Newt Gingrich Doesn’t Know What a Smartphone Is

I haven’t been posting a lot lately because I want to not turn this blog into a re-blog wonderland or a second youtube favorites playlist, but this one was too good:

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“We spent weeks trying to figure out what you call this… if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone.”

Oh, Newt, I’m sad the effort to Santorum-ize your name never really took off.

I really hope Colbert addresses this tonight.

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New The Lonely Island and New Hyperbole and a Half

I do think The Lonely Island is overrated, but I do love anything with Ed Norton in it:

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The Lonely Island’s new album The Wack Album drops June 11.

Meanwhile in the vast ocean of entertainment the Internet loves and shares…

Allie Brosh is not dead! She updated Hyperbole and a Half yesterday with a “Pre-Post Transition Post” and again this morning with a post titled “Depression Part Two.”

I sure hope this update is a precursor to more updates.

And something maybe like a book:

Oh, wait, yes. Defintely a book.

Pre-order Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened [Paperback] on Amazon right now for $12.98. Will be released October 29, 2013.

She even came out of hiding on reddit today to talk about it:

I’ve had a few people ask me if the preorder is a scam, and I just wanted to let you know it isn’t. The manuscript is all finished, and it will indeed be an actual book in October.

I just wanted to clear that up. I’ll talk more about the book later if anyone is interested in specifics. I mean, you guys can ask me stuff now if you’re curious, I just don’t want to be disingenuous/opportunistic about book promotion stuff. How horrible would it be for me to be like “Oh, hey, I wanted to kill myself a little while ago. NOW GO BUY MY BOOK.”

Maybe I don’t have many feelings, but I know what shame feels like!

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“Your local pharmacist is not who you think they are.”

Back before my fake freelance writing gig fell through, I tried to maneuver into a niche as a healthcare writer.

One of the articles-for-moms I wrote was about how pharmacists are vastly underutilized as health care providers.  (Tl;dr-Lifehacker edition: If you have a medical question or want a second opinion on meds, you should just go up to the counter at a store pharmacy and ask. Pharmacists have 7 years of medical education and they’re free.)

I found a TedxTalk by a pharmacist that addresses this exact underutilization issue:

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Pretty good, although dry to watch if you’re not also a provider.

Pharmacists are important because doctors make mistakes. Doctors make prescribing mistakes at alarmingly high rates. If patients asked more questions and pharmacists spent more time on each individual, it would probably save a lot of lives.

One of the aspects of the profession I noted that the lecturer didn’t address is that the way corporations run retail pharmacies makes the kind of access he idealizes impossible. With immunizations and peripheral paperwork, pharmacists simply don’t have the man-hours to counsel every new patient. Any intern who has done a rotation at a high-volume chain knows this already. But I guess the Talk was already too long to go into a tangent about how for-profit-healthcare is fucking awful.

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Footnote on my ventures in my fake freelance writing career:  I was interviewed a few months ago by a health care education group for their company’s blog. They wanted my “expert” opinion on formal education and training for pharmacy technicians.

My answer was, “Don’t go to school because you will be automatically less hireable than precocious college kids willing to work for near-minimum wage.”

They thanked me and then totally did not publish the interview.

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We Giggle Behind Small Hands and No Speak Engrish

“Cho and Chang are both last names. They are both Korean last names. I am supposed to be Chinese. Me being named “Cho Chang” is like a Frenchman being named “Garcia Sanchez.”

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Apparently some Asian people got pissed because Cho Chang could “technically” be a Chinese first and last name. Rostad later stated in a comprehensive response that she knew, but sacrificed the details for a punchline.

Whatever criticism of racial stereotypes aside, Cho Chang is still a pretty shitty character and a pretty stupid name.

(As far as I know, no Chinese person romanizes Qiu as “Cho.”  A more extreme analogy would be like spelling Hussein “Hoosayne.”)

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The Psychiatric Ward and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

April 20, 2013 4 comments

Or: An Oddly Personal Reaction to the News.

I was once in a psychiatric hospital against my will. And yes, they can get just as terrible as mainstream media can make them seem. I don’t keep my mental health problems a secret. Or my involuntary commitment a secret; it’s not an experience I care to repress or forget. At the same time, I’ve never publicly blogged about it before it now.

It happened 16 months ago, and although it’s left an indelible mark on my psyche, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get the experience out in a single entry. “The Psych Ward Story” is a complicated story and when asked why it happened I usually sigh and say, “an unfortunate series of events.”

There were lots of traumatic aspects of the ordeal in addition to the obvious confinement: Being denied birth control by the Catholic hospital. Being transferred to another hospital in a poorer area with an under-trained and under-educated staff. Being prescribed psychotropic drugs that I knew from extensive experience were not going to help or agree with me. Being misdiagnosed.* Being falsely accused of being danger to myself.

But the incident that I would ping in my head as “the most wrong” in the week-long experience was when my doctor refused to give me access to my court paperwork and refused to give me the identity or phone number of the public defender. (There were also a nurse and a counselor present at my first and only meeting with the psychiatrist. They were silent.)

It was as simple and as curt as a “No.” My basic rights, probably as citizen and most definitely as a patient, were flagrantly violated.

I never did pursue a civil lawsuit. Besides legal fees and the desire to not re-live the experience, it was disheartening but unsurprising to learn that my requests to pursue my legal options to formally contest the confinement were never documented. My hopeless crying at the psychiatrist’s dismissal of me was ironically* recorded by the doctor in the progress notes as, “Patient thinks [referring to self in third person] does not care.”

These days I get emotional when reading about anything remotely related to civil rights violations, specifically unjust treatment during confinement. Some days I’m afraid I’m becoming a libertarian. I don’t know enough about trauma to talk about it on a medical level, but I do know that I never used to start crying when reading about the disgrace that is Guantanamo. And I have no doubt that had the psych ward incident not have happened, I would not avoid listening to the Bradley Manning tapes out of fear of having a panic attack.

So today when I read that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect was not Mirandized, my immediate thoughts were, “That’s terrible!” and then “I bet Glenn Greenwald is going to go off about this.”

Greenwald already did:

Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that’s always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others.

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I cried a lot at that editorial. Not that I want to hyperbolize my experience by comparing it to individuals of national interest or make a plea on behalf of all those that have undergone civil or criminal commitment. I just wanted to make note of the highly personal ways individuals can react to current events based on their own experiences.

Today, in a weird way, I find myself having empathy for a terrorist. Or, to be fully politically correct, an alleged terrorist. I too have made had my fundamental rights abrogated in the name of “safety.” And as an American and an idealist, it makes me very sad.

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*My only long-standing diagnosis is Major Depressive Disorder. The same inpatient psychiatrist who shit on my Due Process later carelessly listed the “Final Diagnosis” on my discharge report as “Schizophrenia.”

“Sheryl Sandberg would be disappointed in me if I didn’t ask you about money.”

Anecdotes about the impact of Lean In in the media industry via BuzzFeed:

Other editors whom I asked this week told me that women who worked for them had brought up the book — its broadly empowering message, and its specific advice on pushing for a raise. It’s a concrete, if anecdotal, suggestion that Sandberg’s high-profile effort to start a movement is having real consequences on a dynamic that’s well known to managers and backed by volumes of research: Women often ask for less money than they could get, and negotiate less aggressively than men.

The new phenomenon of women invoking Sandberg in salary talks “has happened here,” New York Times editor Jill Abramson said in an email. “I do think the book and all the attendant publicity have emboldened some women to speak up more directly about compensation, which is, of course, a welcome development.”

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I made note of Sandberg’s commentary on women leaders long before I knew she was expanding her ideas into a book.

My reaction was positive, and although I still haven’t gotten a chance to read Lean In, I imagine that my take-away will be on the more sympathetic side of the vast blogosphere vitriol and confusion.

“We believe the time is now to bring facial hair back into politics.”

April 5, 2013 1 comment

America’s Sweetheart, James Holmes, donning excellent facial fur.

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Hirsute leaders with high office aspirations rejoice.

The paperwork has been filed with the FEC on Wednesday to establish The Bearded Entrepreneurs for the Advancement of a Responsible Democracy, a bi-partisan political action committee whose purpose is implicit in the name.

“It’s been 125 years since our last bearded President, Benjamin Harrison, was elected,” BEARD PAC Communications Director Andy Shapero said in a press release. “We’re hoping that with our support, bearded individuals will shrug off over a century of political irrelevance and start running for office again.”

So why have beards gone out of style for politicians over the last century? Slate speculates that besides solidarity with soldiers, who were forbidden to wear beards that interfered with gas masks in WWI, it was later to avoid association with “communists and hippies.”

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