Moving on...

The ghosts in the machine seem to have fled, so we can resume the daily discourse here. Also missing in action, thankfully, is the virus that attacked the biological systems at home: Not in 20 years, appendicitis notwithstanding, have I been as sick as I was Sunday night and Monday. The functional member of the household took less of a hit, but she was supine most of Monday as well. We've been lucky in the past with daycare illnesses, but this thing swept through Lumpy's place like Katrina through the 9th Ward, and the collateral damage was intense. 

Fortunately, AMC was running a Mad Men marathon during my sick day, so I managed to get four more episodes of backstory in. I'll have more to say about the series as a whole soon; the highlight of the day, though, came when a great ad for Canada Dry ginger ale showed up between the Stoli and the Johnnie Walker in an episode about the problems w/ TV ad placements. Did AMC's demographic research indicate that people watching daylong Mad Men marathons would likely be suffering from intense gastrointestinal pain for which Canada Dry ginger ale is the only known palatable relief? Dunno, but we crawled out and bought three bottles of the stuff. God bless Madison Avenue.

Postscript: Ironically, both the season one episode I watched immediately prior to the digestive onslaught and one of the season two episodes on during the marathon concluded with scenes of vomiting. Say what you will about the realism of Mad Men, when it comes to depictions of violent regurgitation: Not realistic. At all.