Brutal Music

Today's StraightDope reports:

I've heard and read stories about musicians, specifically hand drummers, pissing blood after playing a particularly tough or long set. The great Armando Peraza, Santana's longtime bongo and conga player, told an interviewer: "Playing percussion for Carlos you had to be able to play hard, non-stop for sometimes up to three straight hours, and play loud enough to be heard over the electric instruments. A lot of times I played so hard that I would piss blood after the shows. Santana gigs were an endurance test of the highest order." What would the connection be here? Can blood really get into the urine through this kind of physical exertion?--James

Cecil replies:

Music is a brutal business, James: String and keyboard players can suffer from focal dystonia. Saxophone and clarinet players develop disorders of the temporomandibular joint. At least one guitarist, Terry Balsamo of the metal act Evanescence, apparently gave himself a stroke by head-banging onstage. And hand drummers risk rhabdomyolysis, the disorder you refer to. Typically it's not blood they're seeing in their urine, though — it's muscle.

Rhabdomyolysis occurs when muscle cells are damaged to the extent that they break down in the body, releasing into the bloodstream several substances, including a protein called myoglobin that’s excreted in the urine (if you're lucky) and imparts the reddish brown color.

The condition is sometimes called "crush injury syndrome." Some of the first recorded cases were seen during the London blitz in World War II, resulting from the battering people took when they were trapped inside collapsing buildings. It's also found in the victims of earthquakes — after the 1988 Armenian quake more than 1,000 cases were reported — and auto accidents. Some less typical cases have evidently been caused by lightning, centrifugal pilot training, CPR compressions, riding a mechanical bull, being attacked by a wolf, and taking advice from goons.

For more, see:
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2848/can-playing-the-bongos-make-you-piss-blood

Fascism

Politics reduces to two contrasting simplicities. If you believe in liberty then you must be in essence an anarchist. If you believe that the group has a right to rule in individual, then the steps to becoming a fascist are all but inevitable.

The US gives a monopoly to the post office: fascism.

If I were a "caveman" I don't imagine these distinctions would bother me. As it is, I have zero confidence in civilization. Fascism oppresses me from all sides.

More will follow as I can make time.

Hypocrisy

Every kid in Sunday School looks down on hypocrites, despite knowing somehow that all adults are hypocrites. I had extra talents, extra seriousness (and a meta-sense of humor, of mockery): I still looked down on hypocrites as I grew up. But what what I really hate is secular hypocrisy: institutions that pretend to serve freedom but actually create mono-culture.

Most of all I hate the sheeple pledging allegiance, droning about "liberty and justice for all": while the FBI arrests philosophers on any pretext they can concoct, while the cops bust the heads of dissidents.

Of course the press doesn't report such things: abroad, yes, but seldom at home. Even if a reporter were capable of seeing what's before his eyes, sponsors would punish any organ that let slip more than some fraction of truth.

More will come after I rescue another few dozen Knatz.com classics to these damn 2D blogs.

Group Fiction

More than one module in pk domains offered Jesus as an example of group fiction. My theory of macroinformation argues that all complex information is data interpreted. Shakespeare, were he among us, would have a priviledged position in interpreting Hamlet, but no matter what he said, I, and you too, could still have our own interpretation. I for one have watched famous authors revise their interpretation of their own play upon hearing my interpretation (Edward Albee with his Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, for example).

But no, the fundamentalists don't want that. They want the world to be black and white, true and false, with authorities right, the truth answerable to them! (That might be grand where the fundamentalists not always so wrong, so retrograde, so stupid, so ignorant ... about EVERYTHING!)Bill Maher, on Christianity:They make it up as they go along!I've already been cheated, defrauded, unpublished, interrupted, misrepresented, bankrupted ... blackballed ... arrested, censored; but I'm still talking: or trying to talk. The ill will of the religious fundamentalists though will pale compared to the ire of secular gullibles when I say that, similarly, our concepts of "freedom" and "democracy" and "education" are also group fictions.

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2009 06 07

Thinking of Horus, of Mithras, of other pre-Christian born-of-a-virgin martyred-then-resurrected god-saviors, it occurs to me, I shouldn't just be talking about group fiction, I should be talking about group plagiarism.

Oh but then we're all kleptocrats: we don't just steal land, steal women, steal gold, steal labor; we steal stories, religions, saviors, gods ... We steal ideas, we steal superstitions. Not even our stupidity is original.

Initiations

For all the thousands of posts I've done at my domains and blogs I've never coordinated some scattered comments on initiations. I can't now either, but I do now pledge to do so: if I live, if my I.S. bill is paid, if blogspot.com still accepts my posts ...

In the Italy where Shakespeare set his Romeo and Juliet any young rascal with a sword, meaning "son of a property holder, perhaps a noble," could wound or kill almost any one on the street without a sword: the magistrate could be relied on to back the money, and the hell with Jesus' love or God's law. But with or without such details we all know: the privileged of the society are privileged. It's just a redundancy. The law is for the privileged, by the privileged. Ah, but in the famous (read infamous) "public" schools of the English aristocracy (and its public servants) any half-starved school master could terrorize any future duke with impunity. As soon as Lord Byron came by his great expectations, he was transferred from being tyranized by a nanny to being tyranized by the Harrow School: and he had the chilblained feet to prove it.

pk has written, only half-joking, that this practice was the society's way of getting some of their own back, in advance, from the injustices that the privileged lords (and their courtiers) would visit upon the public once they came of age. Now: who else has noticed?Don't we among the developed democracies do exactly the same thing with our own doctors while we have them trapped as interns? as residents?
Can anyone possibly actually believe that making a young doctor work an eighteen hour shift is good for those under their care? or good for the doctor?
No: it's getting our pound of flesh from them before they go off and earn $600,000 a year for being the second-leading cause of death, just behind heart disease.