"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
A bunch of funny people on what Monty Python means to them.
If you’re wondering what Monty Python — and maybe more so the the Penn State Monty Python Society — means to me, you could do worse than to check out an essay I wrote at the end of my tenure with the Society back in 2004, “One Life, Furnished in Early Python.”
Video via Mark Evanier.
Last week. This week:
See what you can do with it. Good luck!
So I followed up with my orthopedist yesterday evening, after my most recent MRI*, to get a handle on how far I’d progressed (in either direction, good or bad) with this herniated disc of mine.
And, well, long story short: I apparently haven’t. The new MRI shows the disc pretty much exactly where it was over the summer, before the weeks of physical therapy and my three steroid injections. There’s some relief in knowing it hasn’t gotten worse — which was a concern; I do sometimes worry about nerve damage — but there’s the disappointment, on the other hand, that it hasn’t gotten better.
For now, then, it’s back to a game of wait-and-see. I’ll try to avoid the things that aggravate the pain — like, unfortunately, sitting and bending over too much — while continuing the things that seem to help. Surgery is obviously an option, but it’s one that I want to avoid, and certainly avoid in the short-term. There’s no guarantee that it would work, and, worse yet, there’s the very real possibility that it could make things worse. While the herniation hasn’t shrunk by itself, and I do still have to cope with pain in my leg and lower back when it presses in on the nerves, it could be significantly worse. I do believe the pain has gotten a little better overall, and I’ve become better at coping with the problem.
And it’s worth remembering that this has only been a problem since around last May. There’s no reason to think it won’t continue to heal on its own, much less that it will grow progressively worse. It’s no fun being in pain, or worrying about being in pain — it tends to adversely color everything else — but I’m still hopeful.
* The MRI was about as uncomfortable as I remember it being. I’m not overly claustrophobic by nature, but it was a tight fit, with my arms somewhat awkwardly pinched at my sides. And that machine can really heat up when it starts going. Then again, I kept holding out for the call that signaled we were halfway done — just ten more minutes, ten more minutes — so I was surprised when, instead of that call, the tech pulled me out and said we were done. Still, should I ever need an MRI again, I think I’m going to opt for the open variety if I can.
Why I love Bruce Campbell:
“I would rather disappoint with a brand new original movie.”
“If your hero is smart, you can have good bad guys, because your bad guys can be smart.”
“The difference between my fans and Tom Cruise’s fans is that no one is tattooing Risky Business on their back.”
He makes a reasonable argument, but he’s still full of crap. You don’t stop teaching a book because it’s hard; you don’t stop teaching history because it was painful; you don’t move forward into a better tomorrow by forgetting what was wrong about yesterday. Teach the damn context. I know it’s a cliché that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but it’s true. An English teacher ought to know better.
But the difference is that the Kindle is specifically a reading device, so customers can buy the ebook—and get it read to them, which is a different product and right, an audiobook—whereas a computer is a multifunction device. We’re happy that computers have text-to-speech capabilities for visually impaired readers but this seems to be directly impinging on an author’s rights. Hmm.
However, a number of authors are not themselves all that concerned. John Scalzi writes:
Since I’m not committed to busting down doors and shooting people when they read a book to their kids, worrying about a mon[o]tone computer voice bleating out the words to a text on a kindle is not something I’m going to stay up nights thinking about either.
And Neil Gaiman adds:
When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.
Although he does note in a follow-up that his agent’s “concern that text to speech violates audio book rights is natural and sensible.”
I think only time will tell. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry that the new Kindle feature might violate some contracted rights, or even that it might negatively impact audiobook sales. That’s maybe more a fear for future Kindle versions, if the text-to-voice ever isn’t a robotic monotone — although I think even the most sophisticated computer is going to have some trouble picking up inflection from just a printed page.