The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

In an earlier post, I wrote about Andrew McCallum’s accident and being in the hospital in serious condition. There were some good signs yesterday afternoon, as reported by his brother David:

Holy crap. According to the nurses, this morning, Andrew gave a squeeze and a thumbs up on command. Holy crap!

Andrew is apparently no longer in a regular coma (whatever “regular” is), but during this brief bout of consciousness he was struggling against the respirator and working himself up into a tizzy, and tizzies are bad for him at this stage. The staff sedated him and he’s now in an induced coma to allow him to rest and heal. I think he is in a lot of pain. I can only imagine what it must feel like to be inside his head right now.

Thank you very much to those who dropped CDs off. It turns out that he now needs low stimulation, but you can bet I’ll be playing those CDs when he’s ready for it.

Thumbs up!

Here’s a message from Andrew’s father:

Saturday, Andrew was in the deepest coma. Today he is not. He has been put into a drug-induced coma to give him rest, because when he isn’t resting he is fighting all the tubes in him. This is a good sign, like the thumbs up he gave the nurse on command this morning.

He is not out of the woods by any means. He needs you to continue whatever it is that you are doing that is washing him in healing light and energy.

Andrew’s friends are beyond amazing. We read your messages to him and they sustain us all. The nursing staff in ICU stop by to listen to your poems, your prayers, your mantras, your chants, news of your prayer circles. One said yesterday, “Andrew must be truly wonderful to have so many people love him so passionately.” The medical staff have been excellent and are to all patients, but I think that hearing your messages makes them go that extra yard for Andrew.

One call I received today told us about a dream this person had of Andrew touching his nose, toes and ears on command and of a floating, glowing golden balloon.

Keep it up. The love of Andrew’s community is powerful and growing and demonstrates a love for each other, a caring supportive community in a world about which we are tempted to be jaded. You prove the power of love.

A very old and dear Iraqi friend of mine called me from England saying that he and his daughter had just arrived back from Dubai in the past couple of days. On the flight back from Dubai, unaware that we were going through this ordeal, his daughter asked him, when were they going to visit the McCallums in Canada. She had met David and Jonathan but never Andrew. His observation about her premonition: “the heart knows, before the mind.”

What your hearts know about Andrew seems to be coming to pass. Make it so.

Get well soon, Andrew.

Here’s an anti-drinking-and-driving poster from Mumbai — you should view it at full size to get the full effect:

Click the photo to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Ben Stein has had an interesting career so far: law professor, economics writer, Nixon speechwriter, Nixon apologist, television show host and movie actor (you might recall his famous scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which he talks about “voodoo economics” and the Laffer curve, boring his class to sleep), and it’s going to remain interesting — if dead wrong — for some time, thanks to the upcoming release of the “documentary” in which he appears: Expelled, a film that claims that “Big Science” is squelching the theory that he feels is correct: that of Intelligent Design. The movie goes to some incredible lengths to discredit “Darwinism” (the code word that ID proponents use for the theory of evolution), right up to blaming evolution for things like the Holocaust and Planned Parenthood. Its release date is April 18th, the date on which Charles Darwin (the central figure in the movie’s demonology) died.

Here’s the extended trailer (7 minutes and 36 seconds) for Expelled:

And here’s the short version:

There’s an article in Scientific American on Expelled that’s worth reading: Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed. It does a pretty good job of explaining the bunk in the film, most notably the bit about the theory of evolution leading to the Holocaust:

The most deplorable dishonesty of Expelled, however, is that it says evolution was one influence on the Holocaust without acknowledging any of the other major ones for context. Rankings of races and ethnic groups into a hierarchy long preceded Darwin and the theory of evolution, and were usually tied to the Christian philosophical notion of a “great chain of being.” The economic ruin of the Weimar Republic left many Germans itching to find someone to blame for their misfortune, and the Jews and other ethnic groups were convenient scapegoats. The roots of European anti-Semitism go back to the end of the Roman Empire. Organized attacks and local exterminations of the Jews were perpetrated during the Crusades and the Black Plague. The Russian empire committed many attacks on the Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the word “pogrom.” Profound anti-Semitism even pollutes the works of the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who reviled them in On the Jews and Their Lies and wrote, “We are at fault in not slaying them.” I don’t think Protestantism is accountable for the Holocaust, either, but whose ideas were most Lutheran Germans of the 1930s more familiar with: Darwin’s or Luther’s?

I’ll watch the film once it’s leaked onto BitTorrent; I’d rather not encourage Stein and company by giving them any money.

On that note, I’ll leave you with this still from Family Guy:

I’ve been asked a number of questions in response to the previous post, CPAP (or: Snorkeling While I Sleep), both via the comments and email. I’ll answer them over a few posts.

Mike asked this question:

I sleep on my side, and usually turn to the other side at least once during the night.

I may need a similar device, and one thing that concerns me is will I still be able to do that? That is, is the hose long and flexible enough to sleep on your side, facing the inside of the bed?

I thought I’d help mike out by taking a photograph of how I’ve got the CPAP machine set up in my room, with the hose reaching over the pillow to show its reach. Keep in mind that the pillow in the photo is a king-size pillow (in accordance with my rock and roll lifestyle, we have a king-size bed):

If you sleep on your side (I prefer to sleep on my right side, and I sleep on the right side of the bed), you need to find a mask that will accommodate that position. The one I have flexes a little; it also allows the hose to be positioned at any angle.