brief report of ongoing madnesses

Classes start in two days, and my schedule for the semester is not finalized. Consequently, I have opted not to put my syllabi together for the classes that might still be canceled. So there could be a little confusion as the semester starts.

Lauren is in surgery even as I write this. It's nothing major, it's outpatient, but still, it's surgery. Thanks, I'll tell her you said so.

I've drafted a paper, have another one to get done in a week, and have the revision of the AAUP paper to get started on.

Now for a political note. You may have heard various neocons pitching a return to the gold standard as a way to ... um ... to do something or other. Partly, they think that if the US returned to the gold standard, the federal government would not be able to run deficits because the federal reserve bank would have to stop printing money. From what I know about economics, I believe the basic flaw in their plan is that it simply isn't conservative enough.

After all, money doesn't grow on trees, not even paper money, which isn't even paper in the first place! (And let's not get started on the tree-hugging envirofascist movement!) For money to have real worth, it has to be based on a real, tangible thing. Fiat money isn't based on anything at all, except a social and political convention and the exchange value of goods, services, and labor. Labor obviously isn't tangible, and services aren't physical objects either, so that leaves goods, and we all know that a currency based on the exchange value of goods wouldn't be viable because we wouldn't ever know how much any goods would be worth. Right? Right?

A gold standard would give us a straightforward way to know the real value of everything, as compared to a certain quantity of pure gold. A laptop computer is probably worth its weight in gold, say, but my year's labor is worth, I dunno, say an ingot. I don't know how much an ingot weighs, but I figure, something like that. I'd carry my ingot to the Safeway and exchange it for groceries, get some return weight of gold back, and thus our economy would continue to flow freely, and we could all rest in the comfort of knowing that we really knew what things were worth.

That's the theory, anyway. But as I said, it's not conservative enough. If you really want a solid standard for money, you have to go back further in history, before the gold socialists took over. What we really need is a return to the beads and carved bones standard. You're welcome.

terminally tired

We went to our fourth Bridge School Benefit concert Saturday night, through the kind auspices of our pals Jennifer and Andrew. It was, as every year, jammed (the grass seating area was entirely full), chock-full of excellent performances, and very long. It was also rainy at the beginning.

After seven hours of Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, David Lindley, Lucinda Williams, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Idol, Modest Mouse, Grizzly Bear, and, oh yes, Buffalo Springfield, we walked as we have done every year the couple miles back to our hotel. We got to our room at 1:40 AM. We didn't get really properly to bed for another hour.

Up at 9 to grab breakfast and drive home, home by 1 PM, to spend the rest of the day in a muddled state of consciousness. One thing I don't like about Bridge School is that after that much stuff in one evening, I lose the impact of individual performances. The other thing is the exhaustion the next day.

I'm still tired this morning, and just about my first conscious thought this morning was to wonder if exhaustion could be terminal in a literal, medical sense. To the internet I've hied self, then, to find what wisdom I could on the subject.

According to this exchange on Yahoo! Answers, indeed, exhaustion can be terminal. We might, however, question whether the diagnosis of death by fatigue is correctly applied by the, um, roofer who answered.

Something called "Wrong Diagnosis" offers the tidbit that exhaustion death is actually a misnomer for Bell mania. I find this disappointing, because Bell mania is a symptom-related syndrome, rather than a proper diagnosis of death caused by exhaustion. Plus, I'm personally just not that into bells.

I found an online test for an EasyDiagnosis (presumably TM) to determine, from the comfort of your own keyboard, whether you are about to die from exhaustion. The disclaimer uses large bold fonts to tell you, repeatedly, that this diagnosis software, whatever it does, doesn't diagnose. Which may or may not cover the EasyDiagnosis people's asses legally speaking, but sure as heck doesn't answer my question, which is why the hell anyone dying of fatigue would spend their last moments on earth trying to get a computer program to confirm it - or, really, to do anything.

I still, therefore, have no trustworthy information on whether a person in ordinarily fine health can (as they say in the South) up and die from fatigue. I suppose this is the kind of thing I should really ask qualified medical personnel. I'm sure my Kaiser Permanente GP will be happy to hear from me, for the first time in five years, when I email him to ask. Maybe I should ask for a referral.