Dear Everyone,
It’s two weeks since my last letter. It’s almost bitterly cold here (about 10 F) -
- I’m glad we are not in Minneapolis!
Tomorrow is not only MLK day, but also the re-inauguration of the felon-in
chief. I was counting the days of his
four-year term last time, but I don’t have the energy to do it this go
around. Four years of chaos and
political horror show (if not worse) are coming upon us. I was just mentioning
to Cindy what an awful choice RFK Jr for HHS is. His anti-vaccine and anti-fluoridation
screeds are patently ridiculous. Why isn’t
he advocating pushing forward on lead standards, air quality, or the completely
lax regulations that chemical companies have?
I don’t even want to go on about the other nominees. I will stop reading the news to save my
sanity.
Last weekend we went out to Rubi Agave in Homer Glen with Bob Garza
(the head of my dojo), his wife Chris, and other aikido people – Joan Dehnert,
Micah Rademacher and his wife, Jeff Frizzell and his partner Cherry. This restaurant is (I think) owned by some
Ecuadoreans, and they serve a mixture of Latin food from Mexico and South
America. I always like having
conversations with Micah – he is a former bouncer, built like an NFL
linebacker, but is currently a librarian in Blue Island. We have a good time bouncing books and movies
off each other!
On his recommendations, I rented the movie Pierrepoint. The movie stars Timothy Spall starring in
this biopic about Albert Pierrepoint, one of Great Britain’s last hangmen. Pierrepoint was responsible for hanging many Nazi
war criminals. The movie was well done -
- Timothy Spall is an interesting actor, but I don’t think it was accurate
about Pierrepoint’s life, and made a lot of artistic or directorial decisions
about the morality of death sentences.
We also found out one movie Micah likes is Stanley Tucci’s The Imposters, which I
cannot find at my library (Tucci has stated that anyone who likes this movie
must be insane), and Goon,
about minor league hockey in Canada, of which I am waiting delivery.
Jami finally gave into to older age, and had knee replacement
surgery this Friday. He was out of the
hospital on the same day, uneventfully.
I saw him Saturday morning when he was being administered to by his PT
sister Jaycee (and one of his step-daughters, Courtney is also a PT), so I
think he will recover pretty quickly. We
are going to go to his place Monday evening with some take out food to watch
part of the Ohio State – Notre Dame championship. I was reading in the NY Times that the top
college programs may need to spend as much as 20 million per year to have
competitive teams. I find the whole idea
of semi-pro college athletics to be disgusting.
Last November I had been invited (flattering!), and with
some persuasion agreed, to be a judge of the annual UIC medical
student/resident research forum. (They
knew who I was because a year ago I had shown up at the lecture of Peter Agree,
a Nobelist I vaguely knew at Hopkins.) At the time I was told I would only need
to look at less than eight presentations, and they would be skewed towards my
areas of expertise (e.g. pathology, microscopy, etc.). I was pretty surprised when I got an email this
Friday with a list of the titles of over twenty posters, many of them clearly
social work or sociology based. I also couldn’t get into the website where the
abstracts were held. I wrote to the coordinator stating I was not interested in
judging posters where I could not judge the scientific merit - - basically
asking only if the poster looked nice, the presenter spoke English well, and
that their topic could pass the ‘grandmother” test (i.e. can you explain the
science to your grandmother). Instead of
replying, they opened up the link to the abstract site, and I found to my
additional dismay that I could not locate a large number of the posters to
which I had been assigned, or other issues (like incorrect author names). I didn’t want to scroll through over 250
posters to find the ones I had been assigned to! I wrote back again saying I did not intend to
participate (after all, what can they do to me?). We’ll see what the next step they take will
be. It reminds me of why I have never
been a big fan of my educational experience at U of I (to say the least).
Some interesting books lately: The Vegetarian by the
Nobelist Han Kang (chosen by a book club Cindy and I are in). The book is hard to describe. Erotic body horror? Indictment of patriarchy?
It is three short novellas, and pretty interesting. She has had a novel recently translated, “We
Do Not Part”, which sounds gripping, if heavy going. I also read the second book in a duology by M
R. Carey, Echo of
Worlds. Unfortunately, I did not
remember that much of the first book.
Fun characters, but the book ends with a more-or-less literal deus ex
machina, so maybe a bit unsatisfying. Nothing else worth mentioning.
Love, H.
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