I have a little touch of arthritis in my feet. I became aware of this last summer after a trip to the beach which included long walks in the sand resulted in my hardly being able to walk.

A trip to the doctor and some x-rays revealed that arthritis had set into my feet. The doctor prescribed Vioxx which had me back to normal within a few days. I haven’t had a reoccurance of the degree of pain since then. Anytime my feet begin to hurt in the same way I take Aleve for a day or two and I’m back to normal again.

Today I’ve read that Vioxx is being pulled.

“In this study, there was an increased relative risk for confirmed cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, beginning after 18 months of treatment in the patients taking Vioxx compared to those taking placebo,” Merck said in a press release.

It seems that that increased relative risk is something like 50%. So I’m trying to figure out does that mean that if I had a 1 in 100 chance of having a heart attack or stroke before taking Vioxx do I now have a 1 in 50 chance or something lesser or greater? Because I only took the drug for a couple of weeks does this not pertain to me at all?

They were also in tests over whether or not this drug could prevent reoccurrance of cancerous polyps. I think I would prefer to have a greater risk of a heart attack than have a reoccurance of cancerous polyps. I’ve had close friends suffer and pass on from colon cancer. There ordeal was not anything I’d ever wish on anyone.

Now for a word from the other side.

Watching 60 Minutes last night to see if they made any new blunders I caught Andy Rooney’s words of iron.

I have a message for the 100 million Americans who didn’t care enough about our democracy to vote last time. Good! And, please, do us all a favor. Don’t vote next time, either. If you don’t care enough about the issues, I don’t want you canceling out my vote with your vote.

I never understood why I should want to encourage people to vote that I have not spent any time studying the issues or who have shown me no signs of having any original idea of their own. Rather than encourage people to vote, I think we ought to do all that we can to discourage them. Why should I want my vote watered down by someone who has no grasp of the issues and has shown nothing but apathy about politics.

It was nice to hear this said on a national news show. It was especially nice hearing it on CBS.

My last post was at the first of the month and here it is the last of the month. Where has the time gone?

I’ve been away waiting out hurricanes in airports waiting out electricians that were suppose to be through in order to start up some equipment and getting back home to find out that the state of Tennessee Child Support Division will grab the first name that matches what a welfare mother tells them to try to get the child support money she needs to get off of welfare.

I guess I need to explain this a little.

The day after labor day I had a flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Tulsa, OK. Of course that was the day after Ivan had ripped through the Florida panhandle and it had fouled up Atlanta’s airspace pretty badly by Tuesday morning. I spent the entire day in the airport waiting on standby for one flight and then finally getting a flight out at a little after 6 P.M.

I spent the rest of the week in Tulsa and things went fairly well. There are still some issues that I need to go back and work out but overall the trip worked out well.

I came back home in time to head to Augusta where things weren’t going so well. My portion of the project went fine but the electricians were behind in getting the equipment wired up. So most of the following week I spent just standing on concrete waiting for the work to catch up so I could start up equipment.

On Friday I talked to my wife and she had found a business card from a local deputy sheriff in our door requesting that we contact him regarding a civil matter. He had left the office for the weekend before my wife got home so we were stuck all weekend wondering what this could be about.

I got home on Saturday.

On Monday morning I contacted this deputy sheriff and discovered that I was suppose to be in court that morning in Bledsoe County, Tennessee in regards to a paternity suite/child support case. The plaintiff was a woman I had never heard of and the child had been born in 1995. This was a shock.

In the first place I’ve never heard of this woman, in the second place I’ve been in a monogomous relationship with my wife since 1977 and in the third place after our second son was born in 1989 I had a vasectomy. They had just taken the name the woman had given as the father to the state when she applied for welfare and grabbed the first person with that name in the county the child was conceived and sent out a subpoena.

The name she gave them was Larry Burton and he lived in Hixson, TN. Okay, I lived in Hixson, TN from 1986 through 2002 but so did at least two other people named Larry Burton that I knew of. I use to get phone calls for one of them and I bought a piece of furniture from The Furniture Store in Dallas Bay from the other one.

After I finally got in touch with the Assistant District Attorney General handling this case I tried explaining how she had the wrong guy. I could tell she wasn’t buying my story when I acknowledged that I had lived at the addresses that she asked about. But then I told her that even though I had lived in Hixson during the time in question that I knew at least two other Larry Burtons lived there during the same time period, including one that I bought furniture from.

This caused her to change her tone. The woman had told her that the Larry Burton who was the father of her child had worked at a furniture store in Hixson. The matter has now been non-suited.

I’m lucky in that my wife trusts me and has a good sense of humor. However we both thought about a friend of her’s whose husband had an affair but they then reconciled. Had something like this occurred in her family I can see where the reconciliation might be over before the mess could be cleared up.

On a brighter note, my canoe that had been stolen had evidently been hid in the brush on the lake in my subdivision. A neighbor found it in his backyard after the lake went back into its bank. Half of it had been painted white with latex house paint and there were two trenching tools in the canoe that I can only imagine were being used as paddles.

It’s been an interesting three weeks. I’ll try to update more often now but I do have a little more traveling to do. I’ll try to get pictures next time.

California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina are the eleven states with the most electoral votes in the nation. Together they have 271 electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to become president. Under our current system if a candidate for President of the United States wins these elven states with just 50.1% of the vote but loses the other 39 states by a landslide the candidate becomes President. The population of those 11 states is 160,324,350. 50.1% is 81,765,418.5. The population of the rest of the nation is 121,097,556. Now those aren’t registered voters but I think you can see what I’m getting at. It is conceivable that our president could be elected receiving only 29% of the popular vote with the losing candiate receiving 61%.

Still, I fully support the use of the electoral college in selecting our president. I never did care much for mob rule.

I bought my son an electric scooter for his fourteenth birthday for $200. He turned fifteen this past May. during that year and a few months he road that little scooter into the ground. The front wheel bearing was completely shot and the scooter is generally worn out and will no longer charge.

Yesterday I read this aticle about Target recalling an electric scooter. This very same scooter my son has. We took it back last night for a full refund. He is beside himself with his new found riches.