The voices against the TSA and its policies of Gestapo-like treatment of ordinary citizens are getting louder all the time. I’ve been waiting for you people to catch on for a while.

I did get a chuckle out of this lovely bit of YouTube wankery:

Welcome to the party, folks. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be appalled at this stuff. You should be, as well.

This set me off on a train of thought…

I looked up the size of an HD movie. It appears that such a movie represents about 4 to 8 GB of data in uncompressed form, and compressed for over-the-net viewing it might weigh in at an off-the-cuff average of 2 GB of actual transmitted data. That’s 2³⁰ * 2, or 2,147,483,648 bytes of Data.

Twitter, as most geeks seem to know, is limited to 140 bytes (characters) per message. Why is this? It’s because that’s the message limit for an SMS text message as defined by the telephone companies.

So, an HD movie is the data equivalent of roughly 15,339,168 text messages. The phone companies seen to charge about 20 cents per text message across the board, data plans notwithstanding.

At that price, the phone companies think it’s worth $3,067,833.78 to stream that HD movie.

That same 140 bytes of data costs Netflix about 3.25*10^-9 cents.

That’s 0.00000000325 cents.

So, in terms of actual costs, a text message costs virtually nothing to send. Or you could say that it costs about one cent per 4 million text messages.

If you are a world-class text messager, you might be able to send about 1200 text messages a day., let’s say 35,000 or so a month. (There have been higher counts recorded!)

Text messaging plans are the worst deals on the planet. Printer ink? Pikers. For corruption and sheer craven greed, no one beats the telcos.

I thought about that a lot. I’m of the age where voting really doesn’t mean much for my future anymore- there isn’t all that much left of it. But for hers? Hell Yes.

I voted for her future today. I voted for the America I want to believe in, the one I’ve thought I believed in most of my life. It would be nice to live the rest of my life with some of the cynicism washed away.

Last Thursday morning, after work, I went to bed, and couldn’t get comfortable. Not really in pain, just a gentle pressure on my chest and strange sensations in my upper arms. Lying there, I sort of shifted around trying to get comfy, when I noticed, all off a sudden my jaw was starting to hurt.

Hmm.

Pressure on the chest: Check.

Discomfort in arms: Check.

Pain radiating to jaw: Check.

I got up and sort of stumbled into the living room. Gwen (who’s all of 5 years old) took one look at me and said “What’s wrong, Bampy?” with a look of concern on her little face. I told her to go get her mommy.

Saundra walked into the living room and asked me what was happening- I told her “I’m not sure that I’m not having a heart attack.” She called 911 immediately and gave me an aspirin. The ambulance was at the door in 3 or 4 minutes, tops.

Sitting up had relieved most of the discomfort, and the oxygen felt pretty good, so that by the time the paras got me on the gurney and out the door I was feeling faintly embarrassed by all the hoopla. In the ambulance, it took the gal (who I think was a paramedic intern or trainee; she was taking instructions from the more senior person) about 10 minutes to get a line started in my arm. I asked why we weren’t moving, and they told me that “We can’t move until we get this line in you; that’s the rules.”

A couple of sprays of nitroglycerin in the ambulance, and I felt actually pretty OK by the time we arrived at Community Hospital East.

It didn’t take long for me to get into an emergency bed, and doped up pretty good with morphine. Most of the rest of the time in the ER is pretty darn fuzzy to me; I’ve pieced some of it together with the help of people who came to visit.

I don’t remember the trip up to my room after I was admitted. I do remember that the TV operated very strangely with some weird combination of remote controls, and the constant stream of nurses every few minutes taking some sample or checking some IV line or giving me a pill.

Day 2 in the hospital featured a stint in the Cardiac Cath Lab for me. I guess I was spared the full experience, because I was doped to the gills again: all I really remember was that it was fairly cold in there, the nurse shaving the cath site on my groin, and me making a wisecrack about my nipples standing up due to the cold.

The head nurse told me to “lie still” … I couldn’t have moved voluntarily if I had wanted to: the drugs they gave me were some really good ones, apparently. I do remember the lights going on and off, on and off, on and off. I think I said something about it, because I remember someone saying something about needing to see the screens with the lights off.

Another magical transition later, and I sort of came to back in my room again.

Day 2 and 3. Well, all I can say is this; hospital food sucks, no matter how they dress it up, serve it on nice plates with folks dressed like waiters, and let you order it like room service from a leather bound menu: It’s still hospital food. Institutional, blah. Dressing up a turd doesn’t change the smell.

So, the long and the short of it is that I had 2 blockages, they did some angioplasty and put in 3 stents.

I’m home now, feeling better, and will be starting rehab next week as well as returning to work. I got a statement from the hospital: the charges to the insurance company looks to be around 60 grand.

I stopped in Casey, Ill. on my way back from Tulsa, to take a quick search for my grandparent’s graves. It was on a Sunday, so the cemetery office was closed, and I didn’t find the graves I was looking for, but did find this one: a mute but eloquent story of two lives spent together, and sorrows shared.

Last weekend, I sat her boy (my grandson Aaron) while she went out on the town with her gal pals. I had set up the lights and background to take pics of Aaron and Nick, when she came out, all dressed and made up. Inveterate photographer that I am, there was no way that she was going to get past posing.

Where the heck did that little girl, eyes shining over her french fries, go?

Cremation: OK, let’s burn increasingly scarce fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere so some relative of mine can have an overpriced vase with the crushed remains of my bones in it to be yet another item of clutter.

Interment: Let’s use up scarce, prime land to put up an overpriced stone marker that no one will visit after a few years anyway.

Funeral services: Let’s charge an obscene amount of money for people to stand up in front of a dead body and say nice things about it, while cheap refreshments can be had on stylish paper plates and in styrofoam cups.

Embalming: Another moneymaker. Let’s fill the body with unnatural chemicals so it doesn’t start to smell before all the relatives get here.

Caskets: Let’s see, we’ll put the body in a cheaply constructed metal box that costs nearly as much as an automobile, but isn’t going anywhere. It’s ostensibly designed to “preserve” that body, but, in point of fact, can hasten its deterioration. It’s only real purpose is to provide more markup/profit opportunities for the funeral “industry”.

Yep. I stand by what I said.

Now, a statement of my wishes, in public:

The natural cycle of life is birth, life, death, decomposition, rebirth as something new. Why do we pay so much money for anything else? It’s insane. I’d rather someone would plant me in the backyard and plant a rosebush or two or maybe a tree over me for my decaying body to fertilize, and bring a little beauty back into the world. Or bury me at sea, to become a part of that food chain. Anything but become a profit center for someone else at my family’s expense. Please, send my body to a medical school to help teach doctors to heal if you must. Just don’t bury me in an overpriced, hermetically sealed casket or waste energy to get a handful of ashes. It’s wasteful. It’s unnecessary. It’s unnatural.

I have a particular and vicious hatred of the funeral “industry”. These people are among the lowent forms of vermin, profiting entirely from the grief of people who have suffered a personal and terrible loss, striking at their moment of least resistance. Every product this “industry” sells is wasteful and unnecessary.

Penn and Teller, in their second season, did an episode of Bullshit! about the kinds of things that people are sold. Hermetically sealed caskets, upgraded upholstery, etc.

This site, once you get past the horrible design and loud flashing colors (as of this writing) has a lot of good information that should be known to anyone looking into a funeral.

When I die, I don’t expect to be impressed by the amount of money anyone spends on a funeral for me. Actually, I don’t expect to be impressed by much of anything, at that point. Funerals are for the living. As such, they shouldn’t be depressing, formal affairs. I much prefer the idea of a three-day wake where there are tears, laughter, and probably some pretty good booze.

The only thing I regret is that I’ll miss the party. C’est la mort.