Peeking into the rock

Last week I read Lisa Goldstein's Summer King, Winter Fool and Noriko Ogiwara's Dragon Sword and Wind Child. I attempted to read Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, supposedly a "portrait" of the Polish city Wrocław, and started Echoes in Time by Andre Norton and Sherwood Smith.

Both the books I finished were nice little amusements. They have stories in them that ought to seem biggish, involving the whims of gods and kings and queens, but because they were both sort of stylized and removed from actual life, they seemed small to me. Like pretty toys. I liked them both, though I got a little impatient partway through and wished they would drop the royalist crap. I mean I felt like they were wasting themselves on trivial gods-and-royals stories when all that beauty and passion could have been spoent on something I personally care about because doesn't the world revolve around my tastes and if not why not? But they were fun anyway. Goldstein's book is in a completely new world informed by late Eurpoean nedieval times, and Ogiwara's book is in a magic world not many steps removed from Japan.

Microcosm is unreadable. It's written like one of those breathless magazine survey articles of the sixties, jumbled up and oh god why don't they use any of the actual place names! What the hell! Some of the places names they translate into English and I don't mean those odd Anglicized place names, I mean stuff like "Giant Mountains" and "Snowy Head" and "Cats Hills." Also, "The River." Skipping ahead, I see that they eventually deign to use the names of at least cities and states but they've lost me already.

I was going to say that this was obviously a product of the postwar period because even though the book spans prehistory to modern times the first chapter is about World War Two and of course that would have made sense up to about 1989 because until Solidarnosc Americans thought history stopped in Eastern Europe in about 1950. But the book was first printed in 2002, so I don't understand why the book starts out like this. I recall nopeing out of another Polish history book by Davies too. Unfortunately Polish histories aren't very thick on the ground at my library. What there is--is almost exclusively this guy, and/or books about concentration camps. Which are necessary to tell Polish history but not sufficient. Maybe I'll try it again sometime when my disappointment has had a chance to settle down.

I don't have  much to say about the Norton/Smith yet, since I just started it.

I stalled out on the giant fantasy trilogy my brother-in-law lent me. I feel like I should keep trying because he was so enthusiastic about it. Also I haven't started the Kameron Hurley. But probably next is The Mystic Marriage by our own Heather Rose Jones, and anything that looks fun in the library, and another attempt at Eastern European history. I think I remember seeing some other city histories on the shelf.

( cut for medical neepery, not gross but probably boring )
On still another front: I'm hungry and I think I am going to boil some cracked grains in milk. Yes, I get to do that. Because, that's why.

In light of the new guidelines for statin use, and the fact that more people have muscle damage from taking statins than previously thought, it seems like there ought to be better information about preventing, monitoring, and responding to statin-caused muscle damage.

I want to stop right here and acknowledge that statins are good drugs in general. The incidence of side effects, even given that it is much higher than we can really know because of people like me who don't put together their muscle symptoms and statin use, is pretty low compared to the health and longevity effects. They're cheap for what they do, too. I was really reluctant to consider the statin connection when I was figuring out my leg pains. Which probably means that I had years more pain and possibly more permanent damage than necessary. But I'd say to a person who is taking a statin now, that if you develop leg pain that doesn't go away, be suspicious. Do a trial of stopping the medicine. Since the medicine is a long-term, cumulative preventive therapy, you can afford to stop it for a couple-few months and see what happens.

Meanwhile, I have finally found one article that is neither a hysterical, credulous hatchet job nor a dismissive, sweep-it-under-the-rug condescension. It's a little old - 2005 - but it is aimed at physical therapists and it is measured, intelligent, and informative. Here it is.

Unfortunately, what I have not found is an assessment of what happens to people who do get longer-lasting effects, and what is the best strategy for retraining the muscles.

One interesting thing in the article that I thought could have been better explained was the advice to tell patients not to use pain relievers for this type of pain. Since no pain reliever seems to have any effect whatever on my leg pain, I don't take any of them anyway, but I wonder why we're not supposed to. It was in a way almost as much of a relief to give up on pain relievers as it was frustrating, because I already take so many medications (a risk factor for muscle damage with statins, as it turns out: my only other one is being female). Although, these days, most of my medications are actually nutrients. Which sounds good until you think about it.

On a related front, the dog also seems to need anti-inflammatories. Ah well.

The Bad Astronomer tells us that Delta Airlines has contracted to show commercials produced by the anti-vaccination group that sarcastically calls itself "The National Vaccine Information Center."

I wasn't sure how best to contact Delta over this, so I used the customer complaint form. This is what I said:

I have used Delta almost exclusively for travel between Europe and the United States since my son began medical school in Prague. I pay for my own and my son's travel back and forth, and also for his travel to other countries and other continents, where he goes to practice his life-saving learning. But I won't be any longer unless I hear that the anti-vaccination ads are removed from your inflight material.

My family has made a great sacrifice to send my son to school to learn to save lives. It's not an exaggeration. I am a widow in a low-paying job. Every penny we spend has to count. And I will not be spending any of my hard-earned money to support an airline which is helping to convince people to put their children at danger of death. Last year at least nine babies died in California alone of pertussis because they were too young for vaccinations and the disease was passed to them from unvaccinated children or adults. Can you see where it might be especially galling for me -- the mother of a young doctor and a caregiver for infants too young for vaccination -- to buy my son and myself tickets to fly on a flight that lies to parents about this?

I can't believe you would take advertising money from these murderers, whose fallacious claims are rooted in the fraudulent claims of a known criminal (Wakefield, who has been stripped of his credentials and fled his home country to live off the fears of his gullible followers here in the US). I'll be telling everyone I know not to buy tickets for your flights until you stop.

I have had otherwise good experiences with your airline and would be more than happy to recommend your services if it were not for this scandalous complicity with murderous fraud.

I maybe did thr wrong thing by focussing on pertussis because the ads are against flu vaccines. However, any equally strong case can be made for flu vaccines. I got both the latest flu and a D-TAP booster yesterday, by the way. How about you? They're being recommended for everyone, now, not just high risk groups and their caregivers.

Reuters has a headline today: "Studies find gene links to world's biggest killer". earlier I was aprticipating in a discussion about assassin/mercenary/thug/serial killer/torturer/executioner protagonists in slash fiction (short version: I'm totally uninterested in them, where "uninterested" means "I'd rather wash dog poop off the floor than read another one of those"). So of course I thought it was another one of those periodic articles where they find a gene that pops up in fifty-five serial killers and the newsies decide that they must have found the gene for mass murder.

But instead, it was one of those articles where they find a gene in a wad of people with heart disease -- and Reuters actually did okay with putting the findings in scientific perspective.