I just returned from the student health center. I had an appointment to have the wart on my left ring finger zapped, again. After about 30 minutes of being sent up and down stairs to various waiting areas, I had my vitals checked (still 6'1", still 165) and was plopped down to wait for the doctor. I was originally going to be sent to a nurse, but the doc intervened and put a piece of duct tape on the wart. "This is the only thing that works," he said. "If you freeze them, viral particles remain in the area and the wart grows back. There was no way to really get rid of warts until the U.S. Army started using duct tape in 1945. Leave it on for two weeks and it'll fall off; replace the piece of tape as necessary."
I am not making this up. Now I have a piece of duct tape on my finger.
In other news, there was a fairly sizeable protest on campus yesterday during the UC Regents visit. Apparently, a couple of hundred kids hooted and hollered and some got pepper-sprayed in the name of "a host of issues." I'm a stodgy cynic. I'm deeply skeptical about the efficacy of street protests in actually changing anything. They alienate moderates and they anger authorities. That can be great if there's some kind of sustained injustice and civil disobedience is the most visible way to fight it, but protests like the one here yesterday are vacuous - you can't protest "a host of issues" all at once. At a place like UC Santa Cruz, it just becomes a caricature of protest, anyway; a lot of noise, some arrests, nothing accomplished.
IMHO, obviously.
10.19.2006
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5 comments:
I saw a herd of pigs gathered in one of the parking lots as I left campus - they were in their riot gear. I wondered what was going on...
Save the duct tape for my archive (at least in photographic form).
LL
Answers are overrated. Most are just crappy attempts to solve a problem everyone knows exists anyway.
Must say I'm a cynic about demonstrations as well. What really makes a difference - vote with your money. Choose what to buy and what not to buy. American consumers as a group are one of the most powerful forces on the planet - if they would only realize it. Boycotts for example, are a nice, quiet - but highly effective - method of protesting unjust actions.
In other news... DUCT tape?? wow...
Uh, lemme know if that duct tape thing works, I have a persistent one o' those myself, and I've zapped it down to concave (convex? you know what I mean) but it's still there.
So far, the duct tape is great. It's vaguely comforting, although it took me ten minutes to figure out how to type with it on.
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