blast-o-rama. • issue 019 • 2020-02-16
blast-o-rama.
issue 019 • 2020-02-16
marty vs. bronchitis: round 2
Hey gang, do you know what is an awesome way to start your weekend? Let me tell you: waking up on a Saturday morning, unable to breathe because your nose and throat are choked with mucus, with your wife staring at you as if you’re about to die.
Awesome.
Let me take a step back.
About 3 weeks ago, I was diagnosed after having a really awful cough with bronchitis. My doctor hooked me up with the power trio of steroids, antibiotics, and an inhaler, and I went on my way. Finished my treatments, and I was feeling normal. Except for the fact that I had this awful cough which wouldn’t go away.
Cut to the tail end of this week, and my cough was getting worse and worse, and worse. My doctor’s office lets you message them electronically, and his response was (appropriately, I thought) another round of steroids. Picked those up on Friday afternoon, and I thought I was on easy street.
Then Saturday morning happened.
I pondered: do I go to the Emergency Room? Or do I go to a Patient First/Immediate Care type place. (I can hear my Canadian friends chuckling at the weirdness which is our health system, but hey, that’s what we’ve got.)
I went the Patient First route.
After about an hour, they did some Chest X-Rays, and the diagnosis was pretty simple: I still had bronchitis. Or possibly pneumonia, and in turn, I was going to be given another round of antibiotics, and perhaps more importantly, a cough suppressant.
Just over 24 hours later, most of which was spent napping, I’m feeling infinitely more human. We’ll see how this week goes, but I think I’m out of the worst of it.
Why have my 30’s felt like my body is trying to kill me?
a real news story which made me exclaim “holy shit” out loud
Yale News dropped a heck of a bombshell of a headline this week: Scientists find ally in fight against brain tumors: Ebola.
Yeah, really.
The story goes on to break it down as such:
Glioblastomas are relentless, hard-to-treat, and often lethal brain tumors. Yale scientists have enlisted a most unlikely ally in efforts to treat this form of cancer — elements of the Ebola virus.
“The irony is that one of the world’s deadliest viruses may be useful in treating one of the deadliest of brain cancers,” said Yale’s Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery, who describes the Yale efforts Feb. 12 in the Journal of Virology.
The approach takes advantage of a weakness in most cancer tumors and also of an Ebola defense against the immune system response to pathogens.
Unlike normal cells, a large percentage of cancer cells lack the ability to generate an innate immune response against invaders such as viruses. This has led cancer researchers to explore the use of viruses to combat a variety of cancers.
Absolutely incredible, right?
We live in interesting times.
this is a story which bummed me out a little bit this week
Meghan Daum over at Gen bummed me the heck out with this headline: When Getting Older Means Letting Go of Music.
I’m not sure when it started, but at some point over the last several years I replaced listening to music with listening to people talking. Looking back, it must have happened slowly, in increments. First, I began passing over the usual rotation of songs in my iTunes library in favor of some addictive podcast like Serial or S-Town. Instead of Tom Waits or Aimee Mann accompanying me on my daily errands, I’d find myself on the edge of my subway seat waiting for a murder (along with the social, economic, and psychiatric conditions surrounding it) to be endlessly parsed and potentially never solved.
Suffice to say, my response to this was one of wanting to cull my podcast follows and dive incredibly deep back into my Apple Music library and embrace the discovery of new music as I did in my late-teens and early twenties.
This does make me wonder, dear reader: I believe most of you are around my age - did this happen to you? Did you leave music behind for the dulcet tones of true crime dissections, NPR breakdowns and Marc Maron asking “WHO ARE YOUR GUYS?”
I’d love to know if this is exclusively a “getting older” thing, or more a “getting lame” thing. Hit that reply button.
And here’s other links which I spent too much time thinking about this week.
what i read, that you should read.
A bunch of cool links what I read this week, typically culled from my ever-growing Instapaper queue.
- ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and the Enduring Power of Comfort Food TV (Vanity Fair)
- Target’s Shipt Delivery App Workers Describe Culture of Retaliation, Fear (VICE)
- The Behind-the-Scenes Story of ‘He’s on Fire!’ in ‘NBA Jam’ (MEL Magazine)
- I Had to Abandon My Game After 4 Years And It Nearly Broke Me (IGN)
- Media Is Broken (The New York Review of Books)
- How Bong Joon Ho Built the Houses in Parasite (Vulture)
- Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook (WIRED)
- Comedians and ASL Interpreters on Translating Jokes (Vulture)
- How is food made on airplanes? Airplane food, explained. (Vox)
- ‘Home Alone’ Star Macaulay Culkin on Life Now, Dating Brenda Song & His Sister’s Death (Esquire)
- How Well Has “High Fidelity” Aged Over the Last 25 Years? (Inside Hook)
- 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”) (Tim Ferriss)
what i enjoyed.
Something I read, watched or experienced that I really loved this past week
One of the pioneers of comedy podcasting is Comedy Bang Bang (formerly Comedy Death Ray). The concept is simple: Scott Aukerman hosts guests both real and imagined (the fake ones performed by a rotating cast of improv performers), and the show goes considerably off the rails.
That said, sometimes, Scott has a very special chemistry with a guest, and such a guest is the multi-hyphenate comedy genius Ben Schwartz, who you may know best as Jean Ralphio on Parks and Recreation, or, as he currently can be seen on the big screen, as the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog in the somehow-it-exists Sonic the Hedgehog motion picture.
ANYWAY, they, every so often, do an episode of Comedy Bang Bang where it’s just Scott and Ben Schwartz. It’s called a “Solo Bolo”. They sing, they riff, they get really really weird. It’s either one of the funniest things you’ll ever hear, or the most irritating. A new edition dropped this week, “Solo Bolo Sonicolo”, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Maybe you will too? Check it out.
that’s that.
A little later than I’d like, but I have another edition of this here email from me to you. I hope everything is awesome for you, dear reader. If it’s not, don’t worry, we’re all by your side and we know you’re going to do great things.
Keep. Moving. Forward.
-Marty