This isn’t a comforting list, because a lot of these symptoms also accompany chronic disease, but it’s better to be aware of them and get them checked out, than to ignore them! If you are prone to ignoring your state of health because you find doctor visits unpleasant, you will just have to get over it– take care of yourself for the people you love and who love you back. If you don’t, I will rap the backs of your lazy-ass knuckles with my medical assistant stick of authority!!

The mnemonic “CAUTION” can be used to remember some early warning signs of cancer: Change in bowel or bladder habits; A sore that does not heal; Unusual bleeding or discharge; Thickening, lumps, or changes in the shape of the testicles or breasts; Indigestion or difficulty swallowing; Obvious change in a wart or mole; and a Nagging cough or hoarseness of the voice.

You should be alert for changes in your bowel habits (for example, changes in the color, consistency, size, and shape of stools) or a change in bladder function. Constipation and diarrhea over a period of time could be a sign of colon cancer. Be alert for signs of blood in the stool (it can appear as obvious red blood, or if the bleeding is high up in the intestines, it will be digested and appear as dark/tarry areas of stool). Blood in the urine looks like reddish-yellow or dark red urine.

You should be alert for sores that do not heal (for example, a sore in the mouth, or white patches on the mouth and tongue). Since cancer cells are not bound strongly to each other, cancers tend to be fragile and bleed easily. Cancers may grow into blood vessels, causing the vessels to rupture. Watch out for blood in your phlegm, stool, and urine.

Gastrointestinal changes can be cancer warning signs. Take note of persistent diarrhea or constipation, difficulty swallowing, nausea, vomiting, unexplained weight loss, pain after eating, or frequently feeling full, even after eating only a small meal. Also take note if you have a persistent cough or hoarse throat, or having trouble swallowing. If any of these are chronic, inexplicable problems, see your doctor.

When looking at skin, keep an eye out for changes in the color, size or appearance of moles, freckles, and warts. Other skin signs that can indicate cancer are darker looking skin (hyperpigmentation), yellow skin and eyes (jaundice), and reddened skin (erythema).

Jen’s primitive nasal speculum, 2007

I mean, let’s be honest here. The photo above is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The experimentee even reminds me of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (post Shock Shop, pre-lobotomy). Look through the whole set if you want to see some seriously weird shit. And as far as it being creepy to apply electrical stimulation to facial muscles… well yeah, it looks pretty bad, but I’ve had a TENS unit used on me during physical therapy sessions, and it doesn’t hurt– it’s actually pretty hilarious. Compared to other things people were doing to each other at that time for the sake of medical research, I think this is rather innocuous.

Now that I know something like a TENS unit can be used to stimulate facial muscles, I may have to buy one and do a whole series of photographs of my friends. That doesn’t count as human experimentation, does it? I mean… maybe I should have people sign a release first.

One of the cool things about Richard is that he doesn’t need a TENS unit to individually control his facial muscles.

This morning I stepped outside onto the warm bricks and wrote a haiku:

Mockingbirds, stray cat
Lizards scurry underfoot
Today will be hot.

And here is a video of our contrail shadow and a weak glory, as viewed from the window on the flight to our layover in Georgia. Do you see it? If so, give yourself a pat on the back.

Now it’s time for my first Cuban coffee of this vacation. Yes.

I was wondering what prevented the mold spores I inadvertently inhaled while taking these photos from implanting in my moist, dark lungs, and a friend (”FRIEND”) pointed out that nothing really does, so people get aspergillosis. While frantically googling this condition, I found the following Aspergillosis blog that is full of great, terrifying information.

Since I am studying very hard right now (very hard) I decided that I should close the tab and read it later, so I added it it to Google Reader. While there, I started clicking on other blogs I subscribe to but never read, one of them being the XKCD blag.

I found this entry, which is old, but hilarious.

After a hectic few months, I finally have some projects that are in the early stages. But since nothing is worth posting about yet, here instead is a list of phrases that (at the time of this posting) turn up no hits on Google:

* “ate a violin”
* “driver-side bidet”
* “unlike normal furries,”
* “Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg”
* “people are too civil on the internet”
* “his penis shattered my world”
* “more like LAME-arkian theory”
* “my little horse must think it gay”
* “it turned out her bottom half was a robot”
* “Aww, a baby hooker!”

Here are some phrases that I had hoped were original when I typed them in but was disappointed:

* “full-body glissando”
* “passenger-side bidet”
* “underwater Linux”
* “Nu-Polka”
* “erotic colonoscopy”
* “Spocktoberfest”
* “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack.”
* “my bologna has a first name, it’s A-D-O-L-F”

(Reading this made me do my “private laugh”– a cackling, high-pitched repetitive wheezing that I do only when no one can hear me and I think something is so funny that it’s worth giving myself an inguinal hernia to keep reading. Of course this is nothing like the delicate giggling I reserve for public, since as we all know, it’s quite unladylike to laugh too loud or too long, especially if no men are laughing simultaneously.)

FRD came up with a recipe they call “leaves and curds.”

1. Brew loose-leaf tea
2. Add cream
3. Wait for curds to float to top
4. Decide if you’re going to waste a cup of tea or just drink the damn thing

It is possible for the recipe to completely fail, if you pick a non-curdling tea. Rooibos (Aspalathus linearis) was used in the above experiment. Good luck.

Check out the contrail illusion on the left. The contrail is at a higher altitude than the [insert proper name for the lower altitude hazy clouds], so its shadow is cast down by the sun, which is of course WAY farther away from the earth than either layer of clouds. But it looks like the sun is underneath the cloud layers, casting the contrail shadow upwards– and the illusion is enforced by the low altitude of the sun in the sky. It’s just kind of an impossible optical illusion to resolve– for me, at least.

Also, I was reading this cool book about Western magic symbols (like Masonic stuff, etc) that was published in the 70s, and in the caption of one of the illustrations, I remember reading that at some point, people thought the sun was a giant burning ball of wood. HOW THE FECK WOULD A BALL OF WOOD GET IN THE SKY?

I just wonder about that. I really wonder about the other things I would be thinking, just normal, everyday things, if I also thought that maybe there was a giant burning ball of wood in the sky.

Maybe I would think, “Hey, if I have sex with a virgin, it will cure me of this awful acquired immunodeficiency virus I have!”… oh wait, that’s today’s thinking.

Sigh. You know what is really sad (besides the fact that millions of people in Africa are dying of AIDS)? I have an uncle who died of AIDS. My mom calls him her little brother Ian. I don’t know anything about him except for that… that he was gay, and died of AIDS. I wish I knew his story… I hope I can find out. For now, he’s just my mysterious little uncle Ian. I bet we would’ve been friends, if we had ever met each other.

I’m kind of sad I’m not one of those fancy flickr users with like 10,000 views of this awesome HDR composition that makes some stunning commentary on the human condition in addition to showcasing an amazing landscape, but… um… um… the only mad props I need are my own? I think I was taught something like that in school in the 80s. Man, self-esteem was so fashionable then!

My friend Theresa is doing a 24-hour video game marathon as part of the Sarcastic Gamer Extra Life fundraiser, which benefits Texas Children’s Hospital.

The fundraising efforts end tomorrow. (“Computer: day of the week?” “Thursday”.)^[1] That’s Friday, people! Theresa only has one day to make up the last $292 to meet her $2000 goal! I’ve offered to donate a small signed print of any of my drawings (anything you can find in the flickr sets on this page) to anyone who helps her make up this last bit!

Say say say, you should donate! It’s very easy. Visit Theresa and Frank’s main fundraising site and clicky. Then she will tell me you donated, and you will tell me via e-mail which print you want, and I will send it to you through the power of postal mail.

Not only will you be helping a great cause, and helping Theresa who is awesome, but you could get a print like this:

or this:

Sweet!

[1] Edit: I posted this after midnight, and I was sick and tired, so my Head Computer was confused. It was already Friday when I queried it, so it was wrong. The probability that it’s a Friday when you’re reading this blog entry is low, but hopefully the probably that it’s the Friday of October 17th 2008 (known to some as 1224219600) is high enough that there will be throngs of people heading over to Theresa’s site and donating. Help, my wetware is failing. What I just said did not make sense.

Edit #2: She did it, you guys! I’m not sure if any of the people who helped her reach $2k came by way of my blog, but if they did–thanks! I’ll get the roster of peeps who donated within the next week, and get to sending out your complimentary prints. :)

But he keeps coming up with the funniest shit. Check out yesterday’s strip, for example.

How can I ever be that funny?

Am I okay with having a kind of lame web comic? Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. So maybe one will appear soon. -Ish.

Update: I just discovered that some person translates XKCD into Spanish, which is awesome, because… is there a cooler way to practice my Spanish? Probably not. And it’s still funny in Spanish!

Oh man, another update: The New Yorker did an interview with Munroe — and the author challenged him to a cartoon-off which I believe Munroe clearly won:

I took it yesterday morning on the way to work. I caught her in the act, carefully dancing along the spokes of her web, pulling and touching her spinnerets to the proper places. I wonder if she needs all eight legs to do it or if six would suffice. It looked complicated, but the motions and rhythm reminded me a bit of knitting.

I like how spiders keep house; how they cut out parts of their web stuck with garbage and rebuild it. I read that webs lose stickiness after a day, so the spiders eat their web and spin a new one every day. I recently had to knock down a web in my garden so I could pass through some trees, but I took it down carefully, one guy line at a time, leaving the top two intact, and watched the spider gather all the silk up in her legs, climb up to the top, and eat the web, shoving the minute tangle of silk into her mouth with her front legs. So thrifty! So efficient!