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Countdown and launch!

Keith Olbermann is back tonight on Current TV (which sadly only reaches 60 million homes in the US).

If you like Olbermann and would like the chance to see the new Countdown, how about pestering your cable carrier?

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.

Dieting again

Soon after I got to Bakersfield, I started working out in earnest, and I also did a short bit (ten sessions) with a trainer. As part of training, she had me calorie count for ten weeks. Amazingly, I lost about 15 lbs while calorie counting (which for me is a big deal). After that I decided I could maintain my weight by working out and I didn’t need to mess with no calorie counting.

Eighteen pounds later, I’m still working out and the pounds have crept back with interest. I used the occasion of my new smart phone to get a free calorie counting app (My Fitness Pal, which is also available online). It’s a cool app. It will even scan bar codes, and it’s only occasionally stumped. (It thought my Lactaid Low Fat milk was Cheerios . . . that was interesting.) I’ve been at it for a week and a half and I’ve only lost about a pound and a half, but I’m not adhering to too strict of a count — 1700 calories per day. Two years ago, I was running anywhere from 1300 to 1600 per day.

But hey, we all know how worthless fast results can be. The diet I’ve adopted is fairly simple. Calorie counting forces me to think about what I eat, so I’ve stopped eating a lot of crap, and I’ve stopped eating unconsciously, just because the food is there. And that, I suppose, is what calorie counting is all about. I wouldn’t be surprised if in my non-counting days I was taking in 2400 calories a day or more. Donuts and candy bars add up after a while.

I will try not to read too much symbolism into the fact that I just dropped my new cell phone, shattering the face plate. Thank heavens for insurance.

D.

Well, we’re back

and I’m tired the way working makes you tired after you haven’t been working in a good long while. I’d like to say, “Vacation is never long enough,” but that’s not true. As a kid, summer vacations were always way too long for me. Sorry, but I liked school and I didn’t like being home 24-7. Fast forward to internship, and we all got two count ’em two months off during the year (not back to back, thank heavens). Four weeks was way too much time off, especially since the horror of internship lurked just around the corner. You knew you were obliged to return to the grind, and that took much of the pleasure out of your time off. But, really, four weeks was too too much.

Our honeymoon was a three-week trip to Europe, our one and only vacation there, and I doubt we’ll ever make it back, though you never can tell. It’s the jet lag that killed us — I think it took us a good four or five days to adjust. We would have to take several weeks off to make it worthwhile, and that’s not very easy in my current job. Although people do it — take their three or four weeks off in a block, and go back to see their families in the Philippines, or India, or China.

I maintain that the most relaxing vacations are the ones you spend at home, on your ass, book or laptop in hand, nothing to do but veg out. And I think I know why I feel that way: I like sleeping in my own bed, with my own pillow, on my own damn mattress.

Very bizarre dream while on vacation. Can’t go into great detail here (mixed company, after all) but it involved roughly cylindrical items, lubrication, and malpractice lawyers. *shiver*

Tech question for y’all. I need to convert 8 mm film (our old home movies, which my dad just passed on to me) into DVD. Lots of folks online say they’ll do it, but how do I decide whom to use?

D.

Vegas once again

We’re back in Las Vegas visiting my folks. Not much time to blog, I’m afraid. So far we’ve done a lot of our usual Vegas things: we had dinner at Firefly last night (an awesome little tapas restaurant), and made the obligate trip to Claimjumper for dinner tonight. (It’s either that or a buffet, so we usually opt for Claimjumper.)

Today, Jake and I went to Red Rock Canyon to do our version of rock climbing, which involves me falling on my ass a lot while Jake tries his best to give me a heart attack. Lots of fun, and we do it whenever the weather permits. It was more fun than usualy this time because we got to watch some real rock climbers do their thing. I suggested to Jake several times that if he goes to college in California, most of the schools should have courses in rock climbing.

Tonight, we are going to see Penn and Teller. Karen somehow got us front row seats (or close to it).

C ya

D.

Some Gnarls

I like Who’s Gonna Save My Soul a bit better, but I already posted that one to Facebook. Nevertheless, this video brings together Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell for the first time since Blue Velvet*.

Take that, Forrest Gump.

Yeah, I’ve had a singular lack of anything to say lately. Tomorrow I’m having Installment Two of my leadership course, so that ought to be good for a blog. If I can keep my eyes open. Do you suppose I’d lose Leadership Brownie Points if I brought my ebook reader?

D.

*I don’t know this for a fact, but it sounds true.

Friday’s arcana

Tonight we had our graduation ceremony for the Hippocrates Circle group. These are about 30 bright young middle-schoolers who want to become doctors; as I think I mentioned, I made a spectacle of myself a couple weekends ago by scoping my own throat twice to give ’em a good show. (I tried to convince our urologist that he should volunteer for Hippocrates Circle next year. Now that would truly be memorable.)

In the little graduation pamphlet that listed the kids’ names, someone had written, “In this group are four future pediatricians, nine general surgeons, eight family practitioners, five orthopedic surgeons,” and so forth. Numbers guessed at by yours truly — I forgot to bring home one of the pamphlets. When I read this, I wanted to get up and talk to the assembled students, teachers, family members, nurses, and administrators, and tell them the secret of medical school: it’s the exceptional student who leaves med school the same as he entered. Future Ob-gyns become pathologists, pathologists become radiologists, radiologists become orthopedic surgeons, and so forth.

Psychiatrists become ENT docs. There’s just no telling.

No alcoholism runs in my family, but I think I could seriously get effed up over Irish whiskey. It goes down like a dream, even the relatively cheap stuff. I believe that folks who shell out big money for aged scotch and other fancy shmancy whiskeys simply have not yet tried Irish whiskey.

Thanks, Dean.

So it turns out there’s a name for the music I like: post-punk. The list includes Laurie Anderson, Devo, The Cure, Swans, Violent Femmes, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Talking Heads. And it’s a pretty damned long list, too, probably hundreds of hours I could spend snooping You Tube to find bands on this list that I like. (Why aren’t The B-52s on the list, though?)

Just at random, sort of, I listened to some Josef K (meh) and Lydia Lunch (better). I wish I could tell Pandora, “Just feed me post-punk, ‘kay?” But Pandora always wants to branch out and give me pop. Which, you know, is kinda antithetical to the whole post-punk feel, The Human League notwithstanding.

And can I just say that the more I listen to Joy Division, the better they sound? It’s a good thing I wasn’t into them back in college . . . Is there a better song about depression and suicide than New Dawn Fades? Brought tears to my eyes reading those lyrics, knowing something of what Ian Curtis went through. And I’m relatively well adjusted now.

Back to the list.

Someone could make a lot of money by creating a combination cat piss detector and deodorizer. The deodorizer part is easy: CarraScent would detoxify a car that had harbored a dead badger in the Mojave Desert. But what is it that makes cat piss so noxious, and could anyone build a detector for it?

Quick google provides numerous answers, but the leading contenders are ammonia and musk. Since you don’t have to find every component of cat urine, just one part, why not go after the ammonia? And there are indeed ammonia detectors commercially available. And oh, goody, the cheapest one I could find is a hair over $300.

Still, it would beat having to get down on one’s knees to sniff the furniture.

Yeah I know y’all aren’t gamers, not many of you, but I want you to know that Dragon Age 2 rawks. I dig that my badass male warrior can romance damn near everyone regardless of sex or species and grin his way through all of it. The only negative feedback from my group came when I flirted with a male elf prostitute: my in-game sister took issue.

Which brings me to the game’s one flaw. It won’t let me romance my in-game sister, Bethany.

She has one hell of a grip on that staff.

D.