this kid rocks

campus man

This afternoon I'll be taking part in a neurology workshop at the UMN med school. First-year students will practice taking my medical history, then ask me basic diagnostic questions. My wheelchair is a pretty big clue to my condition, and I don't want to make it too easy for them, so here are a few things I'll say to throw them off.

• "It really hurts when I pee."


• "My sinuses sting — I think the fumes from my meth lab are getting to me."


• "Can you write me a prescription for ketamine? I'm going to a rave this weekend."


• "Are you familiar with Excitotoxicity? It's my favorite Def Leppard album."


• "I'm in a wheel chair because of a freak mosh pit accident at a Neil Diamond concert."

The last time I did something like this, I had fun. Hopefully today will bring a few laughs.

I love keeping med students on their toes.

acting twice my age

Here's a fun fact — people with ALS are eligible for Social Security, regardless of age. I guess the government figures we might as well see a little return on those Social Security taxes before we die. OK, maybe that isn't a 'fun' fact, but it's a fact nonetheless.

Since I'm basically retired & on Social Security, I get a lot of mail intended for the 65 and older set. This lovely little brochure showed up the other day:


According to their website, "SilverSneakers is a fun, energizing program that helps older adults take greater control of their health by encouraging physical activity and offering social events."

That sounds delightful, and if I were older than 33 and capable of physical activity I'd be all over it. The SilverSneakers obviously got my info from my insurance company, and I can't fault them for that.

However, I can fault them for this gem.


SilverSneakers has a clip art logo. It makes me sad.

If SilverSneakers was a volunteer organization with a shoestring budget, I'd understand the clip art. Turns out they're a division of a company called Healthways. Healthways is worth about $500 million. They have an original logo, but creating one for SilverSneakers must not have been in the budget. I guess half a billion dollars doesn't go as far as it used to.

C'mon, Healthways — kick a few bucks down to SilverSneakers so they can hire a designer. If you're going to print your logo on a bunch of shirts for old folks, at least make them look kind of cool.

solar

There's a crazy solar storm heading this way. I hope it's as cool as a solar eclipse.

i wish i'd thought of this

better late than never... probably

I planned on returning from my blog hiatus with a fun game for you to play, but I couldn't pull it off. My ActionScript and JavaScript abilities were too rusty to track the score. So here's a free game idea for you Developers.

I was going to call it; "Drunk, Diseased or John Wayne"

The basic concept was this — you would listen to a slurry, sleepy audio clip of a male voice saying a short phrase. Then, you'd decide if the voice you just heard was that of a drunkard, a motor neuron-diseased person, or actor John Wayne.

John Wayne sound clips are easy to find. Recording my own slow speech is easy. Getting a few of my friends loaded and recording them would have been the easiest task, given the massive quantity of Russian Imperial Stout in my fridge. The hard part was that I wanted the game to be 10-15 'questions' long, but I couldn't remember how the scoring worked.

Oh well. I have a feeling "Drunk, Diseased or John Wayne" wouldn't be burning up the iTunes store.

break

i'll be blogging over here for a bit, keeping people up to date on my sister-in-laws brain tumor surgery. Writing brain tumor jokes instead of ALS jokes is a nice change of pace. Weird, eh?