We saw the state of the union speech under unusual circumstances.

My wife had not been feeling well for the last few days. She called just before lunchtime and told me that our Primary Care Physician (PCP) wanted her to get a test at Be Patient, the clinic on the first floor of his medical office building. (All these names will be fake.) For a little background, when my folding bike folded out from under me last summer, my wrist hurt - a lot - so the PCP sent me to Be Patient for an x-ray. The doc at the clinic looked at the x-ray and said, "I don't know if that's a fracture or not," and sent me to Hands r Us, where another doc looked at the fracture and said, "Yeah, that's a fracture." Hands r Us sent me to another place for a plastic splint. So I got about $600 in bills from all these places, and wished I had simply been referred to Hands r Us in the first place.

But back to the present, while I knew my wife could drive herself to Be Patient, the roads there are at the end of the expressway, so I knew there was a strong likelihood she'd get in the wrong lane and end up on the expressway coming back, and feel lost and frightened. So I left work and met her at the light rail station and we drove to Be Patient.

After her test, the doc there told her she needed a cat scan, so we went to SayNo Hospital. We tried to make sense of the entrance signs, and eventually pulled into the main entrance, where we tried to make sense of one sign that indicated patient parking left and to the left, one that said no entrance. I dropped her at the porte-cochere, and came back. That was the right place for parking. The other sign was just left there in case they were full. I took a ticket and parked far away.

We met in the lobby, which featured some beautiful wood lounge chairs, and found our way to the CatScan department. The department sign was also in Cyrillic. We live near a large community of Orthodox Jews, and I guess a lot of them are Russian. SayNo said our referral wasn't specific enough, so we had to get in through Emergency. That killed about two hours during which I watched CNN's preliminary SOTU coverage on a large screen. There was a large digital countdown readout in the lower left corner. They talked about really important issues, like what color tie Obama might wear, and Date Night. Sen. Barrasso was on and said some carefully doubtful stuff about Obama. Then Sen. Webb came on and said some carefully non-committal stuff about gun control. Neither one seemed to have a date, which was sad.

My wife got a room and drank a lot of white fluid and called for me to help her wait. We watched some more preliminary CNN stuff. Over and over they ran a commercial for Piers Morgan's new show, in which he was asking two of the Kardashians if it upset them to be accused of having no talent. I found that hysterical, and wondered if they would smart enough to ask him the same question. I only knew Morgan as the rude Brit from Celebrity Apprentice (as opposed to the rude Brit from Hell's Kitchen). IMO, Morgan and the Kardashians do have talent, but only for getting to be considered celebrities.

Wolf Blitzer and The Situation Room took over CNN with a panel including John King, Ed Rollins, David Gergen, Donna Brazile and Eliot Spitzer (I wish these names were fake). They had a few intelligent exchanges and interviewed Ron Paul. After we nagged the nurses a lot, my wife was taken for her scan, and was returned fairly quickly. Blitzer brought in a guest commentator - Piers Morgan. We - I - switched to a rerun of NCIS. And missed Bill Maher.

When we came back to CNN, Morgan was speaking again (damn!) but he was discussing the effects of austerity in the UK with what might happen in the US, which actually might have been a worthwhile discussion. With the pound not being quite so sterling lately, the Guardian, the Financial Times and many other outlets have raised the spectre of 1970s style stagflation in the UK. I wonder if Piers will ask the Kardashians about the economy.

So the Sergeant-at-Arms introduced the President of the United States, and I listened as Obama, who has almost as good a tan as John Boehner, tried to paint austerity measures as a necessary struggle against the world, something we should undertake proudly, while never mentioning that they would be, in fact, austerity measures, borne by everyone but the already wealthy. I winced when he mentioned Medicare and Social Security because it seemed obvious that just by his mentioning them, they were going to be subject to change.

Then we heard a cracking noise and a man crying out in pain. The noise sounded like a television sound effect. I thought maybe someone was getting cardiac resuscitation, but it didn't sound right. We watched some more of the speech and then five or ten minutes later it happened again. I poked my head outside the room and saw three large po-lice, and all the nurses, staring at a black man leaning against a wall. His hands were tied behind him with a plastic cuff, and he was panting hard.

I told my wife what I had seen. I looked out again, and the man was leaning against a gurney while one officer typed on a computer. Later, as we watched the rest of the speech, we heard the man arguing about what he had and hadn't said. Boehner stopped clapping a few times, but generally Obama managed to find uplifting phrases that pleased both parties.