Balls and Walnuts
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Here’s a taste
I’ll have to see if I can figure out how to use my other movie-editing software to add a voice-over.
The pipe-smoking gent at the beginning of the clip is my uncle — I think this may be the only footage we have of him (inchage?) The older man and woman are my mom’s parents, and the young boy and girl are my brother and sister. The young woman is my mom, of course. This is all pre-me.
Highlights: the aforementioned bit with my grandfather and the fig; my grandmother putting a turban on my grandfather so that he can play Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (I’m guessing here), my brother and sister playing with the hula-hoop (you know — for kids!) My brother always was the athletic one.
D.
Some preliminary thoughts on the home movies
I converted all of our old 8 mm over to DVD. By “old,” I mean “late 1950s to mid 1970s.” Curiously, it seems that the older movies were better quality. I have no explanation for that.
Some key observations:
1. The home movies with me in them are almost all overexposed. It’s as if my brilliance was too intense for normal film.
2. People have no concept of what will be interesting forty, fifty, sixty years later. Hint: photos of people and pets are interesting. Even photos of the neighborhood and our home — interesting. (My banana bike? Interesting.) Long, luxurious panning shots of trees and mountains? Not interesting.
3. I was struck by a really old film wherein my dad had hair. My dad! With hair! Who is that guy?
4. I miss my grandfather.
5. Hmm. Who is more warped: the six-year-old who exposes himself on camera, or the thirteen-year-old who shoots the film?
6. I was struck by a really old film wherein I had hair. All of them, in fact! All of my hairs. In all of the movies. Me, with hair! Who is that guy?
7. Among the three of us, I am by far the most interested in watching these things. Jake lasted ten or fifteen minutes, and I suspect Karen tuned out sooner than that. And even I began fast-forwarding at about half-way through, and I still have about 20% left to watch. I doubt “future generations” of Hoffmans will have much interest in this thing.
So. Was it worth the nearly $200 it took to convert all this film to digital? You bet, and for one shot if nothing else: my grandfather picking a fig off a tree in his backyard, eating it, then thumping his chest, saying (I imagine), “Good for you!”
(Sis, in case you’re wondering, I’ve made copies for everyone.)
D.
The first
“Sour Times” was the first Portishead song to ever catch my ear. I’ve long had the problem of hearing songs I like and having no way to track down the artist — and “Sour Times” was one of those songs. Came out on Portishead’s debut album, Dummy, in 1994, and it only occurred to me while listening to their 1997 album Portishead that maybe, just maybe, they were the same band who recorded “that song.”
Yup, they are.
I found them through Pandora, and figured this whole thing out only a couple of weeks ago. Seventeen years, give or take, between hearing the song and putting a name (and band) to it.
Dummy is one great CD, by the way. If you like “Sour Times,” you’ll like Dummy.
D.
The art of the chicken hoagie
This is one of those (nearly) infinitely variable recipes that is quick, easy, delicious. Just gotta build it right.
The bread: bolillos or hoagy rolls, toasted on the barbecue or under the broiler. You can toast them unsliced, so that they’re crispy on the outside soft on the inside, or you can toast ’em open-faced, crispy all over.
The chicken: breast meat, of course. I prefer breasts that have been sliced so as to make them thinner. “Un-thinned” breasts don’t cook quickly enough and tend to ball up as they cook. Too much of a mouthful.
The additions — a few of the following: provolone cheese, fried onions, onions grilled on the barbecue, bacon (essential), avocado, tomato, sauteed mushrooms. You can even get a little clever — pineapple cooked on the barbecue, chorizo, jalapenos, blue cheese.
The preparation: two ways to do the chicken. Begin by sprinkling both sides with ground pepper and salt.
1. Brown the chicken breasts on both sides in a frying pan. Cast iron, if well seasoned, works best.
2. Grill on the barbecue. Tonight, I laid bacon on the grill and cooked the chicken on top of the bacon until the bacon started to burn. Great way, though, to keep the chicken from sticking to the hot grill.
Then just put it all together. In my opinion, there’s no need for mayo. The sandwich is moist enough that you don’t need gimmicks like that.
It occurs to me that an identical sandwich substituting grilled shrimp for chicken would be very tasty indeed.
D.
Gotta be careful about those apps
Just popped $20 on an Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus for my smart phone, and already I’m wondering if I wasted my money.True, it has gallimaufry (a confused medley of things), phyla (taxonomic class below Kingdom in hierarchy), and howdah (canopied saddle for an elephant), but I could not find merkin (a pubic wig), garron (a low quality horse), or stannous (relating to or containing tin). WTF? It’s not a simple lack of specialty jargon — stannous may not be in there, but ferric (same kind of word, this time referring to iron) is.
I’m having a hard time thinking up words to challenge my OED. Feed me, folks, and I’ll report back on the results. So far I would have to say I’m disappointed — I suspect there were plenty of free dictionaries which would have performed as well as this one. Perhaps if I can find enough obscure words in my OED, I won’t feel like such a dope . . . and in the process, we’ll get some fun words to toss around.
D.
So that’s the great smoky hole in my life
I’ve known a scant handful of doctor-smokers, most notably the chairman of the ENT department back at my med school. I have one of those memories — the kind of memory that is so bizarre you question whether it could have possibly happened that way — of him chain-smoking in his office while talking to me about ENT residency programs. He was a wild man. His residents were terrified of him.
That was a very special department. Their otologist was more entrepreneur than doctor, had his own plane, a few different companies, was a millionaire many times over — I don’t know the details, but I do know that his was likely the corrupting influence of my for-a-limited-time-only boss back in 2008. Their VA doc, at national meetings, would (infamously) show slides of rhinos mating. A complete and utter non sequitur.
Maybe that was my problem in academics. I wasn’t enough of a character.
D.
Don’t you hate it when this happens?
You’re at work and all of a sudden your smart phone starts screaming at you. Screaming. Loud, brash noise, static amped to 11, and your fingers are racing around the damn thing trying to figure out what’s wrong. Is it a low battery? No. Has your son installed some sort of demonic app? No. Ring tone from hell? No.
Is it, most unfortunately, the new Geiger counter app you recently purchased? Apparently so.
And now as you race away from where you were, the counter starts to calm down: dull roar, insistent mutter, and finally a sedate click, click, click-click, click; and you’re wondering exactly how long you stood in that spot where the counts were so stratospheric your smart phone’s speakers nearly melted, and whether you’re now merely sterile, or will you die of cancer within the year, or will your colon melt over the next 36 hours?
The doctor’s no good. He’s misread your chart, which is evident from the first words out of his mouth, “Sorry to tell you this, but the cancer has come back.” Kind of hard to do when you haven’t had cancer in the first place. Employee Health ain’t much better. You didn’t work in an area known for its radiation levels (except of course you DID) so you were never given a badge.
Your boss is smarmy and well practiced in denial. He’s been doing it to the press all afternoon, and now it’s your turn, and before you get a chance to rip out his throat, you effing wake up.
As I’ve said many times, my subconscious is out to get me.
D.
Service!
We had another all-day leadership seminar today, which made this week rather leadership-seminar-heavy, since we had a half-day seminar Wednesday afternoon. That was on “facilitating change.” Today’s was on “service excellence.” And I’d have to admit, grudgingly, that this week’s seminars were, um . . . useful.
Regarding service: turns out that people don’t see quality, they see service. It’s moronic but I’m told it’s true. If you take your car into the mechanic and they return it to you washed and vacuumed, you’re likely to return. (Will you return even if they trash your engine? I doubt it. But I guess the point is, you’re willing to forgive minor quality issues if the service is superior.) The speaker this morning used the metaphor of a commercial airline passenger lowering his tray table to find coffee stains. The average passenger will wonder, “If they can’t get that right, how are they going to manage engine maintenance?” Similarly, a restaurant diner who gets a dirty table, dirty silverware, etc. will wonder what the kitchen is like. Is the kitchen filthy, too?
When it comes to quality metrics, Kaiser knocks it out of the park. But at least in our county, we do no better with service metrics than our two biggest competitors. So the question is how to troubleshoot and improve service while not simultaneously trashing quality.
One of this speaker’s “gems” was that we ought to beg our members for criticism. I’m not sure how to do that as part of the typical patient encounter — what, should I wrap things up with the words, “It was great meeting you today. Oh, by the way, what could I have done better?” I wonder how many people would give an honest answer to that question. I know a few patients who might reply, but I suspect most would be too embarrassed.
In other news: the world ends tomorrow at 6 PM, PST. If you don’t see any more entries here, assume that I have been raptured.
And if I am . . . boy, will I ever be pissed.
D.
Breaking news
I broke my new smart phone last week — dropped it about 18 inches, and it struck the ground on one of its corners, shattering the face plate, which only remained in one piece thanks to the plastic protective layer over the glass. Not relishing the innovation of Smart Phone As Stained Glass Window, I went through the rather painful process of starting an insurance claim. They were good to their word, I’ll give them that: I faxed them the necessary forms on Monday, and we got the new phone today. Now I have to figure out how to get all my info ported over to the “new” phone.
The newest app: SELF DESTRUCT!
I broke the Nook, too, shortly after acquiring it. Seems like there’s a part of me* that takes the phrase “breaking in period” too seriously. The damage to the Nook was not too severe — a small fracture through the case near one of the navigation buttons, such that it occasionally does not work (but usually does).
Most devastating of all, I broke my glasses two days ago. Went to clean the lenses with my tee shirt, as usual, and the damn thing broke in two, right at the nasal thingie. I can’t get in to the optometrist for another week and I am damned lucky to have gotten that appointment. Meanwhile, I’m using an old pair that are fine for distance, but close work such as reading is way off limits. Particularly frustrating was my attempts last night to read my Nook while working out on the elliptical trainer. No go, no way. And I’m getting a headache simply typing this post, my eyes are crossing, waaaah.
Am reading the second book in George R. R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series. I have mixed feelings about it. I know I am reading a soap opera and I know the author likely has no idea where he is going. (I know this because Karen, who has less patients than me for 3500+ word-and-still-not-done-yet series, has read the Wikipedia precis on the books, and she says so.) In truth I lost interest once Martin killed off my favorite character. But I still like the dwarf and I still like Arya, the younger daughter, who reminds me a bit of one of my own characters. Since the chapters are conveniently titled by the POV character, I suppose I could skim my way through, reading only the bits I’m interested in. I wonder if I would miss much?
But I should probably move on to something different. It appalls me that I’ve read over 800 pages and I’m not even 1/4 of the way done with this beast.
D.
*My hands, that is.