Hey All,

I’m truly sorry about the anemic level of posting as of late. We’re gearing up at work for the Third International Medicinal Mushroom Conference, which we are hosting out at Fort Worden in Port Townsend. Let me just tell you: if your company/organization is looking for a responsive, conveniently located, service-oriented venue to host a medium-to-large conference, look elsewhere. The place is beautiful, historic, stately, probably a fantastic place to take the family for a long weekend, but beyond that they’re something of a letdown. Need to seat five hundred for a multimedia presentation? Simple, use the Hangar! Sure, it’s unheated and actually exposed to the elements (in a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest), but hey, you can all cower under tarps or something! Want to stream your Conference activities to clients worldwide? No problem! Simply take your computer into the administrative office, plug your modem into the only available phone jack on the entire premises, and away you go….at 52kbps. Oh sure, they have a T1 for the office computers, but they never really thought about offering broadband Internet access to their clients.

Anyway, grousing aside, what time I have not been spending working on Conference materials has been spent sleeping, playing video games or watching DVRed episodes of Iron Chef America, No Reservations and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. My muse is in a persistent vegetative state from overwork….and I have put in the fewest hours of any of the principal people putting this thing together. Needless to say, we’ll all be quite relieved when it’s over.

So in lieu of anything of actual substance, I thought I’d post an update to the diet thang….like anyone cares (please refer to my previous comments regarding the purpose and intent of this site; namely, to entertain me, not you. 😛 )

To date, I’ve lost thirteen pounds. I’m down to 267, the lightest I’ve been in, what, four years? Pretty good for not having taken on so much as a single erg of additional physical activity. Furthermore, I’ve become quite accustomed to being hungry all of the time. I almost don’t notice it any more. If I’m hungry, I drink something, which fools my stomach for a while—long enough for the sensation of hunger to once again be subsumed by work, conversation, Grand Theft Auto, whatever.

The biggest behavioral hurdle is the kind of mindless snacking that happens whenever you’re too close to a source of food. You’re making a salad and you’ve just finished mixing up some vinegar-and-oil dressing and poured it over your greens, but there’s some left. My, that would be tasty on a piece of bread! You rip a hunk off of a nearby loaf and swish it around in the mixing bowl, sopping up the last of the dressing….then you slap yourself across the face and throw the bread in the composter. Idly snatching pieces of stir-fried yummies out of the Tupperware of leftovers while you wait for your dinner to nuke, opening a jar of kalamata olives and popping a few in your mouth while you’re making dinner….this is the sort of behavior you have to stifle.

On the other hand, restricting your idle consumption transforms mealtime into an extravaganza of sensation, particularly since our migration from the world of the Atkins Diet, a benighted landscape of grilled meat, roasted meat, poached meat, meat with meat sauce, meat a la meat….and salad. Last night I made bruschetta, lovely hothouse tomatoes chopped up fine and doused in a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, dill, marjoram, black pepper, salt and a touch of yogurt, served on a thick slice of artisan bread brushed with olive oil and topped with strips of melted mozarella….It wasn’t a meal, it was a sacrament.

All in all I’m having a hell of an easier time with this 1600-calorie-a-day-diet then my last one, shortly after I was diagnosed as having diabetes. It’s because this was a 100% voluntary act, whereas the last time I was starving myself in a futile attempt to reduce my blood sugar levels without chemical assistance. In other words, to waylay the inevitable—a year later, I had to give up and start taking medication anyway. This time, I’m doing it to improve my overall health, from my diabetes to my herniated discs, and also to prove that I can. By comparison, it’s a piece of cake.

Mmmmmm….cake…..

Margaret came home from work around seven thirty this evening. She was a little wiped out; it had been a wild day at the Pet Works (actually named VCA Five Corners Veterinary Hospital. One of the first trials-by-fire for the new front desk people is learning to say all that when you pick up the phone without spitting your gum across the room).

Among the rest of the wild rumpus, a goodish helping of confusion and disarray was sown by the fact that there were two separate cases in for surgery to fix a bowel obstruction (all right, two bowel obstructions; the two patients didn’t share the same obstruction), both of which were dogs, both of which were named Cooper.

I laughed. “That’s a great name for one dog with a bowel obstruction, let alone two,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked as she pitched her work scrubs into the hamper.

“Well, a ‘cooper’ is traditionally a person who makes barrels, right?” She nodded as she crossed the room. “So, if you’re gonna have a patient who needs his bunghole reamed out, what better candidate than a patient named Cooper?”

Margaret turned to face me. “I do love your way with words,” she said.

The City of Seattle announced this week that it will begin a pilot project to test the viability of using “red light” cameras at intersections. They’re going to start with four intersections, to be determined. If you run a red, a camera snaps a photo of your license plate, and you’re promptly mailed a ticket for a hundred and one smackers.

Yee-HAW! This is exactly the kind of cool, technology-oriented, passive-aggressive law enforcement I love best. The only thing better would be giant steel barriers that shoot up out of the ground at a high rate of speed to block the road the instant the light goes red (though this would, I have to admit, be a titch more on the “aggressive” side).

Of course, the project will have its detractors. There are bound to be some glitches, and there’s always some twit who claims that they were targeted unfairly, and of course there will be a temporary boom in the sale of those dark-tinted “license protectors”. But overall I see this as a good thing. For one, it is a form of enforcement that requires little in the way of resources. Second, it will be a great source of pocket change for the state, unless it results in drivers abandoning the practice of running red lights, in which case the entir exercise will be worth it anyway.

Finally, it will save me the hassle of having to buy a Bradley Fighting Vehicle so I can pull into the intersection when the light turns green regardless of the selfish and antisocial behavior of others.

Margaret snapped this photo on our way back from Alki Beach—sort of the Venice Beach of West Seattle—on Sunday:

Not sure the good folks at Sleep Country thought this particular publicity strategy through.

“Dum dee dum dee doo dee—oh, HOLY CRAP!” *swerve* SCREEEEEEEEEECH !BLAM! tumbletytumbletytumblety BLONK…….FLOOF! “Ahhhh, God, it burns, it burns!”

I’ve never cared for their jingle, but I’m not sure that they deserve a charge of vehicular manslaughter.

Okay, okay, I’m sorry about the title. Honestly, I am. But this really got my thaumaturgical knickers in a twist.

I was listening to NPR on the way into work today (I spent the day putting out computer-related fires….almost literally) and caught a clip from the service at the National Cathedral that kicked off Bush’s “national day of prayer and remembrance” for those affected by the hurricane. The piece I heard was a prayer, offered up by Imam Yahya Hendi, a chaplain at Georgetown Unversity (I had to wait until I got home to get the facts about who was speaking and in what capacity). The prayer is reproduced below:

Almighty, Loving, and Merciful Creator!
We call upon your Glory to bless this nation and strengthen us with your
Presence.
Give those suffering in the Aftermath of Katrina the courage to find hope
and healing. We ask for your blessings, God! On those children affected
by hunger, loss of loved ones and displacement from their homes. Give all
of our children the strength to hold true to their faith and experience the
loving kindness of our great country.
Let all the inhabitants of the America sing with joy Your praise
Let them recognize that you are the lord of all goodness.
May this service promote justice and equity and enable us to feed the
hungry, shelter the homeless and give voice to the voiceless.
May we bring the affected states back to joy and peace.
May we work together to tear down walls of separation, blame and fear
May we work side by side to put up bridges of hope and friendship!!
We ask this in Your Holy name, God!
Amen.

I apologize in advance to my friends of faith, but I simply can’t get over the 5,000-pound elephant everyone in the chapel—not to mention the multitudes tuning in—was ignoring: according to your philosophy, you people are all sucking up to the very Person who engineered this tragedy to begin with!

“We ask for your blessings, God! On those children affected by hunger, loss of loved ones and displacement from their homes.” As a result of Your hurricane.

I realize I’m not thinking of this with the requisite level of sophistication. I’m not a total maroon; I understand the concept of faith in the face of adversity, of God’s joy in beholding His children taking strength from Him in spite of their tribulations, etc., etc.

I just can’t buy it. The only thing more astonishingly unlikely to me than the actual existence of God is the possibility that He both cares infinitely for us and allows this sort of horrible shit to happen. If I thought that God existed, I’d have to conclude that He either set us loose to live or die, prosper or perish, without a moment’s thought to the consequences, or else that He is a complete sociopath, tormenting us for reasons unknown.

*Sigh* Forget it. I’m not churning out yet another fulminating diatribe on the subject of, “If God exists why does He let bad things happen to good people?” The Blogosphere is doubtless already choked with them, and everyone either knows the answer (and knows they know it) or they don’t (and know they don’t….unless of course they don’t know that they don’t know the answer because they don’t know the question. You know?)

I’m not even sure why this particular public expression of faith sparked such anger in me, but it did. (Some of you—you know who you are—are doubtless thinking, “because you hate hearing the truth!” To which I say, maybe so; in an infinite universe anything is possible. But boy howdy, I sure doubt it.)

This bug is up my ass, not yours, I’ll deal with it. I just couldn’t let this event slip by without comment.

Now, I don’t have much of an informed opinion regarding US Supreme Court Chief Justice nominee John Roberts; I’m simply too ingorant. But slipping in and out of the hearings today (and, by association, in and out of consciousness), it seemed to me that the guy is at least quite intelligent, which one would only expect out of a judicial nominee on any level, much less this one. My overall impression is that this is not the person to truly fear, that the Bush administration is saving up the real lulu to replace Justice O’Connor.

Anyway, the verbal back-and-forth at the hearing today had its ups and downs. Among the downs would be what I felt to be a few softballs lobbed by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch—a pity, too, since he actually discussed some interesting points of jurisprudence with Roberts as well.

But the real nifty slider was doled out by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. You can read the transcript if you like, but it was basically this:

Roberts, of course, has been very reticent to answer questions about “particular issues that are likely to come before the court again” (read: Roe v. Wade). This, of course, is what most people really want to know about the dude, whether they admit it or not. By all means, this is not the be-all and end-all of deciding who is right for this job, but to many people on both sides of the discussion, abortion rights are the linchpin of what is right (liberal humanists) or wrong (religious conservatives) with our society. So it matters.

Specter asked Roberts about the role of precedent in deciding cases. At one point, Roberts stated:

I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent. Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough—and the court has emphasized this on several occasions—it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn’t answer the question, it just poses the question.

And you do look at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments. All of those factors go into the determination of whether to revisit a precedent under the principles of stare decisis.

Of course, there are cases where precedent must be abandoned in the name of justice—Roberts cited Brown v. Board of Education overruling Plessy v. Ferguson as an example—but there was general agreement that the destabilizing aspect of violating stare decisis must be taken into account.

The example Specter cited for this came from Roberts’ predecessor and mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who in 2000 said of the decision in Dickerson v United States to uphold Miranda rights:

Whether or not we would agree with Miranda’s reasoning and its resulting rule, were we addressing the issue in the first instance, the principles of stare decisis weigh heavily against overruling it now….Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.

Having agreed that precedent and sociocultural stability should weigh heavily in deciding when to override previous Supreme Court decisions, a few exchanges later, Specter fired this one across the plate:

SPECTER: When you and I talked informally, I asked you if you had any thought as to how many opportunities there were in the intervening 32 years for Roe to be overruled, and you said you didn’t really know.

And you cited a number. I said, “Would it surprise you to know that there have been 38 occasions where Roe has been taken up, not with a specific issue raised, but all with an opportunity for Roe to be overruled?”

One of them was Rust v. Sullivan, where you participated in the writing of the brief and, although the case did not squarely raise the overruling of Roe, it involved the issue of whether Planned Parenthood, even if it’s funded with federal money, could counsel on abortion.

And in that brief you again raised the question about Roe being wrongly decided. And then I pointed out to you that there had been some 38 cases where the court had taken up Roe.

And I’m a very seldom user of charts but, on this one, I have prepared a chart because it speaks—a little too heavy to lift—but it speaks louder than just—thank you, Senator—38 cases where Roe has been taken up.

And I don’t want to coin any phrases on super-precedents—we’ll leave that to the Supreme Court—but would you think that Roe might be a super-duper precedent in light of…

(LAUGHTER)

… in light of 38 occasions to overrule it?

ROBERTS: Well, the interesting thing, of course, is not simply the opportunity to address it, but when the court actually considers the question.

And that, of course, is in the Casey decision, where it did apply the principles of stare decisis and specifically addressed it. And that I think is the decision that any judge in this area would begin with.

SPECTER: Judge Roberts, in your confirmation hearing for the circuit court, your testimony read to this effect, and it’s been widely quoted: “Roe is the settled law of the land.”

Do you mean settled for you, settled only for your capacity as a circuit judge, or settled beyond that?

ROBERTS: Well, beyond that, it’s settled as a precedent of the court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. And those principles, applied in the Casey case, explain when cases should be revisited and when they should not.

And it is settled as a precedent of the court, yes.

There was more—lots more—and Lord knows this isn’t the end of the discussion over Roberts’ qualifications, or even his stance on or intentions regarding Roe v. Wade. But I think this collection of quotes gives you the picture. It was quite a lively little bout of wordplay.

Sometimes I give my representatives in government too little credit for intelligence. Nice to be proven wrong now and again. 😉

Just a few random scrivenings from the front lines of The Diet Wars….

It has been five days since I began my sixteen-hundred-calorie-a-day diet. It’s been an interesting week. I am in no way used to walking around hungry all the time. Well, not all the time; immediately after I finish my bagel, my three turkey dogs (sans buns), my tuna fish on rice cakes, whatever—I feel quite satiated. thirty minutes later my gut starts sending me signals again, something akin to, “Yes, that’s all very well and good, but what now?” By shortly before my next meal the amplitude has risen considerably: “Hey, asshole, wake up! We’re hungry!”

It’s kind of wierd and vaguely rewarding to ignore my stomach’s pleas. It’s a constant exercise in prioritization: “I’m hungry” is followed by, “Yeah, you’re hungry all right, deal with it.” Repeat every half-hour or so until mealtime arrives. Distract your body by drinking lots of water and quasi-yummy diet beverages (I’ve become a total slave to Minute Maid Light Lemonade), which fills you up for a bit, after which your gut realizes the ruse and gets pissed off. Ha ha, fooled you again, gut! Never learn, do you?

The nice thing about losing weight by starving yourself is that the weight loss is so completely, so incontravertibly yours. I’ve lost three pounds already. It’s not water weight, it’s not some sort of metabolic trick. I simply did not eat enough calories in four days to sustain myself, and my body had to burn off some of its reserves to keep me going. In some ways, that is more effort than I have put into anything outside of work in years—um, anything but my marriage, of course. 😳

It’s certainly a lot more effort than it took to maintain myself on the Atkins Diet, where the main problem is the stultifying boredom of ingesting nothing but protein day after day. Lord knows you never go hungry on Atkins, though you may risk becoming nauseated by overconsumption of animal fats.

Other than a bad case of cranky tummy, I haven’t felt any noticeable ill effects from the diet; no fainting spells, no heart palpitations, no weakness. Fortunately, It’s kind of hard to feel low on energy when you don’t fucking do anything all day. This is, after all, why I chose this route to weight loss in the first place. If I wanted to start running five miles a day I probably wouldn’t have to starve myself. Sadly, not only am I uninterested in doing this, I am pretty much unable: the bulging disc(s) in my back make standing for long periods—let alone running—quite painful. The nerve damage from my last back operation makes me unsteady on my feet, as does the blood-pressure medication I take. (“And of course I have these shooting pains up and down the diodes on my left side. Well, pardon me for breathing, which I don’t do anyway so I don’t know why I say it oh, God, I’m so depressed.” [If you don’t recognize the quote, just let it go; it’s a joke, and I don’t feel like explaining it.])

About the only thing that has caught me off-guard is my diabetes, and how to deal with it. I actually have an appointment to talk to my doctor about this, because my blood sugar is on a bit of a roller-coaster right now. Now that I am eating (blessed, blessed) carbohydrates again instead of the all-day meatapalooza of Atkins, my blood sugar shoots up after a meal. However, because the meal is so low in calories, my blood sugar zips back down again in short order. I can’t practically take any fast-acting insulin at the time of the meal (which is what a diabetic would normally do under the circumstances) because the effect of the insulin lasts longer than the effect of the carbohydrates, and I would end up in a hypoglycemic crash, which means among other things stuffing my face until I feel normal again. Kind of defeats the purpose of the diet. I imagine that my doctor will tell me that the temporary upswing in my sugars is offset by the overall drop in calories, but I guess I’ll find out on Tuesday.

Traditionally, Margaret and I allow ourselves a single non-diet meal, including dessert, every week. We’ve been doing this for years, ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes. Today was our diet-breaking day, and we celebrated with—get this—Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cinnabons. Is that grody or what? I mean, they weren’t mixed together in a smoothie or anything, but still….

I am absolutely not exagerrating when I tell you that I got high off of our dinner tonight. I’m not specifically referring to the sugar rush from the cinnamon rolls (although that was spectacular); just the act of gorging myself on all the food I wanted was a euphoriant. Judging by the sensation, it must have been an endorphin rush; it had the kind of bleary hyperclarity that I associate with opiates. Later, when I added the Cinnabons into the mixture….goofballs! I am The Glucose King! I’m only now coming down.

I think I can do this long-term. I’m really, really determined to lose a boatload of weight, for any number of reasons. My doctor actually wanted to put me on a new drug called Amylin, a metabolic and appetite suppressant derived from—wait for it—gila monster spit. I admit it’s tempting, but I’ll be much happier with myself if I can do it on my own. Sure, taking the injection is easier than controlling my appetite on my own—and way less trouble than finding a gila monster to swap spit with—but losing the weight through sheer force of will is better for my self-esteem. (I don’t even want to think about what frenching a gila monster would do to my self-esteem. Not to mention my breath.)

Stay tuned for more self-indulgent and totally uninteresting dispatches from the Diet Wars.

Pardon me while I indulge in a little creative Spamdexing….

Upon review of my referrer log, it has become apparent to me that many people are visiting my blog in the hopes of finding information on milk and molasses enemas. There is no information whatsoever on this site on the subject of milk and molasses enemas. While the words milk, molasses and enema do in fact appear in various places within this blog, in no place other than this post are they assembled into the phrase milk and molasses enemas.

We at Uncle Andrew Dot Net apologize to all those who reached this site hoping to find information about milk and molasses enemas, and wish you the best of luck in your future milk and molasses enema endeavors.

Today I launch what is sure to be a popular new category, “Refer Madness”: a collection of weird crap I find by sorting through my Referrer logs.

For those not in the know, a Referrer log is a text file generated by a Web server that contains information about how people got to your Web site. For instance, if some generic Web surfer came to my site by typing “Andrew Lenzer” into the Google search engine window and following the link that Google proivded, an entry would be made in my Referrer log that read something like:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Andrew+Lenzer%22&btnG=Search

….and I’d know that they got to my site by entering the term “Andrew Lenzer” into the Google search engine.

The concept of Refer Madness is not original: I culled it from the Petting Zoo Web site, who apparently got the idea from Paul H. Henry. Imitation being the sincerest—and most expedient—form of flattery, I thought I’d keep the title and offer my own small contribution to the gestalt.

I’ve added a previous post on the subject to this category already, but I’d like to kick it off with a little something that popped up in my Referrer log yesterday.

Around 11:00 last night, someone from Australia visited the November 2004 archive for my site. They followed a link they had found via Google.

The phrase they had searched for?

“Swap underwear with sister”

I don’t make this stuff up, folks.

Stay tuned for more Refer Madness as it occurs.

Gout!

Diabetes, ruptured discs, and now….gout. The Big White Guy Trifecta.

I thought I was suffering from a cellulitis—a painful, non-site-specific infection—in my toe, which I have had a couple of times in the past. I got my doctor to fax a script for some antibiotics to my pharmacy. A couple of days later the problem wasn’t noticably better, so I went to a local podiatrist I’ve visited before, and he pronounced it to be gout. He wrote me a script for some nuclear NSAIDs and gave me a list of foods to avoid.

Near the top of the list of foods to restrict my intake of: meat.

Well, there goes the Atkins Diet, my main method for keeping my diabetic ass under three hundred pounds.

I’ve often said that us Big White Guys are the Chevy K-Blazers of the human race: we’re oversized, noisy, consume too many resources and have shitty repair records. Since my back surgery left me with reduced function in one leg, I have noticed a lot of fellow Big White Guys have a similar limp to mine; kind of a gentle port or starboard list. I imagine that a lot of them are also diabetic. I am tempted to tell the guy with the limp behind the counter at ERI (my favorite electronics place in the Olympia area) that he better lay off the Atkins or he’ll be facing gout like me, just to see his reaction.

I could go on yet another medication, of course; gout is easily treated, and the science of doing so is quite established. After all, gout is the disease of kings, and who eats more like kings than Westerners, particularly Americans? (McDonald’s could probably make a mint in product placement charges by advertising Zyloprim on the side of every Big Mac box.)

But that would mean that, at age thirty-seven, I would be on my sixth regular medication. I’m already teetering on the edge of my second major back surgery, and who knows what’s in store for me a few years down the line if I keep up this dietary orgy of animal products—aside from and in addition to the gout?

Fuck that. I know one way to take care of the gout, the diabetes and possibly even ameliorate the back problems in one fell swoop. I’ve done it before, back when I was first diagnosed with diabetes. Starting tomorrow, I am going back on a 1,600–1,800 calorie-per-day diet.

This will have many benefits: I will lose a lot of weight (after a year of this last time ’round I was at 230 pounds, which would be a 50 pound loss at this point), which will take a lot of strain off my back and hip. The reduced caloric intake will lower my need for insulin and glucose/glycogen blockers. Abandoning the Atkinsy goodness will drop the levels of uric acid in my blood and deal with the gout.

On top of the medical benefits, I will be able to eat like a normal human being again, albeit a hungry one. I’m sick of eating turkey dogs for breakfast; I want a motherfucking bagel, and I’m willing to restrict my caloric intake in order to get one. I’d rather have only a single small portion of stir fry for dinner, and be able to eat it with rice. And as well as the Atkins thing worked for me for a long time, you just know it can’t be good to eat that way for ten, twenty years. Keep it up long enough, and I’ll be on a whole other pack of meds to deal with that. It’s time to move on.

Finally, I need to do this because I need to exercise some form of discipline in my life. At this point, my existence is pretty much defined by a singular lack of self-discipline. I make practically no sacrifices in my daily life, I indulge most every whim I have….it would be nice to point to something in my life—my rumbling, gradually shrinking gut, for instance—and say, “I’m working hard to control this.”

Also, I wouldn’t mind looking trimmer than I do now. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I have a pretty nice set of abdominal muscles; you just can’t see them easily under the current inch of flab.

Anyway, the only real side effect from this lifestyle change for you, Dear Reader, will be a (hopefully) slight change in my personality. The last time I went on a crash diet, Margaret likened the experience to “living with a sore panther”.

So please accept my apologies in advance for any discomfiture you may experience during your future interactions with me; rest assured, it’s just the lack of donuts talking.

It occurred to me this morning to wonder why no one on the fringes of the Religious Right seems to have capitalized on the destruction in New Orleans as the result of Hurricane Katrina. This would seem like a golden opportunity to publicly attribute the devastation to the wrath of God. After all: alcohol, revelry at all hours of the night, boobies….

Hell, even the mainstream-far-right Reverend Jerry Falwell managed to go on the 700 Club on September 14, 2001 and say, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.'”

With that (not to mention Pat Robertson’s recent comments about assassinating Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez) as the standard, how much of a pair would it require for someone to imply that The Big Easy (even the nickname is sinful!) had it coming?

Sometimes these folks show more common sense than I normally give them credit for.

New Orleans,
Home of pirates, drunks and whores
New Orleans,
Tacky overpriced souvenir stores
If you want to go to Hell, you should take a trip
to the Sodom and Gemorrah on the Mississipp—

–Song from “Oh, Streetcar!”, a musical adaptation of A Streetcard Named Desire
From The Simpsons Episode 8F18, “A Streetcar Named Marge”

UPDATE: Our roommate Shawn suggests that I may be jumping the gun, that the wingnuts are waiting until the event is passed before making their comments. He could very well be right.