10 x 500mg Vitamin C (to improve taste of iodinated water)
20 x 5mg Valium (to rest on the train/bus to Dharmasala)
10 x 400mg Flagyl (Metronidazole, instestinal amoebic/bacterial infections)
10 x 500mg C-flox (Cipro, ciprofloxacin, intestinal bacterial infections)
20 x 2mg Loperamide (Immodium, for diahrea)
10 x 25mg Promethazine (Phenergan tablets, industrial strength anti-naseau, potentiates opiates)
10 x 0.5mg Dexamethasone (for severe Acute Mountain Sickness/edema)
10 x 10mg Cetrizine (Zyrtec antihistamine)

15g tube Miconazole Nitrate Ointment (Anti-fungal)
20g tube Soframycin ointment (Framycetin, antibiotic)

3 x Packs Oral Rehydration Salts (Why am I so thirsty? Oh...)

5 x Bandaids
1 compression bandage
1 roll medical tape
1 pack cotton bandages

Goan Price: 485 rupees, or about $11 US. Medical supplies in the US are too expensive. I heard the VA gets supplies from India, and its no wonder.

Things I must get in Delhi:

1) Diamox (Preventative treatment for Acute Mountain Sickness)
2) Codiene/Hydrocodone/Oxycodone ("Dude, you broke your leg! Now ride out of this valley to help.")
3) Iodine Tabelts (Water purification)
4) Ibuprofen (Muscle/joint injury/aches)
5) Sterile Alcohol (Prep for item 6)
6) "Sewing kit" (Stitch kit: pop a painkiller, then STOP THE BLEEDING!)

Things I already had:

10 x 500mg Chloroquine (Malaria prophylaxis/treatment)
20 x 500mg Paracetamol (Tylenol, Acetaminophin, fever/pain)

All told it will be less than $13. Even though I knew it would be cheap, I am amazed. Just thought I'd share.

Interesting note: Wanna sleep? Straight to valium, no in betweens. Wanna prevent Naseau? No dramamine. Straight to Phenergan. Stuffy nose? No benadryl. Straight to Zyrtec.

The lack of the OTC designation for all but the strongest opiates seems to make Indian pharmacueticals "evolve" quicker, in that you get access to the most effective drugs over the counter morequickly, and the OTC stuff that kinda-sorta-works is completely absent.

] The beaches of Goa are the highlights of travel in this
] state, making Goa the premier beach vacation destination.
] The first beach stop over in Goa is Anjuna beach also
] famous for its flea market and rave parties, then visit
] Baga and Dona Paula beaches that can make any beach
] holiday a memorable one. All in all Goa's 100-km long
] coastline gives an enthusiastic beach lover an
] opportunity to discover new secluded beach sites every
] day.

Goan Beaches

] Rave season in Goa lasts from September to March, and for
] much of that stretch there are parties every other night.
] The locales vary -- Ajuna, Disco Valley, Japora or Badam
] are the most frequent venues -- depending on which police
] official or civil servant can be bribed at the lowest
] price; baksheesh (bribery) is an Indian institution. The
] organizers are ad hoc consortiums of chai-mat vendors,
] bar owners, drug dealers and land-owners looking for a
] quick rupee. At every one of these affairs you see the
] same old Crown or Macintosh amplifiers and beat-up
] Ritchie mixing boards; the output, a meaty 5,000 watts,
] is usually doubled by BGW preamps. No one uses
] turntables. (If you've ever had to haul hundreds of
] pounds of vinyl to a club or a friend's house, then you
] understand the impracticality of lugging albums around
] the world, not to mention the excess baggage surcharges
] airlines will impose.) The DJs who work the Goa raves do
] so with cassette or digital audio tape. A trio of Sony
] Professional Walkmans or Sony or Aiwa digital audio tape
] players are the Goan equivalent to the twin direct-drive
] Technics turntables ubiquitous to most nightclubs in the
] Western world.

Goa is good.

Salon Wanderlust | Raving in Goa

Kick ass resource on Bicycle fabrication.

Anvil Bikeworks - Built to hammer on!

] A blur of platted hair, arms and legs dives into the pile
] of dirt and rocks, searching for hidden treasures.
]
] It takes only seconds before the first high-pitched voice
] screams, "I found one!"
]
] "Hey, here's another one," cries out a young girl. "I'm
] finding lots of them."
]
] Within minutes, plastic freezer bags are stuffed with
] chunks of gray rock containing trilobites, brachiopods
] and horn corals -- Devonian-era fossils from creatures
] that inhabited the Earth 350 million years ago.
]
] Fossil Park, which has been built in an abandoned 5-acre
] (2-hectare) quarry about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from
] downtown Toledo, is open for its second full season this
] summer.
]
] And visitors can keep what they find.

Cool!

Finding trilobites by the bucket, for free

] This amazing image is included in the standard US
] Department of Defense briefings on North Korea. It was
] mentioned in a news briefing on 23 December 2002 by
] Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who stated that "If you look
] at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at
] night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and
] vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark."

I've been looking for a good link to meme this image for awhile. It's a satellite view of the night-time landscape in eastern Asia, including Japan on the right, and the Chinese coast on the left. In the middle is the Korean peninsula. What's remarkable is to see how lit up the southern part of the peninsula is, and how completely dark that the North Korea part of the peninsula is. It's a dramatic indicator of the differing economic and technological levels between North and South.

North Korea Is Dark

] The subjects viewed alternating pictures of cars and
] faces, and asked them to compare each car to the previous
] car they saw and each face to the previous face.
]
] They found that the car fans used just one part of the
] brain to recognise the cars and the faces, taking just a
] fifth of a second to identify the cars.

Sp, because I can indentify cars in a split second... I am slower at identifying faces. Hmmm... Is this why nerds have such poor social skills? :) As new skills are tacked on, and neural nets are configured to deal with those tasks... the performance of nets that impart existing skills suffer? Das pretty coo.

BBC NEWS | Health | Car lovers 'see faces' in vehicles

I hate posting /. stuff to here, because I don't want memestreams to become just another slash, but this was a link from there that I found interesting. One funny thing...

Japanese Manga consumers purchase thick, black and white, cheap digests to read on a long train commute and dispose of them when they're done. American comic consumers purchase expensive, thin, full-color pamphlets to read on the toilet and then save them in boxes forever.

Ok, so who's been spying on me?

Anyway, I think the most important thing to note here is that the US comics industry was in the position that the current Japanese Manga industry is in today - but for the US it was 50 years ago. In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published a book and went before Congress to talk about the ill effects of comics on America's youth. At that point, single issues of some comics exceeded the million copies per month mark. That's more than the New York Times has ever had its circulation. Then Congress threatened the industry - either regulate yourself, or we'll regulate you. Half the publishers closed their doors on the comic book industry. Even though this happened, though, the 50s changed America's culture to one of sitting on our asses in front of the tv, so while one could say the decrease would have happened, anyway - just as the Japanese are facing a decline due to video games - it did have a heyday of its own.

The article/interview also makes a good point in that Manga is a disposable media while here in the states comics are mainly a collectible media. Many of us consumers have been discussing the fact that comics are falling further and further into the niche of collectors only and that there is rarely a mainstream product that comes along to attract new consumers. I don't think the answer is in creating disposable media, but in exposing others to the great stories available in comics. The article agrees and mentions the need to lower prices and achieving an economy of scale, but doesn't point out the geographic advantage that Japan has - it's much smaller. Distribution adds an incredible amount to the price of comics here in the US, especially since the industry has switched to common carriers (UPS, FedEx). Until a few years ago, Diamond Distributors ran trucks across the US, but it's just so friggin' huge that it cost too much - even more than having 100 lbs. of comic books shipped via UPS to you each week.

Anyway, I could go on about this forever. Many of you who know me IRL can attest to my total comic book geekiness.

Post Script: OK, I'm going to post this information as a followup since at dinner I got some looks of "your numbers are beer induced hypotheticals." In reality, my numbers really are way off... they're low.

From The Comic Book In America, by Mike Benton, published by Taylor Press, First Printing.

p. 41: By 1946, comic-book reading was an established habit - some might say an addicti... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why does Manga succeed where US comics fail?