I was in college when I convinced my parents to let me spend a hunk of my Christmas vacation with my girlfriend Susan and her family in Bucks County, PA. I assured my folks that we would do a lot of cultural and intellectual kinds of things. We would go to the symphony, where I could see Eugene Ormandy conduct some Tchaikovsky. We would do the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall — great because I loved the Founding fathers so.
I bought a little gold plated Liberty Bell, which I so loved that I wore it around my neck for many years when the gold plating had long worn off.
Her father, a design engineer, loved making toy soldier models which My-Father-Of-Blessed-Memory loved collecting. Susan’s father had told her to tell me I would bring home a new soldier for my father — that clinched the deal for sure. Read more on Don’t Eat The Blue Stuff — Or Yellow Either!…
Filed under News, Nutrition by on Nov 21st, 2013. Comment. 
The Tower Hill School in Delaware is considered top of the rank of independent schools in Delaware. Maybe, some say, the best private college prep in the United States.
Their website looks a lot like the website for my old prep school — Beaver Country Day School For Young Ladies, Chestnut Hill, MA.
Yes, in the days of the class of 1969, it was girls only, and was almost a relic of bygone days, with mixers (with boys’ prep schools) where an effort was still made to keep couples a certain distance apart. I was one of the early token Jews in a system where all visible human skin was the color of a bleached aspirin tablet. Read more on School Sex Scandals Among The Rich And Powerful…
Filed under Education, Family, News by on Nov 21st, 2013. Comment.
I was wearing my best pastel multicolor weave suit as I walked up the stairs of a drab gray Victorian mansion converted into a medical office on the outskirts of large mid-western city. It was a bit cool, early spring, and I had been through all of the other principal personalities in a fairly large and well respected neurosurgery department. The emeritus chief of the department — older, semi-retired, wrote hunks of textbooks about 20 years before; was the last one I had to see. Although nobody seemed wildly excited, I had “passed” the interviews to make it this far.
The Victorian mansion was the office building of the neurosurgical group that was the residency faculty. I was ushered into a richly furnished Victorian style office with antimacassars and gigantic velvet wing-backed chairs.
The father-to-us-all type neurosurgeon spent over five minutes asking me about France and my passion for the brain before asking me if my period gave me any problems. Read more on Women In Science Sore And Soar…
Filed under Education, Government, medicine, News by on Nov 20th, 2013. Comment.
I am glad that Frida Ghitlis covered this, glad as always that other women in other countries fight against arbitrary and repressive regimes.
Of course a woman should be allowed to show her face, that great bastion of personal identity.
I cannot claim to be surprised that Fox News, that lovely stronghold of all that is conservative, trivialized it into a headline about it being impossible to tell women “what to wear.” Read more on What “Womanstuff” Really Means…
Filed under News, politics, war by on Nov 15th, 2013. Comment.
I had my struggles with the military about weight requirements. Many have. I remember an especially clever nurse-officer who had given a lot more years of her existence to the Army than I had, and was both a cracker jack clinician and a cracker jack administrator, and left with a wimp because she was too heavy.
I also remember one whom I then considered a mediocre physician’s assistant who told me he got a commission as a warrant officer where the physical consisted mainly of measuring the circumference of both his neck and his waist. He did it by pumping up his muscles in his neck so that his neck was so damned fat that the rest of him seemed “proportional.” Yes, this really worked. Waist not — want not.
In case anybody is curious about my military commission physical, I had starved myself to some pretty small proportions. The physician told me I was built like a fashion model, so as much as he would surely enjoy it, he was not going to insult me by giving me a physical. Read more on Plastic Surgery To Pass The Army Physical…
Filed under Government, News by on Nov 13th, 2013. Comment.
Filed under Government, News, Research by on Oct 31st, 2013. Comment.
Filed under End Of Life, News by on Oct 18th, 2013. Comment.
The Yahoo coverage says two Americans and one German American won the prize.
My bet for the most accurate reporting is the New York Times article that says three Americans won the prize.
This is mainly because I remember I wanted to leave France and return stateside with a French citizenship as a souvenir. I found out from American authorities that if I wanted to take any kind of oath of allegiance to any country that was not the U.S. of A., then the U.S. of A. would consider it a renouncement of citizenship. Read more on You May Shut Down The Government, But Don’t Shut Down Science!…
First, let us establish who Callista Gingrich is. She is the current wife of Newt Gingrich, which news reporting at least suggests is a temporary employment. She is a former Washington intern who has created documentaries and media stuff with her husband.
He has a history of finding his next wife before finishing with the last, so if she were my buddy I would tell her that I hope she has a good prenup — or maybe she wants a postnup.
This being said, I agree with this woman on the thesis of this article — assuming she actually wrote it. Often, people in the public eye let someone else “do the paperwork” when they blog, write essays, etc. Ms. Newt says that today’s young kids have an appalling lack of knowledge about the basics of the history of this country, such as why the pilgrims came or who George Washington was. Read more on Knowledge Of History Means National Pride…
Filed under medicine, News, Science by on Oct 11th, 2013. Comment.
The current rate of suicide among soldiers should make us angry, maybe enough to destroy our computers or, heaven forbid, write to congress or even try to stop war.
I checked out this institution¸ the National Center for Veterans Studies, the best I could. I am not sure why the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force seem to have a love affair with this division of the University of Utah.
Of their current projects, some of the proposed studies are randomized clinical trials of various therapies as suicide preventives. I am a great believer in research. But there is one question I am asked frequently, still, although I evaluate research but am not currently engaged in it. People ask me if I am a doctor first or a researcher first. There is absolutely no contest. I am a doctor first. I want lives saved, first. Read more on Why Soldiers Commit Suicide These Days…
Filed under News, politics by on Oct 11th, 2013. Comment.