T minus One
Orientation, day two: More welcomes, introduction to the library and library resources, basic introduction to school's email system. No explanation as of yet as to why email from outside takes 9+ hours to arrive. General IT introduction, and usual Mac blowoff ("We're a Windows shop, and we don't support Macs.") a, well, less-than-ideal approach in an academic environment. Professionalism. Maximizing Learning, Hepatitis B vaccination, and a slice or two of pizza. Overview of M1 curriculum, intro to career advising, incoming student questionnaires for longitudinal study (which did ask about computer OS usage on non-school hardware at home, so maybe there's some hope). Helpful hints from 3 M4s and a faculty member, of whom two of the former are parents (and one of whom had her first child in December of her M1 year), much impressing us assembled M1s. President's picnic, including tales of EVMS's foray into reproductive medicine in Tbilisi in the late '80s, apparently cut short by tank fire from (surprise) the Russian army a few weeks after ribbon-cutting. Mandatory tattooing of 6-inch EVMS logo on left butt cheek (just kidding).
T minus Two
Orientation, day one: Welcomes from the Big Cheeses (Dean, President, Rector of Board of Visitors, President of Alumni Association). Community service and outreach (fundamental to the philosophy of the school, the only grass-roots-organized medical school in the nation). The honor code, counseling services, disability policy, student health, health insurance, lunch (one of two "free" such before the hammer comes down on Wednesday). Registration and financial aid entrance interview. Parking, campus security, Big Sibling introductions, locker assignments and combinations, mailbox, email account. Fall course schedule, book list, syllabus for medical histology is in the mailbox. Primary care provider for student health. Pitch to sign up to call alumni for donations ($12/hr.). Buzz-cut shaving of head (just kidding).
Celtics 131, Lakers 92
In 1986, I was a senior at a parochial boarding high school in Virgina. A couple of years earlier, a Boston school in the same system had closed and a number of its students from around New England had come south and had enrolled at the Virginia school. Two of those students in particular, sisters, seemed to go absolutely nuts each year when NBA championship time rolled around. To someone who had grown up in a city and state with no major league sports teams1, and who, frankly, wasn't a huge sports fan anyway, their behavior was more than a little mysterious.
Having now lived in Boston for 14 years2, during what may turn out to be one of the city's golden eras, sportswise, I think I'm starting to understand what all the excitement was about. So to Dawn and Traci and the other Celtics fans of that time and place (who can't have changed team loyalties in the intervening years), I offer my congratulations.
1. Durham, N.C. Well, OK, Duke basketball under Coach K. was not exactly sleepy at the time, and was on its way to a national championship of its own a few years later. Michael Jordan had been playing college ball at a school down the road a couple of years earlier. So there is some familiarity with the excitement...
2. And despite being about to depart the area, strangely enough, to return to Virginia.
It's probably not the catalytic converter
"I don't think society's going to disintegrate. It's gonna smell funny for a while, but it's not going to disintegrate."
Frank Zappa, in a 1968 WFMT Radio Chicago interview with Studs Terkel
I can think of a couple of images...
David Hockney on Pictures and Power, via Andrew Sullivan:
We do not have debates about images. The world of art is separate from the world of images, but the power is with images, not art. An obvious problem is seen. The world of images claims a relationship to visual reality - television and cinema - but this claim cannot now be sustained. We will get more confused if we don't think about them.
He's not exactly correct to claim we don't have debates about images.
"Life is like high school..."
From Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, pp. 1-12, by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, excerpted by Fresh Air:
Any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons.
When they say, "check references," is this what they mean?
This can be considered a literary blog only in the way the proverbial infinite number of monkeys with typewriters can be considered a literary endeavor, so we'll be the first to admit we're not intimately familiar with the works of D.H. Lawrence, but the following note, found at the tail of an A.O. Scott New York Times review of the film "Starting Out in the Evening," does seem excessively cautious (italics in the original):
"Starting Out in the Evening" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some profanity, sexual situations and references to the work of D. H. Lawrence.
Literary warning gripes aside, the film sounds like a treat for Lauren Ambrose fans, of which group this blogger is a member. From the review:
Ms. Ambrose is self-assured enough to hold her own with Mr. Langella and Ms. Taylor...and brave enough to show the vain, insecure, unformed aspects of Heather’s personality. The character’s evident immaturity shows that the actress is wise beyond her years.
New Orleans, Lower Ninth Ward, September 26, 2007
Remember, if your subject is a primate, get a photo release (or a belt)
From the September 25, 2007 Guardian: "Orangutan rips off tourist's trousers:"
An orangutan who objected to having its photograph taken by a French tourist snatched her backpack before ripping off her trousers.
The woman, known only as Odile, was taking photographs of a female orangutan named Delima in a Malaysian wildlife centre when the ape took offence.
The pair tussled over Odile's backpack before Delima decided to go for the tourist's clothes.
"He (Delima) took my shoes and socks off, and then tried to take off my trousers," Odile told the Associated Press news agency.
"As he couldn't with his hands only, he tried with his teeth and that's when I got bitten. As soon as he got my trousers he went away." She denied she had tried to touch or harass the animal.
Watch out for guys selling monkeys
From the PBS/American Experience documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, forty-some years before Craigslist:
June Cordell, Relative of Peoples Temple Member: "The first time I met Jim Jones was Easter 1953. My mother-in-law, Edith Cordell, had a monkey and it hung itself and she wanted to replace the monkey. So she looked in the Indianapolis Star, and in that Indianapolis Star was Jim Jones's ad that he had some monkeys to sell. So it was through that that she met Jim Jones, and came back saying that he had invited her to church this next Sunday."
In Indianapolis, Edith Cordell wanted to replace a pet monkey and saw an ad in the paper placed by Jim Jones who was selling pets to raise money for a church. "So she went over and she bought 'em—a boy monkey and a girl monkey," her nephew Gene recalled. "Jimmy started telling her about his church." Aunt Edith joined and recruited a number of family members. Gene and his wife became disillusioned after Jones returned from seeing Father Divine and made grandiose proclamations of his own divinity. But Edith and about 20 other Cordells followed Jones to California in 1965. Twenty members of Gene Cordell's family died in Jonestown. Aunt Edith left her entire estate to Jim Jones.
Where, exactly, is that cat spending the rest of his time?
On July 26, the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog published "Final Exit, Pursued by a Cat," reporting on a short article in the New England Journal of Medicine:
So there’s this cat that lives in a nursing home in Providence, R.I., and somehow he knows when people are about to die. At the end of the line, Oscar jumps on people’s beds and purrs really loud.
So when the staff at the nursing home see Oscar get into bed with somebody, they check the person’s chart and make the call to family members. Things don’t look so good. You might want to come down here.
A day earlier, the same blog posted "Lab Values Predict Mortality for Hospitalized Patients":
Measuring just how well hospitals care for patients has proved tricky. Mortality measures, adjusted for risk, are one approach.
So what’s the best way to evaluate how likely hospitalized patients are to die? Lab tests, according to a paper in the current issue of the journal Medical Health.
I think it's pretty obvious what's going on: that cat is crunching the lab test data.