The Neon Museum, Las Vegas - February 1, 2022

The Neon Museum (former Concha Motel).

Stardust Casino sign.

The Neon Museum (former Concha Motel).

The Neon Museum (former Concha Motel).

Showboat Casino sign.

Golden Nugget.

Yucca Motel.

Big skull face.

Stardust sign.

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Motel 51 sign.

Hail, Caesar!

Sahara Casino sign.

Stardust.

Too much to drink.

Hard Rock Cafe sign.

Lost Vegas.

Motel 51 and Concha Motel sign.

Moulin Rouge.

Hard Rock Cafe sign.

Rouge.

Moulin.

Yucca Motel sign.

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse.

Red Barn.

Ernie's.

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Big skull face again.

Stardust.

Moulin Rouge.

Silver Slipper!

Las Vegas Hiatus

Ira's funeral service is Tuesday, February 1st in Las Vegas. (More to come.)

RIP, Ira Gershin

Alas, my good friend Ira has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer.  My last text with him was January 18th:  he died on Saturday, January 29, 2022.  Time to visit Las Vegas and gather with his family for his funeral.

Ira Gershin, at Metro Pizza in Las Vegas, NV, about May 21, 2011.

Rebooting My Heart - My Cardioversion at the Sutter Medical Center Emergency Room - Early Hours of January 30, 2022

About 8 p.m. on Saturday January 29, 2022, I lay down on my couch to nap, and immediately thought, "Is there an earthquake going on?" Because something sure was rocking. But the earth seemed stable. My heart was doing the rocking. 

I forgot about the rocking. Later on in the evening, Rachel came over, and she was able to detect the pounding in my chest. Since I'm taking medications for atrial fibrillation (afib), I used a pulse oximeter to measure my pulse rate, which logged in between 155 and 158 beats per minute. Way high! My heart must be quivering like an aspen leaf in the wind. Yet, I felt perfectly fine - no dizziness or discomfort of any sort. 

What to do? I took an extra metoprolol tablet to slow the heart down. More medical advice might be helpful. I called Blue Shield's Teladoc. After a pre-call getting insurance info, a doctor called back. He was absolutely emphatic that I must get to the emergency room as rapidly as possible. No wiggle room on his advice! 

So, Rachel took me to the Sutter Medical Center Emergency Room about 1 a.m. Given Covid, and all, I was apprehensive about how long it might take to get into the ER, but I was surprised how quick it was. When I presented them with cardiac symptoms, they opened the ER doors immediately. One of the nurses bowed slightly. He said, "Please, come in!" 

So, no matter how jolly I felt, my heart beat was too high. The EKG made clear that the metoprolol tablet had been utterly ineffective. The heart had flown away into the infinite and was beating as hard as it could. There were two options: 1.) more drugs - no guarantee of success, or 2.) cardioversion - using a powerful electric shock to reboot my heart into a proper rhythm. 

Cardioversion seemed the way to go. So, around 2:15 a.m., various nurses, enablers, a sober-looking respiratory therapist, and the ER doctor started gathering around. Maybe ten people in the room, total. They prepared the propofol (that drug that done Michael Jackson in) for injection. (Apparently you really jump when slammed with that much electricity, so they wanted to put me under first.) It almost seemed like a party atmosphere had evolved. I said after the jolt I wanted to walk around like Frankenstein, and have them say in mock horror "He's alive!" I emphasized Frankenstein. I said Michael Jackson was more of a werewolf kind of guy, and didn't want to follow his lead. They wanted to humor me, so they chuckled. 

They glued metal sheets to my front and back. Not sure which plate was cathode and which was anode. The doctor said I'd feel the propofol burn as it entered my arm, and I did. After about a minute, I noticed a kind of fatigue, which lasted about 30 seconds. Then I was out. 

When I awoke most everyone had gone. My heart was beating more normally - still jumping a beat now and then. I was unable to sleep, due to texting people, posting on Facebook, and a ceaseless blood-pressure measuring device kneading my arm. After a couple hours of observation they informed me at 5 a.m. that, even though tropamine levels remained elevated, they ascribed that due to the electric shock, not due to a heart attack. Part of it too might be the hours of pounding.  It was as if I'd been in a marathon race.

So, I could go. Rachel was kind enough to pick me up from the ER around 6 a.m. 

Since the underlying afib problem remains, I might have to have this done more times in the future. Sometimes a reboot is all you can do. There is ablation surgery, which they decided against in 2018, that might cure the problem, but we'll see. 

I felt kind of tired on Sunday, but I had had virtually no sleep, so that was understandable. I have a video call with my cardiologist - the busiest man in Sacramento - this Thursday, Feb. 3rd.

Here I am, post-shock, displaying improved numbers.

California's Periods of Rain are Becoming More Focused

These folks are from the successor department that incorporated my old department at the University of Arizona. Apparently California precipitation is occurring in shorter bursts, and that the trend started some time ago.:

The researchers also found that precipitation variability is decreasing in the northern part of California in the fall. "That's where you get most of the water resources and also that's where you have a lot of the forested areas," Zamora-Reyes said. 

"We're also seeing that less of these really wet events are coming in the fall, and instead we're getting most of the precipitation concentrated in winter. We're seeing this pattern across California. If you look statewide, you see the same trend in both precipitation and stream flow."

...Zamora-Reyes was surprised by the team's results.

"I was expecting to see an increase in variability over the last 20 years at most," she said, "but we've been seeing a steady increase for much longer. People are noticing. I've talked to strangers about my research, and they say they've noticed what I'm talking about. It's been interesting and eye-opening to see my research play out in real time."

Katherine's Mission to Improve Hospital Care

After her recent alarming first-hand hospital experience, cardiac nurse Katherine is on a mission to improve patient care in hospitals through patient advocacy. She was among the healthiest people of all in Zumba class, until she got sick. Give her a listen!

 

Old Music Is Killing New Music

The cost of Oldies:

As record labels lose interest in new music, emerging performers desperately search for other ways to get exposure. They hope to place their self-produced tracks on a curated streaming playlist, or license their songs for use in advertising or the closing credits of a TV show. Those options might generate some royalty income, but they do little to build name recognition. You might hear a cool song on a TV commercial, but do you even know the name of the artist? You love your workout playlist at the health club, but how many song titles and band names do you remember? You stream a Spotify new-music playlist in the background while you work, but did you bother to learn who’s singing the songs? 

Decades ago, the composer Erik Satie warned of the arrival of “furniture music,” a kind of song that would blend seamlessly into the background of our lives. His vision seems closer to reality than ever.

Vank Walen - "Your Jumpin' Heart"

Breaking Bad and Surrealism

 

I'm intrigued by this video on Breaking Bad and Surrealism, particularly since I'm studying the same subject. The author, Angelo Restivo from Georgia State, approaches the subject from a background in Surreal Film. It's intriguing how we tend to gravitate to the same scenes.

Catsitting At Gabe and Eleanor's

It's been a while since I've been to Gabe and Eleanor's house, and I was worried about whether the keys I had in my possession worked anymore. Voila! No problem entering the house! Only trouble was, Gabe had replaced the old alarm system, and my code was not entered into the new alarm system. Teeth shattered with the high-pitched wailing of the alarm....

Gabe said let the cats stay in the gated area of the house, where they had few places to hide, but allow them to explore his office, where there also weren't many places to hide. Great! Only trouble was, I opened the door to Eleanor's office instead of Gabe's, and Danny promptly vanished. About an hour later, I had to pry him out from under a piece of furniture.

Cats are so honest.  When I open the door, I can see Danny look up in anticipation, then look down again, as if to say, "Oh, YOU again!"

Harry needs a laser pointer, real bad.  I could hypnotize him just with my flashlight.

Roomba's Dumb Ass

Antifa Hoedown

Completely down with all this:

 

Midnight Oil - The Dead Heart

In an 80s Aussie frame of mind:

 

Things Native English Speakers Know

One Thousand Fin Whales

Cool!:

This vast assembly was spread over a five-mile-wide area between the South Orkney islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. A single whale is stupendous; imagine 1,000 of them, their misty forest of spouts, as tall as pine trees, the plosive sound of their blows, their hot breath condensing in the icy air. Their sharp dorsal fins and steel-grey bodies slide through the waves like a whale ballet, choreographed at the extreme south of our planet. 

Scientists have recently discovered that sperm whales, which do tend to gather in groups, learned to spread out in the presence of whalers, as a means of self-preservation. Perhaps, Hoare wonders, we only think krill-eaters like the fin whale were solitary because they too learned that gathering in groups was a death sentence when faced with hunters armed with harpoons. Perhaps this amassing was once normal.

Arrowhead Bottled Water in SoCal

What I buy! Still, a curse on the San Bernardino forest:

RIMFOREST, Calif. — High in the San Bernardino Mountains, water seeps from the ground and trickles down the mountainside among granite boulders and bay laurel trees. 

Near this dribbling spring, water gushes through a system of tunnels and boreholes, and flows into a network of stainless steel pipes that join together in a single line. The water then courses downhill across 4.5 miles of rugged terrain in the San Bernardino National Forest to a tank, where some is hauled away in trucks to be bottled and sold as Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water. 

 Local environmentalists say the bottled water pipeline doesn’t belong in the national forest and is removing precious water that would otherwise flow in Strawberry Creek and nourish the ecosystem. After nearly seven years of fighting against the extraction of water, activists say they hope California regulators will finally order BlueTriton Brands — the company that took over bottling from Nestlé last year — to drastically reduce its operation in the national forest.

An Interactive map of California Fire Footprints

It doesn't have everything - 2021 is still missing - but it's close!

What About That Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai?

Wow!:

It takes roughly 900-1000 years for the Hunga volcano to fill up with magma, which cools and starts to crystallize, producing large amounts of gas pressure inside the magma. As gases start to build up pressure, the magma becomes unstable. Think of it like putting too many bubbles into a champagne bottle -- eventually, the bottle will break. 

As the magma pressure rises, the cold and wet rock above the magma fails and suddenly releases the pent-up pressure. The eruption we saw on Saturday blasted rock, water, and magma 30 km high into the atmosphere, and was profound in terms of its energy. Within 30 minutes, the resulting cloud seen from space was over 350 km (or 218 miles) in diameter, with ash falling out onto several Tongan islands.

The sound wave is so impressive!:

pic.twitter.com/bYTm3p78lz

— Dr. Mathew Barlow (@MathewABarlow) January 16, 2022

Corwin Wright was on NPR explaining some of this stuff:

In theory, the rapid updraft of hot air and ash from an erupting volcano into the upper atmosphere could trigger gravity waves on a much larger scale. But nothing like this has been observed with previous eruptions analysed since the AIRS instrument was launched in May 2002.

“That’s what’s really puzzling us,” says Corwin Wright, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath, UK. “It must have something to do with the physics of what’s going on, but we don’t know what yet.” 

He and his co-workers suspect that a “great big, messy pile of hot gases” in the upper atmosphere might be what kicks the waves off. The hot gas is “going up high into the stratosphere and knocking the air around”, he says.

And the sounds of the explosion, as heard in ALASKA! Sound waves can travel far, and can be refracted back to the ground when the atmosphere is stable. It is likely that the early hour favored the Alaskans hearing the explosions.

@andreal.corbin The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption heard 6,000 miles away in Alaska. #Alaska #tongavolcano #weathertok ♬ original sound - andrea.corbin

Annoying Conservatives of the Day

Kari Lake:

If there's one thing Lake loves to amplify, it's a poorly vetted conspiracy theory. There was the time in 2018 she tweeted that teachers' efforts for better pay were secretly a ploy to legalize marijuana — based solely on a joke T-shirt. In recent months, she's retweeted news about power outages at the Vatican and in Pakistan, which conspiracy theorists have claimed were signs that the Pope was being arrested for child sex trafficking. 

She's also helped push unverified claims about voter fraud, further spreading a myth that Trump supporters have used to try and overturn the presidential election. In 2018, she boosted a random Twitter user's unverified claim that the person had received a pre-filled-out ballot. In November, Lake posted a Twitter thread quoting what she called a "sobering interview" by election-conspiracy-theory-pusher Sidney Powell, who is now facing a huge defamation suit related to her claims that the election had been stolen in a scheme connected to Venezuela, Cuba, and China.

Star Parker:

I listened to her on C-SPAN on MLK Day. What an idiot! Conservatives are working overtime to appropriate King.

Djokovic Gets The Boot

Good:

Djokovic has been a vaccine skeptic from the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, and has never hidden his staunch opposition to vaccine mandates. That an athlete of his fame is using his platform in such a destructive fashion is bad enough; even more despicable is that Djokovic seems so comfortable exploiting his immense privilege to endanger the health and safety of others. It is especially insulting to the Australian people, who have adhered to some of the strictest restrictions during the pandemic in an effort to keep their hospitalizations and death rates low. 

Sacrificing is what caring communities do—and it’s something Djokovic knows nothing about. As the top player in men’s tennis, Djokovic has a responsibility to be a good ambassador for his sport. But that, like Australia’s COVID rules, is just another requirement that he’s failed to meet.

Idle Thoughts on Ukraine

John writes:

I have been thinking the same thing articulated in this link. To me the parallels are uncanny. What do you think?

What does the link say?:

Operation Canned Meat II 

U.S. intelligence officials have determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, according to the White House.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday the intelligence findings show Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign that frames Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

Psaki charged that Russia has already dispatched operatives trained in urban warfare who could use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces — blaming the acts on Ukraine — if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides he wants to move forward with an invasion.

...Mass overwhelming forces on the border of a far less-powerful neighbor -- check. Stage a pretext for an invasion -- check. Claim that they are only acting in self-defense -- check. Claim that they are only protecting the rights of their own ethnic people -- check. Right wing groups in the United States parroting the lies of the invaders -- check. An Asian dictatorship using the distraction of a war in Europe to carry out their own war -- check.

Other nations are paying attention and taking their own steps. Russia's aggressive posturing has made it clear to the Nordic neutrals that they will have to choose a side. And they seem to be.

My take:

Maybe so! By putting the word out in advance about a false flag operation, The U.S. takes a lot of wind out of the sails of Russia. Still...

Russia has the luxury of the initiative and a long porous border with Ukraine to work with. It will be difficult to defend Ukraine.

Ukrainian public opinion is increasingly solidified against Russia.

It is interesting that FDR did not make security guarantees for Ukraine at Yalta (a point the Republicans used to hammer Democrats for the next 50 years). FDR didn't do it because the U.S. didn't have a large enough presence in the area to make any guarantees against Stalin. Times are iffy these days with Putin in the Kremlin.

The U.S. was very careful not to intrude on Russia's informal security zone in eastern Europe until very recently. Even in 2008, when Georgia invaded a portion of Russian territory and pleaded for U.S. intervention, and despite John McCain's efforts to do exactly that, the U.S. didn't protect Georgia, as the Russians invaded and whupped their asses.

But times have changed. Putin wants what the USSR had, its respected cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe, but doesn't have the strength to maintain it. Ukraine and others don't fear them so much anymore. The U.S. wants to bring Ukraine into NATO, and Ukraine wants to join. Sweden and Finland are threatening to join NATO if Russia invades Ukraine.

Putin thinks he can get what he wants, and the U.S. thinks it can enter the Ukrainian cordon sanitaire and outlast Putin. A recipe for war, when both sides see opportunities and few downsides. And there are still nukes to worry about too. 9We'll see!

I'm curious about Zelensky's action at this time regarding Poroshenko. Seems risky!:

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine's former president, Petro Poroshenko, landed in Kyiv on Monday to face treason charges in a case he says was trumped up by allies of his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In a brief stand-off at border control after arriving on a flight from Warsaw, Poroshenko accused border guards of taking away his passport. He later greeted a crowd of thousands of cheering and flag-waving supporters outside the airport.

Poroshenko's return sets up a showdown with President Zelenskiy's government in what critics say is an ill-judged distraction as Ukraine braces for a possible Russian military offensive and seeks the support of its Western allies.