“The docs say that the chemo has achieved it’s goal and stabilized the tumor, so it’s shrunk “a considerable amount” and isn’t growing any more. There’s been no spread of cancer (or metastasis) to other parts of my beat-to-hell body.

“And a rib, what was broken about a year ago, and was a spot of concern — the lesion there has shrunk, which could be normal healing or the chemo killing cancer…don’t know, can’t know really. So, I am getting a 90 day stay from more treatment, [while] hopefully, I can start regaining strength and some capacity for doing something besides sitting on my tukus.”

Meanwhile, he’s looking forward to seeing whether the Rangers’ new $107.7 million Japanese pitcher, Yu Darvish, will be able to help get them back in the World Series—where third time just may be the charm for the boys from Arlington. Unless Darvish sucks, as most transitioning Japanese players have.

It’s good to see Gov. Perry is not sullenly nursing his embarrassing loss, but is still kicking where it counts—to the seat of the pants of the Great Divider.

Nothing like the prospect of hanging to concentrate the mind.

Harmless, the dealer concluded after a brief check, but, oh, by the way…

They replaced the clutch for $1,500. If I didn’t know that I had a bad habit of resting my left foot on the clutch pedal (“riding the clutch,” it is called, though it was never this bad), I’d suspect the recall alert was a dodge all along.

It was just after dusk and the sky was still bright enough to illuminate a dense crosshatching of airliner contrails (condensed water vapor) overhead—east, west, north and south. ’Twas a busy evening up there, apparently.

Not that they’ll notice. They’re still singing the “CO2 causes global warming and the science is settled” refrain.

Maybe when the glaciers move as far south as Chicago and, then, Tennessee. Ya think?

Via Instapundit.

“A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon.”

I’m only half through this one but it’s already safe to say it’s as good as the first two about the Fair-haired Donovan, and well worth your time if you like complex, near-literary Celtic space opera.

Now we know their problem. They’re blinded by all the “snow”, obviously.

UPDATE:  Make that thirty-five pounds of cocaine, in hollowed-out text books, found in bags in the UN mail room.

Virga, life inside a Fullerene balloon thousands of miles in diameter, on the edge of the Vega solar system, is scifi author Karl Schroeder’s five-book (so far) series of swashbuckling tales. This is steampunk Victoriana where computers and other electronic devices cannot exist—unless a crucial part of the central “sun of suns” is turned off.

Great stuff, truly, though it’s not a future world I would care to actually live in, unlike the future world of Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict detective series. Virga’s hard science instructs as the romance entertains and the characters introspect, change and grow.

Well worth your time and money to read the first in the epic and don’t be surprised if you find yourself hooked. Unfortunately, they are fast reads. They go lickety-split. Having finished No. 4, a cliff-hanger, I must now wait until Valentine’s Day to receive No. 5. Sigh.

Not that it would help her digest grass or leaves, if she was so inclined, any more than my intact appendix (assuming I even have one; some people don’t) would help me do so now.

When the evolution of, well, evolution made our appendix an anatomical anomaly, it removed the sort of bacteria that once populated it enabling us to digest the cellular structure of grass and leaves in times of famine.

Can’t say I would miss it any more than the vanished tail that once was attached to my tailbone. Ah, but the atrophied muscles that once allowed my ears to swivel every which way, now those I could enjoy having rejuvenated.