hillbilly, please

“There are many differences, of course. But the correlation is about 75 percent, and at two important places — near the equator and near the place in northern Chile where the coast veers sharply to the northwest — the width of Waldseemueller’s South America and the actual one are almost the same. Things were perhaps not as ultra incognita as he let on. That is not the end of the strangeness, however.”

[via]

The post subject line come from this key quote from the article: “There is some probability that Waldseemueller knew something that is no longer extant — information that we don’t have,” Hessler said. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Knowledge comes and goes and is lost and found all the time, particularly when the means to duplicate, backup, and share information were distressingly limited. Don’t assume we are somehow smarter or better than people hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Also on the same tree:

The first thing I want to say is that I am fine.

The second thing I want to say is that I am broken.

If you keep up with me via Twitter/Facebook, then you’ve read this earlier today:  This over-achieving, FUBARed, and completely psycho menstrual schedule I’ve been on since August? It’s wearing me out in every way possible.

I’m on my seventh period since August. That’s…not normal. And for someone prone to anemia and depression on a good day, it is damn near crippling. I’m seeing a specialist about it but that takes time because she has to go through a series of tests to determine and eliminate possibilities. There’s no way around this and I understand that completely. She inspires confidence, which is more valuable than gold.

Thus far I know the following: my blood work shows that, indeed, my hormones are all messed up but my mammogram and pelvic ultrasound are normal. Next up, and just in time for the new year, is an endometrial biopsy. I don’t know what’s next if that turns up normal. Well, ha, I don’t know what’s next if it doesn’t either.

Whatever it is, I’ll handle it. I cannot decide if it would be better or worse for me to go through an entire battery of increasingly serious and invasive tests only to turn up no definitive cause for my over-achieving plumbing. I’d prefer an answer, whatever it is, to this mystery. In my mind, if there is something there, it can be dealt with.

That said, I probably won’t handle the eventual outcome as well as I should. The combination of physical and emotional effects on me is pretty toxic and drains me of all but the most basic ability to function like a civilized human being. Then again, if you know me at all, you know I am always skirting close to the edge of being uncivilized on a daily basis without any provocation whatsoever.

So like I said, I am fine and broken.

Hold tight.

I really cannot stand vanity plates.  They are almost never as clever as believed by their proud owners, and the contorted spellings kill me. A long-standing favorite of this variety is the one I saw several years ago at an educational institution that said ME TEECH.

The only vanity plate I have ever seen that I have ever liked to any degree is one that somehow made it through the system even though it says OMG WTF.

This weekend I saw one that I just plain do not understand: OBAMA44. Of course I understand what it means, but  it wasn’t driven by one of the Obamas, so what, I ask you, the hell? Look, it’s fine to love your president-elect, just don’t looooove your president-elect, okay?

The Got Milk? campaign started in 1993. Multiple variations on that theme have been used for many different campaigns and purposes. I thought that perhaps this trend had finally run its course when PETA launched their Got Beer? campaign on college campuses back in 2000, but I was sadly wrong.

Saturday, there was the Walk Now for Autism event in DC and I saw a whole bunch of folks there in their various team shirts. One of these shirts had white letters on black, with the same typeface as the  original campaign, and it said…oh, yes it did…Got Autism?

Today’s quest inspired by Shorpy.

So did I, Dad, but it didn’t quite look like this.

…people cheering and yelling outside tonight, setting off fireworks, displaying a genuinely impressive depth of emotion about something that we should never, ever take for granted.