write someone in government a strongly worded letter about this nonsense. If we can reach a consensus, an agreement, on the burgeoning hump-bump debate, there may yet be hope for the more serious issues.

I say, let's start with something small.

As some point in the distant past I heard someone ask me if I'd rather be right than happy. I'm not sure how I answered, but the true answer would be "right."

I can't just "get along." When something bugs me, it bugs me, and I have no idea how to stop letting that happen.

Like at least some other people, this year I learned about superdelegates. Now, I can understand some of the reasoning behind the Democratic Party having them, but a lot of people seem to be very upset with the whole idea. "Democracy!" they shout, and while there's a lot to be said in favor of that, a political party, I think, can select its nominee any way they want.

Still, I can sort of see why you might want superdelegates. I guess they're necessary if you need a majority and not just a plurality to select your candidate, but I also like how they add the human factor into the nominating process. It can be like having a human monitoring a computer or piece of machinery. Without the superdelegates, the process could be entirely automated, and I'm not so sure that's always a good thing.

If Barack Obama, who was leading last time I looked, cracks and does something stupid, it's good to have the superdelegates being able to pick someone else. I don't think they should overturn the will of the people on a whim, but if video surfaces of him gnawing on the bones of babies while seated on an American Flag while dressed in only a garter belt and high heels with a butt plug shoved up his ass, I think it would be reasonable to allow the superdelegates to overturn his nomination.

But that's not what bugs me about superdelegates.

It's the way they're referred to by many in the media, as if they were a bulk item. One of my favorite cartoons shows a guy in line at a grocery store correcting the "Ten items or less" sign to read "fewer," and the caption reads "Everybody's an editor."

Okay, not really all that funny, but it tickles my editorial soul. There is a difference between less and fewer, and it bugs me when people use the wrong term. One, fewer, is used to refer to countable items, even if it's a large number the stars in the sky. Less is used to talk about conceptual items, or those who we consider bulk items. There is less sugar on fewer donuts, fewer dollars means less money. It's not really that hard I don't think, but it does require a bit of thinking and evidently that amount of thinking is more than most people care to exert.

It's correct to say Obama or Hillary will need more delegates to win the nomination. But I wince whenever I hear someone refer to the superdelegates in bulk terms, although a specific instance of that escapes me now. Maybe I'll edit one in next time I hear it. If I watch any cable news program, I'm sure it will take fewer than five minutes.

[Edit: Okay, the biggest offense (from a usage standpoint) about these superdelegates is how often some knucklehead will talk about the amount of delegates needed. That's just plain wrong, and I'd be insulted if I were a superdelegate and was being referred to as if I was some sort of bulk commodity. Delegates do NOT come in amounts, they come in numbers! ]

My point is, if I wasn't so insistent on being right all the time, I could more thoroughly enjoy this race.

On the other hand, there's this, which is pretty cool and depressing, and this, which is equally depressing but is a little movie.

Over this last weekend I became a trifle upset. I was all set to add a thrilling new entry to Crenellated Flotsam when I discovered two discouraging facts.

1) My last entry had, somehow, disappeared
2) I couldn't see my site

Then, this morning, as I got set to try and fix things, the site was back. I did some quick poking around, but it wasn't until later today that I discovered my web host had sent me a friendly letter letting me know that my site had been successfully transitioned to their new software.

Which may explain why CF is working again. And, I must admit, better than it was. Last time I updated it, I lost handy little buttons for marking up the text or inserting links, but now they're back. I haven't yet found, on my new control panel, how to quickly check and repair the database, but its loss would only further strengthen my beliefs in the nature of progress.

In the meantime, I'll check around and see if I can find something to post about.