I have decided that I will no longer be promising upcoming posts. I never follow through and provide the promised posts, so it's better if I just don't promise them. If I actually find time to write what I previously would have promised to write about, then I'll go ahead and post it. But I won't promise something that I intend to write but have not yet written.

I suppose it's only fitting that I should break promises made here, since I seem to do it all the time in real life.

Antibiotics hazardous to your health? Who knew?

Turns out there's a particular class of antibiotics that can be extremely hazardous to your health. My wife and I learned this the hard way this past week. It was much, much harder on her than it was on me though - she's the one whose health was affected - I was just consumed with worry. The class of drugs is fluoroquinolone antibiotics. The particular one that my wife was on is called Avelox. They're very powerful at killing bacteria, which is what you want an antibiotic to do. But, according to what I've read about them during the past week, they're also apparently extremely harsh on the healthy parts of your body, and can cause serious damage to your body, sometimes life-long damage. I'm working on a more detailed post that describes exactly what my wife went through, as well as some of the info that I've read about these drugs. Hope to have that up in the next day or two.

I just watched one of the most abysmal baseball games I've seen in awhile. The Detroit Tigers, 0-5 to start the 2008 season, hosted the Chicago White Sox on ESPN Sunday Night baseball. Detroit sent Justin Verlander, arguably the ace of their pitching staff, to the mound. More often than not, this would be enough to break a losing streak. Not this time, however. The White Sox are one of the few teams, if not the only team, that Verlander has had little success against in his career. Tonight was no exception. That, coupled with the horrible streak of bad playing and bad luck that the Tigers are mired in, resulted in a train wreck of a game. The White Sox shellacked the Tigers 13-2, completing the 3-game sweep, and sending the winless Tigers on the road to face Boston.

I have moved this blog to a new address. I think my old address was being blocked by several search engines, probably due to the fact that my site lay dead for a few years. Moving to this new address will hopefully solve that problem. The new address is the one you are at now: newslimestew.blogspot.com

From the Washington Post:

The Justice Department on Monday approved Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s proposed $5 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., saying the deal was unlikely to hurt competition or consumers.

The deal was approved without conditions despite opposition from consumer groups and an intense lobbying campaign by the land-based radio industry.

The combination still requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission, which prohibited a merger when it granted satellite radio operating licenses in 1997.

This is bad news, in my corner of the world. One of my top two favorite XM channels is slated for removal when the merger goes through. The two channels that I listen to the most are XM 82, The System and XM 175, MLB Home Plate. On July 24, 2007, XM and Sirius filed their planned post-merger programming lineup (PDF) with the FCC. One of the XM channels that is absent from this lineup is XM82, The System. I e-mailed Jon Zellner (Senior Vice President/Music Programming of XM) to ask him about this, and register my complaint about the proposed lineup. He confirmed that the proposed lineup was correct insofar as it excluded XM82. There are other reasons why I was hoping this merger would be denied, but that is by far the biggest reason. It's possible that the FCC could still deny the merger, but with the DOJ approving the merger it is very unlikely that the FCC will deny it.

I have a lot of things I want to write about, and little-to-no time to write about any of them. So here are a few of them in a nutshell. I will hopefully be expanding on some of them in the near future.

Barack Obama / Jeremiah Wright
I have been aware of the recent controversy surrounding Barack Obama and his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I had not paid any attention to it until today. I had not watched any of the Jeremiah Wright videos or read any of his comments that were causing such an uproar. In other words, I had no idea what the controversy was about. I didn't watch Obama's speech about race the other day, nor did I read the transcript. The one thing I had done prior to today was read a few articles yesterday; articles that were about people's reactions to Obama's speech.

Today I pulled up a couple of articles that talked about Jeremiah Wright's comments, and watched a few video clips on YouTube. After that, I watched Obama's speech in its entirety. Finally, I read a few more articles about people's reactions to the speech.

1) I thought the speech was excellent.
2) I'm disgusted with the level of outrage at Wright's comments.
3) I'm disappointed at the way people have responded/are responding to Obama's speech. I don't have time to go into detail right now, but I'm particularly disappointed at the reactions of white Americans, or at least those that are being reported by the mainstream media. (FYI: I am a 27-year old white male.)

Iraq war; five-year anniversary
"Anniversary" is typically thought of as a positive word. Calling this an anniversary is technically correct, but it feels very wrong. This is not positive.
My oft-promised post about the Iraq war will have to wait a little longer. After getting myself up to speed on the Wright/Obama controversy, I've decided that I need to write about this first. I think I have a somewhat unique perspective on it, as a white male married to a woman of mixed descent. I don't know if anybody will read what I have to say, or even care what I have to say, but I feel compelled to write about it anyway.

Idiopathic hypersomnia/narcolepsy
I've been feeling very discouraged/depressed lately, because my idiopathic hypersomnia has been getting worse (or the meds have been helping less) and I've been wrestling with severe tiredness much more frequently. It's hard to stay positive when you're this tired all the time. Anyway, the past couple of days I've been trying to find positives about this. It hasn't been easy, but I think I've found a couple. More on this at a later time.

Fahrenheit 451
I've been reading Fahrenheit 451 the last few nights, a few pages at at time. I have to fight myself to put the book down and go to bed. I would have stayed up all night and read it in one sitting, had I been able to stay awake and not had to get up early for work the next day. It is an incredible book, and I highly recommend it. I'll probably be talking about it more in the coming days.

From Bush Is Optimistic Again About Iraq War, at WashingtonPost.com:

President Bush declared today that the United States is on the cusp of victory in the five-year-old war in Iraq, arguing that the recent troop buildup has reduced violence there and "opened the door to a major strategic victory in the war on terror."

Full text of the President's speech is available at WhiteHouse.gov.

I haven't had time yet to read through the entire speech, but I will be reading it at some point before the day is over. I'll probably use it as a springboard for my promised-but-not-yet-delivered personal thoughts about the Iraq war as it stands today. I'll try to have them up within the next 24 hours.