Foodie FAIL

A friend of mine attended this and it was so bad he received a refund upon request. Apparantly expecations were extremely high and the event under-delivered.

I told him I thought this was the absolute worst aggregation of Yelp reviews I've ever seen (and in such a short period of time)

http://www.yelp.com/biz/great-american-food-and-music-fest-mountain-view#hrid:1d5Jj7n5rgvCACMAQibyrg

Up - the new disney/pixar movie

I went to the movies last Friday with my parents. We wante to see Up, but the 8:30PM show was sold out. In a fit of confused rage I purchased 3 "night at the museum II" lie-max (thanks rich) tickets (@ $16.50 for adults, that's stinking nuts) but then my wise parents exchanged those tickets for the 10PM up showing. THANK YOU PARENTS. 

Disney/Pixar's "Up" was awesome! But beware, it's not your typical happy go lucky animated kid film: it's rated PG, there are two scenes with a little bit of blood, and the beginning story arc is very poignantly sad - but it will "lift" you up with great laughs, a fresh-current story, and a strong moral compass.

Angst(er) Rap? No thanks, Lil Wayne.

I recently discovered, much to my horror, Lil Wayne's new(ish) single "Prom Queen". Click on the link and watch the music video if you haven't already, you'll have more sympathy for my ensuing tirade.

It's apparantly a #15 billboard chart topper that debuted on Jimmy Kimmel Live back in Januaray, but it's off his new album coming out this August (see the wikipedia article). Typically, I really enjoy consuming Lil Wayne's music. What, with such great hits as "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", "We Takin' Over" (DJ Khaled), and "Lollipop", it's hard to deny Lil Wayne's charming mainstream rap bankability. However, "Prom Queen" imho is an unwelcome foray into the nether regions of rock/hip-hop fusion (read: Pharrel and NERD) and cross-demographic espionage. I hope to devote some attention to the latter, in two forthcoming posts about mainstream rap's often absurd lyrics and the insidious caricature mainstream hip hop is today (and why I feel duped).

I'll admit: when I'm driving to a party on a Saturday night I "need me some" Lil Wayne to hype the mood and get in the groove. I can more than tolerate Lil Wayne's highly nasal rapping voice, belting out limericks about hot hoes ("Hoes"), menstrual issues (listen to the extremly catchy "A Milli"), and lollipop licking (from the eponymous, "Lollipop"). But if and when Prom Queen resurafces on the 94.9 & KMEL 106.1 airwaves, I will cringe and switch over to one of my other presets (NPR).

In trying to seem fresh and versatile, Prom Queen instead noisly rehashes an age-old, teen-angst drama. Nerdy high school kid is infatuated with hot uber-girl, unrequited love ensues, he becomes famous while she languishes in squalor. The music video for Prom Queen might have catalyzed my atypically violent reaction to this type of song. It's boring and unoriginal. Unless you feel that the following are avante-garde: Lil Wayne in thick framed, taped in the middle, glasses and Lil Wayne wailing on electric guitar (they only seem to show his body in that shot, who's his guitar weliding stunt double, I wonder?) It's kind of like that recent Chris Brown song about a nerd and his high school fantasy girl, except that the nerdy Chris Brown gets his girl and the music video doesn't take itself too seriously, has great dance choreography, and is otherwise highly entertaining. Oh and it also contains the "Auto-tune" effect that we've all grown to love in our mainstream rap music (thank you very much Cher and T Pain).

When Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters commented on his love ballad "Big Me" he apparantly said, "Everybody has to have their pop crap token love song... you know you know boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl tells boy to fuck off!" When he said "everybody" I'm fairly certain the esteemed Mr. Grohl did not have Mr. Wayne in mind. BTW the Big Me video is a great spoof on those 90's Mentos commercials.

If Prom Queen is emblematic of the new album, I might have to say no thanks to Mr. Wayne. Even though he's trying really hard to reach out to me and my demographic by getting revenge on the girl that broke his heart in high school, rapping a tribute to the beastie boys, and laying a verse over instrumentation that "sounds" like Coldplay's Viva La Vida... I must (dis)repsectfully pass. The only rapper who's allowed to crossover and morph gangster rap into rock and roll infused "angster" rap is Tupac Shakur (think the posthumously released"Changes"), but then again he could pretty much get away with anything and I'd love it.

And for those of you who instantly recognized my inccorect use of "eponymous" in the second paragraph - your talents would be better spent figuring out ways to improve mainstream hip hop's horrendous grammar and diction. Ok, I'm just playin' I don't want the diction to change. (someday we'll all look back on this and say: yay for malapropistic easter eggs)

Southland - NBC's new cop drama

I love this show. Cop drama following the lives of beat cops and detectives in lapd. It's got a catchy well-lit noir intro, features a quick glimpse of something that happens in the future, and then the show moves from past-present and onwards thereafter. I saw an episode on Hulu.com last week and now I'm hooked. I'm in the middle of an episode now, unforutnetly Hulu only features the most recent 5 episodes so I haven't seen the first and second episodes. 

Funny thing is that I don't even like "cop dramas". Nope. I never got into NYPD Blue, CSI Miami, Law and Order: Whichever. Barney Miller was before my time, but I'll get around to it since the namesake character was featured in a "top 100 characters of all time" on either Bravo or E!... whoops I can't remember which network...

The closest things to cop drama's I ever got into as a youngster were Quincy and Rockford Files, neither of the guys were cops. Southland is great because it basks in a background radiation of gritty LA life: gang bangers, drug dealers, rapists, so forth. However, it's the foreground we're all after - it strives for in depth character development. It's serial not episodic, which is something that turns me off of most crime drama's and their mindless money-making spin-offs. Oh and of course being about cops and taking place in LA there are a few sub-story-arcs or sub-plots about racial and socio-economic divides.

So when is Oakland going to get a successful police drama franchise on Network TV?

Sinus Surgery - Day 8 - Sinus Rinse Fun Time

I'm sleeping at really odd times, like 5AM to 3PM and napping in the evening. It's weird. Ever since surgery... hmmmm.

So yesterday after the doc's visit I picked up a Sinus Rinse as he instructed. I'm supposed to use this rinse daily. In his ultra-space-y-ness he forgot to explain to me what a sinus rinse was and why I needed it, until I probed him further before our "time was up"... skip to this morning... whoops I mean this afternoon. I wake up and whine about how ridiculous the instructions are... can't use tap water, has to be filtered by a 0.5 micron filter, we don't know our home filter size so my sister suggest that I use the drinking water tap, ok that'll work. I microwave some water and add it to room temp water to make it warm then add 8 ounces worth to the sinus rinse bottle.

It's designed to be held to one nostril over a sink... you mix the aforementioned water and a packet of bicarb solution and then squirt about 2-4 ounces of water in one nostril while tilting your head over the sink... the rinse then swishes around your sinuses and spills out the OTHER nostril. SO WEIRD! I did that in both and it was actually pretty neat, not too much discomfort at all and it really cleared out the blood, etc. that had accumulated. Yay.

I want to post photos of this thing in action, its such a simple product and they charge 9.97 for it at walmart and 11.67 on sale at safeway. It's a plastic bottle, nozzle, and packets of bicarb - probably all made in china... for like 10 cents a unit. Man they're making a killing at NeilMed the san raefel company that produces this stuff.

Sinus Surgery - A Week Later (Day 7)

I still need to fill in the gaps with blog posts about the day of surgery and immediately after, it's been quite a ride since last week (and I originally thought my anxiety over the surgery was nuts!) The surgery went pretty well last Tuesday and the doc has said that he hopes to have addressed the "mechanical" breathing problems I've been facing, but the key caveat is that everything needs to heal properly and that's why I've visited his office 4 times in the last week post-operation.

I just had to sneak in a post here because today's ENT visit was near horrific, but had some aspect of extasy whereby I left the exam room bleeding like crazy, but oddly very excited about how I handled myself. If that makes sense...

So the scheduling nurse had already set up this standard week after surgery appointment and my dad drove me as he has throughout this process. We arrive for a 1:15 appointment and as always I'm seen 30-45 minutes late (sometimes it's a longer day). The doctor squirted a set of nasal numbing agent and decongestant and left me alone for what seemed like an eternity (about 15 minutes). He returned and asked me to hold the instrument you see above, a 5 inch long needle looking sheath that has a tine camera on the end which feeds to a TV in a corner of the exam room. I was asked to put my knees together, and that means pain is on the way. He stuck the rigid needle up my right nostril and poked around checking out the passageways between the nose and ethmoid sinus, but not actually through the tiny openings that reach the sinus (that's for next week).

It was super painful! He then moved to the left nostril and by that point I was all tearing up, but definitely keeping my cool. After the left nostril we chatted about my progress, he said he'd corrected a slight lateralization of the left inferior turbinate and I was otherwise healing well. He prescribed me an OTC Sinus Rinse and sent me on my way. I proceeded have a crazy nose bleed and met my dad outside - he'd always joined me in the exam room, but this time I wanted him to wait outside because I thought it was going to be a bit more excruciating. And it was!

I really felt like I handled the pain well and was somehow really excited after. Or maybe it was the hydrocodone kicking in! Those opiate pain killers are dangerous!

Sinus Surgery - Night Before the Surgery

I'm getting up at 4:30AM and will arrive at Fremont's Washington Hospital around 5:30AM for a 7AM sinus surgery. It'll be my first surgery, and I'm definitely anxious, but I'm also optimisitic that the procedure will help reduce the constant pain/pressure I'm experiencing in my sinuses and upper jaw and the frequent recurring sinus infections, nasal blockage, snoring, ear pressure issues,and reduced sleep quality. Whoa those are a lot of issues!

Before I forget I wanted to include some interesting links I've discovered while researching the surgery procedure:

1) A UCSD medical school diagram/flowchart showing the escalation of treatment from the initial acute sinusitus finally to an exacerbated condition that requires sinus surgery.

2) An informative first person account by a patient who underwent surgery for recurring sinus infection that involved turbinate reduction and correction of a deviated septum.

It's taken me quite a while to actually discover I needed surgery, and after that to actually schedule a proper date and get up to speed on what the surgery entails and the outcomes it hopes to achieve. I still feel a little in the dark as I reviewed a lot of qualitiative information about outcomes and risks, but obtained no quantitative info regarding how these surgeries improve symptoms and quality of life. I had a pre-op with my surgeon last Tuesday, CT scans taken the day before that, and a pre-op testing with nurses at Washington Hospital last Friday. I may not have asked the most pointed/specific questions to my surgeon and therefore received pretty vague answers. In fact the first time I saw a list of the actual procedures being performed is when the hostpital pre-op interview nurse asked me to a sign a form consenting that I know what procedures are being performed on me!

They include:

Middle Bilateral Endoscopic total Ethmoidectomy
Bilateral Endoscopic Antrostomy w/ removal of Maxillary sinus mucosa
Right Concha Bullosa resection
Nasal septoplasty (repair of nasal septum)
Resection of inferior turbinates (with risk of atrophic rhinitis which sounds scary!)

I'm also not clear about how my sinus tissues began thickening in the first place! I definintely didn't have chronic sinusitis 8 years ago, but I have always had allergies and asthma. I've taken lots of different medicines indicated for treatment of nasal and lung inflamation and constriction. The topic of allergies deserves a whole separate discussion/post, but anyone who wants to get a refresher on why we have allergies and how the circumstances in the environment create a perfect storm for allergies year after year, listen to last week's Science Friday w/ Ira Flatow and two allergy doc's.

So I'm going to wrap up now, I wrote this post with two aims: 1) kickstarting a few articles that will chronicle my sinus issues, the surgery, and the outcomes (also with the hope of educating others and helping them ask the right questions before surgery!) 2) writing this helps me organize what I've learned and so I get to synthesize the info and it sinks in a bit more.

Wish me luck!