Category: Human Nature

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Artemis is stable, diagnosis unknown

“I’m so glad she’s doing well, I really didn’t know if she’d make the night,” said our vet Glen Kolenc a short time ago. And yet Artemis did make it through the night, thanks to interns Dr Helsa Teh and Dr Dharshinee Rajkumar and their team at the Sydney After-hours Veterinary Emergency Service.

“On presentation Artemis was collapsed and her gum colour was slightly muddy,” says the discharge statement. “She was given oxygen by mask and started on shock rates of intravenous fluids. Her blood pressure improved afterwards.” Artemis then spent the night in hospital on the drip, with methodone for pain relief.

While there is a lesion in her mouth which, as I explained yesterday, “could be a tumour”, the report also says that “her small kidneys and very dilute urine despite being dehydrated is suggestive of kidney disease”.

This morning, thanks to James Neave providing transport and Kate Carruthers covering the bills for now, Artemis was transferred back to our regular vets at Pet Vets, Petersham. She’s back on the drip and at the start of a few more days in hospital while tests are run and diagnoses reached.

At lunchtime Dr Emily Payne called from Pet Vets to say the first of the blood results were back. They show very marked kidney disease going on, “all kidney-related enzymes high”, “this all relates to kidneys”. And if it is kidney disease, well, it’s generally manageable long-term. It could even explain the mouth lesions: ulceration. We’ll find out more over the next few days.

However for the time being it’s mostly a matter of getting Artemis her strength back and then figuring out what’s going on. There will be uncertainty for a while, but she’s alive and now in no immediate danger.

My especial thanks to the many, many people who’ve given support, both personal and financial.

Donations have now well exceeded $2000, and this will probably cover the emergency treatment, hospitalisation and diagnoses currently scheduled. Whether further treatment is needed remains to be seen.

Of course if the mouth lesions do turn out to be cancer then we’re in for a bumpy ride. But it may not be that, and Dr Payne emphasised that at this stage we simply don’t know.

Thank you, everyone.

Right now I’m mentally exhausted, and I didn’t get much sleep last night. I will respond properly to comments in the next instalment. But for now, I’m taking a nap.

[Photo: Artemis, 30 May 2004.]

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Artemis is gravely ill, generosity astounds

What a week! If you were following my Twitter stream this evening, you’d already know that one of the cats, Artemis, is gravely ill tonight. She is in hospital. My cashflows are thoroughly depleted. And I am severely stressed. But I am also astounded by people’s generosity of spirit.

In writing all this, I run the risk of alienating those who want to see a supposed-professional’s website full of serious things like my media work and serious commentary, or at least mildly amusing satire, not that supposedly lowest-of-low, “cat blogging”. My good friend Nick Hodge has already written this week about professional versus personal social media projections and the risks of letting them intermingle.

But you know what? Fuck all that!

If I am to be an honest human — and I would like to think I strive to be one — then what I write about should be what is on my mind. And this is what dominates my mind today. If you don’t like it, well, stop reading now and pop back another time. Maybe next week.

And if you think less of me for writing about the personal issues that happen to be dominating my life, well, fuck you too.

So, to Artemis…

Continue reading “Artemis is gravely ill, generosity astounds”

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Fine posts for 2010

Since the list of most popular posts for 2010 was pretty disappointing, here’s my personal selection of eight more timeless posts for this year — listed in chronological order. Happy reading!

As usual, this does not include the material I wrote elsewhere, for Crikey, ZDNet.com.au and ABC Online. That’s all listed on my Media Output page.

  1. 50 to 50 #1: Born in Gawler, the first of what was intended to be a series of 50 posts leading up to my 50th birthday. Well, I got a few done, and you can find them in the 50 to 50 category.
  2. Internet hosting: the cost of support, the first in a series of three articles to help people understand how internet hosting services work from a small business perspective.
  3. Internet hosting: the cost of reliability. The second. Alas, the third article has not yet appeared.
  4. Why I’ve deleted my Facebook account, which is self-explanatory.
  5. Jetstar, Powderfinger to exploit fan’s enthusiasm, one of my rants against the evils of “crowdsourcing” that’s really just unpaid labour.
  6. Homophobic beat-up by Sun-Herald’s Heath Aston. Sometimes the popular stories are also the good ones.
  7. Return of the Hallucinating Goldfish: Help! Another brief piece about my little metaphor for government.
  8. Problematising the discourse: clear communication fail. A stumbled across an unfamiliar word while reading newmatilda.com, and that triggered an essay on choosing appropriate vocabulary for your audience.

You might also like to check out my personal favourites from 2009 and 2008.

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Most popular posts of 2010

As the first of my new-year posts, here’s a list of the most-read posts from 2010.

  1. HTC Desire to OS X tethering via USB. Hardly the most general article, but it shoes how you can attract website traffic if you have useful how-to information. Of course this article is irrelevant now that the HTC Desire runs Android 2.2, which has tethering as a built-in function.
  2. Cheap fake tan and fat thighs? Snooki! This is embarrassing, really, but I get traffic to this post because Google Images lists it as one of the first few results for “snooki fat”.
  3. ICT Election Forum: what questions? This one puzzles me. The post just mentions that the pre-election forum was happening, and I asked people to suggest questions. Maybe they’re really looking for something else.
  4. Why I’ve deleted my Facebook account, which is self-explanatory.
  5. Homophobic beat-up by Sun-Herald’s Heath Aston, about a very grubby tabloid attempt to smear a politician.
  6. Senate to re-open Bloggers versus Journalists. When I write about journalism, it usually gets retweeted heavily through media circles. It certainly makes a difference to website traffic.
  7. Jetstar, Powderfinger to exploit fan’s enthusiasm, one of my rants against the evils of “crowdsourcing” that’s really just unpaid labour.
  8. Adam Schwab’s NBN reply, which is Mr Schwab’s response to my article Adam Schwab’s NBN “analysis” arsehattery.
  9. Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?. The main point is that you can’t just bolt some sort of “government 2.0 module” onto steam-era bureaucracies and magically bring them into the 21st Century.
  10. Selling the NBN: couldn’t you do better?. I have no idea why this, of all the things I’ve written about the National Broadband Network, was one of the most-read. It’s certainly not the best.

Just like last year, many older posts also continued to be popular. Indeed, as I worked down the website traffic report, I filled all ten slots in the non-2010 list while managing to find only two stories from the current year. Yet more proof that the more material you have on your website the more visits you’ll get. Don’t delete your old material, people!

However something that worries me is that so many of the items are listed not because people were reading the posts, but because other internet users had hot-linked to the images — that is, included them on another website — or robots attempting to post spam in the comments.

OK, the Top 10 posts of 2010 that weren’t written in 2010.

  1. 67 Australian SAS captured airbase defended by 1000 (March 2008). I think this one only makes the list because the photo keeps getting embedded in various military geek forums.
  2. Live Blog: Internet censorship forum, which is only in the list because for some reason or other it was hit heavily by the spambots. Who would read a live blog from a forum back in 2008?
  3. Julie, I want to make you a star (in a Samantha Fox kind of way) (September 2007) My ode to Julie Bishop, popular because of its photograph of Samantha Fox.
  4. Hello Kitty, you’re dead, and other surprise products (October 2007) People link to the (fake) photo of the Hello Kitty AK-47. Few seem to realise it’s a joke.
  5. Apple iPhone parodies (January 2007). Another embedded photo, I reckon. I must make sure my traffic reports filter out that stuff.
  6. Spaceport America, designed by Foster+Partners (October 2007). I’m puzzled why this one is on the list. Maybe people linking to the photos again?
  7. Live Blog: Politics & Technology Forum 2009 (February 2009). Another artefact of the spam robits, I think.
  8. The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney (January 2008), proving once more that the lowest common denominator wins.
  9. My new hero: Hideki Moronuki (January 2008). Whenever the work of Sea Shepherd is in the news, people stumble across this post and discover that — shock horror! — I’m no a fan of that organisation.
  10. Oz soldiers design own recruitment ads (April 2007).

None of that surprises me. The most common searches which brought visitors to my website were “steve irwin jokes”, “stilgherrian”, “heath ledger jokes”, “julia gillard”, “hideki moronuki”, “snooki fat”, “sas”, “fisting”, “snooki is fat” and “hello kitty ak 47”.

You might also like to check out my own selection for what I think were the best posts from 2010, plus the lists for previous years:

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Return of the Hallucinating Goldfish: Help!

“My preferred term is that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish. No long-term memory, and a world of imagined horrors,” I said last night.

My comment was triggered by a discussion about Australia’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which stands at 6%. Here’s a picture from March 2010, showing that even with the recent rise in debt to deal with the global financial crisis our government is debt still within the usual range historically.

Personal debt, on the other hand… Ahem!

The United States, by comparison, sits at 60%. According to one economist even that figure is wrong. It’s really 14 times greater, and he reckons the US is actually bankrupt.

But opposition parties here in Australia screech that 6% is “out of control” — even though, as Ric Hayman reminded me, it’s only a few years since one of their own was congratulated for settling things down to 6%. It was acceptable then. But now…

A debt ratio at 6% of GDP is nothing, of course. To use the traditional analogy, it’s like a household with a combined income of $100,000 taking out a loan of $6000. Quite manageable. Families regularly take out loans of 500% of their GDP to buy their own homes and it’s considered normal, even admirable.

Yes yes, if they spent that money on cocaine instead then might be different, but that’s not the issue here. Anyone who tries to equate stabilising a national economy so people can keep their jobs with a drug habit is in my opinion nothing more than a blind political tribalist. If such comments are made here I shall mock and insult you personally.

This is all part of what my Crikey colleague Bernard Keane calls the Perpetual Present of politics, “in which what happened two days ago, let alone two years ago, is forgotten”. But my preferred term is Hallucinating Goldfish

That must’ve struck a chord, because when I mentioned it last night my comment was retweeted around 30 times. I therefore pointed people to my original post, Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

I was also reminded that political journalism fails to cover the vast majority of what happens in Parliament and government.

As Tim Dunlop put it, here’s “some stuff you might’ve missed if you relied on the media for all your information.” Like the House passing 29 bills, the Senate 16, and 11 bills passing both houses. Nothing important there, eh?

Quite.

Now my original Hallucinating Goldfish post now seems quite dated, and I haven’t posted anything in the Hallucinating Goldfish category in most than two and a half years. I reckon we need new examples. This is where you come in.

Please help me identify more Hallucinating Goldfish. Where are policies being proposed, or decisions being made, based on a paranoid fantasy worldview and ignoring the lessons of the past?

[Photo: Goldfish by Helga Birna Jónasdóttir, used under a Creative Commons attribution license.]

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A misanthropic alphabet for grown-ups

I was particularly pleased to see a fellow misanthropist produce a nastily whimsical alphabet on Twitter last night. I thought it deserved to be recorded for posterity. And here it is.

A is for Arsehat.
B is for Bastard.
C is for Coprophile.
E is for Eris.
F is for Filth.
G is for Gauleiter.
H is for Herpes.
I is for Ignominy.
Oh yes, one can’t start a tweet with a capital D. D is for Degenerate.
Now, where was I?
J is for Jesus.
K is for Kristallnacht.
L is for Lubricant.
N is for Nudism.
O is for Orifice.
P is for Pistol.
Q is irrelevant, and I shan’t have anything to do with it.
R is for Rotten.
S is for Sodomy.
T is for Tammany Hall.
U is for Uvula.
(No, that’s not what a uvula is. You people are sick. Go look it up on Wikipedia.)
V is for Vulgar.
W is for Wastrel.

And that’s as far as he got. However for the sake of completeness he has this afternoon added the following:

X is for Xenophilia.
Y is for Yes-man.
Z is for Zarathustra.

I can’t help but think this should be illustrated by Edward Gorey, in the style of The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

[Update 4pm: The misanthrope writes: I have just noticed I’ve left out M from my alphabet. Oh well. I never liked it much anyway.]