Guinea Pigs And Plain Ol' Pigs

Whoops! Look like we missed a day or so of posting random thoughts. That's the life of a guinea pig for you. We were decidedly perplexed upon learning of our acceptance into the clinical trial for the experimental drug, Maraviroc, yesterday. It had been unlikely from the beginning that our particular virus would be susceptible to it. And, frankly, we're not sure just how excited one should get about swallowing pills with yet-to-be-determined effects.

Then again, we swallowed lots of pills in dark bars in the 80's that could have been anything from Certs to Cyanide. So who are we kidding?

The specialist mentioned during our consultation over The Headache of 2007 that it would take a few days for test results to come back. It's been 8 days. We still have the headache (going into month #3), and no test results. If the man stood next to Tom Cruise, we wouldn't realize Tom Cruise was in the room. He's that good looking. So rather than bitch, we've been taking our Vicodin and having inappropriate thoughts about the man who put a foot-long Q-tip in our ear.

Three years ago, we let him straighten the septum, drill out the sinuses and take out some bones that we didn't realize were Just For Show. We realized what the big deal was over nasal breathing afterward. See...we hadn't done that before. Ever. The man is a god. And a good doctor, to boot. If we had fewer scruples, we'd shove things up our nose on a weekly basis just to see him regularly. You do that sort of thing for people you like. That's called establishing rapport".

Dick Cheney was dispatched to the Middle East this week to establish rapport in that area. That's what our newspaper said, "Cheney Seeks Rapport In Iraq". We called the Editor to make sure there hadn't been a typo: "Clooney" or "Sacks" or "Report" or "Colorado Springs", maybe. Nope. Sure enough, Our Only Vice-President, charmer that he is, was sent by Our Only President on a surprise good-will mission to Iraq. The surprise is not that he went. It's that anyone thought he was capable of good will. This is the guy who bit Matt Lauer's leg off in an interview for wishing him well in his pending grandpa-hood. Good will is not in his arsenal.

We were going to write something mildly humorous and scathing about sending people who have even less good will capacity than Cheney. But Leona Helmsley and Satan were all we came up with. It's hard to stretch that into a full paragraph. Looks like Cheney is treading into guinea pig waters himself. Maybe he's trying on a new leaf in his old age: niceness. Or humanity, perhaps. This kind of thing is catching in a syrupy Pay It Forward sort of way.

Now, Lindsay Lohan has been dispatched to high schools to seek sobriety among alcoholic teens. Paris Hilton has been dispatched to Driver's Ed to help 14 year-olds learn how to beat a bum DUI rap. O.J. will be offering marriage tips. Oprah will show us how to do the Virgin Islands on $10,000 a day. And John Edwards is the new spokesperson for SuperCuts.

Sometimes irony is funny. Sometimes it just reveals stupidity. Playing around with a new gig in hopes of stumbling on solutions is admirable. Throwing gasoline on the fire in your living room is not. Throwing it on the fire in someone else's living room is less so.

See the clock at the right of this screen and pray we don't all die of "rapport".