Best Quote I Heard All Day
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.--Frank Zappa

Here are my eyebrows.

Some people have snowmen on their trees. I have a collection of nutcrackers. Grimacing nutcrackers.

Lost in the Shuffle
While the Shrub continues his oblivious hike down the Highway of Hubris, I've been pondering a troublesome news story and wondering if it will be swept under the carpet.

The sad story of Rigoberto Alpizar, the bipolar man who was shot to death in Miami last week, has seemingly disappeared from the news this week.

I've done a lot of thinking about this guy. He stopped taking his medication. He and his wife were in Quitos, on their way back to their home near Orlando. I can picture the scenario: He's been off his medication for a week or so--a common thing for us bipolars to do because we think we're "well"-- when he becomes increasingly agitated, paranoid and miserable. His wife, rather than hospitalize him in Quitos, gets his ass onto a plane, figuring that heading for home is the smartest thing to do.

On the plane, he has even more time to become agitated, anxious and paranoid. And certainly frightened. She manages to keep him calmed down until they land but at that point, his mind is so out of control that he thinks the only way he'll get off the plane is to say he has a bomb. And runs out with his carry-on and onto the jetway. Do anything and say anything to escape his mania and his fear. Where he is shot by air marshals as he reaches into his bag. Extreme behavior on Rigoberto's part? Absolutely. However, it's not surprising for a bipolar I.

I don't know if the air marshals were right or wrong to shoot. They may not have received the proper training to deal with the emotionally disturbed. Could they have not used a Tazer to subdue him? From their viewpoint, they honestly thought he had a bomb and weren't going to take the time to find out up close and personal. I don't know if his wife was right to put him on that plane or whether she should have kept him in Quitos and sought help there. My instinct would have been hers--get his ass out of here and back to his own doctor.

What I think I understand is Rigoberto's thought processes. I've been there, although perhaps not as out of control. But the agitation, the paranoia, the anxiety and the frantic need to escape a situation that I've perceived as harmful have all happened to me.

The difference between me and Rigoberto is that I am alive and he is not. And that does not bode well for manic depressives in extremis.

Knitting--Not
Well, not exactly. I finished John's Touch Me scraf, thank you Jesus. I'm working on finishing socks. I have no interesting or boring pictures of any work in progress. I've managed to spend about two hours a day spinning both the Cormo and the Starry Night but if I took pictures of either, it would be deja vu all over again, with apologies to the Yog.

I have nothing particularly pithy to say about knitting except that lately, there isn't much interesting knitting going on and that's OK.

Sometimes knitting can be a stone bore. And I'm ready to toss it and just read or do something utterly dumb, like watch judge shows on TV.

I'm actually writing this in advance of tomorrow (or today, whatever) because I'm out the door early for Christmas shopping with my sister, the Queen of the Malls, and my mother, who will hopefully give Karen the hairy eyeball should she decide to turn a simple shopping trip into chaos. So I decided to forgo Boston Law for this evening. Which is why the posting time is 12 midnight. No time tomorrow.

See what I do to write this thing? Give up Shatner. There's nothing more rare or handy than watching that old ham do his thing. Pure genius.

ADDENDUM: If you've viewed December's Bizarro link, you may be as astonished as I was to find out that the film is of the actual house and music, not some Flash movie done as a joke. I saw an interview on the Today show last week with the guy who owns the house--he's a "IT professional"--and the house and music are real. It's in Mason, Ohio, if anyone lives near there and wants to see it for real.

If he were my neighbor, I'd have to kill him.