My glamorous life as professional patient model.

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I have a great doctor who is not only wicked smart, but manages to keep me in relatively good health considering how unhealthy I tend to be. Dr. CK is also very patient with me when I offer lame excuses for not doing what she told me to do to lose weight the last dozen times she saw me. She’s even cool enough to drop by SEB on occasion and leave a comment.

When my back sprain flared up over a month ago my wife made me an appointment to see my doctor so she could gently chide me for not doing the things she told me to do the last time I had a flare up. She was happy to hear that I had purchased an elliptical exercise machine and amused that it’s been used more as a coat rack as is required by Federal Law. After the exam she gave me a couple of prescriptions including one to start Physical Therapy, which I have done, and she left the room.

A few moments later she swept back into the room with a form in her hand and said, “You’re never gonna guess what I’m going to ask of you.” To which I agreed I wasn’t going to ever be able to guess. It seems the folks at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan put out a newsletter every so often and they wanted to do an article on Dr. CK and her commitment to patient communication. To go along with the article they wanted to get some pictures of her interacting — or “communicating” – with a patient and they just happened to have shown up and I was one of Dr. CK’s favorite patients (everyone loves me) so she wanted to know if I would consent to being a Patient Model. (Note: I don’t know if that’s an official title, but it’s what I made up just now so I’m using it.) Being the narcissist that I am I naturally said yes. The photographer came in and we spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes going through various poses such as doctor-pointing-out-worrying-result-on-her-tablet-computer and doctor-stereo-typically-listening-to-patient’s-heart-like-every-picture-of-a-doctor-ever and finishing with doctor-and-patient-both-smiling-at-the-camera-for-no-apparent-reason.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday I get an email from her letting me know the article has been published online with a link to it included (warning: PDF file). Given the number of pictures they took I was curious to see how many and which ones they used. The article has two pics. One of her alone smiling at the camera and one of us together. The latter being the most unintentionally hilarious one possible in part because they went with the stereo-typical-doctor-listening-to-patient’s-heart pic, but also because… well… just look at it for yourself after the jump.

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My mother turns 78 years old today.

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Momma-1-31-13I need to take a moment to wish my mother a very Happy 78th Birthday. If there is one person in this world who deserves much of the blame credit for the wonderful person I turned out to be, it’s her.

She’s been an endless source of both inspiration and wisdom not only my myself and my siblings, but for friends and extended family. If you have a spare moment, drop by her blog and say hi.

Love you so very much, Mom. Happy Birthday.

And to think my mom only ever hired a clown for my birthday parties…

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… and she didn’t even do that until I was 21 years old!

Cops: Mom charged after stripper party – Times Union.

SOUTH GLENS FALLS — Police arrested the mother who hired two strippers for her son’s 16th birthday party, according to the Glens Falls Post-Star.

The newspaper reported that Judy H. Viger, 33, of Gansevoort, was charged with five counts of endangering the welfare of a child.

The Nov. 3 party at Spare Time Bowling Alley featured two exotic dancers performing for partygoers as young as 14. The dancers stripped to thong underwear and bras and gave lap dances to some of the teenagers. A photo taken with a cellphone camera shows an upside-down dancer with a teen’s head between her knees and her head between his legs.

At least she meant well.

Teaching your kids about sex can be difficult.

As for this mom, I’m a little torn about what she did. Her son is 16. Chances are he’s already had sex a few times by that age. In Michigan he’s at the age of consent, though in New York (where this took place) he’s still a year away.

Personally, I probably wouldn’t hire a stripper for my kid. For one I have a daughter, but even if I had a son I’d probably still not do it. Not because I think its wrong, but because he’d probably find it awkward. It’s similar to watching a sex scene in an R-rated movie with your parents in the room. It’s just awkward. But maybe this kid and his mom don’t find such things awkward.

If the mom didn’t let the parents of the other kids know about this ahead of time then I can definitely see why they might be pissed, but if they knew and didn’t have a problem with it…   well…

Granted I think 14 is a bit young for this sort of thing, but these women stayed in their bras and thongs. We live in an age when they can see as much in the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show which aired last December on CBS at 10PM EST. True, the Victoria Secret girls weren’t shaking their money-makers in anyone’s face, but it’s only slightly more upscale.

At best I can only say that it’s not what I would’ve done, but the fact that someone else did doesn’t outrage me.

Your kid’s elementary assembly is not the place to do a striptease.

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In the right time and place getting up and doing a striptease for an audience can be a very liberating and exhilarating experience. In the middle of an elementary school assembly, however, probably isn’t the best choice.

But that didn’t stop 24-year-old Aydrea Meaders of Albany from giving it her best shot:

Police: Woman undressed in front of elementary school assembly – NEWS10 ABC

“It had been going as a terrific event. The cafeteria was full. We probably had about 200 students in there from throughout the school,” said Ron Lesko of the Albany School District.

The school district says Meaders joined in on the assembly – at first just dancing with the students.

“Wasn’t an expected part of the routine but she wasn’t doing anything inappropriate,” said Lesko.

But that’s when things quickly went in the wrong direction

“Suddenly she stepped to the front of the group threw off her coat and stripped from the waist up,” said Lesko.

Staff rushed the stage to protect the kids from seeing naked boobies which would undoubtedly scar them for life and Ms. Meaders was arrested and charged with seven counts of Endangering the Welfare of a Child and one count of Public Lewdness.

The article doesn’t say what her motivation was or if she was drunk or high at the time. It could just be that she works up one helluva sweat dancing and finds that dancing topless is the best way to moderate her body temperature. Even so, the potential corrupting influence of naked tits is too much of a risk to allow to go unpunished.

Jack in the Box heiress blows $1 billion gambling over 9 years.

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gamblingcatI can admit that the main reason I’m not fabulously wealthy is because in many ways I’m a bit of a screw up. Occasionally this realization makes me a little sad, but the next time it does I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I’m not this much of a screw up:

San Diego ex-mayor used charity funds to cover gambling debts – latimes.com.

SAN DIEGO — She married a fabulously wealthy man decades her elder, and became the first female mayor of San Diego. But when Maureen O’Connor left public life, she spent countless hours seated in front of video-poker machines.

Over a nine-year period, she wagered an estimated $1 billion, including millions from a charity set up by her late husband, who founded Jack in the Box.

That was the portrait that emerged in court Thursday as the frail former mayor tearfully acknowledged she skimmed more than $2 million from a charity founded by her late husband, Robert O. Peterson.

When my father-in-law took me gambling for the first time last year we went with a budget of $300 and I had a hard time with the knowledge that we were risking $300*. I can’t begin to fathom coming anywhere close to wagering a billion dollars.

She obviously has a gambling addiction problem, but it’s still hard to conceive how should get let herself get to the point of blowing her fortune and then stealing from her late husband’s charity without ever once thinking that maybe she might have a problem she needs help with.

I don’t mean to criticize or condemn this lady over this. I’m only writing about it because it so boggles my mind to even think about that writing it down is the only way I can deal with it. There are so many other things I’d be doing if I had that kind of money at my disposal and I probably still wouldn’t come close to ever spending it all.

* We left the casino with $50 more than what we walked in with. Which was enough to convince me I shouldn’t press my luck by ever going again.

A small update for Valentine’s Day.

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Yep, I’m still around. My back problems have almost faded away completely after nearly an entire month of recovery, which is a record I hope I don’t ever break in the future. I started physical therapy this week in hopes of strengthening the core muscles that were the problem. Sitting for extended periods still hurts, but it’s more of an annoyance than the debilitating problem it was.

If nothing else, I think this episode has given me the motivation to finally get serious about losing some of the excess weight I’m carrying around. I’ll be pulling the elliptical out of the corner of the living room and getting back on it at least three days a week on the instruction of my physician.

Beyond that, I keep coming across things I think I’ll blog about only to decide I really don’t have anything all that significant to say about them. It’s odd, but as I’ve gotten older I seem to find it harder to get the outrage that fueled so many older entries going. Or perhaps I’m just getting to be apathetic about the stuff that used to rile me up. Probably a little of both.

In honor of the day I present you with this:

And now the unstoppable force vs. immovable object argument solved. Kinda.

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Wow! It’s a good day for science videos tackling age-old brain stumpers. Earlier today we had one that took on the Chicken or the Egg question and now here’s one that deals with the old mind bender of what would happen when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object:

I just tickles me pink that we live in a day and age when we not only have almost all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but that there are folks out there who are applying science to silly questions and sharing the results with the rest of us.

Finally, an answer to the Chicken or the Egg question.

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This is one of the things I love about science. It can take a relatively silly question like the old one about whether a chicken or an egg was first to come into existence and apply a little thought to it along with our understanding of theories such as evolution and put forth an answer to a seemingly impossible question.

Check it:

What I like most about this video is how it points out how ambiguous the original question really is: The answer depends in part on how you define your terms. It also highlights one of the problems with dealing with reality when we have a tendency to think in absolute terms.

Thinking in absolute terms is one of the problems I think Evolution deniers have. “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a dog give birth to kittens” is one of the common arguments you’ll hear from them. Evolution doesn’t work that way. It’s the result of the accumulation of small changes over long periods of time.

In the evolution of, say, the wolf into what we know today as the domesticated dog there’s no one point along the line where you can point and say that’s definitively where it stopped being a wolf and started being a dog. It doesn’t help that there isn’t a “line” to point to because pups in a litter are not clones of each other. Each one has its own small mutations that make it slightly different from its parents and siblings. Each batch of pups starts a bunch of different potential branches which, depending on if they survive and manage to breed themselves, produces that many more potential branches with their own mutations. That’s why we call it “the tree of life” and not “the single file line of life”.

Given enough time you will eventually get different, but related animals. Given even more time you’ll get much more different animals that can be difficult to tell are related to something in the past (e.g. birds being the descendants of dinosaurs). That’s apparently hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Hence you get silly questions like: Which came first? The chicken or the egg?