Dave Cancels Canker Sores (Canker Sore Cancels Dave)

Today's sentence is canceled, due to a festering canker sore under my tongue. 

Canker Diet

Your body works in mysterious ways: just before break I wished that I could lose a few pounds because I knew of the holiday gluttony ahead, but of course, I didn't act on this wish-- I just hoped it would come true, and, in a way, it did, because I got several horrifically painful canker sores under my tongue and was unable to eat anything but yogurt and noodles (you should have seen the spread of cookies, cake, cupcakes with bright red hyper-sugared icing, and candy that I ate NONE of, despite being within arm's reach of these goodies for several periods-- normally I would have DESTROYED a table full of food like that) and so I lost five pounds (which I'm sure I've gained back by now, but still, at least I'm breaking even).

Dave Throws This Sentence into the Volcano

I hereby vow to sacrifice these very words and this very sentence to the irate, pus-filled, and vengeful Goddess of Canker Sore, in the hopes that mine will be gone tomorrow.

An Autumn Miracle

Last week, I was walking home with the dog, annoyed that when I got back I would have to rake up all the wet leaves on my lawn and bag them-- in my book, the only thing worse than handling and bagging mounds of damp leaves is a pus-filled canker sore under the tongue-- but when I arrived, our lawn guy-- who only comes every two or three weeks, was blowing all the wet leaves off our lawn with an industrial strength leaf blower and he then vacuumed them all up and took them away . . . a well-timed serendipitous autumn miracle if I've ever seen one (and the opposite of the autumn disaster my brother and his friend conducted when they were in high school, they snuck out late at night and took all the leaves people had bagged-- and this was in North Brunswick, where the lawns are much bigger than Highland Park-- and they dumped the leaves back on people's lawns . . . and I'm hoping that none of those people read this blog and seek vengeance on my brother and his friend for this mischievous re-leafing).

This Might Be Farewell

In case I don't make it through the next couple of days, I'd like to thank all my readers for their encouragement and support . . . I know you all agree that I am an advanced wordsmith of the highest caliber, but I still don't think I have the lexical dexterity to explain how irritating, annoying and painful the canker sore under my tongue is . . . and while I've tried some of the remedies you have suggested, they don't seem to be working; in fact, I'm sure the sore is growing larger and larger each minute, festering and suppurating vast amount of pus, and in the coming days, I'm sure it will consume the rest of my tongue, then my mouth, then my face, and then my entire body-- I'll be one gigantic frothing sore, and thus unable to write any sentences . . . but it was fun while it lasted.

A Useful Analogy (Hindsight is 20/20)

Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, makes a case for increased government regulation of the financial sector, despite the logic that "the government does not know better than those whose actions are regulated by it . . . the government cannot know someone's situation as well as the individual or firm concerned" and so "government officials cannot improve upon the decisions made by the economic agents," but he explains that regulations often work not because the government "knows better," but because the regulations limit complexity, and of course this applies to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where the financial instruments and derivatives were more complex than the experts and investors could predict, and Chang makes this useful comparison: when a company invents a new drug it cannot be sold immediately . . . first the drug needs to be rigorously tested on carefully monitored patients because the interactions of a new drug in the human body are complex and unpredictable, and it will take a while to tell if the new drug has more positive benefits than its side effects . . . and, of course, this was not done before we sold unregulated sub-prime mortgages, packaged them into mortgage backed securities, packaged those into collateralized debt obligations, and insured those with credit default swaps . . . and it turns out the side-effects of this financial treatment are nausea, irritability, unemployment, mental confusion, erectile dysfunction, depression, problems sleeping, constipation, diarrhea, kidney failure, hostility, hallucinations, canker sores, foreclosures, and panic attacks.

Alan Moore: Predictable and Amusing (Just Like Me)

DC Comics is planning to release a seven comic book mini-series prequel to the unparalleled comic masterpiece Watchmen, and (according to The New York Times) creator Alan Moore is-- you guessed it!-- outraged and calls the new venture "completely shameless" and the article reports on Moore's typical pompous grouchiness, and explains that he has "completely disassociated himself from DC comics and the industry at large," and this sounds like a lot of fun-- to completely disassociate oneself from something, so here are a few things that I am now involved in that I plan to completely and indignantly disassociate myself from in the future:

1)  doing the dishes
2)  picking up dog poop
3)  tying my children's shoes
4)  wearing underwear
5)  flossing
6)  blogging
7)  canker sores
8)  Boardwalk Empire
9)  driving
10) Canada.