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Right Angle: Backstage 06/06/23

From playing the air drums to on-the-job hookah smoking, we have a cornucopia of conundrums on this week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage.

Top songs for the air drums enthusiast, drag queens at Disney, Megan Kelly’s pronouns, the Republican primary contenders, AI and clickbait, five star reviews and on-the-job hookah smoking… all this and so much less on this edition of Right Angle: Backstage!

32 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 06/06/23”

Be honest in your reviews, but if you give less than a top rating, include comments explaining your rating. Otherwise, how can they understand how yo improve.

Bill, there are no “real trans-sexuals”. That is seeding too much ground. If you could change sexes, trans-sexuals could conceivably exist. There are more convincing transvestites and less-convincing transvestites. Gender dysphoria needs treatment, not affirmation. Just because they are better at their deception or more intent on their deception doesn’t mean they deserve any respect for it. That’s like saying a thief deserves to get away with it if they get away with it.

Funny note: this cheap ugly gun is responsible for so many deaths. I know what you really meant, but as a gun owner, I’m aware of how language is used for “guns killing people” argument. Still love the show!

My tinnitus (extremely high pitch & LOUD) was likely result of head phones @ 11, Live R&R concerts next to 12′ tall amps, gun fires (no plugs), sprint-car engine mechanic w/open exhaust, 3 serious concussions … BRUTAL trying to live with it, and it’s getting worse w/age. HELP! Like Bill, I too am always listening to music, play background videos (like this one), humming, etc. just to try and mask sound. How many ‘remedies’ have you tried? I am trying another recently bought … so far … no relief. 🙁

I understand the vast majority (90%+) of chronic tinnitus cases, like mine, are associated with hearing loss. Given your history, you might have some hearing loss. There is no known cure for tinnitus, although a few months ago the FDA approved a biofeedback device, Lenirehas, which has some promising test results. In my experience, your general practice MD or ENT won’t be able to offer you much, and chasing “cures” touted on the internet is a dead end. Best bet is to find someone who specializes in this area–like an audiologist or otologist. 
In my case a set of hearing aids with a tinnitus masker helped. Better hearing helps mask the noise naturally and the masker, if properly adjusted, helped me as well. It has the advantage of being on 24/7 so you are not entirely dependent on background noise. My audiologist directed me to sleep with the hearing aids in. Modern hearing aids are so small that they don’t present comfort issues when sleeping. The goal of this type of treatment is to reduce your perception of the noise.
Everybody’s case is different, but hopefully you’ll find some of this helpful.

It’s my understanding, from articles I read, that tinnitus is not a hearing problem involving the ears, but a brain chemical problem. i don’t think there’s a cure for it, as far as I know. I’ve had it since I was about 35 (I’m now 72) and it changes frequency quite a bit. It also gets horrendously loud at bedtime now and then and is accompanied by a loud heartbeat “noise” in the area of my right ear if I’m laying on that side. That noise, the thump of a heartbeat, prevents me from sleep for hours. If anyone who reads this knows of a treatment, please oh please, for the love of everything sacred, let me know!

You could have a dehiscence of the bone where the superior semicircular canal abuts the sagittal sinus (Big vein that leads to the jugular from the brain). A CT mastoid would help diagnose. Look for an appointment with an otologist – a subgroup in ENT.
Read Johns Hopkins medicine’s online description of semicircular canal dehiscence syndrome and see if your symptoms align with the list they provide.
You may have been diagnosed as having endolymphatic hydrops – Ménière’s disease. Meniere’s is usually accompanied by sensitivity to loud noise, fluctuating hearing loss, roaring tinnitus, and vertigo. It comes and goes and usually presents at the age you described. Treatment is salt restriction, diuretic medication (used with care as this can drop your blood pressure and Meniere’s patients usually have low blood pressure), bursts of steroids when hearing is dramatically affected, and treatment of allergy – a trigger in 40% of patients.
The differentiating history, however, is the pulsatile tinnitus, not usually found in Meniere’s.

All I can say is thank you for the plethora of information. (I just had to use a word not usually used to show off my smartz.) Anyway, I don’t have the symptoms of endolymphatic hydrops, except for tinnitus, and it only “roars” occasionally. I’ve never been diagnosed with it and I’m not in a financial position to have any testing done. I just do as much research as possible on my own.
I’ve been able to pinpoint some health problems that many doctors and far too much testing were unable to find. My husband went to multiple doctors and had every test available in an effort to find out why he was getting dizzy. It turned out to be the one thing that none of those doctors tested or thought of, an ear infection.
My own problem of racing heartbeats and overly hard heartbeats turned out to be stress-related. I realized that on my own and taught myself calming methods to reduce stress. And, of course, that was after enduring a long line of tests with no results. My heart is fine.
Those things, along with many other factors, are why I am super leery of doctors and the medical establishment in general.
I do very much appreciate your time and effort to explain it all for me, dear sir. We’ll see what the future brings by way of testing.

There are stress-related causes of pulsatile tinnitus, the primary one being bruxism – grinding your teeth. Most women do this while sleeping and are not able to control or recognize it. If you wake up with a sore neck and discomfort in your ears and have pulsatile tinnitus, wear a night guard and maybe take a CBD gummy at bedtime.
If not, read the article from Hopkins that I recommended about superior semicircular canal syndrome.

Thank you, again, new friend. Stress may have caused it to begin so very long ago, but it has persisted non-stop for all the years until now. I was married to an abusive alcoholic, who kept me in high level stress for years. I’ve also endured and self-treated many stomach ulcers. But I’m still alive and, for me, that’s all that matters. I survived that husband and now am married to the exact opposite. We’ve been married for 24+ years and counting. Went through hell to get to this period in my life, but in retrospect, it was worth it to be so happy now.

I was just about to post Megyn’s commentary. I thought she did a really good job of going back in time and admitting how wrong it was to be accommodating to these “simple” requests and how that led to where we are now.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT UBER: Yes, we get to rate the drivers and yes we are reluctant to trash a driver for fear of costing them their jobs. But did you know that UBER DRIVERS ALSO RATE THEIR PASSENGERS.
Several low ratings can get an Uber Driver removed from the list. So we have good reason to be careful not to overreact when we rate a driver. Who wants to get a guy fired (anyone who is not an entitled, drunk on power, #$$#()|& that is). But the little-known fact is, that Uber drivers rate their passengers and several low ratings can leave you stranded because drivers won’t pick up passengers with a low rating.
I got a message from Uber that a driver had given me a low rating and I got a lecture about wearing a mask in the car. I investigated further and found the driver had burned me because I got into the car from outside and forgot to put on my mask. Instead of reminding me, which would have got him an apology and my instant compliance with Uber’s mask mandate, he remained in a sullen silence the whole trip and then low rated me afterward.
Needless to say I reciprocated vis-a-vis giving him a low rating and expressing my opinion. He clearly jumped to the conclusion that my noncompliance was due to me being a Republican White Supremacist conspiracy theory who might commit violence against him in his car in the midst of a deadly pandemic. These people make me so tired.
The Uber system does allow you to protest the low rating by contacting their customer service and giving your side of the incident. It also allows drivers to warn other drivers that this passenger is bad news. That makes for a more friendly environment for both drivers and passengers. In all of the hundreds of rides I’ve take with Uber I’ve only had that one problem and the trouble erupted after the ride was over and I was safely home.
It’s a good system, but knowing the driver gets a vote on how well you behave as a passenger should probably be more widely known among riders. It might result in a lot of self-restraint among their riders. I’ve driven a taxi so I know how much I appreciated polite people I carried in my cab. Met some of the nicest drunks and I couldn’t even rate my riders. This was Texas and people tend to gravitate toward nice by and large.
The closest we ever got to being able to rate our passengers was when a driver (not me) picked up a drunk at Felix Bar in downtown Ft. Worth. The driver got pulled off the cab stand at the Hyatt where most of the riders are headed for the airport or are great tippers so he wasn’t in a mood to put up with much. The drunk he picked up immediately got surly because the barkeeper had cut him off. He began threatening the driver and shouting from the back seat. The guy was driving one of those old yellow Checker cabs. So the guy was sitting on the right side of the back seat, leaning against the door and berating the driver. So when they reached 7th Street, my fellow driver made a sharp left hand turn onto 7th and mid-turn, reached back and flipped open the back door.
His increasingly violent passenger, rolled limply out the door and onto the street and the cab disappeared into the night leaving the drunk in the middle of the street in a puddle of his own vomit. The driver, in effect, rated him 0, GONE, and canceled.
I personally think Uber’s system is much better.

Yes! Bill and I lost our hearing the same way! Gigantic Koss “cans” on our head, with very early 70’s music at volume E.L.E.V.E.N.
My tinnitus varies from the sounds of a distant (very) crowd, to a continuous mid pitch tone, and lastly the LSD portion of Strawberry Fields. If my tinnitus ever gets to ABBA’s Waterloo, that’s it. I’ll join the Billionaire.
Just once I wish my condition could somehow allow me to hear…
“THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF SPACE!”

I stumbled across Megyn Kelly’s podcast after hearing her on Mike Rowe’s podcast several months ago. Learned some new things about her on Mike’s show that were interesting enough that I started to listen to her show. She has some really interesting guests and she is a very good interviewer; she actually listens.
Her journey is a real one and represents why we as conservatives need to stop with the whole, she said X so she is dead to me. The guys competing against girls was her epiphany. On a show last week she admitted that she had taken an on-line political quiz and it showed her as well on the conservative side, something she hadn’t realized.
I actually sent her an email a few weeks back suggest Bill as a guest when the new DW videos drop. She has a top ten rated podcast and it would be a good forum for Bill. Hopefully Jeremey or Ben will suggest it to her as well.

I saw Dan Bongino interviewed by Megyn Kelly a few weeks ago, now we check her out often. Love the no holds words barred podcast style too, totally seems way more real than when she was at Fox or wherever she went to next. Really liking Russel Brand on Rumble too, funny, fast and coming from a completely different point of view, which is refreshing. Wasn’t Megyn the first “Nasty woman” according to DJT? Bleeding or something?

I think DJT did not like the way she moderated the debate. But yea, Megyn on this show is way different than she was as a network person. She has had quite a few outspoken women on her show covering the male athlete and the rush to hormones and surgeries. She is definitely passionate on this topic but she is certainly right of center though I am sure most wouldn’t believe that.
The Dan Bongino was a good one and she had an ex-Seal on for Memorial Day – can’t think of his name off the top of my head but folks would know it.
It is a good listen.

This is how I explain tinnitus to patients; When we are screening babies for whether or not they can hear we put a device in the ear canal and listen for how much noise the ear makes. The sound is called an acoustic emission. If we hear all frequencies, we know the baby can hear all frequencies. No noise means a deaf baby. So if you think about it, your ears are generating all the frequencies all the time. The reason most of us don’t hear this is that the brain generates canceling frequencies. Sound is a wave and ear noise and brain noise can cancel one another out.
The reason we do hearing tests when evaluating tinnitus patients is to find out if there are frequencies with hearing loss. Loud noise tends to injure the nerve cells that generate 4K. If you have a 4K frequency hearing loss from acoustic trauma, your ear doesn’t generate that pitch as loud as it did when your hearing was normal. Your brain doesn’t know that and still sends out a cancelling frequency. This “brain noise” that was emitted to cancel an “ear noise” that no longer exists is what you are hearing. That’s why when you are in a noisy environment you don’t notice it as much because outside noise is cancelling the brain noise. This is why sleeping with a noise in the background helps people not able to sleep for the tinnitus get better rest.
Disclaimer; This is a generalized explanation that is actually extremely complicated. And you can also have tinnitus from grinding your teeth, blood flow changes from hyperthyroidism (Steve), and from certain drugs like high dose aspirin. To make it even more difficult to understand, some people whose hearing test appears quite normal have tinnitus. Some people awaken one morning with screaming tinnitus like feedback from a microphone that we can’t explain. And tinnitus is a known, common reason for suicide.

I never knew Bill had tinnitus before today!
I have a similar condition, called APD; audio processing disorder.
I can’t filter out background noise. I hear EVERYTHING, All. The. Time!
Right now, I hear my breathing, my pulse, people’s voices in other offices, air conditioning, the fan on my computer, machinery in the factory floor downstairs, the server fans inside the server closet across the office, etc.
All while I’m listening to the show on (open ear) headphones!
So, yeah, I do a lot of humming in my head, too.

I totally have this. I wear headphone/earplugs almost all day long without any music on just to dull the input.

Lost most of my hearing to a combination of loud rock and roll in the 70s and shooting guns unprotected most of my life. The higher the pitch the harder it is for me to hear. Everyday I’m getting tinnitus cures on my fb feed. Pretty sure most are scams.

On my YT feed, I’m told Tinnitus is “eating my brain cells”. I researched hearing aids on YT last year. The algorithm must remember everything, I’d guess. I really hope my brain cells won’t be eaten.

I love the cryptic references, whenever they crop up! I spend more time looking up references after these shows than any other podcast!

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