WHAT A SHAME, MARY JANE HAD A PAIN AT THE PARTY: In an exercise in the power of positive thinking, I changed my cell-phone ringtone to the Beatles' "Getting Better" when I got home from the hospital. The chest ache from the pericarditis did indeed diminish over the next week or so, only to be replaced by a different ache in the right side of my chest (accompanied by night fevers and chills). Not being a Time Lord, I was fairly sure that this was not coronary in origin, but I checked with Dr. T., the cardiologist, who confirmed it didn't sound like anything he could help me with. Consequently, I went back to Dr. B., my primary, who decided it was upper respiratory and prescribed a five-day course of an antibiotic I'd never heard of, Azithromycin. That, in turn, caused a new pain a bit further down, which I took to be stomach irritation (which a lot of antibiotics tend to cause); it was mild enough that I decided to tolerate it for the five days, rather than waste more time and money on further medical visits. (Besides, Dr. B. had already taken off for the High Holy Days by the time I stared feeling it.) By the end of Rosh Hashanah, I seemed to be able to breathe deeply without any discomfort for the first time in a month.

     I've now tapered off the ibuprofen, but Dr. T. has me on the colchicine for another two months just to be sure. I was getting Nexium in the hospital, but my medical insurance wouldn't pay for me to continue it once I was out, so at the pharmacist's recommendation I'm now taking omeprazole (the generic equivalent of Prilosec) to forestall stomach irritation.

Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 10, #9 (e-APA-NYU #101)

JAMISON, TAKE e-LETTER (Mark L. Blackman):

(¢hard-copy cover) "Where's the key?" Rather than waste space and bandwidth here providing the Pseudo-Roster sequence numbers for the 192 persons Nina depicted on the cover, I'll send it to you under separate e-cover. (If anyone else wants the list, just ask; you know where to find me.) /*/ (¢APA-NEWS) "Tony Martin played the Zeppo role in THE BIG STORE; to my surprise, he was Jewish Polish, NOT Italian!" That is surprising—but it doesn't make him any more appealing as a Zeppo substitute and vocalist. /*/ (¢Cinii) "DR. WHO isn't mainstream the way 007 is..." I thought it was, in Britain. Daleks show up routinely in editorial cartoons and TV comedy sketches there. But it might have been harder to make a TARDIS disappear at the Olympic ceremonies. (There was a three-minute Doctor Who "mini-episode" produced a couple of months before the Games, in which the TARDIS materialized in the path of a runner carrying the Olympic torch into the stadium.) /*/ (¢me) "One much-publicized prophecy involves something called the 'Rapture', only the wicked part of 'the human species continuing to exist on the earth', so a devastated (by quakes, nukes, pestilence or by being overrun by McDonald's) earth doesn't matter." But things like radiation don't disappear in days or even seven years. (I'm not sure about Big Macs.) Then again, I guess a deity who can Rapture thousands of faithful into heaven when he chooses, can also transform radioactive into non-radioactive material, restore smashed buildings, or banish pestilence (or McDonald's) when he chooses.

WILL I SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER? (Deb Wunder):

Happy birthday, retroactively. /*/ (¢me) "Companies have figured out that if they build their products to fail, people will generally choose to replace them rather than give them up..." I don't know if this is universally true; my TV is still going strong after a decade, and I can't even recall how old my receiver and cassette deck are. (As you know, I still use cassettes for capturing A Prairie Home Companion and one or two other radio shows. Younger readers may need to pause here and look up "Compact Cassette" on Wikipedia.) I believe—I hope—it has more to do with the immaturity of the technology, and when iPhones and Android phones have been around for a decade or two, they'll be more durable and reliable. And that's when something even newer will come along to replace them—cranial-implant phones, anyone?

ICONOCLAST (Joel Nelson):

(¢Wunder) "I am now on antibiotics for code milky green." Hope you're feeling better now. /*/ "I found out that each 15.5 oz. can [of Monster Rehab energy drink] contains 170mg of caffeine..." That's only a bit more than an average 8-ounce cup of generic brewed coffee contains (it ranges from 100 to 200 mg), and a lot less than a Starbucks Grande contains. That makes me wonder about the warning you mention on the can: "max 1 can every 4 hours, with limit 3 cans per day." If the stuff is that dangerous, why aren't there warning labels on cans of coffee or at coffee-bar counters? (Alternatively, what else do they put in Monster products that you want to be really cautious about putting in your body?)

DANCE* OF CERTIFICATION (Ariel Cinii):

May the income-certification issue be resolved for the best, soon! /*/ Congratulations on your Pegasus nomination. Can "Unknown Is Unending" be nominated if it was written centuries ago on another planet? /*/ You should definitely put something up on YouTube to publicize The Family Forge. As a struggling Filthy Pro, it is essential that you spread the word, and the price of submitting to YouTube makes it a no-brainer. It needn't be anything fancy; you may already have the tools you need on Molly. The video can be a sequence of slow zooms and pans on artwork you've already created, while the audio can be your own (or someone else's) reading of a blurb about the story, the characters and the setting. That blurb can be what you've already put up at Amazon, or you can make it something more detailed to take advantage of YouTube's ten-minute limit. (You could even read a swatch of the actual story.) Just be sure to end with the image of the book's cover and to provide a link to the Amazon selling page for the book. And to Harold's page for the CD, too, while you're at it. /*/ And given your publicity budget, you should probably rethink your rejection of Facebook. Yes, it has hazards, but you can read up on what to do to minimize them, put up the barest minimum of personal information, and then avoid wasting time and effort by just posting abridged versions there of whatever you put on LiveJournal. Twitter, I'm not so sure about; seems like a much bigger time-sink than it's worth.

>Portions of the preceding have managed to mention religion, politics
                                          and the Great Pumpkin. Are you offended?<

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