Rupert Murdoch Steps Down From Fox Corporation and News Corp. Management

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

Ninety-two-year-old Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch is turning over control of Fox Corporation and News Corp. to his son Lachlan, age 52, bringing an end to his domination of conservative media in the United States and around the world. Fox Corporation is known, of course, for the Fox News talk show cable network, and News Corp.’s best known US properties are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Last week, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a career retrospective on Murdoch’s legacy. Wemple writes that while Murdoch’s work with the WSJ, the NY Post (founded in part by Alexander Hamilton!), and the 20th Century Fox movie studios was significant, it was his development of the popular Fox News cable network that was transformative to American media. Wemple writes:

At the network’s launch in 1996, Murdoch placed Republican operative and television producer Roger Ailes in charge of turning Fox News into the country’s No. 1 cable news operation. Ailes eventually succeeded, on the back of distorted and often false programming that vilified liberals and served as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party — essentially a glossy, televised version of a right-wing tabloid. Ailes lasted until 2016, when a lawsuit filed by onetime Fox News host Gretchen Carlson helped expose a wide-ranging sexual harassment scandal….

Yet subsequent events demonstrated that the Fox News programming formula — Republican propaganda and high ratings — was more durable than its architects. Minus Ailes, Fox News continued its path toward reckless and biased reporting, a strain personified by now-former host Tucker Carlson. For more than six years of prime-time broadcasting, Carlson served as disinformer in chief at Fox News, a run that enjoyed the support of Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, the other top executive at Fox Corp. and News Corp.

According to the Washington Post, there is off-the-record talk that the Fox Corporation may get sold under the new leadership. Back in 2017, Fox sold off its 20th Century Fox movie studios to Disney, where it is now sadly known as 20th Century Studios.

Looking back, 2023 has been a rough year for Fox News.

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Everyone’s Gone to the Movies – The Year Sequels Didn’t Rule

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

It is almost fall, but it still seems like the summer movie season has a little time yet to go before we jump into the doldrums that lie in between the blockbusters and the late-fall/early-winter Oscar bait. Oh, wait a minute, perhaps there is no difference between the two, because this year Barbenheimer were two of the biggest summer films and are also the two top contenders for Oscars.

For the first time since 2001, the top three box office performances all came from first-time films that are not sequels to previous hits. Number one is, of course, the phenomenon that has been Barbie. As of today (Sept. 20, 2023), Barbie has brought in $626 million domestically and $791 million internationally for a worldwide total of $1.418 billion. That also puts Barbie at #11 on the lifetime domestic gross list, just behind 2015’s Jurassic World.

Number two is the animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie which has brought in $574 million domestic and $787 million international, for a worldwide total of $1.362 billion. That places it at #15 on the all-time domestic box office list (not adjusted for inflation), falling in-between Incredibles 2 and the 2019 Lion King remake. (I refuse to call it the live-action remake as it isn’t – it’s just a photo-realistic animated remake…)

To me, the unexpected hit of of the summer was Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer which was the Number Three movie for the year with a domestic take of $319 million and an international take of $593 million, for a global total of $913 million.

As  Dune director Denis Villeneuve put it in an interview with Variety, this success was a huge surprise because, “It’s a three-hour movie about people talking about nuclear physics.”

Villeneuve went on to talk about how Oppenheimer also helped remind people why they go to theaters to see movies: “There’s this notion that movies, in some people’s minds, became content instead of an art form. I hate that word ‘content….’ That movies like Oppenheimer are released on the big screen and become an event brings back the spotlight on the idea that it’s a tremendous art form that needs to be experienced in theaters.”

One of the reasons Oppenheimer did so well is the it brought in more than $179 million from large-format IMAX screenings. (I did not get to see it on an IMAX screen, but I did get to see it on a premium-quality theater with a giant screen and sound system.)

Domestically, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 out-performed Oppenheimer, but they did not have near the same international interest.

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Remembering A Motorcycle Ride to the United 93 9/11 Memorial on a Rainy Summer Day

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

It was 22 years ago this morning that I was teaching my freshman media literacy course at West Virginia University.  I had a class with close to 350 students in it. C-SPAN’s Washington Journal morning show was playing on the big screen as students gathered.  At 8:30 a.m. I shut off C-SPAN and started teaching.  When I got back to my office an hour-and-a-half later, news that our world was changing was in the process of breaking.

9/11 has always been highly personal to me.

One of my (and my Dear Wife’s) student’s father was supposed to be working in the section of the Pentagon that was hit by one of the planes. But since that area was under renovation, his dad ended up safe.

Another one of my students had a mother who was a flight attendant who flew out of the same airport the Twin Tower planes had departed from.  She was desperate for news. Fortunately, her mother was not on one of the attack planes.

One of my friends was the public radio correspondent for the area, and he ended up providing much of NPR’s coverage of the United 93 crash in Shanksville, PA.

And one one of my colleagues, who taught advertising, lost an old friend in the Twin Towers collapse.

The memory I’m sharing today is a brief story story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.

Me and my old KLRTook a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.

Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)

Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.

Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.

Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.

The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.

A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)

It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.

The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.

The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.

It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.

I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.

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Riding Up North – Wheels on Walls Part 5

Posted on August 30, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

This is the fifth post in a series of images from my travels for the  Wheels on Walls motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored  by Team Strange Airheads. For it, I need to collect photos of my motorcycle and rally flag taken in front of outdoor murals. The primary goal is to get photos of murals featuring wheeled vehicles. I can also collect up to ten that don’t feature wheels in them.  The winner of this year’s grand tour will get a lovely plaque and bragging rights for the year, and everyone who finishes will get an enameled pin. 

Last week I rode up north to the Twin Cities to see my dad and siblings as well as go to the Minnesota State Fair. A wiser person than I would have taken a vehicle with air conditioning, given that the high for the day was slated to be close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But I was not smart. I took my motorcycle and managed to survive: I drank a lot of water and Propel from my Camelbak, and managed to collect another four Wheels on Walls murals on the round trip.

My frequent riding partner Mike went with me for half the day last Wednesday. Given the forecast, we headed out at 6:30 a.m. with a stop at Central City, NE’s Waffles and More cafe for breakfast. It was there I discovered my insulin pump had decided it didn’t want to talk to my continuous glucose monitor (CGM) via Bluetooth anymore, so I had make a call to pump support services to get things up and running again. From there it was on to Clarks, NE. Clarks is a town of just a few hundred people, but still has two murals and Clarks Trikes & Bikes – a Gold Wing and trike-conversion shop.

August 22 – Clarks, Nebraska. Mural with map of Nebraska and a roadster.

August 22 – Clarks, Nebraska, mural 2. This one is a traditional pioneer scene with an ox-driven covered wagon.

The ride home on Saturday was much nicer. The weather had changed to be almost 40 degrees cooler. I had planned for the Clarks murals, and I had been looking for another one on the way north that I didn’t find; but coming home I found several grayscale murals in Le Mars, Iowa portraying first responder and military scenes. Le Mars was also where I stopped for lunch each way.

August 26 – Le Mars, Iowa. The first of several grayscale murals in town that I discovered on the way home when I had to take a detour into the central part of downtown.

August 26 – Le Mars, Iowa. This one, featuring the War on Terror, was somewhat hidden down an alley. There were also several small panels on nearby buildings, but since I can only have two murals per town, I haven’t included them. This one was somber, featuring a funeral scene, airplanes and helicopters. 

I mentioned up above that I went to the Minnesota State Fair while I was in the Twin Cities. While there with my older brother, I got to see my old college friend Jane McClure at the Hamline Church Food Hall where they were serving the wonderful Holey Hamloaf Breakfast Sandwich. I also got to meet up with my motorcycling buddy and dear friend Bishop Matt Riegel, who was in town delivering home goods to his daughter, who now lives in the area.

Always fun to see the great local journalist Jane McClure at the Minnesota State Fair.

Myself (in my Team Strange tee shirt!), my brother, Bruce, and Bishop Matt. Matt felt compelled to the try the crispy lutefisk steamed lotus bun at the fair. My brother and I did not…

You can view all of my Wheels on Walls Grand Tour posts here.

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‘Great 78 Project’ Works to Preserve Vintage Recordings; Big Music is not Amused

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” – John Keats:

If record companies had their way, there would be a lot of really sweet music out there. Let me explain.

The music streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and Amazon Prime all have deep libraries of recordings, but the emphasis always seems to be on what is popular and new. After all, their job is to get people to pay for access to music, and most of what people want access to is new.

Motorized gramophone Mounted on card.- Originally housed in Joseph Sanders Collection Box 5. From Library of Congress

Motorized gramophone photo from Library of Congress.

But there is a lot of music that predates streaming, predates, MP3s, predates compact discs, predates cassettes, predates 8-tracks, predates vinyl LPs, even predates 45-RPM singles. These are the recordings that were issued on the original commercial music format – the 78-RPM shellac disk.

The format was developed by young German immigrant Emile Berliner who arrived in the United States in 1870 at age 19. He wanted to create a recording format that would record sound on flat discs rather than Edison’s cylinders. And he wanted a format where you could make multiple copies of a recording so that people could buy copies of it and listen to it again and again.He called the player for these disks a gramophone, and for decades they were the way to listen to music at home.

So there was a huge amount of music recorded in this format. Unfortunately, it’s way too hard to access this music today. First of all, these discs are fragile and prone to taking damage to the sound on them with lots of clicks and pops. Second, few people have the equipment that will let them play these disks. And, finally, these discs are rapidly disappearing, and when the last copy of a particular recording disappears, it is gone forever.

Which is why The Great 78 Project is working at digitizing millions of sides of 78-RPM discs. While the most commercially attractive of these recordings have been remastered, cleaned up, and put on LPs or CDs, there are huge collections of these recordings that are orphaned and would eventually disappear if people such as the Internet Archive were not working at actively saving them. The recordings in the Great 78 Project are straight digitizations that are not cleaned up or modernized. They sound just like they would if you played the disc on a gramophone.

So it would seem that a project like this is nothing but good, right? Preserving the history of recorded music. Maybe the recording companies would even want to help support this kind of work financially? That would be a big NO.

According to a post in the Internet Archive Blogs by Chris Freeland, record labels including Sony and Universal Music Groups have filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for copyright violation.

While the following is likely not legally relevant, it is important to note that this is a non-profit project to preserve recordings and make them freely available for everyone. These digitizations can be used for teaching, research, and entertainment.

Interested in listening to these recordings while they are still available? Click the image below to hear a sampling of the many recordings in this archive.

Just a sampling of the hundreds of thousands of vintage 78-RPM recordings available at the Great 78 Project.

 

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The Lessons of Barbenheimer Shake Up Movie Industry

Posted on August 8, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

The standard narrative this summer is that audiences are tired of going to theaters for movies and would rather just stay home to watch streaming. Audiences stayed home in droves from one more Indiana Jones flick and didn’t show Mission Impossible the love analysts were expecting.

Audiences clearly are tired of franchise movies that have revisited the well too many times.

Conservative critics tell us movies are failing because they are “too woke,” whatever that means.

And yet…

Disney/Pixar’s Elemental was written off as one more Disney failure after having a $29 million opening weekend. But seven weeks into release, it’s brought in $148 million in domestic box office and a total of $424 million globally. Normally a big movie will fall off 50% or 60% after the first weekend, but Elemental held in surprisingly strong with declines in the 30s or even the teens some weeks. Families with kids found their way to the animated feature for weeks after release. It’s not a huge Disney hit, but certainly no disaster.

And then Barbenheimer weekend came along and surprised everyone.

Barbenheimer, as you no doubt know, is a portmanteau combination of the titles of the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer that both released on July 21. Now “everyone knows” that studios try to stagger release of big movies so that they don’t have to compete for audiences.

But these two highly anticipated movies went ahead with the same date – perhaps thinking that there was little overlap between a three-hour-long WW II biopic from director Christopher Nolan and a fashion doll-based fantasy from director Greta Gerwig.

But then something odd happened.  Gerwig and Barbie star Margo Robbie showed off on social media that they had opening day tickets to Oppenheimer.  And MI’s Tom Cruise proclaimed he was going to both. Going to a Barbenheimer double feature became the chic thing to do. But with the two movies having a combined run time of close to six hours with trailers, that’s a pretty big commitment.

Now the last time I did an insane double feature was in the summer 1989 when I went to the Cinerama to see the 70mm re-release of Lawerence of Arabia in the afternoon and to a regular theater to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the evening. Nearly six hours of movie in one day – one an epic, one a popcorn muncher. Lots of fun, but would have been better spread out over a couple of days.

Nevertheless, I made it to Oppenheimer with a friend at a big screen theater on opening weekend and to Barbie the next week with my Dear Wife. Both movies were wonderful, and the two movies were very, very different. But what did they have in common? They both benefited from being seen in a theater with an engaged audience.

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were expected to do well, but no-one (except maybe Gerwig herself) expected either movie to be as successful as they have been.

Barbie  ended up taking first place in the box office, earning $162 million on its opening weekend, the best North American opening for a movie solo-directed by a woman. And Oppenheimer brought in $82 million, Nolan’s best opening for a non-Batman movie. Barbie unquestionably had the bigger opening, but it’s worth noting that Oppenheimer runs three hours plus trailers and so has fewer showings per day. It also is a dark, serious, R-rated WW II bio pic about the creator of the atomic bomb. Not exactly summer popcorn fare.

Now, three weeks following release, Barbie is still number-one at the box office, having brought in $459 million in North America and more than $1 billion globally. Oppenheimer has dropped to third place but still brought in $28.7 million for a domestic total of $228 million. On a budget of about $100 million, Oppenheimer has done an excellent $500 million globally.

So what does all this mean? It’s hard to read too much into this other than that in the summertime people love to go to the movies when there’s something new and interesting to go see!

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Riding The Storm Out – Wheels on Walls Part 4

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

This is the fourth post in a series of images from my travels for the  Wheels on Walls motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored  by Team Strange Airheads. For it, I need to collect photos of my motorcycle and rally flag taken in front of outdoor murals. The primary goal is to get photos of murals featuring wheeled vehicles. I can also collect up to ten that don’t feature wheels in them.  The winner of this year’s grand tour will get a lovely plaque and bragging rights for the year, and everyone who finishes will get an enameled pin. 

I was scheduled to meet my friend Mike at his house at 7 this morning so we could get out on the road early before the brutal heat that’s been plaguing us could get into full swing for the day. (Yesterday’s high, out here on the prairie was at least 101 degrees Fahrenheit.) But I woke up at 5:45 a.m. to hear the sounds of heavy rain, thunder, and high winds – a major storm that had not been in the forecast when I went to bed last night. Clearly we were not going to be getting an early start.

We ended up going to breakfast here in town and hit the road a little after 9.  There were still some moderate winds, and rainclouds that had passed us off to the east, but overall it seemed like a pretty good day to go collect murals north of Kearney.

Given the late start, we skipped heading northwest to all the way to Anselmo, NE and instead went north to the tiny burg of Arcadia. Although this town has fewer than 400 residents, it has several thriving businesses and at least three nice murals featuring wheels. Since I’m only allowed two murals per town, the mural of a service station with car tires out front had to get skipped.

July 29 – This agricultural-themed mural is largely hidden by the Arcadia, NE Post office.

July 29 – Arcadia also has one of the seemingly ominipresent city name and scene murals. This one was particularly nice, featuring a historical look at downtown Arcadia, including a little boy and his dog in the middle of the street. (Thanks to Mike for the photo.)

July 29 – Is this town named “Howard City” or “Boelus” Nebraska? Both the mural and Wikipedia assign both names to the town, while Google Maps labels it as Boelus, but will find it if you search for Howard City. Why? It’s a mystery!

July 29 – Cairo, Nebraska is pronounced “Care-Oh” but it clearly is referencing the city in Egypt – elsewhere in town there is a sign featuring a camel.

Wood River, Nebraska was our last stop today on our way home, following the Lincoln Highway. Unlike most of the murals I’ve collected on this grand tour/scavenger hunt, which are located at street level, this one was up high above a roof covering a restaurant’s porch. The featured vehicle for this mural is an older woman in a wheelchair, who can be a bit hard to pick out from a distance. But believe me – she’s there!

July 29 – This is the mural above a covered porch in Wood River, Nebraska. If you look carefully, you can see the older woman in a wheelchair.

Here is the detailed image that makes the woman in the wheelchair easier to see.

You can view all of my Wheels on Walls Grand Tour posts here.

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Riding with Strangers – Wheels on Walls Part 3

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

Wheels on Walls Grand TourThis is the third post in a series of images from my travels for the  Wheels on Walls motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored  by Team Strange Airheads. For it, I need to collect photos of my motorcycle and rally flag taken in front of outdoor murals. The primary goal is to get photos of murals featuring wheeled vehicles. I can also collect up to ten that don’t feature wheels in them. Finally, there are several “special” locations around the world. The winner of this year’s grand tour will get a lovely plaque and bragging rights for the year, and everyone who finishes will get an enameled pin. 

On this ride, my friend Mike and I rode an area south of I-80s between Kearney, NE and York, NE.

July 15 – Mural on a small store in Minden, NE. It wasn’t the mural I thought I was looking for. Possibly it was painted over the old one, or perhaps there is still another to be found.

There were two murals in Hastings, NE – one from 2013 featuring the people in town on a community building, the second from an older section of town celebrating the area’s German heritage.

July 15 – This mural was painted by members of Hastings community as a part of the Mid-America Mural Project. Click on the photo for more information about this project. Notice the silhouette  of the steam locomotive in it.

July 15 – This is the “Guten Tag” mural from the south side of Hastings on the side of an old store. Notice the horse cart in the middle of the street.

If you need a hearty breakfast while traveling through Hastings, I would suggest a visit to the Goldenrod Cafe. Mike and I enjoyed our meal. Be advised – You will need to bring cash as they don’t take plastic. Mike talked to a couple of gentlemen at another table who were able to point us to the Guten Tag mural’s location.

Fairmont was one of several places we stopped where we only knew of one mural in advance, but quickly found several others. Given that I’m only allowed to use two per town, that’s all I included here. But public art seems to spread through these small towns once it gets started.

July 15 – This mural of a covered wagon and an older car was the one I was looking for in Fairmont.

July 15 – This one of the WW II bomber was the bonus mural we found nearby in Fairmont.

Exeter was another town with multiple murals.

July 15 – This older mural on the side of the Exeter, NE fire department was a little worse for wear around the edges, but was still a great bit of public art.

July 15 – This was a patriotic mural honoring veterans in Exeter. Love the airwoman in the upper right who reminds me of the badass dropship pilot out of the movie “Aliens.”

The three final murals from this Saturday ride through south-central Nebraska were all community-themed ones with the name of the town featured prominently.

July 15 – On the side of a downtown building in Shickley, NE.

July 15 – This mural from Carleton features the omnipresent steam engine, but also an image of the dry-lands crop milo/sorghum, raised as animal feed. Click on the photo for more information on this alternative grain.

July 15 – We closed out our mural hunting for the day with this one from Davenport, NE featuring a combine and other farm equipment. We also had an excellent lunch at RW’s Dining and Drinks in downtown Davenport. Click on the photo for more about this bar and grill. (And if you are out motorcycling, they serve an ice-cold Busch non-alcoholic beer that did a good job of dealing with the hot weather we had been riding through all day.)

You can view all of my Wheels on Walls Grand Tour posts here.

 

 

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The Highs and Lows of Living with Diabetes

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

I have been living with Type II diabetes since 2001, and it affects almost every aspect of my life. Like many diabetics, I really can’t go more than a couple of hours without having to actively think about it. I’ve written about diabetes both in popular culture and in my own life several times here over the years. Back in 2011 I wrote a guest essay for Kerri Sparling’s diabetes blog “Six Until Me.” The blog archives are no longer up, but I  highly recommend every diabetic buy the book that collects her posts in a printed volume. 

Since it’s no longer online anyplace else, I’m reposting what I wrote about having a horrible high blood sugar incident 12 years ago after eating Thai noodles for dinner. 

I’ve always been more afraid of low blood sugars than highs.

But then again I’d never been through a really bad high before.

Killer lows, those where you drop into the 50s, the 40s, the 30s… the kind that leave you twitching, bathed in sweat and incoherent… are the quintessential diabetic horror story.

But highs, serious highs, can be brutal in their own, more subtle ways.

It all started with Thai noodles.

I know better than to have something like Pad Thai or Phad See U or Drunken Noodles for dinner.  I know I’m going to be bumping against 300 or so all evening if I do this.  Lunch with an afternoon to work it off?  Maybe.  Dinner? No… just no.

But I’d been running low all afternoon.  And everyone else in the house was talking about Thai, and my thoughts never went far beyond “Yum.”  I wanted noodles.

When I got home with the food, I checked my blood, and the meter showed I was up in the 200s.  How’d that happen? (For you non-diabetics in the audience, you want to be somewhere around 100.  Anything lower than 80 or higher than 200 is not a good thing.)  So I dish up about half a container of noodles, pop a metformin,  and take a big dose of insulin from the pump to compensate for the high starting blood sugar and the honkin’ serving of carbs.

After dinner, I went to work at my computer.  But I soon had all the symptoms of a high creeping up on me.  My mouth was dry, I was really thirsty, I was getting irritable, and I really, really had to pee — the whole constellation of symptoms you live with before you’re diagnosed.

I took my blood, and the meter showed 395.  This was not good.

I took a big bolus of insulin and went out for a 20 minute walk to help bring it down.  When I got home, I had to pee again.

Bad.

I took another reading.  Crap.  My blood sugar was up to 422.  I can’t remember the last time it got that high.

I took some more insulin and sat down to try to work.  Half an hour passes;  I have to go to the bathroom again, and the meter shows I’m now up to 480.  This is getting scary.  I don’t remember being this high before.  I bolus more insulin.  And that makes me nervous about how much insulin I’m taking.  It’s been 12 units in the last hour. I don’t want to rage bolus my way into a serious low.

Another 20 minutes pass, and I’m feeling really bad.  Nothing as specific as a low.  Just bad.  The thirst is terrible.  I simply can’t drink enough.  I check again, and my blood is up to 565.  I’ve know I’ve never seen a reading like that before.

As a symptom of the high, I’m starting to get angry.

I didn’t do anything that bad.  I had half an order of drunken noodles.  They were spicy, not sweet.  Why is this happening?  This isn’t fair….

If I can’t get that meter to head down, I’m going to have to go the ER.  In addition to being expensive, it will upset the kid, my wife, and my mother-in-law — everyone in the house who worries about me.

I don’t take any more insulin, but I get on the exercise bike for 45 minutes.  But halfway through I have to stop to pee one more time.

When I’m done, I test my blood again.

I’ve never been so happy to see 460 on a meter before. What’s more, my pump says it’s safe to take another several units of insulin.

The trend over the next hour or so continues down, but the work I was intending to do is a complete loss.  I can’t focus, I’m exhausted, and I feel lousy.  I give up and go to bed, knowing that sometime during the night I’ll pay the price for all the insulin and have a low.

Which I do.

Lows are scary because you’re on the ragged edge of passing out, but the treatment is easy as long as you have juice, or glucose, or Cap’n Crunch around.   The worst that will happen if you over-treat the low is that  you’ll end up pushing 300.

But a high that won’t come down is dangerous on its own, but it can also prod you into taking more and more insulin to the point that you could take yourself down into dangerously low territory.  And I must confess I don’t really understand the dangers of venturing into the 600s, though I know they’re bad.

What really scares me is I don’t really know what triggered this high.  I mean, I know I had a bad dinner, but it wasn’t the worst I’ve eaten as a diabetic. What combination of factors made my blood sugar soar this time?

I was angry and railing about the unfairness of it all when I went high.  I know the anger is a symptom of a high because my wife still talks about how angry I was all the time before I was diagnosed 10 years ago. (Editor’s Note: Now more than 20 years ago.)  I’ve long ago quit worrying about fairness.  The world isn’t fair, and I have a pretty good life.  But I’m not going to have Thai noodles again anytime soon.  Fair or not.

Update: Twelve years later and I have never eaten rice noodles again. In popular culture, people always make a big deal out of the fact that diabetics should not eat sugar. Fair enough. But that doesn’t begin to tell the story. Your body eventually turns every carbohydrate you eat into sugar, so the real villain diabetics have to control is the amount of carbs they eat. Too few and you get low blood sugar. Too many and it goes high. I have a friend who has been recently diagnosed with diabetes, and a conversations  with him over the last few weeks prompted me to track down a copy of this essay.

If you are interested in the history of the treatment of diabetes, I wrote an essay for World Diabetes Day back in 2019 telling the story of three diabetics and their relationship with insulin.

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Riding With Strangers – Wheels on Walls Part 2

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Ralph Hanson

Wheels on Walls Grand TourFor the last ten years or so, I’ve competed in a large-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored annually by Team Strange Airheads. This year’s event is called “Wheels on Walls Grand Tour.”  For it, I need to collect photos of my motorcycle and rally flag taken in front of outdoor murals. The primary goal is to get photos of murals featuring wheeled vehicles. I can also collect up to ten that don’t feature wheels in them. Finally, there are several “special” locations around the world. The winner of this year’s grand tour will get a lovely plaque and bragging rights for the year, and everyone who finishes will get an enameled pin. 

This post will cover some murals I collected close to home

South of the tracks - Kearney Junction

June 8th – A classic historic image mural south of the railroad tracks in Kearney. Seems like most of the wheels I have in these murals are from trains.

June 8th – The Lincoln Highway (US 30) runs through the middle of Kearney and is a part of our local culture. I love how it takes the perspective of looking through a convertible’s windshield.

June 9th – Another of the historic image murals in central Nebraska – this one from the small town of Ravena to the north and east of Kearney.

July 5th – I would love to know the story behind these frontier Nebraska scenes with the town name and year of founding arched across the top. This one is in Pleasanton, straight north of Kearney.

July 5th – Despite it being the Fifth of July in central Nebraska, I was actually cold while out riding this morning to Sumner, to the north and west of Kearney.

You can view all of my Wheels on Walls Grand Tour posts here.

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