Maybe this isn’t completely different since I’ve posted recently about selling our MINI and buying our Infiniti, but I personally think these are a different animal altogether.

Here is a sampling of cars we’ve spotted recently, with our phone cameras available. Normally photographing these things in the wild doesn’t happen because we’re too busy pointing at them to grab our iPhones.

Feel free to caption them however you wish. I think I’m too close to the subject and thus captions are just beyond me.

Enjoy.

Georgia Guidestones : America's Stonehenge

I’ve wanted to see the Georgia Guidestones since I first heard of them years ago. If you’ve never heard of them, this is the gist of it. Elberton, Georgia is the granite capital of the world. An anonymous group of conservationists from outside the state commissioned the work under the pseudonym R.S. Christian, and it was erected on March 22 1980 at the highest point of Elbert County. The project involves a time capsule buried six feet underneath an explanatory tablet to the East of the guidestones and the guidestone monument itself, which is a made up of four upright granite slabs, a center column, and a captstone. The upright slabs and capstone hold 10 guiding statements for a better world, translated into multiple languages, both modern and ancient. Starting North, going clockwise, the languages are Hebrew, Sanskrit, Hindi, Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Arabic, English, Babylonian Cuneiform, Russian, Swahili, Classical Greek, And Spanish.

To be honest, I think that the ancient languages on the capstone probably say less than the modern languages on the upright stones, but I can’t read Sanskrit, Egyptian Hieroglyphys, Babylonian Cuneiform, or Classical Greek. A shame.

The message on the stones :

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
• Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
• Unite humanity with a living new language.
• Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
• Balance personal rights with social duties.
• Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
• Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

The Modern Languages

Although the sun was pretty brutal the afternoon we found the guidestones, supposedly you can see the North Star through the center column and it is in some way aligned with the solstices and equinoxes. The upright stones mark the lunar declination cycle, and the capstone is designed to always allow a beam of sunlight to somehow indicate the day of the year. To be honest, the sun was almost blinding when we were there, so we missed all of this. Because the ground is uneven, I was also only tall enough to look through the center column from one side.

The Georgia Guidestones

Leave Room For Nature

Apparently there are 2 primary camps of opinion on the stones. The first is that they are truly markers of wisdom for an age of reason. I’m not so sure we’ve reached that age. To that end, there’s a camp that believes these are the 10 commandments of the antichrist and that because it is aligned with North South East and West, with the Sun, etc that it was built for sun worshipers or satanists. Like planetariums! Very logical. As a result the stones have become a target for vandalism. You can see this in the gallery I’ve uploaded. It’s hard to tell what the graffiti said before being cleaned off, but apparently it was about the devil and a new world order.

At any rate, if you’re in the area and don’t plan to paint anything on them or take a swing at them with a sledgehammer, it’s a neat little place to visit. It’s not a big detour on a drive to Atlanta. I’m glad we went, and I’m glad that tornadoes can’t knock them over and the stones can also weather the culture of the South.

Tysabri : A picture is worth $6900!

My parents assured me that although they’ve gone to many MS events they had never been to a spectacle like this before.

Last night I trekked down to the basement of a branch of the AnMed hospital in Anderson, SC to attend an MS event my parents had alerted me to called Dialogue of Hope and Health. I can’t deny that I was hoping that the “hope” in the title of the event referred to the new oral medications soon to be available (at least in other countries) or perhaps stem cell developments. It turned out to be something between a sales pitch and damage control conducted by a local neurologist and a Tysabri sales rep.

In my opinion, it is a questionable ethical choice for a neurologist to invite his patients to a deceptively named seminar to be pitched to by a drug rep with only negative statements about alternatives and without providing a forum for the other MS DMD manufacturers to respond to allegations leveraged by the doctor and rep or to the questions posed by the attendees.

Tysabri is a relatively new drug, and I doubt my neurologist has more than a few patients on it. This neurologist does not specialize in MS but still drew what appeared to be at least 40 Medicare patients all on Tysabri out on a Wednesday night to wander around a hospital until they found the basement conference room. He said he organized the meeting (I wasn’t aware he had organized it until it had started) to eliminate some questions floating around. In other words, to get his Medicare patients to shut up about taking “medication holidays” and switching from Tysabri.

When we showed up, we were asked to fill out additional paperwork for government records. This raises another question – did taxpayer money go to fund this virtual sales pitch? It seems as though this doctor just got Tysabri to put together a thing for all his medicare patients so he could get them in a room together and tell them there is no hope on any drug other than Tysabri.

The meeting started with him saying no one can tell you what drug to take, but the message that followed was very different. Essentially, the message was that interferons and betaseron are bad and don’t work and that the new oral drugs (Cladribine and Fingolimod) kill you with cancer and infections. That marijuana has no effect on MS symptoms and that people just like to get high. We were all but promised that people don’t die from PML and that MS patients no longer have any attacks once they’re on Tysabri.

Following the doctor/patient bullying session, the sales rep came over to give me his expert medical advice. The whole event left me seething. If I decide to take the risk and go on Tysabri it isn’t going to be the result of the 3 questionable men running the show last night. PML is a scary thing and no one should be mocked for fearing it. The statistics presented last night (if you can trust them) are that only about 1/4 of people on Tysabri who develop PML will die from it, but the rest will be left with permanent disability ranging from mild to the need for life support. 1/1000 Tysabri users will develop PML and your chance of developing it increases with use.

None of our options for Disease Modifying Drugs are great. They all have drawbacks. Rebif is only supposed to reduce my relapses by 30% and no one can say what the last 18 months would have been like if I had not been on it. I have less options for neurologists than if I lived in a more metropolitan area, but I now know another doctor that has made it to my never in a million years list.

I understand that pharmaceutical companies are businesses expecting to make money. Sometimes they fail spectacularly in creating a drug and future drug prices make up for it. Sometimes they are spectacularly successful, but it is still incredibly expensive to develop the drug and prices are affected by that. Even so, when Rebif representatives call me they want to know how my health is. They don’t want me to die from liver failure just so that they can sell more Rebif.

I have nothing against Tysabri. I may even have to switch to it soon.

I have been on Rebif for over a year, but I’ve had several attacks (although I don’t think I’ve had any new lesions). According to the sales reps there, Tysabri doesn’t help prevent MS attacks following viral infections, although he was adamant that if I had an MS attack for any reason on Rebif that it’s not controlled and I should switch to Tysabri. With Rebif, sometimes the injection pain is terrible and sometimes I hardly feel it. The real issue at hand is liver function. I’m borderline and monitoring this is becoming increasingly difficult.

As of 2010 my insurance company, Cigna, has decided that blood tests ordered by a neurologist do not follow normal coverage guidelines and must come out of my deductible. Therefore, one simple blood test for liver function cost me nearly $400. I’m not sure I know anyone who is willing to spend $1600 a year on blood tests if they can avoid it. There were years in college when that’s all I spent on rent!

If my liver function deteriorates and I decide to shell out another $400 to find this out, then my options are Copaxone and Tysabri. After last night, I’m leaning toward Copaxone, daily injections and all.

Anyone ever wonder what he'd look like without that moustache?

So Russia finally announced what happened with Hitler’s remains. Apparently he died from a combination of cyanide poisoning and a self inflicted gun shot wound. The Russians buried the remains in a forest near the town of Rathenau, Germany in June of 1945. When the Soviets decided to give up the garrison there in 1970 they disinterred the remains, burned them, and threw them in a river under direct orders from Yuri Andropov, the then Chief of the KGB.

I have to admit I am kind of surprised how right we got his demise having never been explicitly told what happened. I guess there goes any chance of a zombie Hitler or someone finding the Führer enjoying the remaining years of his retirement in a nice assisted living community in South America. If he had managed to stay alive he would be 120 by now and in the running for the oldest living person.

It’s amazing to hear that they just burned the remains of Hitler, Braun, Goebbels and his family and tossed them out but I can see how they might believe it would prevent their graves from becoming a kind of facist mecca.

I’d debate how successful they were as Nazi Germany continues to be, for most people, one of the most fascinating pieces of modern history. As somewhat of a WWII history buff myself I think it’s interesting to find out what finally happened to the remains of the most rotten core of Nazi Germany. “als Partisanen auszurotten,” indeed!