After reading about Red Bull and coffee (and other high-caffeine drinks) being possible ways to stop or prevent an attack, I have reason to suspect that my heavy coffee drinking might have played a role, though:

What if my constant coffee-drinking has always prevented the condition from getting noticed?

So as a means of experiment, I doubled my coffee-intake yesterday (I must say, it has been a while feeling that “caffeine-buzz” which I felt after only 4 mugs), to see what would happen that evening. I had one moment that I felt a headache coming up at which moment I took another mug of coffee.

I kept an eye on the clock and 20 o’clock passed without any headache at all. That seems quite promising, although it’s difficult to say whether the coffee is really helping, I might have had no painful headaches that day anyway.

(And of course, it’s still not sure that I really suffer from cluster-headaches, it could just as well be some weird coincidence.)

Today, as part of my little experiment, I’m dropping back to just 3 mugs again to see what happens.

Until, a few of months ago, my stomach started acting up on me after drinking my WTF-mug filled with coffee. Seriously thinking it was the coffee, I started to cut down on my coffee-intake from that day on.

I usually drank about 10 to 12 of those mugs and the days after that was severily reduced to about 2 or 3 mugs: one or two in the morning (to wake up), and one in the evening after dinner.

Having built up a fair dependancy on caffeine; the headaches of course started to get worse.

Somehow, the brain still longs for caffeine — or the extra water-intake that comes with it — and your body lets you know it by giving you a headache to cope with.

Now, I used to have these types of headaches a lot, especially in the weekends in which I did not drink as much coffee as I have done during the week. These headaches weren’t anything “new” to me, I have had these long enough to think that it was coffee / caffeine related: if I had them in the evening (which I used to have regularly, somewhere between 19 and 20 o’clock, I had always fingered caffeine as the one responsible.

If you have drank liters of coffee a day and suddenly reduce that to barely 1 liter of coffee, your body starts to complain, or has a change to get used to. Well, at least mine did. The first couple of weeks were relatively easy, after 2/3 weeks, I started to really feel those ‘caffeine-dependancy-headaches’ as I’ve grown to call those.

The amount and intensity of these slowly reduced, even convincing me I was on the right track cutting down on coffee because the headaches went away.

Cluster Headaches
Now, a buddy of mine has been suffering from a condition called “cluster headaches” (Wikipedia page here) for quite a while now.

Honestly, the first time I heard of this, I think must be 2 years ago by now, I did think it was similar to what I was having — but I was still too busy blaming caffeine at that point and didn’t pay it no more mind.

Recently however, the intensity of my headache now increases again: “attacks” that last for about an hour, usually a bit less but sometimes even a whole hour longer.

I also noticed a slight difference that I had not felt before: the normal “caffeine-headache” I used to have concentrated mostly in the temple — but these headaches I was also having felt like being stung by something sharp in my eyes from behind at the same time: a subtle difference that I probably haven’t noticed earlier.

So there I was, earlier this week, lying on the couch, waiting for the pain to pass, when this friend suffering from the condition coincidentally came by our house. I told him about my headache-episode I was having at that time and how it felt. He immediately recognized it — especially the stingy pain behind the eye which sometimes can be really, really painful, making you want to roll on the floor in pain…

So, it wasn’t the caffeine after all and I may have been suffering from this quite some time now. The funny thing is, I have only really starting to get bothered by it the last couple of months, where before I thought it was caffeine related, the pain didn’t seem to take me out like it does now. It seems like its intensity is increasing over time…

Oh well, I’ll see how this pans out…

Updates
13:30: I discovered www.clusterheadaches.com and the “quiz” there. If I may have been in doubt, I’m most surely not anymore…

You know, if you had biology in school, there are 2 tiny little holes on the floor of your mouth, about where your tongue attaches, where your saliva comes into your mouth.

Basically, what happens is that sometimes — and this is usually when I am eating — one duct that brings the saliva into my mouth is blocked by some white stuff. No problem, you’d say, you still got another saliva duct so enough saliva will still get into your mouth to be able to eat.

Yes, there is enough saliva in my mouth, but here is the problem: my salivary gland does not know that it is blocked so it keeps on producing saliva. This in turn causes my glands to swell up immensely: you can see a big bulge forming below my jaw.

And it also expands internally — causing pressure against my throat, making it extremely painful, thus hard, to swallow. This pain is pretty hard to describe… it’s like … when you throw up after having too much to drink and ate to much food whole and unchewed. You can imagine, or remember, that food hurts on it’s way back up through you throat. Well, it’s like that feeling, the main difference being I’m trying to swallow chewed food.

The first time this happened to me was when I was eating tomato-soup in 2001. Having had cat-scratch-disease I thought this was just my old swelling acting up and didn’t pay it any more mind as it went away after a few hours.

At a later time, I believe I was eating something with peanuts in it and it happened again. This time, more painful, and as I was home I went to the bathroom to check things out. That’s when I first noticed that there was something actually blocking my saliva duct! I did then realise possible consequences of the salivary gland keeping on producting while the stuff can’t get out — I freaked thinking about the gland ‘exploding’ in my neck.

So what does a man do? Of course, he tries to solve things by himself.

With a pair of cotton-tip applicators I was able to massage and force the white thing outward. Painful, yeah, because the floor of your mouth is pretty sensitive. After couple of minutes I was able to pop a little white thingy out and I felt and heard the saliva being released from my gland, going through the duct like a *woooosh* in my head. That really, really felt great.

So in total, I have been experiencing those painful episodes, 5 or 6 times now, over the last 6 years, messing up a couple of dinners. I thought it was some weird allergy, really. I didn’t touch tomato-soup since!

Only since about 2 or 3 years, thanks to some smart googling by my girlfriend have figured out it is salivary duct calculus that is causing these episodes. She only found a couple of Dutch sites though and at that time, I did not seem to find find anything relevant in English, because I really didn’t know any English term.

Obviously, I thought I was a freak. Nobody I knew ever heard about it, and that isn’t strange because I hadn’t before, either.

A week ago I was happily eating my girlfriends’ home-made tomato-soup and nothing happened I could enjoy it all. We even talked about that it was ages ago that it last happened.

Of course, a few days later (last weekend), it happened again. This time it was pretty painful again and I ran upstairs to the bathroom for the usual poke-and-massage-it-out routine. Looking inside my mouth, the two spit-holes seemed OK so I thought it’s OK, let’s continue eating. I went downstairs again, took another bite, and I really hurt when I tried to swallow it. So I went upstairs again, because this really felt the same as before. Again, I couldn’t see nothing… I really wanted to because I could force it out and go on eating my dinner!

After a couple of minutes of swinging back and forth between uh-oh-let’s-go-upstairs-and-check-it-out and hmm-really-nothing-let’s-continue-dinner I finally noticed the usual white spot behind one spithole.

I must’ve used about 20 cotton-tips to try to force it out, it was really a pain (as I write this 2 days after, the bottom of my mouth is still sore). I got a bit of white stuff out, but it was definitaly not all so I kept on massaging and forcing it. This even caused a small internal bleeding in my duct. The skin of the bottom of my tongue being fairly thin and transparent I could see a red spot between the spit-hole and the white stuff. I kept on forcing it out and I see the red spot popping, the blood from it merging with the out-flowing saliva and the rest of the white stuff coming out with a *woooosh* of saliva entering my mouth and my swollen saliva gland finally reducing.

Curious about possible causes and remedies I starting searching the web again. That is when I discovered this UK site about the condition, with a link to a forum with user experiences.

I was amazed at the amount of people suffering from this same, freaky and rare condition. Some people have even worse and more painful episodes so I guess I can consider myself “lucky” not having stones the size of an almond which have to surgically removed with possible nerve-damage.

I have read some pretty freaky stuff, about nerves growing the wrong way back causing one fellow his face’s sweat-glands to activate while chewing — or people without feeling in parts of their face after the surgery. I’ve always been pretty hesitant about surgery; and if I read that in some cases it didn’t really solve anything — or only temporary — it doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

So.. as far as I now understand, nobody really knows what exactly causes it, only that it statistically happens more to males than females. It is theorised that it may be caused by periods of reduced saliva production and that a steady flow of saliva may reduce changes of blockage by accumulating calculi, so for this I need to find some herbs or simply some sour candies to induce saliva production.

That’s the problem with homonyms, words written the same, but with different meanings. Kanker in Dutch, really, really only is a disease (or a district in India).

Amusing to some, offending to others…

I wonder how long this wrongly has been displayed — and how long before it’s noticed by someone that’d actually take the effort of sending them an email about it…

As you may have read before we now stay away from products that contain aspartame and have stopped using toothpaste that contains fluoride.

At that time I hadn’t yet mentioned monosodium glutamate (also called MSG and goes by the EU food additive code E621 but may be known by the exotic name ve-tsin). This is also a food-additive with possible allergic effects on some people. So we have also treated that as ‘suspect’ for quite a while now.

It is commonly used in, sadly, of lot of products as a so-called “taste-enhancer”. Riiiight.

So we stopped buying certain tastes and brands of potato-chips and started to season and flavour our food ourselves. Now, I can imagine you to say we’re overly paranoid, but we see this as an experiment — just to see whether we’d notice and change, physically or mentally.

Funny thing is, a few weeks ago we went over to a friends place to eat dinner, not realising that it could be chunked full of MSG… and it was. But what is a polite civilised person such as I to do?

So we ate it, being hungry and all.

The next day though, I had a terrible head-ache and a general feeling of, well, just feeling “off”. Didn’t pay that any mind until my girlfriend came home later that day and told me that she had had a headache all day long and was feeling sick as well. Only then I realised that it could have been the MSG we ate the day before. That, or other stuff the industry puts in all those products that we don’t even know about. (With all those chemicals combined, who knows what effects this’ll have on various processes in your body. As you are merely the result of thousands of chemical processes, this could affect your whole being, your soul. It strikes me as sad when you realise that hundreds, if not thousands of families depend on this poisoning because the family-members work in that industry. But I, again, digress.)

Lately, my girlfriend is investigating what other stuff gets put into the food you buy in stores and, really, it’s not at all a pretty picture. It’s not only that the industry wants to put cheaper stuff into their products to substitute the original, no, in the future it’ll be as bad as the industry to start slanging unfertile seeds to the farmers — so they have to buy new seeds each and every year to be able to grow their crops — actually this is already happening. My girlfriend read me this romantic story how a farmer used to selectively pick the seeds of its best crops for the next year and how that is becoming more and more impossible.

It really is insane what we’re collectively doing to Mother Earth and ourselves eventually.

The number of un-suspected products is decreasing rapidly, as the demand for these products reduces in even a faster pace.

All this makes me wonder what is more important… be it those unjust visible violent wars for power and control, or these invisible wars for, well, also power and control. When it comes to life we’re getting screwed on all sides and while the people fight over what is more important, the silent invisible force of money will sadly prevail.

Everything will aggressively be replaced by a cheaper and unnatural “equivalent” and we allow it to exist by starting to use it because it’s a couple of cents cheaper — but only until the real thing is gone. Meanwhile we are naively kidding ourselves that all those “New and Improved Recipes” really are cooked-up solely to give us a more pleasurable experience.

Soylent green, anyone?

These fluids I guess are only available in the Netherlands, as its home page suggests.

The internal stuff, a fluid based on Articum Lappa, Carbo Mineralis, Calendula Officinalis, Viola Tricolor, Rhus Toxicodendron and alcohol, mixed with her food, would ‘fix’ things from the inside out, because a certain chemical imbalance could be a cause for a cruddy chin.

The other stuff we applied on the outside to clean the acne and her skin is based on Calendula, Aloe Vera and Hamamelis. Because this doesn’t have any strong distinctive smell as alcohol does, it’s even relatively easy to apply to her chin as well.

(Incidentally, before we bought this stuff, we already applied some home-brew lip-balm type of stuff that my girlfriend made weeks before, which was also based on Calendula, which is known for its skin-healing properties.)

Anyway, the first week things seemed to get better; then her chin seemed to get a bit worse for a few days, but then it really started to visibly clear up. In the end, disappeared completely and now her hair is slowly growing back on the bald patches.

So it seems to have healed completely! *knocks on wood*

And it really hurts to see a little critter in pain… You see, sometimes, for a yet unknown reason (most likely his hairs though), his intestines somehow get blocked so, well, he is unable to ‘take a dump’… And because that hurts, he doesn’t feel like eating… And because he doesn’t feel like eating and feeling generally shitty, he finally ends up lying down in his litter box — something he usually doesn’t do.

So if that happens, we know it’s that time again and we have to give him some special care.

This not being the first time, we do have a pain-killer and some stuff called Prepulsid, which ought to help him process the blockage, in our medicine-cabinet. The last time we saw it coming, we could react pretty quick and were able to medicate him before things escalated, but last night, we didn’t see it coming. Trying to force a rabbit some medicition with a little plastic syringe didn’t really work out either — it only stressed the little animal even more. So he ended up scared and behind a couch.

We could do nothing else but call the vet and, not having a car anymore, had to depend on a friend to take us. I really hate to have to ask other people for a favour, especially when you call ‘m to find out you’ve woken them up because they went to bed early… Woops.

The vet checked him out and was able to administer necessary medication. Maybe I ought to get the painkiller he uses and a syringe to inject the stuff in stead of administering it orally. See, I had to do that to one of our cats before so I know that, apart from the adrenaline-rush, it is less of a hassle than trying to get an animal — that doesn’t want to eat — to eat something…

We were back home at about 23h, but as usual, didn’t go to bed until 1h30 because we wanted to see our beloved animal eating something. In the end, that didn’t happen and I was like, thinking it may be best to leave him alone for a while as he might just be irritated by us. This morning when I woke up, I quickly jumped out of bed to check on the little animal to see he ate all the greens and stuff we had put there the night before. If you got pets and you’ve bonded fairly well with them, you know that was a pretty relieving sight. I may sound like a pussy but I really love that furry little rabbit.

For the moment things seem to be looking out pretty good; he’s acting his usual self again so that’s cool.

Why is eating so important?
The reason it is so important that rabbits eat, and why we’re on our toes when it happens, is because they have this unique digestion system not many people are aware of. Some people may perhaps know that, just like Microsoft employees using Microsoft products, rabbits are coprophagic, meaning that they eat their own shit. (Yeah, that’s a cheap shot but it made me chuckle, OK?)

Also, a rabbit has evolved to be able to live in harsh environments, all the fur he ‘licks’ up when he cleans himself, he eats, not wasting anything. (In female rabbits, after ovulating, even the unfertilised egg will be assimilated by the body again if it hasn’t been used.)

The technology is pretty smart but obviously has its drawbacks, such as blockage caused by too much fur.

Another one of these drawbacks it that the digestive system requires it to be active, all the time. If it doesn’t get any food to process for 12 hours it’s critical and after 24 hours of having nothing to process, the digestion system could go into a total shut-down (‘stasis’) and is hard to ‘jump-start’. This is a situation we don’t want to have, of course.

One of the things we’re trying is to give him some fresh pine-apple juice (it has to be fresh pine-apple, processed canned ones are no good) because the enzymes in it help break down the rabbit fur in his stomach — which should reduce any blockage caused by it. We’re not a 100% sure if that’s causing all the problems though, but it always seems to coincide with the period in which he’s shedding his fur… so it is definitely worth a shot (and the fellow loves the stuff, man, he won’t complain!).

We’ll see how it goes.

Although rarely heard of (Google search — at the time of this writing 606 hits) it’s not an entirely uncommon condition though. Iterating through these results I hit this guys experience with the disease which linked to more detailed information on the condition right here.

I also found some more information on this page.

It’s yet unclear what exactly causes it, but it seems to be either because of stress, or because of an allergic reaction and the condition is potentially chronic. (No, not that chronic.)

It could be stress — she had a pretty rough procedure earlier this year (although that’s more than 9 months ago ago).

Anyways, we noticed it a few months ago and, of course, went to the vet. We were told to try to keep it clean (with some alcohol, for instance) and it should go away over time.

Well, it disappears allright — but meanwhile it appears again on the other side of her chin, kinda like ping-pong. Also, it is pretty tought trying to clean a cats chin with something ‘smelly’ as alcohol — cats don’t like that and start to struggle a bit so we couldn’t really ‘get at it’ so I guess that’s why it keeps re-appearing.

A couple of days ago my girl incidentally found something when she was in a pet store; something natural. Well, two things actually: a spray to clean her chin from the outside, and some drops to put in her food, to work on it from the inside.

We’ve been given her both for 2 days now and, well, the one thing I immediately noticed is that the cleaning spray (which is better used if you spray it on a cloth or something, to rub it on her chin — our cats hate spraying cans) doesn’t smell as strong as other stuff so you can actually rub her chin without her trying to get away from the stinky stuff. It seems like it’s actually healing better, though I won’t get my hopes up too much, it could be my imagination and 2 days really is too soon to say anything about it.

We’ll see…

If you are a couple worried about the same thing, chances are you have occasionally discussed ‘why should the woman take precautions, and not the man?’.

Apparently, the pharmaceutical industry saw this coming and has started spending their research-budgets on it years ago.

Recently, me and the girl had the same talk, sparked by some new developments on the male birth-control scene I read about some time last month (looking around for references I noticed some recent hype about it) — within a couple of years the male birth control pill may actually be a reality.

So we were talking about the options, when it suddenly hit me why male birth-control can never be as effective as the female. I haven’t gotten around to actually share this and because I feel I make a very solid point that both male and female would acknowledge — here goes…

First of all, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to take a responsible part in accomplishing the goal of not having kids — even though I shiver at the thought of things like surgical sterilisation. That’s why I had always thought the male birth-control pill to be a good idea (apart from possible long-term problems that might arise from teenagers using it to mess around, in contrast to using a condom which would beneficially prevent against venereal diseases).

Getting the male sterile (chemically, surgically or whatever way), just like the decision not to have sex, will not ever guarantee anything…

In the worst case scenario you’ve had your vas deferens cut in two and tied knots in, thus making it impossible for the sperm to leave your testes. OK I know it’s hard (pun unintended), but try to imagine that. That doesn’t prevent any other man’s sperm leaving their testes, now does it? [It's like, installing a firewall on machine A to prevent attacks on machine B which obviously doesn't prevent it getting probed by a third, unknown machine.]

I don’t want kids and I surely wouldn’t want to raise some frigging rapists kid — or any other guys kid for that matter.

Imagine if you have gone through having a vasectomy — there you stand, a man, psychologically possibly your manhood affected because of the surgical procedure — and you would still end up paying for an abortion or (even worse, if you have objections to abortion) waste your valuable time raising a kid you didn’t want to have in the first place, and its looks are probably a constant reminder of the rapist and that it’s not even yours.

Life can be a bitch at times, but that would really hurt (and it will most probably seriously mess up the kid, too).

In conclusion, after having thought about it while writing this post, at the moment I’m likened to think that these pills are not targetted at couples. They’re not for the people that seriously want to prevent (or postpone) having kids — not really if you think about it. It seems more targetted at the male that ‘screws around’ and I bet that’s a goldmine.

Birth-control

People always noted my sitting position: I was either hanging backwards in my chair (hey the monitor is at eye-height then, too), or I’m sitting behind a desk at a slight angle (i.e. my face and body is facing the laptop or screen, but the rest of my body is at a 45 degree angle).

When criticising, they would always say things like `that position will haunt you in the future, you’ll have back problems‘. I always responded that this is my most comfortable sitting position and that everyone really ought to sit in a comfortable position. (Which of course, is a different position for each of us.)

Anyway, this morning I was rather amused when I caught this article here about some research into the ‘best’ sitting position.

Apparently, sitting up-right is the position that puts most strain on your spine. It’s always nice to see something confirmed — I’m one of those guys that actually loves to say “I told you so” after being told they’re ‘wrong’…

So there!

I’ve always defended the position of the smoker, and have always doubted research into this field because, hell, cancer could just as well come from another source, not specifically second-hand smoke (it could be farts, or fuck, this is one of my latest gems: cancer could be caused by (second-hand) ‘religion’ — so I will refrain from making religious remarks in this post because I know what it does, man).

Anyway, everybody ‘defending’ the anti-smoking lobby keep hammering me on the fact that ‘these guys are experts they know their shit’. (Oh, and smoking is ‘dirty’.)

Well, lo’ and behold…… It is possible for ‘experts’ to be wrong for decades, after all:

For decades, efforts to cure the disease may have targeted the wrong cells.’ If true, the discoveries of Canadian and Italian research groups may give us a new path to selectively attack cancer.”

But don’t get your hopes up — knowing ‘man’ we all know there’s bound to be a new thing causing disease all over the planet.

Of course they don’t want you to do that because the State will loose money: the national income will be lower in the future if a few people would take their own life.

So — one doesn’t only have the incapability to live the life you want to live, according to ones own standards but also, one is incapable of choosing your own moment of death. It’s either to be a slave to society’s money-machine, or get locked-up in jail so others profit from you anyways.

Choice, Freedom, Suicide, Life

I didn’t give it any mind at all; that kind of stuff happens all the time. At work, a colleague noticed that I had one red eye. So I checked in a mirror that me right eye-ball was indeed more red than usual; looking like a vein that burst or something. Not really unusual either, I thought.

That evening, I told my girlfriend and she noticed my eye-lids were a bit irritated and slightly swollen. “Rats”, I thought, the thing I removed from my eye was a fly, or something, that had stung me, thus causing this irritation.

“It’ll pass — it’ll pass..”…

Well, the weekend passed and I still had that red eye. (The medical term for this is ‘conjunctivitis’, I understand.) The swelling in my eye-lid was gone, however.

Now, I have a history of regularly having headaches, behind this same eye, so I wasn’t sure what to think of the general pain that I felt, behind, or rather ‘in’ my eye: my whole eye-ball seemed to be more sensitive. Also, I had this constant feeling that there was something in my eye.

So, like anybody with a broadband connection, that rather doesn’t go see a doctor, yesterday evening, I started googling for the symptoms I had.

I discovered that there is a myriad of eye afflictions causing the most horrific symptoms. There were a lot that I could eliminate, of course, it wasn’t any of the real ugly stuff. I’m likened to think that it’s most probably a bacterial or virus- infection or an allergy to something (unlikely as I don’t have a real history of allergies).

So, there I was reading up on what it was, recognising the symptoms, reading what could happen and I didn’t know what hit me. I discovered a side of me that I didn’t know was there: I actually ‘freaked out’.

I started sweating and sounds were suddenly seeming to come from far away, muted, just plain weird. I thought I wanted some fresh air to relax, so I stood up and tried to walk to the door to the back-yard. My legs started feeling ‘wiggly’ while I opened the door.

Then, the ‘grand finale‘; I stepped outside, and I remember was that I was thinking “I really gotta get this door closed in case I collapse, otherwise our pets can escape” — priorities, eh.

I managed to close the door while, in the meantime, things were going black before my eyes and I started to loose feeling. I could only hear sounds, still seeming to come from far away. I was fully conscious yet, but it seemed I just lost the ‘connection’ with my body, unable to control my limbs. I really was wondering what the hell was happening to me…. Especially when I heard some metal hitting against metal (there’s a stack of fence material outside to set up in the garden for a rabbit), I was thinking “Now, that isn’t supposed to happen”, sensing my girlfriend was near me, to who I said “What is happening?”.

See, in the meanwhile, she (first unable to get outside, because I had closed the door was making sure it was shut), finally managed to get outside as well and said to me “You are passing out.”.

And I was: my body had collapsed, I couldn’t hear, see or feel anything for a moment.

“I’m back..” I said. “My mind is back, but my body isn’t yet.”.

Slowly, I started my body started to feel ‘normal’ again, vision and sound returned to normal and my mind returned its ‘normal’ state, as I started to go through whatever the hell just happened and realised that I simply panicked. My legs still felt a bit wiggly after this all happened but generally it was over pretty quickly.

A silly anxiety-attack and I just frigging passed-out. “Pussy”, I thought. I really didn’t know I had it in me.

Oh well, a first for everything, I would say, but still a rather freaky experience. My girlfriend thinks otherwise, but I find it amusing how I made sure that I kept the door shut, fearing the cats would escape. I can imagine how she felt though, standing inside, looking outside seeing me crumbling to the floor and not being able to outside because I was keeping the door closed. It surely mustn’t have been a pretty sight for her.

Now, I’m a computer-guy and I can type blindly, but still, I rather still see what I’m doing with both eyes, obviously. 3D vision really comes in handy driving your car as well. It could just be damaged by my fingernail, but if that’s not the case, well, it could be serious.

Also, my girlfriend has been pressuring me, so I’m going to see the doctor this morning just to have somebody to look at it who should know about these things. The warning was pretty clear in anything I read, if a red-eye doesn’t go away within 1 or 2 days you better go see a doctor or risk impairing, or even loosing, your vision.

So, that’s on my schedule for today, “go see the doctorrrrr”.

I didn’t ask for that cheap, vulnerable, very easily exploitable, technology.

But I am forced to use it.

Now, if somebody threatens my life, I either risk getting shot by the guy, or getting sued by the state, because I’m a criminal when I hand over my PIN-code. Like I said: I did not ask for this vulnerable technology, and, I didn’t ask for the banks to move to machines, so they could fire their (human) personnel thus make more money.

So now, in order to fix the problem they have created, they’re labeling us as suspects, pointing the blame at us?

See how they distrust you? And we are expected to trust them?

Remember years ago, when we had to physically go to the bank to get funds and had to show our passport to a person before we got our money.

The whole ‘Gimme your PIN-code at gun-point‘ situation wouldn’t even exist then. Basically, they are trying to fix a broken system that shouldn’t have been introduced in the first place.

Watch my words, in a couple of years we get this same shit dealing with RFID and other ‘new’ stuff.

PIN-code, Criminal, Threat, the Netherlands

Sign that prohibits the transport of mammals, poultry, eggs and manure.

Coming home, I checked the news to find out that a new case of the bird-flu was discovered during a routine-check and appropriate measures immediately taken. As a precaution, the 25.000 chickens present have already been killed. It is now prohibited to transport poultry, mammals, eggs and manure through the territory where the case was discovered; this to reduce any spread. Maybe the recent heat-wave and the recent rainfall combined, created a good breeding place for the virus — I don’t know.

Now, if only this is just an incident and not the start of a new pending epidemic. It is stated this other (Dutch) article that the virus does appear in nature and that it isn’t strange that stock gets infected — apparently this case was the second recent case, too. At the first company however, the virus was no longer present so the chickens haven’t been killed there; apparently, the virus disappears, with a relative few sick or even dying chickens.

Bird-flu, Nature

It’s like yelling `Saddam Hussein is an evil man and he harbours terrorists and he has weapons of mass destruction and we need to rid the world of that evil!‘, to find out that he, well, actually didn’t, and was in cahoots with the US government all along and killed all those people to serve them.

It’s like, well, yelling ‘There are terrorists all around us out to get our freedom; we are all gonna die if we’re not going to stop the Islam-aggressor.‘ to find out that, after ridding the world of all the Islamic people, shit still gets blown to pieces and the world is still a fucking mess…

Life: you better start enjoying it or it really has all been in vain…

Smoking, Life, Joy, Cancer, Humanity

It sure as hell would be pretty insane if one cannot decide what’s to happen to ones own body. Isn’t that a persons’ own choice, just like religion, or beliefs are?

Apparently the juvenile court didn’t think so. Insane, that…

Chemo treatment, Alternative Medicine, Force, Freedom, Choice

All fine and dandy — I see no problem there.

Until 1959, cannabis was available in pharmacies as medicine, under the name Extractum Cannabis Indicae. After that, cheaper, synthetic drugs appeared on the scene. So, that the compounds in it have some effect on some species stands to reason.

But the following line bothers me, just a little:

The new tracer will also help scientists learn more about marijuana addiction, and possibly treat it more effectively, says Henry Wagner, director of the division of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins University (who was not involved in the research). With the new tracer, neuroscientists could determine if smoking marijuana increases the number of cannabinoid receptors in the brain, which could lead to a craving for more of the drug.

OK, ‘to learn more about marihuana addiction‘? Why are they so quick to say that ‘marihuana is addictive’?

Isn’t sex comparingly ‘addictive’ too?

I mean, I’m not addicted to sex, but getting it every time I would want it wouldn’t bother me a bit. Does that make me an addict?

Doesn’t that just make me an ‘enjoyer of life’?

Of course, the problem here is the fact that, in the US, it is a controlled substance since some paper-producing guy wanted to keep its paper-monopoly.

That, and the FDA stating that it has no medicinal value.

Of course it has medicinal value. And they know it. They just want to investigate the compounds in order to make cheaper, synthetic ‘alternatives’. (Yeh, the pharmaceutical industry is producing the ‘alternative medicines’ in my book.) But that’s just a hunch.

Marihuana, Medicine, Alternative Medicine, Drugs, Recreation, Addiction

So we were sleeping and in the middle of the night, last friday, we heared a *bang*, a toy-bell ringing and a very loud screeching rabbit. We jumped out of our beds and raced to Chico’s cage.

There we saw the little fella entangled in the cages’ bars trying to force its way out — a pretty scary sight. In fact — initially I thought the critter scared itself to death and was stuck there, frozen still. Luckely, the guy wasn’t dead but just frigging scared.

Usually, you don’t ever really hear a rabbit make any noise, besides some cute humming. Only if it fears for its life that it makes this awful screeching sound. Kinda like a squeaky toy, you know, that high pitched noise (oh yeah that reminds me to kill that sadist that invented those toys — I still hear the damn sound echoing in my mind).

Anyways, we still don’t know as to what exactly happened, but what we do know for sure is that Chico got caught with its jaw between 2 bars. While I was holding the animal, my girlfriend was bending these bars further apart and the bunny ran off in its cage when it felt it was loose.

All in all a pretty panicky situation, especially because after, the rabbit was very scared of everything. We kept offering it food but it refused in the beginning so I feared something with its teeth, or jaw even.

But now its happily eating and running around again — not as before, but the affair obviously left a scar and those things take time with rabbits.

So now we can go back to enjoying our two weeks off — laters.

Rabbits, Bunnies, Cages, Panic

My girlfriend is basically with me on this and she has got this book about herbs and their medicinal uses. That book contains the most interesting facts about many plants.

As I am having a slight health-issue at the moment; I’m drinking some sage-tea:

I boil some water, pick a few leafs, and pour the hot water over the leafs and let it stay there for about 10 minutes. Then it’s good to drink, or, if you got a sore throat or infections in the mouth, just rinse your mouth with it and spit it out. The active compounds, essential oils among others, kill bacteria that cause illness and help the body fight against all kinds of infections.

The plant in question, the Salvia Officinalis was long praised for its medical uses by the ancients. Martin Luther is credited with once saying that, Why should a man die whilst sage grows in his garden?.

And indeed… Why should a man go to the doctor whilst sage is growing in his garden? Isn’t it also true that, what does not kill a man, only makes him stronger?

Salvia, Sage, Health, Medicine, Nature

The moment I heard that I was thinking: and they jump to this conclusion because… ? The guy’s missing? Cellular phone data implicated him in the vicinity? So basically they’re only jumping to this conclusion because some database, or computer system spitted that out?

Today, my suspicions were confirmed: it is reported that the suspect has seen himself on TV and immediately went to the police. Yeh, he was in the neighbourhood the night the girls gone missing and was immediately branded the suspect. The man or woman that really kidnapped these kids probably has never yet been arrested for a sex-offence. And while the police was too fucking busy finding out where all the local sex-offenders were that day, the real kidnapper has had ample time to get as far away as possible. Probably already left the country.

Anyway, if you read how this woman actually treated her children, it could be some form of poetic justice in progress here. See, the women finds it strange that, at 02:30 AM in the morning when she walked out of the cafe that she got drunk in, her children weren’t outside the cafe where she had left them.

Left them? At 2:30 AM in the morning? And she’s blaming others for kidnapping these kids?

If we leave our keys in our car and it gets stolen, the judge will say it was stupid to leave the keys in the ignition: that is creating the opportunity.

Kidnapping, Belgium

“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.

“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986.

“Starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart – I saw nests, and I found eggs.”

There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained.

It even appears that the rare species of Przewalski’s horses are even breeding there. (If you check the Wikipedia article, you’ll note its conservation status is criticial.) Incidentally I happened to see a documentary some time ago about Chinese biologists and their breeding-programme to keep this species alive so it’s a good thing they are ‘surviving’.

Amazing eh, nature? It’ll fall back on its feet as long as you keep the humans at bay.

BTW if you never caught this in the past, for a real spooky series of photos check out this tour through the Chernobyl-area by motorbike. It’s pretty impressive and it nicely shows the consequences of the dangers of nuclear energy when things go terribly wrong (which they will, in the end)…

I do think the radiation is bound to have some effect on the genes, negative or positive. For all we know, these species could somehow have now evolved into a more radiation-resistant type.

But I leave that to the real scientists to found out.

Chernobyl, Radiation, Nuclear Energy, Nature

Global warming of only a couple of degrees Celsius projected by the end of this century is enough to trigger widespread melting of the massive Greenland ice cap and the partial collapse of Antarctica’s ice sheets.
[..]
The findings are a stunning about-face from previous expert forecasts that such massive melting would take millennia to kick in, even with rising global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This new research, based on a comprehensive look at global warming in the distant past, says melting the two icy domains could eventually raise sea level worldwide by as much as five metres, enough to flood low-lying regions like the Netherlands and most Pacific atolls, as well push half a billion people inland.

Pretty serious indeed. Most people seem happy enough to downplay the dangers that all the melting ice will cause the density of salt lowers significantly in sea-water. This causes all kinds of warm- and cold- water flows to stop, basically halting the transport of warmer water to the European continent. As I read when I logged-in to a machine yesterday: Some people prefer certainty over truth.

Nature, Ice caps, Global Warming

As much as 80 per cent of Caribbean hard coral cover has vanished in the last 30 years. Large North Atlantic fish have endured a two-thirds drop in numbers. Up to around half of higher birds are threatened with extinction.

Disturbingly, every year since the turn of the century 6m hectares of natural forest have been destroyed. The bulk – around 4m hectares – disappear annually from Africa, which can scarcely afford to lose what natural resources it does have.

Even where habitats are relatively intact in terms of sheer area, they are becoming fragmented. This puts huge pressure on their ability to support biodiversity.

Productive ecosystems are the foundation of human wellbeing, the authors say. A recent survey showed that 15 out of 24 markers of ecosystem health – from fishery stocks though to water supplies and atmospheric cleanliness – were in decline. In fact, overall demand for ecological resources outstrips supply by 20 per cent.

Alien species introductions brought about by human activity are bad news for biodiversity too. Since the opening of the Suez canal, some 300 species have invaded the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, out-competing natives that occupy a similar niche in the ecosystem.

The US presidents stance of ‘future technology will find solutions to these problems’ sucks major ass — obviously he’s saying “You let your kids worry about the fucked up planet. We are currently cashing in on it and whilst the pockets are filled you won’t hear us complaining.”.

Of course, it is not the US only: we are all to blame. But hey, in these selfish day-and-age who fucking cares about other things than themselves.

Sad, sad sad indeed…

Nature, Health, Earth, Globalism, Capitalism

The substance in chillies that causes the tongue to burn also drives prostate cancer cells to kill themselves, according to research that could pave the way for new treatments. The pepper component capsaicin makes the cells undergo programmed cell death or apoptosis, says a study published in the journal Cancer Research.

I doubt dangling your family jewels in some chilly-sauce really has the desired effect — so don’t.

Health, Cancer, Prostate, Chillies, Testicles