I'm Gina Smith

The drugs I need.

Excerpt from "The Drugs I Need:"

“I’ve got insurance, as least for now I do. If I bought generic it would cut my cost in two. But I want Progenitorivox because I saw it on TV. Those families look so functional, that paisley pill’s for me.”

Have you seen the Consumers Union satirical site on drug safety? Ha. There is an animation and an MP3. Totally worth checking out at www.prescriptionforchange.com.

Says a French proverb.

"Better the foot slip than the tongue." French proverb.

The French Art Theif (joke from woz)

Did you hear about the guy in Paris who almost got away with stealing
several paintings from the Louvre? After planning the crime, getting in and
out past security, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out
of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an
obvious error, he replied:  "Monsieur, I had no Monet to buy Degas to make
the Van Gogh."

And you thought I lacked De Gaulle to send you a story like that.

The Naked Lunch photo (and full story)

And there you have it. Click this link.

Says William Dement (on dreaming)

"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." -Scientist William Dement, quoted in Forbes

And I found this quote courtesy of the Woz email list. Thanks.

I like this joke.

Been so busy working on Steve Wozniak's book that I've been terribly slow about the blogging. Just lately. But after Steve and his friend Alex Fielding sent me this joke tonight, I thought it was a great start toward getting back into the daily postings.

A man who just died is delivered to the mortuary wearing an expensive,
expertly tailored black suit. The mortician asks the deceased's wife
how she would like the body dressed. He points out that the man does
look good in the black suit he is already wearing.

The widow, however, says that she always thought her husband
looked his best in blue, and that she wants him in a blue suit.
She gives the mortician a blank check and says, "I don't care what
it costs, but please have my husband in a blue suit for the viewing."

The woman returns the next day for the wake. To her delight,
she finds her husband dressed in a gorgeous blue suit with
a subtle chalk stripe; the suit fits him perfectly.

She says to the mortician, "Whatever this cost, I'm very satisfied.
You did an excellent job and I'm very grateful. How much did you spend?" 
To her astonishment, the mortician presents her with the blank check.

"There's no charge,"  he says.

"No, really, I must compensate you for the cost of that
exquisite blue  suit!"   she says.

"Honestly, ma'am," the mortician says, "it cost nothing.
You see, a deceased gentleman of about your husband's size
was brought in shortly after you left yesterday, and he was
wearing an attractive blue suit. I asked his wife if she minded
him going to his grave wearing a black suit instead, and she said
it made no difference as long as he looked nice.

"So I just switched the heads."

`

Says Richard Gere.

"People get offended by animal rights campaigns. It's ludicrous. It's not as bad as mass animal death in a factory." Richard Gere.

Animal rights activist puts her own skin up for auction.

This is my kind of human!

LONDON (Reuters) - Looking for a unique way to support the fight against animal abuse?

The British founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world's biggest animal rights group, is auctioning off a lizard tattoo on her right arm -- with proceeds going to the charity.

Billed as "waterproof and weathered" and "suitable for making into a wallet or watch strap," the tattoo is being offered on Web site eBay to draw attention to the plight suffered by skinned animals.

"It's the only skin you can wear and use with the express permission of the original owner," said Ingrid Newkirk of her tattoo.

"Euphemisms like 'leather' and 'meat' help mask the cruelty that goes into stealing and slaughtering for clothing, trinkets and taste ... It may be uncomfortable to contemplate, but we're all flesh and blood," she said Tuesday.

The purchase price will be donated to PETA's "Shed Your Skin" Campaign, which promotes alternatives to leather and exotic animal skins.

But the winning bidder might have a long wait getting hold of the tattoo: it will only be delivered after its owner has passed away.

Is Western Civilization Doomed? Maybe.

By Dan Vergano
USA TODAY

Will Americans go the way of the Maya?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond considers the odds that modern civilizations will disappear, following into oblivion the ancient Maya, Polynesia's Easter Islanders, Greenland's Vikings and the Anasazi of the American Southwest.

In his new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking; $29.95), Diamond looks at civilizations that crumbled. And he ponders how today's societies can dodge the fate of their failed ancestors.

Diamond presents case studies of collapsed civilizations, starting with ancient ones and moving to present-day failures in places such as Rwanda and Haiti. He also looks at successes, such as Iceland and Japan, which overcame environmental problems.

"I see each chapter as part of a grand detective story," says Diamond, 67, a professor of geography at UCLA. Diamond's last book, Guns, Germs and Steel, for which he won the Pulitzer, was a surprise best seller, a bracing look at the geographic factors that led to the ascendancy of Western nations.

Diamond came to his career circuitously. Trained as a physiologist, he speaks 12 languages and is a leading expert on the gall bladder as well as on the birds of New Guinea. "I guess I realized that human society is more important than the gall bladder," he says.

And his studies, ranging from Montana to China to Rwanda, have not reassured him about the future of modern society. Deforestation in the tropics, depletion of the ocean's fisheries, widespread soil erosion, declining oil and natural gas reserves and growing pollution are all global concerns.

Most striking, Diamond says, is an expected 50% increase in the world's population over the next 50 years, which comes at a time when people in third-world nations are seeking first-world lifestyles that magnify their use of resources by a rough factor of 32.

"What is going on is an exponential horse race between the forces of destruction and the forces of sanity," he says. "We should know the winner in the next few decades."

Since Thomas Malthus' 1798 Essay on Population, thinkers have warned of the social dangers of unchecked growth. Diamond says that to disregard this warning ignores the history of societies that relentlessly consume their resources and steadily increase production and population until they collapse.

Collapse comes at a pregnant moment for the historians, anthropologists and policy analysts who study the decline of civilizations, says political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto. The field has grown over the past two decades into a full-fledged academic discipline, and while many of its members share Diamond's concerns, their response to his emphasis on environmental factors varies.

"I hope the book really forces people worried about collapse to look seriously at the problems we face," says retired environmental historian Alfred Crosby of the University of Texas-Austin. "The book really doesn't rave about our problems, but just puts things out there that personally scare the hell out of me."

"The book's virtue is that it provides a pretty systematic way of looking at the role of environmental factors in societal and political decline and collapse," says Georgetown University historian John McNeill. But, he adds,"My personal position is the story is a little more complicated."

Joseph Tainter, author of the influential 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, calls the environment just one of many societal problems. For example, in his view, ancient Rome - not a case study in Diamond's book -collapsed because the empire grew too complex and expensive to operate in the face of dangers like barbarians and epidemics. "When it becomes impossible to solve your problems, you are vulnerable to collapse," he says.

Anthropologist Lisa Lucero of New Mexico State University-Las Cruces disputes Diamond's view of the collapse of the Mayan civilization. She thinks that he has swallowed an unreasonably high estimate that "millions"of Maya suddenly disappeared.

"There's no evidence for massive violence and massive disease among the classic Maya," she says. People simply moved on because of widespread drought, she says.

Diamond denies he is simply a prophet of doom. He puts faith in today's global communications and the burgeoning environmental movement to save modern societies.