Thursday, August 10, 2006
2741 Thursday Thirteen: Thirteen Medical Studies
Medical trials have writing groups, steering committees, policy committees, safety boards, statisticians, coordinators, and investigators. But what do they call the committee or group who comes up with a snappy name for the Trial, a name that can be spelled and pronounced? A name that can go down in history? I don’t know! But here’s some recent trials reported in the medical literature. They are not in alphabetical order, which is unusual for me, but in the order in which I noticed them.1) International Study of Salt and Blood Pressure (INTERSALT)
2) Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT)
3) Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering treatment to prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT)
4) ALiskiren Observation of heart Failure Treatment: (ALOFT)
5) Valsartan In Acute Myocardial Infarction Trial (VALIANT)
6) TRial Of Preventing HYpertension (TROPHY)
7) Telithromycin, Chlamydophila and Asthma Trial (TELICAST)
8) Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE)
9) Rescue Angioplasty After Thrombolysis (REACT)
10) Medical, Epidemiological and Social Aspects of Aging (MESA)
11) Pelvic Organ Prolapse Quantification (POP-Q)
12) Study of Tamoxifen and Raloxifene (STAR)
13) Metaanalysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE)
1. Unexplored Territory 2. Blogging outloud 3. Tinkerbell 4. Buttercup & Bean 5. Nat’s Mini-Obs, 6. Lisa 7. Pastor’s Wife 8. Mierda del Toro 9. Kevin 10. Life in the Burg 11. Rowan 12. Lisa-Marie 13. Caldonia
Trip Tale: Kalinka, Kalinka
A Russian chorus and folk dance troupe performed in our hotel's theater in St. Petersburg. Our tour guide had offered to set something up for us, but Gloria spotted a notice that one would perform in our hotel. Seven buses brought cruise ship tourists, but the hall wasn't filled. The performance was lovely, and we didn't even have to leave the building. After dinner in the hotel dining room at 7 p.m., we just walked up a flight and enjoyed the fabulous talent of this group with a live orchestra.
Калинка, калинка, калинка моя,
В саду ягода малинка, малинка моя,
Под сосною под зеленою
Спать положите вы меня.
Ах! Сосенушка ты зеленая,
Не шуми же надо мной!
Ах! Красавица, душа девица,
Полюби же ты меня!
folk singers
St. Petersburg, Russia
2739 Old Joe
The Democrats have lost the heart and soul of the party to the radicals. They will listen to the lies of the rich, white, anti-Jewish left in the party and dump old Joe, who is right with them on just about everything except defense. He is a supporter of Israel, increasingly a no-no on the left. I guess the Jews in the party don't read history, if they go with the party first and their heritage second. Jews in Germany and Russia learned the hard way.
I personally like to have some decent Democrats in office--they keep the offensive right wing nuts in check. Joe brought in a lot of votes for Gore in 2000--they would have lost by many more votes if he hadn't been on the ticket. Of course, those were the days when the Dems also believed, and preached, the danger of terrorists and WMD. They weren't rushing to support McKinney in Georgia, who is articulate, black and just as kooky as they are.If a super-rich white guy with no political experience were running on the Republican ticket, the press would be all over him like flies on sweet corn cobs at a summer picnic. But WaPo described him as "little known entrepreneur." Yeah, a one issue candidate with the isolationist stance right out of the 1930s.
We can only hope that all the smart, patriotic Democrats and Independents were on vacation for the August primaries and they know how to vote at the polls when it really counts.
Joe Lieberman
2738 Back to Columbus
Usually I don't do the driving, but today I'll return to Columbus to pick up our cat who has, of course, been pining away for me while we were in Michigan.We had a terrific time, staying with our friends who have a summer home in Boyne City, MI, and then drove us around to the various sites. Such a beautiful area. We were very impressed with Bay View, which looks much more like an architectural museum than Lakeside does. Beautifully preserved and restored homes from the 1870s-1915 era with a central campus.
With Jerry and Joan at the Bay View Inn where we had lunch.
Example of a restored home in Bay View. I couldn't possibly post all the photos my husband took, but this one is in the book, Cottages, which includes one of my husband's designs.
This is the street along the marina in Boyne City--a really lovely town with great appeal for both summer and winter (skiing).
We had a gorgeous trip to Charlevoix in our hosts' boat.Lake Charlevoix
Boyne City, Michigan
Bay View, Michigan
Monday, August 07, 2006
Monday Memory, a Trip Tale: July 21 Hvitträsk
I'll cheat a little here, because this memory is only about 2 weeks old. Our last full day in Finland (having returned the day before from Russia), we drove west out of Helsinki, past Espoo and visited Hvitträsk, the Finnish home of the Saarinens, architects who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. It was the working space, and now a museum, of three young architects 100 years ago, Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950), Herman Gesellius (1874-1916), and Armos Lindgren (1874-1929). Gesellius died young and Lindgren returned to Helsinki after a few years, so the Saarinens lived there with their children. Eliel Saarinen was designer of the Finnish National Museum in Helsinki (1902-1911) and the Railway Stations of Helsinki (1904-1919), from which we travelled to Russia, and Vyborg (1904-1913) where we stopped to have our passports checked.The style of the complex is called National-Romantic, but to my eye it appears very similar to the early arts and crafts movement which influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and many others in the arts like the Roycrofters (Elbert Hubbard), which we visited on our trip to East Aurora, NY two years ago.
The main building of Hvitträsk is now a museum and includes furniture designed by the elder Saarinen and fabrics by his wife. His son, Eero (1910-1961) also became a famous architect. Both father and son are represented in Columbus, IN which we were visiting the following Friday. One of the restored houses in the complex contained a nice restaurant where we enjoyed a nice brunch/buffet for 12 euros on a glassed in patio. It was a wonderful place to visit, especially for the three architects--reduced ticket price for them, but Riitta and I thought it was terrific too.
When I get back from Michigan, I'll link to commenters. 1. Reverberate58 2. Mrs. Lifecruiser 3. Melli 4. Friday's Child
Sunday, August 06, 2006
2735 Pot calling the kettle black
Geoffrey Nunberg is on C-SPAN discussing his theme that our social and political language is pulling to the right, having written Talking Right. He runs political speeches through speech analyzers, and is concerned that the Republicans can produce a coherent, but bland, standard speech from an archive, but Democrats' speech is gibberish (my word), implying I suppose that there is variety, but no message. But I noticed he uses the word "right" exclusively for conservatives, but the word "liberal" or "Democrat" and never "left," i.e., "At that moment, the right began to brand liberals as. . ." He also refers to Democratic politicians by their full name, i.e., Geraldine Ferraro, Spiro Agnew, and Republicans by surname only, Reagan, Limbaugh, with a little spittle. I don't think he reads the NYT, WaPo, or listens to CNN.Saturday, August 05, 2006
2734 Save a word
My friend Carol from grade school, sent me a list of words and phrases we rarely hear anymore--we being people young in the 1950s. I liked this line: "Some words aren't gone, but are definitely on the endangered list. The one that grieves me most "supper." Now everybody says "dinner." Save a great word. Invite someone to supper. Discuss fender skirts." Yes, and serve some "oleo." This year, "Bible School" went on the endangered list at our church--seems it scares away some folks so it was changed to "Adventure Week."2733 The Purple Martin House
At the end of our street we have 4 Purple Martin houses. They eat a lot of bugs and need to be encouraged to stay. My favorite is the one that was built to look like the Lakeside movie theater, Orchestra Hall.
Lakeside, Ohio
Purple Martin
birdhouses
2732 Hand dryers vs. paper towels
One thing I liked about public restrooms in Finland (didn't like paying 1 euro to use them) was the "old fashioned" cloth towels on a roller. But I'll take paper towels if I can get them and sometimes take them with me. I'm thrilled that more and more restaurants and public buildings are at least offering us a choice. Jenna has the 13 perfect comebacks for the lies they tell us about those machines that blow feces and urine around public restrooms and spread germs through damp hands on door handles.2731 Plaskolite
When you open your cell phone and look at the screen you're seeing this product, whose headquarters are in Columbus, Ohio and which has recently opened a huge plant in Zanesville, Ohio. The vice president of marketing owns the coffee shop Coffee and Cream where I enjoy my first cup of the day.
Trip Tale: Our tour group, The G-6
It's not clear what happened to the rest of them, but by the time we got on the Sibelius train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, there were only six left of the original tour group. The G-8 had caused some shuffling of hotels and tourist sites, so I suppose the others decided to go another time. The six of us had a terrific time and were great companions. Both of the other couples had been touring Scandinavia, although not together, and like us, decided they'd rather have a little help with Russia. We called ourselves the G-6 since the G-8 was meeting in the city at the same time. This way we could all have a window seat in the van, and could all hear our guide. The other two couples, Betty Lou and Barry from Seattle and Gloria and Doug from Cape Cod, had much more travel experience than we did, but we were all novices in Russia!
Nordic Saga Tours
Friday, August 04, 2006
2729 It wasn't political, just silly
WaPo's editorial on the House hearings on energy was not political, just silly, off the mark and clueless, says Amy. She suggests that editorial writers at least look up the webcasts of the hearings if no one can attend.You know, I'm so old that I can remember when heat waves weren't the President's fault. Like 1988 when we had a drought in Ohio, and in 1953 when they closed the schools in my home town (northern Illinois) in September because it was too hot. I can even remember when 92 year olds died in July and they didn't blame global warming.
2728 Demand and Minimum wage
". . . I’ve met no one who, upon finding that he cannot sell his house at his current asking price of $250,000, reasons that he will attract more potential buyers if he raises his asking price to $260,000. I’ve never heard of a supermarket that seeks to clear out excessively large inventories of canned peas or laundry detergent by raising the prices it charges for these items. I’ve never heard of a construction contractor who believes that the higher the price he asks to do a job the more likely he is to be awarded the contract for that job. I’ve never encountered a car salesman who, upon my rejecting the price he asks for a car that I just test drove, says “Okay, okay. I’ll talk to my manager and ask if he’ll accept an even higher price for this baby.” I don’t encounter advertisements by merchants bragging that their prices are the absolute highest in town -- guaranteed!Do any of you, Dear Readers, know of such behaviors? More importantly, do you know people who are generally more likely to purchase something as its price rises? If you do, surely you are by now a person of enormous wealth.
What is it about unskilled- and low-skilled labor that makes many people fancy that the law of demand does not apply to it? Are the greedy, profit-lusting employers of this labor so foolish that they’ll just dish out more money for the same output as before, without economizing further on labor – say, by buying less of it or by extracting more work from each man-hour hired? Or are low-skilled workers so daft or dysfunctional that they consistently refuse to respond to pre-minimum-wage-hike differences in wages and work conditions?" Don Boudreaux
2727 It takes a computer
Seems that 46 inmates released as far back as 1987 appeared on the municipal jail rolls and were billed to Franklin County (Columbus, OH). They're blaming a Y2K glitch. (Toledo Blade) Oh please. What about the guys from the 80s? How did they get brought forward? Sounds like my checkbook.And in an unrelated Ohio computer story, Ohio University (Athens, OH) has fired two employees for failing to protect the University from security breaches that exposed 367,000 files with social security numbers, names, medical records and addresses. Earlier their boss had resigned. I think there was a total of 5 break-ins. And now the auditing firm investigating it has destoyed the records according to the Columbus Dispatch. So that's a mess too. I tried to track this on Google and there were so many stories about OU's computer problems, I just gave up. Sounds like they had a lot of extra money. And in searching the inmate story I used the search term "46 inmates." Could hardly believe how many totally unrelated stories involved 46 inmates.
2726 Trip Tale: Russia, first views
We met our trip companions, Gloria and Doug, in Helsinki at the beautiful train station designed by Eliel Saarinen. Martti and Riitta gave us big hugs and repeated the warnings about the dangers we would meet and we boarded the train for Russia on Monday of our second week. The Finnish countryside was beautiful, tidy and meticulous as our Sibelius train neared the border with Russia near Vyborg (which used to be in Finland). Even if it hadn't been announced in three languages we could tell we were in Russia by the smartly uniformed border police and the corresponding crumbling buildings.But if the Russian countryside was gray and forlorn, the outskirts of Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, formerly Petrograd) were almost horrifying after tidy, dynamic Finland which has so overpowered its former enemy in everything but military might. From 1917 to the break up of the USSR in the early 90s, the people have suffered the worst form (well, not as bad as North Korea) of totalitarian despotism. And for years before that regime, it was the Tsars and serfdom with not a lot of the population in the middle ground.
The cheaply built high rises of the Soviet era we saw in the distance were in various stages of decay, depending on their ages which ranged from 10-40 years (I'm guessing). Our guide who met us at the train with our other companions, Betty Lou and Barry, told us that after the revolution in 1917 the homes of the rich were broken up and the rooms were given to the poor--sometimes six families sharing a bath and kitchen. But even 90 years later, it is still the same in many housing area with several families sharing a bathroom and kitchen. Housing is very difficult to find.
Now in the post-soviet era, crime families have taken the place of the party and the criminals who ousted the Czarist system. One can only pray for the Russian people--that this will be a temporary phase on their way to a republican form of government.
The G-Eight Summit was meeting in St. Petersburg at the same time, so our talented van driver had to take many detours and we sat in a lot of traffic (although not as bad as Washington DC) as traffic was being rerouted so the visitors would see the restored areas with good streets. My husband with a new digital camera was giddy with snapping photos, so a lot of the pictures of our first day look like this.
Other entries about the Russian leg of our trip
Our tour group, the G-Six
Peter and Paul Fortress
Hermitage
St. Isaac's Cathedral
Russian Folk Singers and Dancers
Tsarskoe Selo
Tsarskoe Selo, pt. 2
St. Petersburg by canal boat
Church of the Spilled Blood
Thursday, August 03, 2006
2725 I wonder how they do this?
Incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-wUgnyGv0
Thanks, Mickey.
2724 Lakeside, Week 6, Rhein Center for the Arts
Other classes this week are
- beginning knitting
- ceramic painting
- kites, planes and parachutes
- glass projects
- stepping stones
- stained glass
- beginning and intermediate creative writing
- candles and crafts
- photography
- ceramics
- herb projects
- caricatures and cartooning
- basket weaving
- scrapbooking
- silk painting
- jewelry making
- tin embossing
- easel painting for little kids
- creative crochet
- decorated flip flops
- mosaic top table
- watercolor workshop
- Chinese calligraphy step-stones
Lakeside, Ohio
2723 Lakeside Week 6, Perspective Drawing Class
These are photos of the class my husband is teaching this week. Thirteen brave students have struggled through a 105 heat index in an un-airconditioned building. He has promised them 3 paintings to take home for their efforts.
Lakeside, Ohio
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