By now we all know that Fat Duck has undergone surgery to fix his broken heart.  Not surgery like a good drunk because his wife left him, but more like his heart could not keep up with him in his daily activities and so it would “halfheartedly” (get it?) give up.  As I understand it, the bottom part of his heart just would not pulse like it should and after numerous tests on all sorts of body parts the doctor determined he needed to install a “internal implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) pulse generator”.

Holy crap Fat Duck, that is a big old word for what they put inside your body.

Well, I went to work right away to find out exactly what this IICDPG is made of and how it works and this is my take on the whole deal.

First off it is made of some material that the body doesn’t reject like a sliver in your finger.  It just won’t push it out any time real soon and so I figure that is a good thing.  It is not a small little thing either, and so they put it high up on his chest just under his collar bone and they tuck it back in out of sight.  You know, so he shouldn’t see it sticking out when he is flexing his sharks.

Inside the unit are all sorts of neat things.  One of the things it does is keep checking up on the activity of the Ducks heart.  Is it beating properly?  Or is it not doing what it should be doing?  If the little sensor unit detects an issue, it ZAPS the heart with a powerful and painful pulse of electrical current.  Enough to run a small electrical appliance, like a toaster.  The Duck should feel this electrical impulse if it is working properly.  I suspect we will see him squint his eyes if it goes off.

Another thing this thing does is play music for the doctor to hear when he puts his stethoscope against one of the ducks sharks.  It constantly plays water sounds like a running stream in a high mountain brook.  When the doctor hears this he knows it is properly installed and operating correctly.

This little devise is really quite fascinating to study.  And in my research I have learned a new word…”joule”…

In the world of electricity I am quite familiar with the words “volts and amps” but in the doctor world they have had to come up with another word and this is the one they chose.  How did they choose such a word.  Again my research leads me to make many assumptions and this is my take on that:  You see a bunch of doctors were sitting in their exclusive little club in the hospital drinking adult beverages and after many beverages they decided they were having a jolly good time.  They talked about giving patients shocks using them big old paddle boards with the wires that shocked the patients heart and brought them back to life.  Well, this little devise had just been invented and they were talking about it at length.  They were laughing and cutting up when one of them said, let’s say we are giving the patient automatic shocks and we are getting our “jollys ” from that.  And so it was.  Let’s study the word “joule”, it does not take much imagination to come up with “jolly” out of “joule”, they just spell it like it is something new to confuse us.  But I have that one figured out pretty well.

Wikipedia says this about that but I have already figured it out for you, pay no nevermind about what is about to follow:

The joule ( /ˈdʒuːl/ or sometimes /ˈdʒaʊl/); symbol J) is a derived unit of energy, work, or amount of heat in the International System of Units.^[1] It is equal to the energy expended (or work done) in applying a force of one newton through a distance of one metre (1 newton metre or N·m), or in passing an electric current of one ampere through a resistance of one ohm for one second. It is named after the English physicist James Prescott Joule (1818–1889).^[2][3][4]

In terms firstly of base SI units and then in terms of other SI units:

where N is the newton, m is the metre, kg is the kilogram, s is the second, Pa is the pascal, and W is the watt.

So, back to the little devise.  This bad boy has a battery that will keep on ticking for up to 5 years!  The Duck will be just like the Eveready bunny….Eveready Duck…Boom!  Boom! Boom!  Boom!  FAT DUCK!  FAT DUCK!  FAT DUCK!!  Boom!  Boom!  Boom!

So, let’s just say the Duck is having an issue with his heart.  Of course he does not know it, but the IICDPG does and it sends out an electrical shock…It doesn’t just send one of the jollys out, it sends 20 jollys out!  ZZZZAAAAAPPPPPP!  Whoa, that will make your hair stand on end Sister Sara!  And the best of it all is that that little bad boy is capable of sending 30 jollys if it needs to.  Hell Carol could feel that one if the Duck and her were is the right position! ( I wonder if having this devise installed would now qualify the Duck to get a prescription for viagra ?)

And just so we all know some of the things that could be a problem for the Duck in the future it is not all roses and wine with this thing.  The doctors have told him the obvious, “infection” and we all know too that they don’t always follow the procedures of sterilizing the equipment properly after cutting up their donuts in the break room before surgery…there is often just not enough time for that.  Doctors are so busy you know.

Another thing that he could develop is “Twiddlers Syndrome”…that is where he thinks he can’t move his arm up and down because of the devise pressing against his collar bone…hell Duck give it a sharp upward go…that devise will move out of the way.

There are other things that could happen, but we won’t go into them because the likely hood of them happening are out of the question, right?  Something like the wire coming loose from its screwed in position in the heart or the wire breaking…come on…these wires are made by the same company that Edjukateer is working for.

And so there you have it right from the old knowledgeable Bears Butt and we all know it just doesn’t get much better than that.

Glad to see you are going to be around for many, many, many more years Duck!

Bears Butt

Nov. 20, 2012

We have all seen or heard of the devastation of Sandy in and around New York State.  I have a niece living there and she joined with her fellow LDS people to help with some of the cleanup.  This is a video that one of them put together of the efforts being done by these and other volunteers.

http://vimeo.com/53357089

Bears Butt

Nov. 20, 2012

I sometimes catch myself wondering where words or phrases come from and then try to figure out a common sense sort of way that it could have come about.  For instance “Beaver Sharn”, most of us know exactly what that is, but it has not been around forever.  It came about when Tracker and I were coming back to rendezvous camp with a couple of sticks we retrieved from a beaver dam.  And during our conversation, we coined the term, beaver sharn, because the sticks had actually been sharned of their bark by a beaver, you know, “sharned” as opposed to “shaved”.  Everyone knows that a beaver can’t shave anything, especially with those big old teeth of theirs.

Well last night I thought I would look up the phrase “Half a mind”…the net is full of stuff about it but nobody has any information on where it was first used or how it came to be.  I have half a mind to write something and make it up for everyone to use in the future.  Sort of like Al Gore inventing the internet.  I may get around to that some day, when I have half a mind to do it.

As I researched I came across another very well used phrase, “within a hares breath”.  You have heard it, “I came within a hares breath of pulling the trigger on that big old buck”.

Actually, the saying has nothing to do with the breath of a rabbit.  Rather is has everything to do with the thickness of a hair.  A “Hairs Breadth”, breadth being the thickness of the hair from one side to the other, straight across.

Over time the saying has been modified to many other things but the main meaning is still the same.  RCH, BCH, Whisker, Frog hair….all varying in thickness, but all so very close to a collision or situation of whatever it is you are talking about.  Can you imagine two trains just missing each other by a Frogs hair?  Man that was a close call!  And for the same trains to miss each other by a Whisker…heck compared to a Frogs hair, a Whisker isn’t even close.  Good grief, why even talk about it?

To use the phrase “Hares Breath” is rather ridiculous when talking about close calls. ” I almost ran off the road, I was withing a hares breath of going over the edge”.  That really does not make any sense at all once you know the real meaning of the term does it?  I suppose it could mean some sort of distance if the rabbit was breathing out hot breath in a cold environment and you could see his breath.  Let’s say the rabbit just woke up on a very cold morning and took a deep breath…the vapor would probably leave his mouth or nose about an inch, but then get the little guy running away from a coyote and once safe he breaths out of his mouth, the breath would probably extend maybe 5 inches from his mouth.

In order to use the “hares breath” idea, you would have to clarify whether the rabbit was running or stopped or stopped after running or making babies or whatever rabbits do, like “Man that was within a hares breath after the hare had been chased by a Willow Creeker in the Crawfords”.

Nuff said.

Bears Butt

Nov. 12, 2012

Just a little fun for you…A very old one from Earnest Tubb….

http://www.jango.com/music/Ernest+Tubb?l=0

Bears Butt

Nov. 12, 2012

Ladies and Gentlemen, please pay close attention to the flight attendant standing in the door way before you.  We are preparing for take off in and will be taxiing to runway 71 for our departure from here to points before us.

Bears Butt

Nov. 11, 2012

Snowing outside and snowing harder in the Crawfords.  We don’t want to get stuck in camp like we did back a couple of years.  We need to be able to get to the big bucks.

Maybe this is the answer:

http://www.squidoo.com/AtvSnowblowers

Bears Butt

Nov. 10, 2012