We are not friends. Which is inconsequential to me. I have friends.
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without getting into the particulars of that whole episode, I do note that to this day that when my Toyota manufactured car goes in for service at the Toyota dealer, they make a major production of assessing the floor mat around the accelerator...it strikes me as a bit of theater.
This one is for ClemmonsDevil:
I hate turkeys. If you stand in the meat section at the grocery store long enough, you start to get pissed off at turkeys. There's turkey ham, turkey pastrami, turkey bologna. Someone needs to tell the turkey "Man, just be yourself. I already like you, little brother. You do not need to emulate the other animals. You got your own thing goin'. I used to draw you." (Stares at hand.) Man, if you were missing a couple of fingers, you would draw one messed-up turkey. You'd be like, "That turkey's been in an accident." --Mitch Hedberg
When I first heard Diane Rehm on the radio I thought there would be no way I could listen to her. And after about three episodes I realized that her speech disorder offered her such an unbelievable advantage because her guests had to pay attention to everything she said and her pacing made it so that it was impossible to interrupt her. She is the best interviewer I have ever heard.
I remember laughing with the guy checking me in when I took my Camry in due to the recall. I didn't think it was the floor mats at the time and never figured out why the driver's didn't put the car in neutral, slam on the brakes, or even try pulling the emergency brake. Note: I've never tried the last one and hope to never have to - not sure what the results would be. The movies make it seem like it makes you do a 180 but not planning on ever testing it.
I think this is the correct reading of the situation. People are incredibly bad decision makers in an emergency. Working in medicine I have watched people make catastrophic mistakes just because things occurred outside of the norm and they didn't know what to do to respond. I'm getting ready to do a lecture in an hour and a half for a group of Physicians and I am going to have to find a very nice way up saying that the mistakes they are making are errors of both omission and commission that are fixable and have rational explanations and that many of their problems stem from an inability to recognize when they are going down the wrong path. And I give this talk 80 times a year. And that number is getting ready to go up and it will be given to a larger audience starting in a couple of weeks. But the message is pretty much always the same. People are bad at making decisions in an emergency and they are blinded by the wrong variables when the decisions they do make go awry.
I often lose track of my cursor. Furious movements of the trackball follow. Grace under pressure it certainly isn't.
*This is all exacerbated by having two monitors, one 28" and one 23".
Heading out to celebrate my last grandparent’s 90th birthday. Fortunate to be able to do it in person.
Hopefully, not bad news. I just got this in one of my e-mail accounts:
Attachment 12917
Maybe this will work better:
Attachment 12918
I am good in an emergency. After hearing athletes describe what it feels like to be in The Zone, I feel sure that is what happens to me when a "real time decisions are going to matter, and if you don't do the right thing serious injury (or worse) could happen" crisis presents itself to me, I go into The Zone. I take over and start barking orders at people. The amazing thing is they all listen and do exactly as I say.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Or something like that.
I had a plan for lunch. Then I got hungry early.
There has been an egregious break with protocol ^^
What should we do?
So many rules are being broken, I need to have a lay down.
Could someone please remind me - what is the first rule of Book Club?
Put the traps out tonight as there is a newish face around We'll see what happens.
As someone who has frequently had to deal with feral cats (and quite a few domesticated ones) that get under my porch and poop, dig up my flowerbeds and poop, spray everything in sight, hang out under my bird feeder for a snack, and generally knock things over, like plant stands - I have a problem with the TNR program. But that is probably getting into PP discussion, so I will leave it at that.
Except that it is frustrating when your yard reeks of cat pee - an you do not own a cat.
the male cat spraying thing is about the worst thing they (cats) do...smell hangs around longer than L'Aire du Temps...
p.s. about two weeks ago I busted The Mad Pooper, a neighbor's dog who comes over in the dead of night (its owners are nocturnal) and poops on our front steps, garden, back door area...as they say, the proof is in the pooping
I think except for dermatologists, MDs are not aware that gold jewelry contains nickel. But then again, it might not just be MDs, perhaps the only people aware that gold jewelry contains nickel are people with severe nickel allergies.
TBH, lots of people look at you funny when you tell them you are allergic to most things made of metal.
https://youtu.be/EKu7TYWNxqA
The collective scream you hear this afternoon will be from my coworkers when my promotion is announced. They have all been with the company at least a decade longer than I have. In some circles being in the same position for 15 to 20 years and never being promoted and never seeking a promotion is seen as a recognition of your skill-set. I can promise you that the two reactions are going to be "Wait. Why did he get this job?!?! I didn't know this job existwd!!!!" And also: Wait. We could try to have increased levels of responsibility?!?!"
My assumption is this is exactly how the announcement is going to go down.
Ignoring my own warning again.
We have one neighbor who currently has about 6 cats that she allows to roam. She has had two mauled by feral dogs or coyotes, several that have run away or disappeared, one was shot with a bb gun (no, not I!), and one who recently disappeared, then was found about two months later in a neighboring county, half dead. She still lets them roam. She just keeps getting more. Except I narced on her to APS b/c the papers you sign explicitly say you will keep them indoors. I have made it clear to her that I do not want her cats on my property. She told me I should move. THEN she posts on Nextdoor a complaint about someone else's cat coming onto HER property and harassing her cats. So . . . it's OK for her cats to roam, but not anyone else's. The animal control guy spoke with her as well, and she brushed him off. Meanwhile, a neighbor who had previously said he did not have a problem with her cats woke up one morning to find cat paw prints all over his newly stained porch. He had to re-sand and stain the whole thing. I think his opinion has changed.
I awoke this morning to raccoon prints in the 1/2 inch thick pollen on my porch.
I worked with a guy who was an absolute star High School baseball player. He got drafted in the second round and went to high-level A ball. They gave him a $75,000 sign on bonus which was huge back then. And about 3 days a week he told them he was too hurt to practice and he put on about 30 lbs. When the organization eventually asked him about this he looked at them incredulously and said: "You've already paid me. Why would I need to work hard?" He eventually became a respiratory therapist and we promoted him to supervisor so he could more efficiently sit around.
"I have an underwater camera just in case I crash my car into a river, and at the last minute I see a photo opportunity of a fish that I have never seen." --Mitch Hedberg
"My sister wanted to be an actress, but she never made it. She does live in a trailer. She got half way. She's an actress, she just never gets called to the set." --Mitch Hedberg
Yes. My personal level of ambition has always skewed heavily toward the life side of things, which I understand requires money but as I’ve gotten older I have begun to seriously come to grips with the fact that I don’t actually want to be a bigwig (in whatever field).
My wife is grappling with that now. She’s been ID-Ed as the successor to the current ED at her non-profit. She really doesn’t know if she likes that it would want it.
I used to think that kind of thinking was bad, particularly with all the eager young conquerors at Duke, but I’m trying to put it to bed.
This exchange from my annual review with my boss (around 10 years ago, maybe 15)
Boss: You are never 1st author on any of our papers.
Me: Are you going to fire me because I don't have enough 1st authorships?
Boss: No.
Me: Give them to people who need them for their careers.
Boss: Sure, but we could probably get you a couple of 1st authorships if you want them.
Me: When it's a play I've written, I want 1st and only authorship.
One thing I have discovered in high powered academic research (I am at Harvard after all), if you don't care about taking credit, you get tons of publications. My Q rating is rather high for someone who has never been a PI.
Once though, for political reasons, I was left off of a paper. Personally, I didn't care. Ethically, I did. According to the journal's authorship guidelines, I should have been an author. I had come on the project near the end to finish up most of the statistical analysis because the previous person had left. (I generated all the tables used in the paper.) My boss had loaned me out to a different department (a common occurrence) and the PI never interacted with me. Apparently he was the one who refused to put me on the paper. I wrote an email to the person who I did work with and told them the same thing about the difference between my personal and ethical feelings on the matter. Then I said that I was sending the email and keeping a copy just in case any ethical questions were ever raised about the paper. As gently as I could I told them I was adopting CYA mode. Then I told my boss what I had done and said that I was not willing to work with that group again.
Irksome is a wonderful word that is not used nearly enough.
Flightradar24! That plane above my house is going to Ethiopia from DC, that one over there is going to Dallas from Paris...Kyrie might want to think about that...
I delayed getting a promotion in the Navy, because at E-5, I was able to concentrate on doing my job of maintaining my shipboard target tracking/missile guidance radar, at which I was very good and which I considered relatively important during Viet Nam years. My radar had the highest fleet-wide target kill rate for that particular missile system. A promotion to E-6 became more administratively responsible, with less hands-on. It was only after getting married and needing more money that I relented and got the promotion. I was uncomfortable in that position, and subsequently did not seek a promotion to E-7 either.
Rip dmx.
Never use phillips head screws when proper replacements are available. Never!
Acreage still seems like a good idea...
Homemade pizza night. Hot little standby and trying a Tuscan with red onion confit, Gorgonzola, whole cloves of roast garlic and pine nuts.
Vaccine scheduled for next Wednesday at the Menino YMCA in Hyde Park.
As in longtime Mayor Menino.
I put three bulbs of garlic cloves on the Tuscan. 😀
We have a Dewey's Pizza here. One of their pizzas is the Porky Fig - A Fig Jam Base, Mozzarella, Fontina, Prosciutto, Caramelized Red Onions, Gorgonzola. It is delicious!
What’s your work equivalent of a triple double?
I always wondered what it would be like to defend someone (legally speaking) you knew to be guilty.
Someone I knew committed a pretty bad crime years ago and I spoke with the lead mitigation guy and he seemed pretty committed to painting the full picture of a person, which I can appreciate.
The last 2 times I've been called for jury duty, they ended up not needing jurors to report on the day. The time before that, when I actually reported for jury duty, they were seating jurors for a malpractice case. In the "Is there anything the court should know about your background?" portion of the juror information sheet, I had written "Have participated in research on malpractice cases". I was juror number 87 out of 96 that were called that day. They had kept 2 potential jurors by the time they got to me. The judge looked at my sheet and laughed as he waved me on. I said, "I'll understand all the testimony." He still waved me on.
I had co-authored a paper with one of the expert witnesses on the case, so, there is no way I was going to be seated but we didn't have to get that far.
It did make me wonder though. I suspect I will never be seated on a jury ever because I cannot imagine a scenario where one side won't take objection to me. Everyone has biases though. When it came to that malpractice case, it was a woman with breast cancer who was suing her PCP, the radiologist who had read her mammogram, and the clinic where the mammogram was done. I wasn't seated so I didn't hear all of the details, but I like to think that if the case had merit, I would have found in her favor. That said, I would have been a particularly hard nut to crack given what I know about mammography (it's the best we've got, it doesn't catch everything), about malpractice (winning cases isn't really about doctor negligence, it's about how sympathetic the plaintiff is), and about the doctors who insist on their day in court (vast majority of malpractice cases are settled out of court and insurance pays the award, those that do make it to trial are usually the cases where the doctors refuse to settle because they firmly believe they met or exceeded standards of care). So yeah, the plaintiff had an upward battle with me, but, again, I would have understood all the testimony and I would have take my job to be impartial for that case very seriously.
I have come to the belief that a jury of one's peers is no longer possible.
At the time though, I was relieved to be let go. My kids were still little and it would have been extremely difficult to arrange child care for a long trial. (IIRC, they expected that trial to take 3 weeks.)
Banana nut muffins. Need more nuts.
I brought that up because in a criminal trial, since sending someone to jail is way more serious than having to pay money, my "reasonable doubt" bar is probably very high. I would rather let a guilty person go than find an innocent person guilty.
So, yeah, I get that defending an innocent person who might be found guilty would be the absolute worst.
Also, if the state brought in an expert witness who never found evidence that would help the defense, I would immediately discount everything they said and I would make the statistical argument against that witness in the jury room.
I've lived for fifty years in the same place (essentially) and have never been called for jury duty.
The last two times the jury duty envelope has shown up at my door, it has been for my two oldest sons, once each.
The three stages of reaction: Oh no, jury duty! Wait, not me, yay! Wait, now I have to make sure the kid deals with this, another chore for me, ugh.
LTE pumping out fast balls this morning. The triple double for me is speaking in a room of adversarial doctors and having them come up to me afterwards and thanking me for my participation and trying to get more information. I love speaking at conferences with large audiences, but those lectures are generally sedate affairs and you will seldom have an audience member who is so diametrically opposed to what you are saying that the knives come out. I have had that happen a few times and those are a lot of fun as well, but that has only happened maybe two or three times. Medicine is weird, and this should make Bostondevil nod, because everyone is smart, but there is literally so much information to know that no one can have an absolute grasp of everything. I am not in the upper echelon IQ in most rooms, and especially not in front of physicians at major academic medical centers. What I have done is find a relatively esoteric branch of neonatal medicine and learned as much about this area as all but maybe three or four of the most prominent physicians in the world. And I'm friends with all of those dudes because I have spoken at lots of conferences with them and I take them out for a beer and picked their brains. It's a funny thing about information that none of it is yours. Everything you know was given to you by someone else. What is also true is that everyone in the room is convinced they already understand neonatal ventilation. And they don't . So what I have tried to do is learn from those people who understand things at a higher level than I do. So the triple-double for me is being at a large academic medical center and having the folks in the room pull out all of their grenades while I calmly discuss anatomy and physiology, the physics of gas flow during ventilation and the mathematics involved in getting that gas to go where you would like it to go and avoid those areas you would like it to avoid. And when you break it all down, that's what everyone who is using a device to ventilate a baby is trying to do. The secret is there really aren't that many folks who are actually good at doing it. If the general public knew just how bad it was they would be appalled. Most medical centers operate in a quasi vacuum and there is very little accountability. Until last week when I received a promotion to become the person who will be doing these lectures all over the world rather than regionally, my best professional day is the day I did a lecture at one of the four or five most respected medical centers for a room of about 60 neonatologists, fellows and residents and 1 physician stood up and said: "This all sounds wonderful but how do we know you are not just a salesperson?" And his medical director stood up and pointed at him and said: "Did you not listen to him? I have spoken at conferences with him and he is an accomplished pulmonary physiologist." That day was a 48, 17 + 15 night for me and I promptly drove to grab a cigar and beer. And I sat outside and smoke that cigar and drink that beer with a smile on my face because that was all I had ever wanted.
Sorry, but you did ask.
Oh - what's my triple double?
Easy. Although I tend to call it a triple threat. It's when I participate in a short play festival by writing one, directing another one, and acting in a third one.
My triple double would be the time my company got bought out, and I was dealt the hand of designing the plan to merge two completely different systems into a unified whole. This was before cloud services days, so there were physical servers in 20-some offices in 4 countries to change over without disrupting business on either side. In house HR/payroll, accounting, email, files, and some arcane stuff, too.
Then seeing it through - successfully - as my last project as a contract "employee" for them.
-jk
Some urinals are intentionally designed to splatter pee back on your shins. Prove me wrong.
Annual remove patio furniture, sweep, leaf blower, hose out, squeegee, blow dry and then air dry the back patio day.
One of the companies I worked for was acquired in '97. Little to no systems integration required. The 6 months as we were waiting for the deal to close were some of the most cushy days of my working career. We were there to make sure it didn't all fall apart. Luckily, it didn't. The manufacturing plant or the deal.
Oven suddenly not working. Ignition on gas stove top not working. Can light with a match. Clock on range clearly pulling electricity.
Any thoughts?
Just checked...marriage still strong. Despite penchant to overshare.
No longer concerned about overhsaring...
This isn’t discussing! This is like the waiter bringing a single bite of something out to whet the appetite.
For men, the worst, and I mean the worst, are the urinals with no splash guards between them and someone is peeing vigorously next to you and also you’re wearing sandals.
Using the ignore function.
Why is The Masters so famous?
And, it is the only major played on the same course every year. Incredible history on every hole.
The back nine is very risk/reward. Someone will shoot 31; someone will shoot 38. Huge swings, great hole designs, lightning fast undulating greens. Usually sets up for great drama.
GNR covering Bob Dylan at the Freddie Mercury Tribute in '92.
So to recap yesterday: Bostondevil is like LeBron and professionally she goes off weekly while I am Tony Delk and you see my name and go: "Tony Delk. He didn't suck. Nice little change of pace point guard. Wait? He had a 50 point game one time?
So basically the Masters started as a tournament before the real concept of majors became a thing. There were just some tournaments more prestigious than others. So it was a tournament played at the same course, just like the Kemper open or the TPC at Sawgrass. It was just the most prestigious one. Here is a good article on the modern concept of majors. Golf is like tennis in that many of these tournaments were open only to amateurs and not professionals. This persisted for a long time so a lot of the past champions of tennis and golf tournaments may not have been among the greatest players of their era. So basically it's a major because people decided it was and it's played at the same course because it always was.
https://www.golfmonthly.com/tour/us-masters/augusta-blog/why-is-the-masters-a-major-152766
The Augusta National was founded by Bobby Jones and they started an invitational event in 1934. It is an annual invitational event put on by the golf course itself. All the other events on the U.S. calendar, I believe, are sponsored by the PGA.
The other three majors (U.S. Open, British Open, PGA Championship) have locations chosen by their respective committees and they move them around.
Jack Russell Terriers are a pain in the butt when they visit.
I would like you to explain more about this. I'm interested in why so many Jack Russells come to your place. Do you have a Jack Russell terrier haven? I have so many questions right now. Is this federally protected Jack Russell land? Are there feral packs of Jack Russells? Why the hell does a dude named Jack Russell have a terrier named after him? My mind is absolutely swirling right now. I'm a little dizzy. Going to sit down.
Aimo is going to read my post and think I'm either asking too many questions about Jack Russells or not enough. But she will definitely think one of those.
we have one who visits us with its owner for dinner...the first thing it does each time is jump over and deck railing and disappear for hours, inducing stress in its owner, and hence us. It can stay home next time. My wife even provided it with a perfectly lovely marrow bone, but it still had to bolt...I remember our Exalted Leader Julio telling me all about his Jack Russell Terrorist...now I get it.
I had cow marrow in France — tastes like butter. They just spread it on bread there.
Attachment 12936
I picked my own lower bar, so, I wouldn't exactly say I'm LeBron. My Tony Delk for 50 moment is the time I wrote one play and directed another, no acting. But, opening night, an actress who was in both shows called at 5pm to say she was at the hospital with her father and she wouldn't be able to go on that night. In a "show must go on" moment, I had someone else drive me to the theater, learned the lines on the way over in the car, and went on for her. Dad turned out to be OK and she was able to finish the run, whew. (To be fair, since I had written one of the plays, it made learning the lines a little easier. Still, for a couple of the lines, I was like, why did I write it this way?)
I’m really tickled over the idea of a pack of Jack Russell’s laying waste to the Shire.
FWIW, I've never broken a leg. Or any other bone.
I guess the secret to clean windows is get someone else to do them?