Forgive nonfunctioning brain

    While I wait for my brain to check in again, here's something conspicuously stupid that I've been pondering for a long time: monograms. Every time I see one, which is nearly always on the back of a vehicle since I'm not much going door to door looking at people's towels, I read it straight across. Of course, it's supposed to be left letter, right letter, middle letter. I don't think I've suddenly gotten stupid; I think they're doing them wrong. I think the outside letters are supposed to be slanted towards the outside, with the idea of subtly suggesting that no, you aren't supposed to read this straight across. Instead, all three letters tend to be at the same slant. Yes, I know it's of no importance. For once, I'm not even mad or up in arms about it. I just couldn't figure out why suddenly I can't read monograms, and then maybe I did.
    Dad is still a bit weak after his procedure, and uncomfortable, but he was glad to be home. Dialysis thought he was still in the hospital and weren't expecting us, but when we turned up they made room for us pretty quick; we barely had to wait any extra time at all. If I had banged on the door to say, "Y'all knew we were coming, right?" we probably wouldn't have needed to wait that long.

He's home again

    Due to the vicissitudes of my Dad's life, I've probably used "He's home again" ten times already, but there you are, he's home again. He could have come home first thing this morning but for whatever reason, the paperwork wasn't ready, so he just hung out in bed. As he hadn't slept the first night, catching up on his sleep further was a good thing. Eventually, when paperwork still wasn't appearing, I went home to throw the laundry in the dryer and maybe to eat lunch, and of course the moment I was ready for the latter, they called and said they were ready for me to take him home.
    But unsurprisingly, that didn't exactly happen either. They had brought him his lunch in the meantime, so he went ahead and ate that. But finally, we were all ready to go. A nurse got him into (onto? whatever) a wheelchair and I met them downstairs with the car. (First they had to give us a notification form that I had to sign that if we thought they were throwing him out too soon, we could appeal. I, at least, was fairly amused.)
    As a newly made cyborg, he now has some extra external equipment as well. Specifically a doohickey that reports back to the cardiologist what his heart is up to, especially at night (since they wanted it within 15 feet of his bed). I got that set up and plugged in, so I think he's good to go, and happy to be home. And even happier to be out of the dang hospital. May he not return any time soon.

Post-op update

    It was successful. That's the main thing. Hospitals are legendarily no fun at all, and this one is no exception. Everything is tied up in red tape. Dad brought his own pills and could have just taken them, but that is forbidden. So he had to wait all night for everything to get through the computers and the paperwork and he finally got a rough equivalent of his pills. He was fairly upset about it, but honestly I think mostly due to the disruption of his routine.
    The major point is that the procedure was successful, that it will probably help him, and he'll probably get along a little better in the future. He has to have dialysis (and a chest x-ray) this afternoon, and he has to stay over another night. Brave Margaret is willing to endure another night of "Oh Gods!" Hopefully, this time they'll both be able to sleep. Or at least catch the NFL game. He should go home tomorrow and can settle back into his routine. Hopefully.

Brief pre-op update

    Here's what I know that I didn't know before about Dad's pacemaker procedure. Even though we had to be there at 10, it doesn't happen until 3 at the earliest. (That's when it's scheduled, but they had an emergency procedure and computers are running slow, so the odds that it happens that early are remote.) He was already expecting an overnight stay, but depending how things go, it might be two nights. He hasn't eaten or drunk since midnight and can't until the procedure is over, so he's very uncomfortable. At least he has a blanket and a TV. He'll have to wear an immobilizer (the big metal dealio that rides your head and shoulders, I think) for 24 hours. I'm pretty sure if they'd told him this in advance, he would have said, "Uh, I don't think I need a pacemaker all that badly." He's scheduled for dialysis tomorrow, which they say he can get done in the hospital.
    I'm on lunch break, and also running out to get some groceries, but I'll be back there before 3. He thinks Margaret will be staying the night with him, but I don't know how workable this is going to be. But if they want it to, I'll make it happen. I suspect that I'll be the one staying instead. The cat will be highly displeased.

Dum dum da dum

    I just tweeted, perhaps mysteriously, that "Dum dum da dum doesn't necessarily equal Here Comes The Bride." (Earlier and briefly I posted the same thing on Facebook, except with an extra dum. Unfortunately, the tune in my head was "Hail To The Chief," which would have made for a great joke 5-odd years ago, but rather spoiled this one. It's just been that kind of day.)
    What brings it all up is that I bought an office chair at Habitat for Humanity's thrift store ReStore. It was a fairly nice one for $10. Unfortunately, by the time I got it to my car, it had four casters instead of five. I walked back around to the checkout area to look for the fifth one, but it was nowhere. They don't accept returns, so I just shrugged and took it home.
    My thinking, such as it was, was that the caster must have been missing all along and I just hadn't noticed. I had sat in the chair and rocked in it and it worked well, so I decided that I didn't need all five. Later, I thought about it and remembered that when I was pushing the chair to the checkout area, the base was spinning around, and all the way around. I definitely would have noticed if a caster were missing. So presumably when I picked up the chair to carry it out, one caster fell off and some person picked it up immediately. I should have asked if anyone had seen it, but as I say, at the time I thought it must have never been there.
    I got it home and set it down on the front walk and tried sitting and rocking. Indeed, missing one caster made a lot of difference. So it never even made it in the house, going straight to the curb. And the That's What I Get For Being Stupid file, already voluminous, gets one more entry.
    Dad is getting his pacemaker tomorrow. We're pretty relaxed about it, actually. We're more worried about being bored to death or starving to death than any more dramatic event happening. He does seem to think he'll be admitted to the hospital, but we can cope with that, too.

Ralph Bell and Leon Janney

    The long title is "Ralph Bell and Leon Janney always messing with time machines." One of my favorite old-time radio actors, Ralph Bell, appeared in a very wide range of roles and shows. On two separate episodes of a show called "Mysterious Traveler," he costarred with Leon Janney in episodes about time machines. In one, "The Man Who Tried To Save Lincoln," he played a scientist sending Janney into the past to try to save Abe Lincoln. (Spoiler: he didn't succeed.) In another ("Operation Tomorrow"), a scientist sends Janney into the future to find out what happens then, and he meets Bell.
    I appreciate that a story only has to be internally consistent; a series need not be. Still I think there's a certain irony that the twist in the Lincoln story was that Janney couldn't save Lincoln because the time machine was supposed to send his mind into the mind of someone in 1865 who could stop Booth. That didn't work so well. In the other story, the time machine didn't work because Janney couldn't bring anything back to the past from the future, not even memories.
    In other words, the Mysterious Traveler couldn't make up his mind. If you wanted to take your time machine to the past, then your memory would work fine going backward, but your aim might not be so good. But if you wanted to take your time machine to the future, suddenly you won't be able to remember anything when you get back. Or maybe Ralph Bell and Leon Janney just weren't very good with time machines. By and large, they always seemed to need a bigger tube! (Not really an inside joke; just a plot point that sounds silly, retroactively.)

Transcribed

    I may have mentioned already, but many of my old-time radio shows, especially from the '50s, identify themselves as being "transcribed." As far as I can tell, what is meant here is exactly the same as what TV people meant when they said "pre-recorded" or "recorded." I have no idea why the word changed. My friend Terry Lynch, who sometimes reads this blog, recommended that I read a book by the musician David Byrne called "How Music Works." Mr. Byrne describes how pre-recording shows on tape started (because Bing Crosby wanted to play more golf, and thus invested in Ampex). I was thinking that "transcribing" might have been used to refer to recording to disc. I do know that some radio shows were put on wax, because that's how they were rebroadcast to the troops abroad.
    However, since Ampex was founded in 1944 and the word "transcribing" was used for years thereafter, that can't be it. I suppose that transcription just sounded overly literary for TV, or rather overly word-centered for the recording of words and pictures, so another word started being used. I remember when I started listening to old-time radio how weird that word "transcribed" sounded and how long it took me to figure out what in heck it means. So if you ever get into OTR, well, now at least you know.