I'm a medicine-taker

This past Monday, around 11am or so, I started having chest pains. That kinda freaked me out, you know, a pain in that area isn't something to mess around with. So, being a dude, I waited until around 9 Tuesday night to head out and go to the PatientFirst. If you're not familiar with what that is, it's one of those minor injury mini-hospital type places. A clinic, but not the free kind with all those poor people.

At 9 on a Tuesday you actually get pretty good service. I wasn't waiting around for more than five minutes at any one time; in and out in an hour. Also, I (very luckily) have insurance so the whole thing, which included an EKG, only cost me $25.

In the end it turns out the pain was just heartburn/reflux and not a real big deal. Unless it's an ulcer which, I found out, is treated pretty much exactly the same as reflux. So either way I'm in the clear!

But, and this is what sucks, they gave me medication. Nothing crazy, just some Protonix, but it has completely blown my set of standard medical answers. I'm in a whole new phase of life.

Before
Doctor: Any allergies?
Me: Nope.
Doctor: Any existing conditions?
Me: No siree.
Doctor: On any medications?
Me: Thank god no.

Now
Doctor: On any medications?
Me: ...
Doctor: Any, uh, medications?
Me: Yes.

You see?! Now I'm the "on medications" guy! You don't go back from that. You just go from medication to medication until one day you wake up and instead of making some tea and checking your email you're flipping open the little plastic "Tu" tab because it's Tuesday and you have to take that horse pill for your gout. Jesus.

Now I know lots of people are on medication, why not, people have medical problems, no big deal. But now it affects me. I have to take this shit every morning or else I feel like I'm on 24-hour heart attack watch. Believe me, people notice the constant left arm grabbing. You can't do that subtle-like.

But I'll deal with it, like I always do, with humor and understanding and sarcastic complaints. It's just like, man, there you are. Old.

New Telephone Game

Everybody knows the telephone game; you know, a group of people sit in a circle, one person whispers a phrase into someone's ear, the next person whispers into the ear of the next person and so on. When it comes back to the originator you compare what was said first to the final version, which has been distorted through mishearing along the way. Then they all laugh and laugh because somehow "I like bananas" has turned into "Stalin wasn't such a bad guy nacho hat".

Anyways, long story short, I had my laptop passed around to a roomful of people at work today. I was giving a presentation, sans projector, and had to show everybody what I'd been working on the old fashioned way. Like back in the time before projectors, yet somehow after laptops.

This got me to thinking, why not make a laptop telephone game? It goes like this:

1. First person browses to a popular/semi-popular website and passes the laptop to the next person

2. Next person clicks a link (internal or external) on the website

3. Continue passing and clicking until the laptop is returned to the owner

4. Owner attempts to guess the original website or, more likely, attempts to clear out all the porn links

In any event, it sounds like a pretty fun way to burn some time at work before a meeting, during a meeting, or even in some strange world where meetings don't exist.

System of Touch

The Rise and Fall of Moe's Backroom Lager

It was only in the last couple of years that I found Moe's Backroom Lager over in the beer section. It was cheap, less than $6, and actually tasted pretty good to me. But recently I noticed three changes which I think will doom this entire line of beverages.

1. Price increase
So it started out at $5.89 and stayed that way up until just the past month or so. To the best of my knowledge all the big beer price increases already occurred, so why now has the price gone up 90 cents?

Maybe they had trouble with suppliers or changed to pricier ingredients or something. In any event, the new price-to-flavor ratio just isn't cutting it. Especially since:

2. It now tastes like crap
What the hell? I had some last week and it tastes like some cheap malt liquor. So not only am I paying more, I feel like a chump drinking this smelly, skunky beer.

3. Kroger can't do math
A little bit of research led me to the fact that this beer is actually a Kroger brand, which explains why it's not anywhere over at the Total Wine. Now, recently they've begun selling Moe's in 12-packs, which is a nice way to trick people into an even larger investment in crap beer.

Kroger's there to make money, which I can understand, but at least get the pricing down on 12-packs. Rule 1: do not make the 12-pack cost more than two 6-packs!

I swear I had to bust out a calculator when I saw a sixer selling for $6.79 and the twelve going for $13.89. How is that even possible? Was there some guy out there who always buys two sixes clamoring for this?

I can only imagine a one-man letter writing campaign could have brought this about.

Dear Kroger,

I luv Moe's backroom so MUCH! The only thng is that I hat carying two 6ers. Why not a 12pack?! I WOULD EVEN PAY MORE THAN IS LOGICAL!!!

Signed,
Guy who hates life

And that is the only way it could possibly have happened.

Let's make vegan biscuits!

I'm vegan now and, among the many foods I normally can't eat which I used to enjoy, biscuits are high on the list. It's so easy on a lazy weekend morning to just go out and grab a biscuit from Hardee's or, if there are too many old people in line, Burger King. But those biscuits are made with buttermilk, or powdered buttermilk, and eggs, or powdered eggs, and are thus now off-limits.

But lo and behold it turns out you can make biscuits at home in your very own kitchen! Even ones without milk and butter. Who knew? It's actually deceptively simple. All I've done is taken the recipe from the bag of flour and replaced the non-vegan ingredients with those which are.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups self-rising flour (White Lily...it's flour named after a flower!)
1/4 cups Earth Balance (butter replacer)
3/4 rice milk (I use Rice Dream because I like foods with states of consciousness in the title)

Instructions
- Preheat oven to 500
- Lightly grease a baking sheet
- Flour goes in mixing bowl
- Add Earth Balance by hand, breaking it up in the flour until it resembles bread crumbs and is mostly evenly distributed
- Add rice milk and stir with fork until dough comes away from the side of the bowl*
- Turn out onto well-floured board and knead a few times
- Roll out the dough to 1/2" thickness
- Cut out 2" rounds. I actually do about 1 1/4" rounds because I think they look cute.
- Place on pan, 1" apart.
- Bake 8-10 minutes or until they begin to brown. Check the bottoms because they can cook quickly on the one side. I'll sometimes flip them about 3 minutes from the end.

*If the dough is a sticky mess (which it probably is), add more flour (1/4 cup at a time) until it's no longer sticky

And ta-da:



See, just like the real thing. They even split all nice down the middle and choke you if you stuff too much in your face without a suitable liquid nearby.

This recipe also illustrates how you don't have to go crazy finding a wholesale replacement if you want to make something which is vegan. Just take a recipe you know works, and replace the things you need to. Doesn't always work, of course. Biscuits: easy. Turducken: difficult.

A History of World Trade, Pt. 1

I've been reading this book about world history recently and I started wondering about how world trade began. I mean, did merchants just go sail to some other city, drop anchor and see what was available? How did they do that and not get killed every time?

And once you did eventually gain these prospective trade partners' trust, how did you ever determine the value of what was being traded?

You know, some Greek sailors pull up in Delhi with a boatload of olive oil. How does that work out?

"Hey we got all this oil here, made from olives, you want to trade something for it?"

"What's an olive?" the Indian merchant would rightly ask.

"I think it's some kind of fruit."

"Is it sweet?"

"Oh god no. It's terribly, almost offensively, bitter."

"Well what do you do with the oil?"

"Um, we like to dip our bread in it. Oh or we sometimes rub it on our bodies.

"I see."

I can't imagine this going well for either party, yet somehow it did. Maybe it was the body lubrication angle that eventually sold the world on olive oil, and cooking uses came later. Hopefully not at the same time.

But what could the Indians offer back to the Greeks? Obviously some quick-thinking Delhian was on the scene with a superb counter.

"Hey, you guys got any turmeric over there?"

"What's that?"

"It's a spice. Very popular 'round these parts."

"What's it taste like?"

"Very warming."

"Oh, you know, we kinda just got some ginger in. No thanks."

"Uh...it settles the stomach, very good for digestion."

"That's cool, but we're, like, swimming in fennel back home."

"It turns everything yellow."

"What's that you say?"

"Everything you add it to, turns it completely yellow."

"Give us all you have!"

And with that, the first successful Greek-Indian trade route was born. I'm sure I've glossed over some minor details like quantity and receipt signage, but I can only assume this is pretty much what happened.

Next time we'll explore the dangers of transporting open containers of ghee on a month-long trek across the Indian Ocean.