So, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. died yesterday. If you’re only slightly old, you remember his daughter, Stephanie, from ‘Remington Steele.’ If you’re old, you remember Efrem from ‘The FBI’ (a show we were forced to watch every Sunday – I think it was – night because my mother liked it, though I don’t recall the rest of us liking it). If you’re even older, you remember him from ’77 Sunset Strip.’ And if you’re ungodly old, you remember his parents, who were apparently famous musicians.

I guess we’ll all soon be joining Ef and his folks because it looks like we’re all gonna die. Yes, MERS has made it to America.

Health officials on Friday confirmed the first case of an American infected with a mysterious virus that has sickened hundreds in the Middle East.

The man fell ill after flying to the U.S. late last week from Saudi Arabia where he was a health care worker.

He is hospitalized in good condition in northwest Indiana with Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Indiana health officials, who are investigating the case.

Another Mooslam attack! Thank goodness Ground Zero is in Indiana – hopefully this thing will burn itself out before it hits the coasts.

The virus is not highly contagious and this case “represents a very low risk to the broader, general public,” Dr. Anne Schuchat told reporters during a CDC briefing.

Yeah, right, like I beleive any of that nonsense. You, I, and Alex Jones all know this is a conspiracy by the oil-loving illuminati to knock down the US population and implement martial law.

Wake up ‘Merica!

So today is a big day, in work-land. It’s phase three of the implementation of electronic medical records (first came outpatient, then our main hospital and now the backup hospital we bought because we’re just loaded with money – so much that we’ve all endured pay freezes, furloughs, and increased health insurance premiums).

Even though I have more or less nothing to do with any of this, I was asked to “keep my phone with me” over the weekend (for free, of course) just in case some clueless administrator has some totally non-pertinent question or complaint. I could also have volunteered to answer phones in the “Command Center” (again, for free) which would have been rather pointless since I have no idea about any of this shit.

From what I understand, last time they did this the upper mucky-mucks sat around marvelling at what a smooth implementation they were having, because there weren’t any help calls. A few hours later, some low-level lackey asked them if they’d actually transferred the phones over.

Oops.

Oh well, big non-work plans today. Goal number one is drag the mower out of the shed, clean it off, grease it up, sharpen the blades, and then mount it on the tractor. If that’s successful, goal number two is to go out into the woods and get some dirt to at least start filling in the holes in the lawn. Then we’ll have to see if it’s worth cutting the grass or not.

Naturally I’ll keep my phone with me, though. ‘Cuz I can totally hear/feel the phone when I’m on the tractor.

But first, coffee….

I don’t know about where you live, but here in my neck of the woods, there’s been rain, rain, and rain. And the forecast calls for a rainy day today, followed by showers over the weekend. Maybe it’ll stop on Monday. Maybe. One thigns for sure, all this rain has the grass nice and green. Guess I’d better get the mower on the tractor this weekend (hopefully there’ll be a gap between showers). I also need to fill in the massive number of holes and trenches in the lawn that have appeared courtesy of the dogs. Looks like they have a strip-mining operation going on, and I have no idea how to get them to stop, short of only allowing them to go outside if accompanied by a chaperone (which would pretty much have to be me, and I’m too lazy to do that).

I also need to play with the new car code reader that was finally delivered yesterday. I already have a code reader, but this new one has a color display and besides reading/clearing codes, will show live data from the engine sensors (it will even graph it!) and will store like 8 hours or something so you can hook it up, go for a ride, and then look at what happened. Plus you can read the freeze-frame data so you can read what was going on at the time a fault code was thrown. Did I really need this? Oh, probably not. But it was only $43 with free shipping (which is about half an hour’s worth – or less – of labor at a garage), and I’ve always wanted to see the engine coolant temp and rpm and percent fuel trim….

Oh, it’s gonna be great.

So have you heard about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty that’s in the works? It’s an agreement that’s being worked out in secrecy between the US, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam and all the “advisers” (aka, corporate reps and industry lobbyists) involved in the negotiations have been sworn to secrecy, so they only thing us regular folks (who will suffer the consequences of this treaty) know about it comes from leaks and rumors. But what’s been leaked and rumored doesn’t sound so good.

For instance, , you know how you’ve heard about other countries that have access to affordable medicine? Yeah, this should get rid of that.

Last November WikiLeaks released a chapter of the proposed agreement that deals with patents, copyrights, trademarks, industrial design and intellectual property.

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

You can read the full leaked chapter here.

Last Sunday, at a joint presser with the Malaysian PM, Preznit Obama derided critics of the TPP as uninformed conspiracy nuts, citing critics’ “…lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations.”

Yeah, because you’re keeping it a fucking secret until the corporations are done writing it and pay off the governments involved to ratify the goddamn thing.

But what’s the use of worrying about it? Hopefully our corporate overlords will be benevolent.

Oh, and a note to Home Depot, Lowes, Tiger Direct, NewEgg, et al….

If you call every other fucking Friday “Black Friday,” the term “Black Friday” really loses any significance it might once have had. Unless you’re giving shit away, it’s just plain Friday.