Last year, I got a ton of electric blankets to help out with the joint swelling and pain and I used them all year. (Yes, even in the summer.) So much so that the single-sized electric blanket I got (I got a whole variety of them) seems to have burned out from overuse. So that’s something, for those pondering choices.
In the non-electric variety, I’ve gotten more and more into lightweight “throws” that can be layered on. This is sort of an expensive one, but it’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
I get 28 days of pills at a go. I cannot fill my prescription until I’m out. It takes 24-72 hours to refill my prescription, since my doctors have to be consulted every month about this.
In the meantime, I have a softball lodged under my left kneecap and my tongue is turning into a pot roast left too long in the oven.
Former Daily Press Editor in Chief Don Ray has a five-part series about homelessness in the High Desert online that are, I think, reprints from the Daily Press.
A more modern take on the same subject was offered earlier this month by the DP’s Tatiana Prophet.
If you’re thinking that I found these in Google while doing some research for a story for the Hesperia Star next week, you’d be right.
Well, Microsoft has done it: By caving into the music industry’s insistence that people only want MP3 players to listen to stolen music (and somehow ignoring that iTunes is a top 10 music retailer now) and paying a “pirate tax” to the music industry on all 10 or 11 Zune units they’re going to sell this holiday season, it’s apparently opened the door for Universal Music to go after Apple:
Universal, the world’s largest music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, was the first major record label to strike an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to receive a fee for every Zune digital media player sold.
“It would be a nice idea. We have a negotiation coming up not too far. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do that… but maybe not in the same way,” he told the Reuters Media Summit, when asked if Universal would negotiate a royalty fee for the iPod that would be similar to Microsoft’s Zune.
This is the same level of thinking that brought us the motion picture agency shrieking that the VCR would be the end of the movie industry. Old guys who don’t use modern technology should not be in charge of information industry companies. (And yes, that includes newspapers. Incidentally, Stephan Wingert, the publisher at the Daily Press, once told me he owns one of every model of the iPod. Neither old nor technology-averse.)
VCRs ended up being a huge boon for the movie industry, as were DVDs, which were supposed to kill the movie industry due to their “perfect” image quality. Instead of fighting MP3s, the music industry needs to be figuring out their own counterpart to the movie rental industry that will give them a fat new revenue stream.
