Jack Manassas and Company

 In early July 2023, I had a walk-in visitor to my pharmacy.   "Doc, have you got anything for painful sores on my feet?" This was a 50-year-old male, First Nations, Height about 6 feet, weight about 230 lb.  He is self-employed as a chicken-vaccinator;  His full day of work consists of standing inside industrial chicken coops and vaccinating all the chickens against salmonella.  It is difficult work in a dirty environment. He complained that he had developed large sores on one of his feet-- And also a deep sore on his abdomen, near his navel, which he attributed to an accidental needle stick, courtesy of a chicken that had gotten out of control.   He was most concerned with his feet.  The pain from the sores was making it difficult to stand up, and he had to stand up in order to keep vaccinating chickens.  I was able to examine the sores.  The most troubling one was a tunnel about 5 mm in diameter going into the right second toe about 3 to 4 mm deep.  It appeared clean and h

 What follows is a fictional story.  It is not actually true. 1. If you are reading this, Emmanuel Goldstein is dead.  He died roughly 72 hours ago, because he was no longer there to prevent the automatic posting of this message to his blog.  Check the blog anyway– Emmanuel was planning to post an expose´ about some recent discoveries he accidentally made on the internet.  If by some miracle the posting is there, print it out as soon as you can, then turn off your computer and hide the printout.  It will be gone very soon. What follows is a brief synopsis of Goldstein’s discovery, not the full story.  This account is really just an afterthought.  Probably I will find it on my hard drive by accident, laugh a bit and then erase it.  But, cautious fellow that I am, I can’t help jotting down a few notes from my larger study.  A trail of breadcrumbs through the forest may help someone else find the same discovery–unless, as Hansel and Gretel found, the birds get to them first.  To be clear,

 Whenever we go down to Washington State, we always stop off at Hope BC.  We like the park in the centre of town, the impossibly tall Cascades that surround it– and especially, the wood carvings; A lot of these are left over from chainsaw carving competitions; But at least one of them looks like an authentic Pacific Northwest Totem Pole; There was no signature on this one, no date on which it was carved.  There is a raven with its claws firmly on the head of the being below.  All of the raven’s attention is focused downwards.  And what sort of creature has the raven’s attention?   It is almost a bird, but the beak is not long enough, and the carving of the shoulders and chest suggests fur.  Yet it is not a bear.  Possibly an ape of some sort, or a Yeti.     It has a waist, and could be a woman, but the deep-set eyes in the chest, where the breasts would be, make this questionable.   The face coming out of the chest is ape-like and very intense.  The woman seems to be holding it back w

 23 June 2022 How to get the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 to Work in Windows 11 Introduction I have had my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 since, probably, 2009.  It does two-sided black-and-white or color scans with amazing speed.  It requires a bit of dusting sometimes, but has otherwise never given me any trouble. After upgrading to Windows 11, I noticed that my scanner no longer worked.  It still works on my old Win 10 laptop, but not under Windows 11.  Sure enough–The Fujitsu ScanSnap Website confirms, in its laconic fashion, that the software that runs the ScanSnap S1500 is not compatible with Windows 11; No plans to upgrade their drivers at Fujitsu.  Their only recommendation– Get a brand new Fujitsu ScanSnap iX 1600 Versatile Cloud Enabled Document Scanner for Mac or PC, for only $599.95! I am sure I would enjoy a new iX 1600, and since it is being sold for the price of 2 gallons of gas, why not?  But I thought I would try to get Win 11 to run the old scanner anyway.   Finding the Programs Th

 Carrots Grow from Carrot Seeds When I was small, my parents subscribed to a children's record service for a while, which regularly sent us 45 RPM records that contained stories read aloud.  While looking for something else entirely, I came across a YouTube video with one of those stories on it-- The Carrot Seed.  Here's a link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHxLfBSU-9E My brothers and sisters and I were allowed to get these records out whenever we wanted, and play them on the Hi-Fi (family record player) 'all by ourselves.'  I played that record over and over from about 1962 to 1968, and so did my siblings.  It was very scratched and dirty, and probably was eventually broken.  In any event, I had not heard the recording from the early 1970's until it popped up on YouTube in 2022. The recording is pretty much as I remember it-- Oddly, listening to the grit-free, skip-free version, I remember the scratches and skips from the original record.  The boy w

When I watch TV, I find that I watch the ME TV Channel a lot (Memorable Entertainment TeleVision).  It contains a lot of the old TV programs that I used to see from childhood to teens and twenties.  Among these is M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital).  The film came out in 1970 during the Vietnam war, and the TV Series started in 1972. After a while, we figured out that the producers were using a story set in the Korean War to protest continued American Involvement in the Vietnam War, but that’s not all there was to it.  I remember enjoying the episodes, when they first came out.  Mischievous Hawkeye Pierce and his bunkmate were always getting one over on their rivals, Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan. When they weren’t defeating Frank and Margaret, or convincing a different nurse each week to sleep with them, they were complaining about the Korean War–Why were we there?  When could they go home? Why is the food so bad? These were consistent features of all the episodes, and consis