Gout vs Burdock

Another beautiful summer weekend has come and gone, I, with my foot suspended on two pillows harboring a smuggled walnut in my big toe. For those of you who don't know about gout, let me have the extreme displeasure of introducing you. Gout, formerly known as the "rich man's disease" is a condition in which the body creates more than its fair share amount of uric acid and doesn't know what to do with it; so it sticks it a joint, for me the big toe, and the uric acid crystallizes and even whispering winds become very painful. The correlation to "rich man" is a high purine diet. Things that I love like mussels and steaks are high in purines. Also brains and anchovies and other things I don't have very much trouble avoiding, except when my friend Erik is cooking. Beer is also at the top of this catastrophic list of things that are gout-attack inducing. So, summertime is here, I'm BBQ'ing, having nice mussels in garlic white wine sauce, and drinking beer in the sun. As far as I can tell, the sun has no effect on gout.

The last time this happened was over Memorial Day weekend. I was stuck inside playing micro-stake online poker for North America's toast to BBQ, beer, and war veterans. I took everything the docs had given me: colchecine, allopurinol, naproxen. The allopurinol I was instructed to take every day for the rest of my life. Aside from all of the above turning my duty into a phelgmy mess, they in fact made my gout worse, as I had not been taking them on a regular basis. My uric acid levels must have spiked and the thing lasted for a week or more.

I was busy, didn't get to a doctor, and less than 2 months later, here I am again, foot propped up on two pillows with a fan poined on me point blank staring at a laptop screen for hours on end leading to indescribable headaches. But i did something different this time. I went herbal.




This scary thing is a Burdock plant. It has no relation to the sinister Murdoch character that always fowled up MacGyver. I mean look at this thing. If anything could beat gout it has got to be this thorny spiderwebbed creature.

Luckily for me, other people have done the work of extracting the needed parts and placing them in little pills that I found at The Harvest Co-op. Friday morning I started to feel the gout coming on and I popped a colchecine. I called my doctor and he told me just to take Naproxen (prescription form Motrin) and rest. Obviously he has never had gout. I took it on my own to beat the ghastly disease. Which led me to pay $20 for some bogus gout report online which should somehow get me a $25 target card....still waiting on that. But the report had a few different methods to try out, so before things got too bad, I got to the grocer.

I scribbled down 8 or 9 herbs, most of which I'd never heard of but also a few flowers which sounded tasty. In the store I found the burdock, which was comparitively cheap alongside its pitchuli stinking neighbors in the aisle. I also loaded up on starwberries and cherries, which are also supposed to tame the beast. To my apprehension, I also picked up a box of baking soda, which I was supposed to add to water and drink...I tried that, and determined gout was almost better than drinking saltwater. Luckily I bought some other teas to aid me, one a Yogi joint relief tea and the other a nettle leaf tea (nettle being one of the herbs I'd had on my cheat-sheet). With the combination of cherries, starwberries, nettle leaf tea, burdock, and a shit ton of water, I'm almost cured in less than 2 days. I stubbed my toe on the cat in the dark and things are a little sore at the moment, but i think there might just be something to this herbal stuff. We'll have a talk with the doc this week and I'll tell him the good news.

Gout vs Burdock. Burdock stands victorious.

D.C., Smithsonian Castle, Maine Ave. Fish Market, Georgetown, Zoo

the horrors - sea within a sea

London spazz goth rockers return with a kraut bliss single. The young spastic sounds of Strange House, a goth-rock glam jam album reminiscent of The Birthday Party and at times Bauhaus, has been tamed by former experimental video director, now album producer, Chris Cunningham. The single is a laid back dance dream with a hibernating electronic pulse, almost like listening to joy division underwater. The new album, Primary Colours, is due out May 4th.

Internet Behemeth Rigs NCAA Round One

In urgent news, Yahoo! Inc. settled with the players and coaching staff of Illinois on a sum of $900,000 in an agreement to lose their first round game Thursday evening against Western Kentucky. The Silicon Valley corporation decided it could make more money running KFC banner ads if W. Kentucky remained in tournament play for a few more rounds. The settlement bears close resemblance to the site's $1,000,000 prize attached to creating an unblemished Yahoo fantasy bracket of 63 correctly picked games.

Late in the second half it is reported that a mobile message was sent from Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to Illinois head coach Weber which caused alarm among the Fighting Illini. The message, 'your team's money is all gone' induced the 5th rank team to claw back and drain their massive deficit to within one possession. With moments to go, Weber received another message from Bartz, "all GOOD. money's all GOOD. T9 sucks, my bad. now lose!".

W. Kentucky's upset will undoubtedly boost KFC sales, which now offers 10 great tastes starting at 99 cents.








(This post is completely ficticous, obviously)

jan 20th, Inauguration Day, ubiquitous conscientious mob, pt 1

Inauguration day was an amazing, albeit an amazingly confusing, experience. We watched the inauguration from the National Mall on the same plot as the Washington Monument, via jumbo-tron, 1.4 miles away from history. In fact, this distance remained pretty constant; I never saw the Obamas in the flesh once during my entire trip. But I quickly came to the realization that the distance from the President didn't really matter. People are more likely to trust something they see on tv than with their own eyes anyway. Video can be rewound and revisited. Just like a referee can be overturned by instant replay, the camera shapes people's perception of fact and validates their memories of history. People's lack of proof is what makes them question their lives when told to others. Did I really see Bjork in New York City 4 years ago, or was it just an asian in a gigantic blue bubble jacket wearing a ponytail on the left side of her head?

The point is, the history that was happening on screen, on camera, and perhaps through the eyes of ticket holders in vantage, is fact that cannot be altered. This perspective can be corroborated by many and replayed as proof, but the camera is actually a disconnect from the experience. People at home witnessed an event, while the people on the mall actually experienced it. Even though I was over a mile away from the Inauguration, I never once felt distanced from it.

Jan 19th, MLK day

The Capitol was very blurry, all night.





The filming of an episode of Hardball on the mall. The media was basically a circus all week. People didn't care so much about the news, but they desperately wanted friends and family to see them waving a plastic bag in the background.



Sue lives so close to the National Cathedral that she didn't think she needed fingers on her gloves.

Inauguration week photos, jan 18th

Sunday, the 18th, heading toward the mall and Lincoln Memorial Concert. It felt like a post apocalyptic zombie film...but with street vendors. Favorite sales pitch: "Hand warmers $5. Frostbite is free."



Firemen doing their job (taking pictures for people in the crowd, of people in the crowd, from their exceptional view).