As we close out another season of the Green Pill Secret, we wanted to go out with some hope of a greater future. Yesterday, I got a call from an employer who wanted to offer me a job in San Antonio, and while the pay would be less, so would the cost of living, and when I quitted my last job I celebrate change. And after being scammed, I’m kind of itching to get out of the DMV and all its lack of romantic opportunities.
All that said, I got a letter from the FAA extending my license through 2025 and I’m sure as heck going to continue my studies when I get down there!
The thing about life is, sometimes it gives you lemons and you’re allergic to lemonade. For instance, although the date on this post is the right date, I am only able to write it 48 hours later, which allows me to tell you not just about the frightful topic but also why my telling you about it has been so hard.
First and foremost as viewers of the podcast will know, my dear friend and co-host Cat will be going under the knife to hopefully resolve their neck issues this Thursday and I for one am concerned for my friend and their overall recovery. However, I am confident that they will at some point be returning to the show but most of all I am hopeful for my friend’s swift recovery.
That said, I wasn’t able to secure an alternate co-host for my Romance Scams discussion. I had a wonderful discussion with one of my neighbors who talked a lot about fake male profiles, typically in their twenties, and in uniform, running the typical romance scam. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to schedule a time when she could appear so I did this one, and likely the next one and the last December episode solo. But, I do have something special planned for the Winter Solstice!
Meanwhile, on the job front, my next employment seems to be further delayed and I might not be working until after Christmas. As usual, I refuse to look at as a setback but rather I see it as a wonderful Christmas gift as I head into 2025.
I’ve also been flying recently but my instruction has been forestalled because my fundamentals are still quite rusty. So, while I’m still unemployed, I’m focusing my day-to-day work in studying the PHAK and AFH. I found a great channel on YouTube by Philip J Murphy. The recitations are a little dry, but I find the contents quite educational. I personally think my instructor is a little annoyed with me being so rusty, so I hope the next time I’m able to schedule a flight, I’m able to show great progress. Hopefully, I’ll finish before my FAA license expires on 31 December. I have submitted an extension to the FAA, but I don’t expect the new license to be issued before mid February.
But, the big thing I am most thankful for is that I’ve reconnected with my brother. For the last year, my brother has eschewed my contact, and ghosted me because he went off his meds. His Breton, now ex-wife reached out when he was at his darkest and fortunately we were all able to convince him to get the help he needed, since he filed a medical directive to prevent anyone from helping him save himself.
Now, he has the right meds, is stable with his work, and able to live in his now empty house. He reached out just after Thanksgiving and we made hummus together thanks to his home-made recipe. It was delicious. After we ate and caught up, he made me a custom batch with extra garlic. Yum!
Suffice it to say, I’ve been busy. But, I was able to record an episode in time, right before my semi-annual toastmasters training. I missed the last day of the Reston Farmers’ Market Market and my weekly workout but I had the episode recorded and submitted to YouTube with an hour to spare, at 07:30 on Wednesday. Finally, I clicked to schedule it, and set the schedule for 08:30, which is the time we normally would have released this episode. Only, I got the day wrong as it was supposed to be 7 December, not 8 December! D’oh!
So, I submitted the episode, went to the Toastmasters training, met a beautiful friend from the last Toastmasters social event I was at, hurt my arm, and then rushed home.
Unfortunately, there was no time to check on the episode because my poorly-fitting Airpods fell in my iced tea while I was smiling and eating during my Maryland Science Book Club meeting last Wednesday.
When I went to the apple store to complain, they said just buy a new set of headphones. I tried on a different set but let me just say apple earphones are the worst designed earphones ever built! Sure, the ATMOS sound is cool, but what good is an earphone if it can’t even stay in your ear when you have the temerity to even smile! I mean, isn’t apple just making their 1984 Commercial a reality? Apple is making you constantly frown while you listen to their airpods while a real, professional earphone maker, like Shure, is in skimpy shorts and tossing something and Tim Cook droning on and on and preventing you from even smiling. Touché, apple. I see you!
The point being, my new earphones were scheduled for arrival on Saturday and I spend the time after the training working with the concierge for the missing package to no avail. Since my Denon AV Receiver broke after a power cut just before Thanksgiving and I knew I could replace it with a Black Friday discount. The unit arrived and I lugged it all the way up the 16 flights of stairs because I need to be fitter if I want to attract women. However, I wanted to test the audio out of the old receiver to confirm it was the receiver and not the speakers. Since the Shure earphones are optionally wired, I was able to confirm the receiver was dead and I bought a label maker to perform the rewiring.
I will say the climbing of 16 flight, or 40 flight if I move to the apartment across the street, even if they made the most awesome flat a three-bedroom well outside of my budget. I still need to figure out if I want West-only or South-East exposure and my dilly-dallying is my way of saying I’m willing to forsake either while I consider my job situation.
Okay, I seem to have lost my train of thought again. Maybe I’ll talk more about how I have two red flags against me because I’m bald and not six-foot tall. Meaning, women already have a lot of good reasons to reject me and why I’m mainly attracting scammers and lower quality women. I’ll leave it at that, as I want to talk about Hypergamy in a different episode.
Anyway, I was unable to get the earphones after the training, and then I had a Tesla Light Show event with the Maryland Tesla owners. We got 190 cars for our part of the display in the Christmas lightshow. I have video from both up close and on a hill, though on the hill the audio is somewhat messed up because people were talking near the camera.
After that, I had a special neighbor party organized by an absolutely gorgeous women who is a good friend but is very much not in any way, shape, or from attracted to me and is utterly disgusted by the prospect. Did I mention Hypergamy?
Thus, I wasn’t able to confirm the video uploaded all day Saturday, and had some things to take care of on Sunday so I wasn’t able to see until last night that it was posted and it wasn’t until now that I could write this long updating post to you. If you read this far, I thank you. Now, go enjoy the episode where I talk all about how I, personally, was scammed.
In fact, having seen many clips on YouTube, and being a huge fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s work, and having a subscription to Peacock, I decided to watch the entire House series. Also, as a huge fan of Blackadder, a show which Dr. House keeps on his DVR—that Dr. House is a dead ringer for Hugh Laurie from that series! Overall, I very much enjoyed the series and the rotating cast of characters, though when House goes nuts and ruins his boss’s first post-breakup date, the shark has been jumped. I mean, the takedown of the narcissistic cop in series 3 was just funny, but what happens in series 8 was just creepy. But, I won’t spoil it any more than that. It’s a fun ride and I much encourage it!
But before you start binging House, and then “A Bit” of Fry and Laurie, please check out this week’s episode!
This week, Cat and I return with a special 2-part series on Seeing the Doctor.. We both discuss our various doctor visits and experiences and of course we have to talk about the elephant in the room. Some doctors are just absent any form of bedside manner, especially when it comes to women patients and dismissing symptoms, especially pain. Nothing exemplifies this more than the famous Golden Girls scene where Dorothy Zbornak (played by the late, great, and then there’s Bea Arthur) when she confronts a dismissive doctor who ignores her clear set of symptoms for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Meanwhile, I wanted to give an update with respect to my Doctor Whorewatch. I’m currently in the Jon Pertwee and thoroughly enjoyed watching The Dæmons (I have a bit of a crush on that Olive Hawthorn) and the ghostly apparitions from Day of the Daleks (which has the wrong Dalek voices—sorry Nick, shows light beams on weapons which are literally described as sonic, and I miss the camp visuals!) around Halloween. I enjoyed seeing the Royal Navy (I and the BBC thank you! But Doctor, are you telling me the Silurians evolved in the Age of Mammals? Is that much better than the Age of Molluscs?) base where The Sea Devils was shot during Veterans’ Day, and on Monday, in keeping with the 61st Anniversary today, I’ll begin me rewatch of The Three Doctors (the last live appearance of William Hartnell as the Doctor and of course it’s great to see Patrick Troughton return since his last story last Summer) ! I could not have asked for a better synergy between stories and real life!
Anyway, enough about the Doctor, on to this week’s episode!
Folks, as the leader of the Science Book Club, I’m all about knowing how things work like how clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (i.e. CRISPR) works using the CAS 9 component of the various CRISPR methodologies used by microbes. That is why I was excited to get the Pfizer / BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, since it’s a direct mRNA (messenger RiboNucleic Acid) vaccine using techniques coming out of the CRISPR biotech revolution.
Indeed, anyone who saw me on social media back in 2021 could see me being a whiny little b*tch when it came to my desperation to get a jab. Fortunately, I did get my shot, and my second shot, and at the time of this posting, I’ll be on my 6th dose of the COVID vaccine and have my latest flu shot and as discussed in the episode, I did indeed get my Shingles first shot, with the second shot to come in about a month, whereby I plan to also get Hepatitis B and maybe Gardasil vaccinations, or Monkeypox—if they don’t let me take the later. Knowing the 250 year science behind these amazing inventions makes me all the more eager to teach my immune system about all the dangerous pathogens I can.
After all, vaccinations, or virulations as they were known in the 18th Century, were familiar to President Thomas Jefferson in his day, and it’s an honor to use the same historic technology updated for today that the framers of this Democracy used. We’ve come a long way since then, using smaller and then microscopic samples of the pathogen, all the way down to mRNA. We don’t store the samples in Mercury anymore either. And we now know that the data linking vaccines to Autism is just, pure bunk!
While I’m elated that Smallpox is all but eliminated from humanity, I hate that in the 21st century, we’re now losing ground to Polio. Most people don’t that to pinpoint and capture Osama Bin Laden, agents posed as Polio Healthcare workers to get into his compound and find him. Having done so, and assaulted the compound, the Pakistani people grew to distrust the vaccination campaign workers and started refusing the legitimate Polio vaccinations. Eventually, Polio again began to spread and is once again on the loose. That was the faustian bargain we played. Eradicate Polio from the world, or eliminate the man behind 9/11.
So folks, trust me, get your shot and thank the virulations and the vaccinationists for finding a drug-free, one-to-two dose cure to so many nasty diseases. Stay healthy my friends, and thank you for watching!
This week I wanted to pay my respects to our nation’s military as on Monday it will be Veterans’ Day. That’s why this episode it about Serving Your Country, especially in uniform. Having worked for the Naval Research Laboratory for almost 2 decades and that was some of the greatest work I’ve ever done. I was and am very proud of how I worked to keep our men and women in uniform safe.
My work there was lifechanging. Until I worked with those uniformed men and women, I didn’t have a good graps for what our nation’s military does. I didn’t see them, I only saw how politicians used and abused them. And, I didn’t realize that our armed forces are the best way out of poverty. Or that women in uniform protected under state-wide Equal Rights,give ip those rights when they’re shipped abroad and only under the protection of the U.S. Constitution.
So, thank you all for your service and Happy Veterans’ Day
In the United States of America, on 5 November, 2024, you have your last chance, as a citizen, to vote for your next President. But, did you know there are also down-ballot elections? Do you know who your Congressperson is? Do you know your Governor? Do you know your state Senator and Representative or Delegate? Because, believe me, fixing the flaws in the system starts in the grass roots and all politics is local so please do read up on your county or parish ordinances up for vote, and be mindful of who’s running for School Board or Soil and Water or County Attorney General.
On this site, we won’t tell you how to vote—however, I did suggest you listen to Taylor Swift instead—but for your state and local elections, think about how we can make politics more responsive to the people. For instance, do you know where your state lies on the Swamp Index? If you’re like me, you may be surprised to learn that Virginia ranks 46th of 51 in the Index; my co-host Cat (who couldn’t make this episode) in New York is all the way up at 14th place, by comparison. This is why my special guest Nancy Morgan and I have been fighting to get money out of politics. After all, since Citizens United v. FEC, we’ve seen astronomical growth in dark money political spending under the guise of legitimate businesses. While you’d need a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens, many other reforms are best performed in your local state capitol, from Atlanta to Salt Lake City.
And you know I, personally, have been a big proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s bodily autonomy, for electric vehicle access and support, and for good governance of one person one vote and for every vote to be equal with a National Popular Vote bill. The National Popular Vote is a bill passed in states with a total of 209 electors—only 61 more electors are needed to have the voters choose our President. After all, the system we have now causes both large and small states, both deep red and deep blue states, both rich and poor states to be totally ignored because they aren’t a battleground. And if you are in a battleground, your days are numbered. After all, Ohio and Virginia used to be battlegrounds, but not anymore. That capriciousness just isn’t a good way to select the leader of world’s biggest military. Is your state part of the compact? Great, maybe you can help in some other states! If not, write your state legislators, and consider, if your governor is against it, add those 888 words as an amendment to your state constitution, like Nevada.
Of course, there’s also the issue of Opened Primaries to keep our candidates more centered and weed out the unstable ones. And of course First Past the Post voting is one reason we get such diametrically opposed and out of touch candidates and are so afraid of the Spoiler Effect. I’m glad that Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting is gaining traction, though I feel that it’s not as intuitive as Star Approval Voting, which is what you see in, for instance, your Amazon ratings, and has a much better chance of being Condorcet. And of course there’s the issue of Gerrymandering, which we tried to fix with OneVirginia2021 but failed miserably with obstructive politicians added at the eleventh hour to the “independent” redistricting panel. Gerrymandering allows the politicians to choose their voters, and not the natural other way around.
If any of these non-partisan issues matter to you and you’re in Virginia, please come to our Democracy Day on 21 January in Richmond, on the Quindecennial anniversary of Citizens!
Addiction is a very serious topic, and, after all, quite scary for this Halloween episode. Sure, I could have chosen something less real, like skeletons or blood (but the CCS does give some of that aspect in this Spoopy character class I’m using) but tonight, we’re talking about Addiction. After all, there’s nothing more terrifying than the dark and deadly downward spiral that addiction brings.
The first thing I want to make quite clear is that: it’s not your fault! Addiction is a brain malfunction no different than any other malady in the DSM. You’re not yourself when you’re addicted, and those around you can only be there to support your recovery, but it’s up to you to want that recovery and rock bottom is almost always on that difficult path.
This week, my dear friend Shea Megale. joins me as my guest to discuss this very personal issue. You see, Shea lost their brother to addiction. They had to witness the downward spiral first-hand and their experience, I felt was critical for this episode and Shea delivered most eloquently and succinctly. Of course, that’s no surprise as Shea is also a fellow author who I met through The Hourlings.
Also, please check out the foundation Shea and her family set up to help fight addiction.
Finally, I feel I must bring up the topic typically banned on YouTube, that of suicide. Please know there are people there who can help, whether you’re addicted or just depressed and listless. Please phone the Suicide Hotline at 988; there are people here to help!
If you ever read about economics, you’ll no doubt have heard about the sunk cost fallacy. The thing to remember is that this isn’t a general rule. In fact, nobody says it better than The Gambler, as sung by Kenny Rogers: You got to know when to hold them, and when to fold them. Know when to walk away, and when to run…
The long and short of it is that you need to look toward the future. For instance, with my job, I could see that I was working insanely long hours and never being given credit for all my hard work, with the final spoils of the assessments going to junior coders to my detriment. I don’t have any animosity, mind you, even if I feel most cheated about them never moving the office to Reston Town Center, as promised, after a fifteen months of working there. I’m very proud of the work I did and my contributions. And I have no regrets when it came to a head of me needing a vacation and them not granting it, so me happily signing my resignation.
Or, consider my 25 year relationship with my ex. I still consider her my friend and don’t regret the time we had together but the sunk costs were piling up with no sense of return to come in the future and I knew it was time to get out when she tried to lock me in a room. As a single man, I can very easily forgive and forget and know my worth is more than that and be willing and able to move on, with no intention of ever being more than friends because those memories will never fade, they just don’t hurt as much as they used to.
But, there are many reasons to persist. I’ll never be able to pick locks if I give up before I’ve mastered the skill. I need more than 12 flight hours to become a pilot as well. These aren’t sunk costs because they have a definite goal and a path to get there. The cost only becomes sunk when you only see more of the same ahead and no hope for anything different or to change.
So, whatever your burdens are, just take a minute from time to time to reassess. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, then consider persisting, but never continue throw time or money after a lost cause. And that’s my best advice.
Continuing on from our series autumn episodes, this week we’re discussing introversion, extroversion, and extroverted introversion. What is an Extroverted Introvert? If you like parties with friend that you know, but still need to recharge, you might be an extroverted introvert. If you love talking to perfect strangers and schmoozing, and your only feeling when it’s over is that it’s over, you’re kind of an extrovert. And if you like to just netflix and chill, maybe introvert is more your style.
Is Introversion better? Of course not! we need all types to have a successful society. Someone needs to make the sales, after all, after someone else writes the software. It all goes hand in hand.
As for neglect, well, there are many forms of that. Being a child with your needs ignored, or being a wife who’s husband neglects her. Neglect is difficult and debilitating and it’s not what an Introvert wants. Introverts still want friends and to hang out with them, just as extroverts do.
So, whether your an introvert, or an extrovert, or something in the middle, we hope this episode will help you understand all about us. Until next week…
