Which half is gay, top or bottom?

I will organize the poor souls into a vocal group and go on tour as The Assless Chaps, naturally.

Using the term ‘assless chaps’ infuriates me and I will not let that aggression stand, man.

All chaps are assless. Chaps with asses are pants.

Fight me.

I make a ham and brie sandwich on a toasted bagel. The just-melting brie holds into the hemp hearts as does the fig jam I out on the other half of the bagel. Yummers.

I give this post 3.5 buttholes.

I despair of any insulation of Canada. Too much daily ground traffic across that huge unguarded border. Cancelling flights won’t make much difference there. North America is one giant petri dish sharing disease like a family full of young children.

But I am glad the other nations have begun to strengthen their systems too. Humanity will survive in some form, pandemics can’t wipe us all out.

So the field is ripe for harvest then. :(

I’m trying to prepare myself for things to get really bad really quickly. Pandemics are the Achilles heel of complex global societies that forget the great secret: we are all made of meat.

I am certain I will be the last person to point out that you may feel you are the last one to know what it was like before the public internet, but that your feeling is completely off base and not based on anything from reality.

This is 100% true.

It is especially clear when you sit down to write out an idea or plan that you think is fully formed in your head. It turns out that you didn’t have it all thought out and the act of writing is where the important details get worked out.

Writing is thinking, diagramming is thinking, making any external expression of an idea is thinking.

Sitting around with a cool universe in your head is not thinking, it is feeling. Put it in a tangible communicable form, then okay you have turned it into thinking.

Exactly! It’s time to circle up and be our own fact checkers to the extent we can.

Everyone knows someone who knows more than they do about something.

I gave it the P2P journalism name mostly to get this discussion going. I figured it would draw in a crowd of the deep geeks who love that stuff.

But really, we can’t trust any information on the internet completely. We need trusted networks of real people in our lives to ground us in lived reality.

I especially like the idea of not just passively being angry or upset at news. Yes I consider too much online venting to be a passive activity, as in ineffective.

Check in with a friend, everyone likes to be asked their opinion and they probably need to be needed right now too.

Scruffy the janitor knows more than you about toilets, boilers and boilng toilets. Think to ask him when the bowl is steaming.

I’m just saying maybe we should all get out more?

So correct. The time to chill out is after we have all talked to each other instead of solving it all on our own.

Way too complex!

Stop stewing.

Seek comfort in the counsel of friends!

Oh that’s the point though. Even people who don’t think they are “well-connected” are just a few hops from Kevin Bacon. Or a person who works at a bank during a banking crisis. Lots of folks know people who work at a bank.

The point is to stop stewing and start asking. Ask anyone who might know even a bit more than you on a particular thing.

Doesn’t that seem healthy?

Most bands I care about have a website and an email distribution list. Most venues I enjoy also send out their upcoming events by email.

Now excuse me, there is a cloud I must go yell at.

Thank you for chiming in on the slightly spurious billing claim. Yes, billing and charge codes are woven throughout EHR systems but that’s just because everything we do in health care costs time/money. It’s as much about cost tracking as cost recovery.

We measure what we treasure however and if you look at the structure of any EHR, they are steadfastly patient-centric. Billing is ubiquitous but it is more like tinsel on a Christmas tree, sort of draped lightly over and connecting everything. Pick off the tinsel and the core patient care features are unaffected.

It will take years to see the effects in large scale but I like the features that allow patients to see their test results the minute they are released. As a patient myself, it gives me a feeling of having a bit more ownership of my own healthcare.

I was intrigued to learn recently that better EHR use a patients highest education level to tailor the way genomic test results are presented in the patient-viewable chart. The same results are reported to anyone but apparently patients with higher education levels will take positive actions when provided with sufficient depth of background information. Conversely, too much background info can be off-putting for others and reduces proactive behavior changes.

I get it, it’s really easy to be cynical about health care especially in the USA where it is kinda bad in many ways for no good reason. But at least pick the right things to complain about.

That it can be a form of ‘tokenism’ that erases or ignores the vast majority of my personal characteristics and reduces me to a cliche.

I hated identifying as a gay cis man after a while. It was in a small US town and the identity came to feel like a straight jacket (ha!). My identity is much more fluid now even though I fit the descriptor of ‘mostly gay’ in a statistical sense.

I’m not your fscking ‘gay’ friend, in a nutshell. If someone doesn’t understand why I might feel this way, well then the friendship is probably doomed.

“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

Ok!

Years ago as a stupid fresh college grad, I worked for the US Forest Service as a summer intern. I co-authored a study that showed that bighorn sheep were NOT limited by availability of lambing habitat.

This was a political hot button issue that pitted hunters against cattlemen. Cattlemen claimed that the sheep were not getting brucellosis from their cows and that the sheep populations were indeed limited by lambing habitat.

I was very surprised when, 15 years later, I visited the same ranger station to say hello and that same study was still being used as evidence in hearings to undercut the claims of the cattlemen that they didn’t need to vaccinate their cows to protect the sheep. That felt really good.