Friday Fish Wrap: January 7. 2010

“OUCH! OW! OW! OH S**T! OWWW!”

“Uh, are you alright, ma’am?”

“Can you get my right ski off? I think that’ll help.”

Engaging in any outdoor sport comes with inherent risks. Skiing is sort of high up there on the list of ‘Ouch’ causing sports as I found out yesterday. Despite the nearly four decades of sliding down mountains in the West, I’ve never really taken a fall that didn’t allow me to ‘ski it off’. And, true to almost every other skier I’ve known, it happened after the great ‘run’, near the bottom on the ‘run out’ approaching the lift. Giddy with sunny blue bird success, going fast and getting goofy.

Oh, and a binding that didn’t release.

But I got a nice ride down on the back of a snowmobile, and spent the next hour with the good looking - and highly professional I might add - ski patrollers of the Mt. Rose ski area. I want to commend them for a rapid response, and delivery of caring, thorough and highly competent services. I was able to swap emergency management/critical incident ‘war stories’ with the patroller that kept me company and filled out the paperwork, while I held a plastic bag of snow packed around my right knee and waited for Shelly to ski back over to the Rose side and get my gear and the car over to the Slide side.

After x-rays at the ER, back down in Reno, it looks like nothing more than a nasty MCL sprain. At least Grade 1, possibly 2. I went home with a Vicoden script and a pair of crutches. Let’s say that I am ‘compliant’ for a week, then I ‘should’ be able to go right back out and hopefully not make the same mistake again.

One of the great benefits of having great friends, is that they bring you dinner and then stay and watch a funny movie. Chicken soup makes everything better. Thanks so much Shelley and Suggi, this a the best sort of ‘payback’ for the ‘death curve’ bicycle incident this summer.

We watched a really good movie on Netflix/BluRay: “City Island”, and indie film with Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies. I had no idea that there was an island comprising a part of the Bronx, resembling a small New England town. Anyhow, it’s a warm, funny story about the Rizzo family. None of the Rizzo’s can manage to tell the truth, and are caught in an almost Shakespearian comedy of errors and identities in their attempts to hide their past, real ambitions, obsessions and foibles. Alan Arkin makes a sweet appearance as an acting instructor.

This is one of those warmly human stories that we can all relate to - reconciling what we think our families expect of us versus what we might want instead. I love movies like this - no car chases, no violence, no brutality and victimization. Humanity with a few laughs.

Humanity with a few laughs isn’t exactly what we’re getting - and I certainly didn’t expect it - with the new Congress. Eric Cantor, R-VA and John Boehner, R-OH are poster children for Panglossianism - where otherwise intelligent people can completely deceive themselves, in this case to pursue asinine and cynical party objectives.

Cantor would have us believe that the Congressional Budget Office is simply wrong, wrong, wrong in it’s analysis of how much the Affordable Health Care Act - or ‘Job-Killing Health Care Law Act’ for those who use language to obfuscate and confuse - would actually save the country. Deficit hawk and House Majority Leader, Cantor likes CBO analysis only when it serves his purposes. Then they’ve managed to go on to blithely ignore the actual costs of such a mis-guided repeal attempt and how much it would add to the deficit they’ve sworn to lower.

Huh? As the New Haven (Connecticut) Advocate says:

“Republicans want to help business grow in order to create jobs.

To help business grow, it wants to repeal the health reform act.

But repealing the health reform act actually hurts business. Insurance companies will be making bank.”

Sheesh. These people continually remind me of the saying attributed to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Actually the repeal of healthcare would be a huge job killer, and you can read more about it on The Center for American Progress website.

You can be sure over the next two years that there is no principle the Republican won’t turn upside down,  no promise they won’t break and no worries that they will happily throw the interests of the American worker under the Wall Street and RepubliCorp bus.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and some of the new members of Congress are going to sleep on the couch in their offices. Now isn’t that just precious. So, pretending that Congress isn’t their real job, not getting a decent nights sleep in order to be effective at ‘work’, is their way of making a childish ‘statement’ about their supposed fiscal conservatism. It reminds me of “I’ll show her, I’ll go out in the living room and sleep on the sofa.”

There’s always still a chance some of these nitwits could grow up and act like adults.

This continued farce that the deficit is the most compelling issue confronting America now is ludicrous, as Robert Kuttner, of The American Prospect and the Economic Policy Institute points out in the following video:

Under what I might headline ‘Arm yourself with facts rather than fear’, I found some great resource materials on the following website - Our Fiscal Security. You can check in here to get facts, rather than hyperbole and propoganda on taxes, deficits and deficit reduction, social security and more.

Here’s a handy-dandy tutorial you can print out, read, absorb and pass along - Understanding the National Deficit and Debt:

Understanding the National Deficit and Debt  

Well, I’ve sure had enough of this freezing fog. It’s starting to remind me of Salt Lake City aound here. the damn stuff doesn’t burn off until around noon, making it tough to ‘greet’ the day with a chirpy demeanor.

I’m gonna go put the old battered knee up for a while and watch some trash tee-vee - probably cooking shows. I don’t do well with this sort of thing - always seeing the dust and debris on the floor that really ‘should’ be dusted and vacuumed. I was hobbling around this morning folding and stowing until Mr. Maven caught me and told me to knock it off.

I’ll try to file some posts under Health regarding ways to recover from such an injury, including ways I’ve found to cope with pain without meds - although medicine is just fine, but there are ways of reducing the need for them.

Take care, be a bit more cautious than moi. Stay warm.

I’ll let myself out. Well, not … you’ll have to open the door.

-maven