'Bred Crumbs
06.10.04
Voulez-vous Coucher Avec Biotechnology Ce Soir?
07:35 AMA big biotech conference in San Francisco has of course drawn protesters. Yesterday, one of the speakers inside the conference was, for some reason, Brooke Shields, who tried to chide the protesters, but may have accidentally given everyone a brand-new reason to shut down biotech. From the Associated Press:
Actress Brooke Shields told an audience Wednesday that she became a mother because of advances in biotechnology.
Yes, thanks to biotech, Brooke Shields is breeding. Consider the implications. More from the noted issues analyst:
Shields said she was puzzled by the anti-biotechnology protesters who had targeted the convention, saying they must not realize how biotechnology can help people.
"Some of these people need to get a life," Shields said.
If you think Brooke is puzzled, wait till you see yourself after the actual last sentence of the article:
Shields was joined in her presentation by singer Patti LaBelle.
06.09.04
Focus Grope
11:45 PMI officially became Old today. The life sentence of my agedness was handed down in one word: presbyopia.
After years of slightly improving vision – still horribly nearsighted, but improving – I have suddenly and unexpectedly hit the Time of Needing Reading Glasses (Or Some Variant Thereof). I didn't realize it, hadn't been feeling like I was having trouble reading, but better-one-better-two doesn't lie. My eyes can no longer completely focus near as well as far, even when corrected. And it's downhill from here.
Bifocal contacts are still too imperfect to apply to my myopia, but science has cooked up another way I can avoid glasses. It's called monovision, which somehow doesn't have a ™ after it. One of my eyes now gets a contact stronger than my previous prescription, and one eye a weaker one. Supposedly, my brain will shortly learn to handle distant focusing with one eye and very close objects with the other. But the more I think about this, the less sense it makes. It seems like the result would be slightly blurry vision at every distance, which is pretty much what I'm experiencing. (The distance to the computer monitor especially seems to fall into the zone of mixed focus.)
But it's been only five hours, and these things take time. For all I know, I'll wake up tomorrow a multifocusing machine.
I'm also trying a switch from two-week contacts to daily disposables. Another curious trick of vision seems to come into play here. When I'm in the doctor's office, the daily contacts are only a little more expensive than my old ones, especially when you consider that I won't need solutions anymore. But when I go out to the reception area, the contacts suddenly cost a few hundred dollars more a year. Then when I go back into the doctor's office to express my doubts about switching, the extra cost is again described as slight. I guess my brain will adjust to this discrepancy as well.
06.07.04
There's No I in the Word Call
11:16 PMThis was seen on a shelf at Safeway.
Really now, how many ways is this a bad idea?
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