Polite Dissent

The newest member of the Polite Dissent family:

Makenna
Born 2:33 pm, weight 6 lbs 15 oz.

When we took the cats to the vet last weekend for their annual vaccinations, this poster for National Pet Wellness Month caught my eye. But then again, it contains two of my interests combine it one: it’s a cat wearing a head mirror dammit (and wearing it incorrectly at that). So of course, I decided it required a blog post.

To rescue his niece, John Henry Iron (Steel) and the Teen Titans break into Lexcorp and battle their way through Lex’s goons and the remaining members of Infinity Inc. until Steel confront Lex Luthor in his office:

Lex Luthor to Steel: You have four broken ribs and a ruptured appendix. Your small intestine is leaking fecal matter into your blood stream. Trust me–I have x-ray vision.

Let’s take a closer look at the injuries Lex claims that John Henry Irons has suffered:

broken ribs: Most likely suffered when he was being crushed by Everyman. Broken ribs are painful and will take several weeks to heal, but they are not usually dangerous. Rib fractures can be more serious if several ribs are broken in multiple places resulting in a flail chest, or if the broken ribs are pushed far out of place and are sharp enough to lacerate the lungs, but thankfully both of these injuries are very rare.

ruptured appendix: Most likely injured by the hammer through the abdomen. The appendix may not serve much of a function, but a ruptured one can lead to serious problems such as peritonitis. This will require surgical repair.

small intestine: An injured small intestine may leak intestinal contents into the abdomen, but not into the blood stream. The circulatory system has evolved in such a way that foreign matter doesn’t “leak” into it, even in a trauma situation. An injury leaking intestinal contents into the abdomen is serious and a surgical emergency. The intestinal contents have digestive enzymes that cause inflammation of the peritoneum, and bacteria which infect it. Surgery drainage and repair along with high-dose antibiotics are needed, and the sooner the better.
A nit-pick, but digested food in the intestine is “chyme” and doesn’t become “fecal matter” until well into the large intestine.

Lex is a shrewd businessman and a good scientist, but he’s not a doctor. His descriptions are off in places, and I suspect this is because he’s being his normal condescending self and trying to look like he knows more than he does — he ends up using the wrong terms and describing unlikely injuries. In fact, if you glance at the scene in question, he’s not even looking at Steel when he “diagnoses” him.

I wonder about how good x-ray vision really is. I know it’s been established that x-ray vision better than a regular medical x-ray, but those are some pretty specific injuries Lex is describing. I would need to order a CT scan with oral contrast to diagnose those. But then again, how much is the x-ray vision, and how much is Lex just gloating/bluffing?

Tags: comics medicine steel lex luthor flail chest peritonitis 52

It’s a beautiful day and I’ve spent nearly all of it working in the garden. For now, it’s a nice dinner and then off early to bed before my muscles start hurting too much.

Tonight on Fox, House repeats it’s third and fourth episodes of this year. The first one, Humpty Dumpty, is one of the better episodes of the year and well worth watching. The second one, TB or Not TB, is fairly pretentious and not much fun, despite the appearance of Ron Livingston from Office Space (and Sex and the City). So my recommendation is to watch the first episode of House tonight and then switch over and watch the season finale of The Deadliest Catch on Discovery for the second hour.

• A list of all prior House reviews

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Grand Rounds is the weekly collection og the best medical blogging on the ‘net. It always features fascinating stories, advice, and insight into the medical field. Check it out this week at The Haversian Canal.

Tags: television medicine house grand rounds.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been planting a garden in front of our house. I had a very nice butterfly garden at our previous house, but it took a tremendous amount of work to keep the deer away. I was pleased that our new house was in a less deer prone area. Unfortunately, I didn’t count on the depredations of the little rabbit who lives under our neighbor’s woodpile:

I think the rabbit is winning.

Tags: house garden rabbit

Looks to be a beautiful weekend with gorgeous weather. Plans include:

• Yard work, and lots of it. Mow the lawn and get the gardens ready for planting.
• Bike riding. Hopefully a nice long ride on both Saturday and Sunday.
• Pick up the in-laws at the local airport Sunday night.
• Wasting time with my new toy: an X-Box 360 (thank you, state income tax refund). Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion here I come!

Tags: home yardwork bicycling xbox360 in-laws

It seems that while I was enoying myself in Seattle, some wild weather — including at least one tornado — rampaged through my part of Illinois. The house (and cats) survived, though some of the street signs around the corner were bent in two.

Power and cable are sporadic, so posting may be a little intermittent for the next day or two.

It’s a beautiful day, so I’m going to help the Polite-Wife do some painting and then go for a nice long bike ride. See you tomorrow.

We now have cable TV and high-speed internet access. We also have several bright orange cables snaking across the yard. I sure hop they come back and trench those in soon.

Spent today hooking up a wireless network so the PoliteWife and I don’t have to share computers anymore. It was a long process. The LinkSys router hooked up easily, but the wireless receiver I picked up for her computer kept rebooting it. I would unplug the receiver and everything would work fine, but about 10 seconds after I plugged it back in the entire system would reboot. I finally gave up, returned it to the store and picked up a PCI-card receiver. That worked fine and the network is set.

Now in a week or so I’ll pick up a receiver for the Xbox…

Today’s the day.

The cable people should be here this morning to install cable throughout the house and hook up the cable modem.

About time! This 2 1/2 weeks of dial-up has been killing me!

Last night in the wee hours of the morning, Samantha, our “main cat”, awoke us by sitting outside our bedroom door and yowling. Cat owners will tell you that cats have several different vocalizations, each with a different meaning (such as “feed me”, “look what I caught”, or “pay attention to me!”). This was not a sound we’d heard before.

We sprang from bed to make sure she wasn’t injured. As soon as she saw us, she bagan purring and wrapping herself around our legs. We petted her and comforted her until she calmed down and went to sleep. We went back to bed, puzzled by her behavior.

This morning we discover there was a small earthquake in our area last night. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

It’s a beautiful day in central Illinois. The sun is out, a nice breeze is blowing, and not a storm cloud in sight. I just returned from a nice bike ride, from Pekin to Groveland to Morton and back by some mostly deserted country roads. Passed a group on tandem bikes. I could never feel comfortable on a tandem, sure you go faster, but I never entirely trust the other person to steer. There were a few recumbent tandem bikes too. I’ve never seen those before — they just don’t look comfortable.

Today is day for housekeeping, both literal and figurative. I need to file and put away this month’s shipment of comics, plus do some yard work. I also want to play with some of the WordPress CSS files and spruce up this site a little.

In the meantime, here are some good weekend blog-o-bits:
Laura at Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog waxes rhapsodic about Aquaman #18, and particularly some very nice interior art. Makes we want to run out and read the issue now; unfortunately it won’t be in my shipment until next month (sigh…)

Johanna at Cognitive Dissonance continues her weekly “chick check” (Marvel here, Mature DC here ), with results that are slightly less dismal than usual…so far. As she cautions, regular DCU titles still have to be totaled.

Michele at A Small Victory reports that children’s book writer extraordinaire Syd Hoff is dead and writes an elegant eulogy. Rest in Peace, Mr. Hoff.

H at The Comic Treadmill takes a hard look back at the Outsiders Special #1 and issue #28. His closing dialogue between the JLA and Geo-Force is a must read. (H, you’ve got to get a longer name so that links to you are easier to see. Just one more letter, please. How about “Ha”, or “Hi”, or “He”?)

In Anime news, the series Full Metal Alchemist has secured a US release in October of this year. I understand the Cartoon Network will be showing it as well. I saw several episodes of this at Millennicon this year and it was excellent. (I watched a subbed version, so the dubbed voices in the trailers seem a little off to me…). This series bears no relation to Full Metal Panic, another highly recommended anime series.
UPDATE: Watch Trailer 2 (as it explains the story better), then Trailer 1.

UPDATE: I see I’m having some sort of problem with the archives and calendar. I’d like to point out that this was happening before I started changed the CSS. Oh well, I’ll see if I can find a fix tomorrow… UPDATED UPDATE: Fixed the archives, temporarily, by upping the number of posts per page.

My wife was kind enough to let me assist in two ways for our wedding: I could choose the cake topper, and I could pick the music for before the ceremony and the processional. She knew my interests and my sense of humor, so she knew what she’d be sacrificing.

For the music, I stayed with the normal Barouqe music common to weddings. I did add a few songs into the mix: the Princess Bride, the theme from Lost in Space (the movie, not the TV show…bad movie, but good music), and the theme from the Incredible Hulk TV show. It sounds weird, but all the pieces fit in perfectly with the traditional music. Unless you knew what my additions were, you’d just think it was regular wedding music. You could see people give a smile when they recognized what I added, but it wasn’t many. Last but not least, I had the Planet of Krypton (from Superman the Movie) as the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and groom were introduced. It’s the best short dramatic piece, ever.
I let my bride keep the traditional music for her grand entrance. I’m not stupid.
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