Maybe it’s just me, but were someone to serve up a batch of fetus-shaped cookies at a baby shower, I wouldn’t be able to make it to the Gift Unwrapping stage.

(Via Megan McArdle.)

There’s something a trifle askew about this story, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. What do you think?

I live in Oxford, MS, and my girlfriend and I researched the availability of Plan B in this state. We knew there might some puritanical problems with purchasing it here in Mississippi — we have all kinds of arcane alcohol laws and only one abortion clinic in the state, after all — and from what we could tell, a pharmacist can refuse to sell Plan B to a woman on religious/moral grounds. But otherwise pharmacies do carry it, and it should be available to a woman as long as she can prove she is over age 18. As this is a university town and a top-ranked party school, we supposed it wouldn’t be as hard to get Plan B as in other really small, ultra-conservative rural towns. And we also figured that a corporate pharmacy such as Walgreens would be less troublesome to deal with than a mom-and-pop one.

Well, the other day we decided to be extra-safe and to get the Plan B pill from Walgreens here in town. My girlfriend went and requested Plan B, equipped with the knowledge that it’s a non-prescription drug available with ID. She said the pharmacy worker started asking for proof of insurance in order to get the pill. My girlfriend refused and asked to speak to someone in charge. The pharmacist then came, and my girlfriend told him she simply wanted Plan B and that her ID should be good enough. The pharmacist then went about getting the pill, but they also seem to have a policy, a la abortion clinics, of forcing a waiting period of an hour and giving adoption literature to the person requesting the contraceptive. Now, Plan B is just an additional spermicide, not an abortion pill, but that’s another can of worms. In the end, my girlfriend demanded the Plan B immediately, and she got it, but not without a fair amount of interference on Walgreens’ part. They also insisted on writing down her driver’s license number.

I’m wondering how much trouble other people may have had with Walgreens (or any other pharmacy) over acquiring Plan B. There are several other Red States that make allowances for the pharmacists’ “moral concerns” to get in the way of getting Plan B. What are our rights in getting this pill right away? Walgreens’ website didn’t indicate that they could possibly get all high-and-mighty with her when she went to make the purchase. Could they also get uppity when you buy other kinds of contraception?

One thing jumps out at me: Plan B is not actually a spermicide.

Mississippi is, I understand, one of four states which allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense “emergency contraception” of this sort on moral grounds.

On the other hand, several states, including Oklahoma, routinely jerk you around should you wish to purchase stuff that theoretically could be used in a meth lab. (And I have to show my driver’s license to buy Ambien, fercrissake.)

I’m not quite sure what I think about all this just yet, so I’m throwing it out here. I do, however, have an ongoing policy of avoiding Walgreens on general principle.

“If I am somewhere I should not be, or doing something I should not be doing, I will suffer consequences. This is called the ‘Self-Cleaning Oven’ theory.”

Not by me, it isn’t.

Well, if you think about it, we wouldn’t necessarily know it if it were:

Might the hypothetical but vanishingly-unlikely black hole just transport us all to another region of the universe, and things go on pretty much as they are now, except the constellations are in the “wrong” places?

Or maybe we’ll wind up in one of those alternative universes that is hypothesized to exist (keeping my fingers crossed that it’s either one where I’m Benevolent Dictatrix of the World or one where I am the figurehead of a Martha Stewart-like multimedia empire but am basically universally adored while having to do little actual work).

I’d prefer, ever so slightly, the Benevolent Dictatrix scenario, if only because it would result in the displacement of an enormous number of governmental hangers-on, a black hole in their own right.

Still, if this is the last page you ever get to read, thanks for dropping by.

The math has already been done for you:

“We can’t cover everything for everyone,” said Dr. Walter Shaffer, medical director of the state Division of Medical Assistance Programs, which administers the Oregon Health Plan.

“Taxpayer dollars are limited for publicly funded programs. We try to come up with polices that provide the most good for the most people.”

Which is defined thusly:

As of now any treatment that doesn’t provide at least a 5 percent chance of survival after 5 years won’t be approved.

Last fall the [Oregon Health Services Commission] said coverage of palliative care for patients with advanced cancer would not include chemotherapy or surgical intervention intended primarily to prolong life or alter disease progression.

However, they did advise the patient that they would pay for this:

“The letter said doctor-assisted suicide would be covered. To say to someone, ‘we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live,’ it’s cruel,” she said. “I get angry. Who do they think they are?”

Dr. John Sattenspiel, senior medical director for LIPA, said that at some level doctor-assisted suicide could be considered as a palliative or comfort care measure. “We had no intent to upset her, but we do need to point out the options available to her under the Oregon Health Plan,” he said.

The survival rate for doctor-assisted suicide is, I would think, something less than 5 percent over 5 years.

And you can take this to the bank: people who want “universal” anything have no idea of the size of the universe.

(From Mark Shea via The Dawn Patrol.)

American soldiers burying their dead, Bois de Consenvoye, France, 8 November 1918. Via Susanna Cornett.

Previously posted here.

Twelve years into this little technological exercise, and maybe I’m not getting enough exercise:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

If I get to the point where this seems too much like work, I am out of here faster than [fill in name of distasteful waste product] through a [conduit for same].

Besides:

I’m pretty sure you could take a random sample of most white-, blue-, and no-collar occupations and find three middle-aged men who had heart attacks since December, not to mention members who have gained weight. I say most because there’s not a lot of 50-y-o men teaching preschool.

And if not, so what? If you work in the mines, you know you’re going to get black lung. If you flip burgers, you know you’re going to get acne. If you build skyscrapers, you know you could plummet 30 stories to your death. If you blog, you might not get enough exercise. Whoop.

Hey, I had acne before I ever flipped burgers.

It should surprise no one that I still remember this scary little incident:

In 1985, a petroleum tanker making a left turn around a narrow corner didn’t see me and attempted, quite involuntarily, to prove the law of physics that says that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time; not only did I survive, but I was able to drive away from the carnage with less than a deductible’s worth of damage.

Not the easiest thing in the world to forget. Obviously this didn’t happen in slow motion; just the same, I remember it unfolding slowly, deliberately, as I perceived the threat, estimated the time of arrival, and planned my response, which, I decided, would not be to throw up my hands in despair and prepare myself for a world with less traffic.

Instead, I tried to point the car, to the extent possible, at the tanker’s spare-tire carrier, midway along its underside, with the ridiculous idea that if I hit the big rubber tire, I’d be bounced back just enough to save my miserable hide. Of course, if I sheared off the tire carrier and ripped open the belly of the beast, I wouldn’t have to spend any time wondering how I’d failed; I’d be roasted to a crackly crunch.

Now I didn’t tell you this to try to impress you with my resourcefulness. For one thing, I don’t have as much of it as I’d like. What’s more important, at least for the purpose of this narrative, is that while all this happened in a split second, it didn’t seem to happen in a split second: time, at least from my point of view, seemed to slow down.

Which supports this premise here, I suppose:

U.S. scientists leapt off a 150-foot (45-meter) high platform in a hair-raising bid to test if time really does slow down in a crisis as film-makers like to show.

The experiment was divided into two parts. First the researchers asked volunteers to show on a stopwatch how long someone else’s fall had taken, then how long their own fall took. All the participants believed their own fall had taken some 36 percent longer.

The phenomenon is explained this way:

Researchers believe that during terrifying events a part of the brain called amygdala becomes more active, adding extra memories that accompany those normally dealt with by other parts of the brain.

“In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories. And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took. It can seem as though an event has taken an unusually long time, but it doesn’t mean your immediate experience of time actually expands. It simply means that when you look back on it you believe it to have taken longer.”

Which adds a certain resonance to the way I read Donald Sensing’s harrowing story of spinning out on a rainy Tennessee highway. As he says:

Samuel Johnson, one of the leading literary figures of 18th-century England, wrote, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

So does spinning out at high speed in the rain on the interstate. It gives your mind a certain focus.

And his report, like mine, ends with a word of thanks pointed toward the heavens, and the knowledge that we would be forever changed by what had happened. The difference is this: he realized it a lot faster than I did.

A regular commenter around here for quite some time, and a blogger in his own right — and, sad to say, he may be leaving us:

During Drinking Right last night we got a call from Triticale’s wife.

She told us he is not doing very well. His Doctors only give him a few more days.

We offer our respect, best wishes and prayers.

No more can I add, except to do the same.

Not Maurice Ravel’s, though he has a small role to play in this tale of someone whose time ran out far too soon, by the inimitable Akaky Bashmachkin.

If Blogspot is acting up, you can read it here. One way or another, though, you must read it.

And yet the ending is happy — maybe.

Read it and decide for yourself.

(Thank you, Tam.)

From my single entry for 11 September 2001:

Blessed are the doubters; though they be thought indecisive and wishy, washy even, it would never occur to them to settle a petty grudge by mass murder.

Donald Rumsfeld was saying that the Pentagon bureaucracy needed to be shaken up, but this isn’t what he meant at all. So far, I’ve remained just as calm as can be — going through the Oklahoma City bombing perhaps has taken some of the fright out of me, and gallows humor will take care of some of the rest. But somehow I can still see myself tumbling from bed at the stroke of midnight, sweating to beat the band and screaming my fear into the night sky.

I haven’t had much occasion to scream since then, and whether I should credit this comparative placidity to the (perhaps inadvertent) efficiency of the government or to the fecklessness of the jihadis is a question on which I plan to spend no time. What matters is that faith has been kept; memories have been preserved; resolve, where it counts, has been maintained.

Life among the Type 2s has in no way altered my endorsement of this viewpoint:

If you want to eschew smoking and fast food, exercise, and otherwise lead the disciplined life that will allow you that extra six years of geriatry, so that you may live as long as the average Andorran, that’s your prerogative. Some of the rest of us may choose to live it up a little, even if that means we spend six fewer months in the nursing home before kicking off. Of course, you could also get struck and killed by the organic food truck in the parking lot of Whole Foods.

Not likely. We don’t have a Whole Foods. Yet.

There are plenty of folks who will tell you that engaging in activity A, on average, will reduce your lifespan (call it B) by some number C. What they don’t mention is that neither you nor they can balance the equation without foreknowledge of the value of B.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

I have “risk factors.” So does everyone else. I can take — indeed, I have taken — some steps to mitigate them. But they’re never going to go away completely, and as I get older, inevitably I will develop more of them. I wrote this ten years ago:

Popular psychology insists that men of A Certain Age are driven to go forth and seek out, in Tom T. Hall’s words, “faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money.” I can’t see myself doing any of these things, but then I can’t be sure if my life is half over, or two-thirds, or ninety-five percent. Somewhere out there is a bullet or a bacterium or a Buick with my name on it, and its scheduling is unclear, to say the least.

But I’m not going to hide in my room and hope it goes away — because it won’t.

Why, yes, I think I will have fries with that.

(American soldiers burying their dead, Bois de Consenvoye, France, 8 November 1918. Via Susanna Cornett.)