3924

Guitar; an American life

About 25 years ago I thought I'd get a jump on my mid-life crisis by doing something different, deciding to take an aerobics dance class, pierce my ears (I have no discernable ear lobes and don't wear earrings), and learn to play the guitar. I did take the exercise dance class, liked it even though it meant sweating and over about 6 months I lost 20 pounds and went to work for one of my instructors. A story I wrote about it was published in the Columbus Dispatch. But poke holes in my dainty, tiny ears? No way. I did actually borrow a guitar for awhile from our friend John who told me he'd give me lessons, but memories of the trombone and piano failures came back to haunt me, and I don't think I ever even went plunkity plunk.

Yesterday at the library I was looking for an interesting, non-fiction audiobook to listen to while I walk and discovered "Guitar; an American Life," by Tim Brookes, a British ex-pat who lives in Vermont and is a commentator on NPR and writes for various magazines. I just had no idea that the history of the guitar would be so interesting. And when you start with almost no knowledge on a topic, you are soon 1000% smarter than you were a day ago! 24 hours ago I would have thought "luthier" was a misspelling of Luther, but it is someone who makes guitars. Here's a nice review by ricklibrarian with bibliographic details about the book and the audiobook.

Here's Brookes' list of 100 guitarists who weren't on Rolling Stones list.

What to do when you turn in your dissertation

I don't have a PhD and was never even remotely tempted to try it, but Susan is writing a History of the Whole World, and here's what she's doing now that the dissertation has been turned in.

1. Watched all three seasons of The Office twice.
2. Reread the entire ouevre of Dick Francis from beginning to end.
3. Run about a zillion miles on deserted country roads while listening to the entire collected works of Sophie Kinsella. (I wish I were a shopaholic. If you’re going to obsess over something, wouldn’t it be more fun to obsess over shoes than over the exact ways in which Frankish kings were recognized as legitimate?)
4. Viewed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy from beginning to end. The expanded DVD versions. With all the extras. The Two Towers, twice.
5. Worked my way from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower all the way up through the final book in the series. For about the twentieth time in my life.
6. Baked forty batches of cookies. (Approximation.)
7. Ate a significant portion of those cookies all on my own. (See #3, above. This is why boosting my average mileage-per-run from five to nine or ten miles has NOT dropped me a dress size.)
8. Sat and stared at the thousand pages of formless, shapeless medieval history on the left side of my desk.
9. Moved my chair to the other side of my desk and sat some more and stared at the manuscript of my revised dissertation, which is almost but not quite ready to send off to the university press which might publish it.
10. Read the first page of about a dozen new novels which, somewhere deep down, I really want to finish.
11. Read the flap copy of five or six really fascinating new history books which, even deeper down, I really want to start.

She also has a great story about a trip to the dentist with her kids, things I never thought about because I didn't home school.

Friday Family Photo

Summer is tick season, so I want to tell you about "my tick." When I was in elementary school, my family lived in Forreston, IL, but we went back to Mt. Morris for our dental appointments. It was either the summer of 1947 or 1948, and I probably had a tooth ache, because in those days, I don't think we went to the dentist unless something was wrong. While I was in the chair, Dr. Boyle (I think that was his name) noticed something in my hair when he was leaning over me to examine my mouth (dentists loved my mouth because it is big). My mother was horrified (in those days moms were allowed to stay in the room with the child--I don't think they do that now). I was old enough to be combing my own hair, but she still washed it on Saturday nights in the sink for me. So the tick probably hadn't been there too long. The ticks are tiny, unless getting a meal of your blood, then they are big. Dr. Boyle removed it with a heated tweezers being careful to get all the mouthparts out. Mother took it home and looked up the critter in our encyclopedia (I get that from her--she always wanted to be a librarian) and pronounced it a "Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever Tick."

Both the American Dog Tick (Dermacentor variabilis) and the Rocky Mountain Wood Tick (Dermacentor andersoni) are vectors for Rickettsia rickettsii, the causative agent of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, D. andersoni is much more common from the east coast through the plain states and western California, and D. variabilis for the most part is in the mountain states.

I probably did get my tick from a dog, because not only did we have dogs which stayed outside all the time, but I was a fearless dog hugger, and would wrap my arms around one and lay my head on them. I also played outside constantly, and we lived in a rural area where hiking or biking outside the town limits to visit friends or just to play was pretty common.

I didn't get sick, but ticks are really dangerous. I have great respect for them, and you should steer clear! They can cause Lyme Disease, which got its name when an unusual number of children near Lyme, Connecticut came down with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in the 70s, caused by the bite of a tick (Ixodes scapularis, also called Blacklegged Tick) carrying Borrelia burgdorferi. (I think when I was a vet librarian I actually met Dr. Burgdorfer, for whom it is named.) Now there's a entity caused by ticks (Amblyomma americanum, also called Lone Star) which hang out in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Missouri, termed STARI, or Master's Disease. Symptoms are similar, but it's not Lyme Disease.

The reason I'm telling you all this isn't because I know a lot about ticks, but because there is a clinical article in JAMA 297:23 (June 20, 2007) about Erythema Migrans. That's a rash that is associated with tick bites. There seems to be quite a bit of overlapping of this rash, depending on which tick has bitten you, and the right antibiotic is important. And you don't always have erythema migrans with Lyme Disease, or with the other tick bite diseases, but you might.

As a librarian I always read the authors' method, because this is the type of thing I helped researchers with. For this study they examined 1266 articles in the medical literature with a very specific set of criteria, narrowing the search down to 53 articles. I won't repeat everything the authors report, only that they weren't thrilled with the inconclusive evidence currently reported and seem to suggest that the doctor will need to eyeball it (my non-medical term) which means you need to have some experience with these rashes.

"Physician education should emphasize the wide variability in the clinical presentation of erythema migrans and the need to factor in multiple components of the clinical examination and epidemiological context into clinical decision making."

If you live in a tick area (which seems to be every state except the extreme southwest), you might pick up this issue at your library and photocopy p. 2664, which is the JAMA patient page for Lyme Disease. Moms need to know a lot. And it doesn't hurt to have a sharp eyed dentist.

Thursday Thirteen--13 Singers I didn't know I missed

On Monday we got a digital box for our cable TV and some new features, including the music channels. One is classic country. It plays, without voice overs or advertising, C&W songs from the 60s, 70s and 80s. I'm hearing singers I didn't know I'd forgotten. Most of the time I recognize the voice and song, but sometimes I have to walk into the living room and see who's singing. Guess I don't listen much to music radio any more. A few I've enjoyed this afternoon

Charley Pride
Tanya Tucker
George Strait
Crystal Gayle
Jerry Reed
Tammy Wynette
George Jones
Roseanne Cash
Floyd Cramer
The Judds
Hank Williams, Jr.
Waylon Jennings
Ronnie Milsap

3920

Bush vetoes stem cell bill

Bush has been such a disaster on the border security issues, amnesty for illegal workers and wimped out on social security reform, that it's a pleasure to see him standing fast on something important. I wrote about this for last year's veto. Yes, I'm just a wacked out fundamentalist on creating human life in order to diddle it in the labs of America with my tax money. It's not illegal you know--the US is producing most of the scientific research in this area. All you evolutionists should just wait around and see if some mold in the corner that the janitor missed turns into a highly developed, functioning human being. If it happened once without help from the big guy, you should be able to do it with a few spores, some ammonia and fairy dust.

3919

Marriage and poverty

If a child is poor, her mother is probably not married, had her children without a husband, didn't finish high school, or had her first child before her 20s. That's why I say women can virtually eliminate poverty in the USA by doing the right thing in the correct order.

Yesterday I was reading a senior thesis from Ohio State University about bilingualism in Lorain, Ohio. So the author tossed in some interesting statistics for the metropolitan area that weren't directly about language (Lorain has a significant number of Puerto Ricans). The national family poverty level is 10.2% in the U.S. and 14.9% in Lorain. Now, let's look at the marriage stats in Lorain. Never married--higher than the national average; married--lower than the national average; separated--higher; widowed--higher; divorced--higher. However, in education levels, Lorain does quite well, exceeding the national average in a number of categories. Getting an education won't necessarily undo other mistakes made young. Unfortunately, girls won't learn this kind of "radical math" in school.

3918

Wanted: a full time trouble maker?

Why does Columbus, OH need a full time "Mexico Solidarity Network – Activist?" Hmmm. Solidarity. Where have we heard that term before (definition)? I was just browsing the OSU publication Que pasa (translation: wha's happening bro?) and saw this job opening for a position that reports to the "Executive Director," and "Maintains regular communication between the Commission and the vast array of Hispanic/Latino-serving community based organizations (CBO’s) statewide." I'm not sure which "commission" is referred to, but there is a link to Amnesty International for the application materials.

"The Mexico Solidarity Network struggles [oh yeah] for democracy, economic justice and human rights on both sides of the US-Mexico border [you need to try a little harder in Mexico]. Civil society must take the leading role in fomenting [we hear ya] social change by developing democratic spaces [i.e. the southwestern USA then north to Ohio] and empowered communities that are outside of party/establishment structures, but always interacting with those structures. The Mexico Solidarity Network is a grassroots-based organization [I'll bet!] dedicated to profound social change [you mean like in Russia and China in the 20th century?] that challenges existing power relationships [US government] and builds alternatives."

This isn't the only job opening with Marxist red flags (no pun intended) listed in Que Pasa, but you can check it out for yourself.

3917

Death by Chocolate

New York Board of Health is trying to require big fast food chains, but not deli's or pizza shops, to include calorie count for every item on the menu and get rid of trans fat*. "The proposals are winning plaudits from health advocates, including the [phony as a $3 bill] nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which has been urging cities, states, and the federal government to take both of those actions." Some of the companies are going to fight it--is it even legal for the Board to pass these laws?

These food nannies won't stop at the door of the pizza parlor owned by your Uncle Vito, you know, nor at the fancy restaurant where you need a reservation and pay $50 just to sit down. It will go on and on.

Let's give New Yorkers some credit. They probably can figure out that eating a big mac at McDonald's is about as healthy as having a Death by Chocolate Brownie with a double scoop of ice cream at a full service restaurant. This is racist, classist and elitest regulation. Middle class and wealthy people are not as overweight as working class and poor people. Caucasians are not as overweight as minorities. We could probably improve the obesity rate of the nation just by closing the borders to illegal immigrants.

Americans are fat, yes, but they got that way bite by bite, calorie by calorie, gene by gene, and for being inactive slugs sitting at computers. The Women's Health Initiative study published in 2006 in JAMA spent $700,000,000 of our money, used 7.5 million forms, clocked 1 million clinic visits by almost 50,000 postmenopausal women all to discover that lowering dietary fat and eating more fruits and vegetables for eight years didn't affect breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or cardiovascular disease in women. That won't stop the CSPI. It's like the global warming fundamentalists. Norma's advice: Move more, eat less. Eat all the colors. Say no to seconds.

*"The reduction of trans fatty acids in the food supply is a complex issue involving interdependent and interrelated stakeholders. Actions to reduce trans fatty acids need to carefully consider both intended and unintended consequences related to nutrition and public health. The unintended consequence of greatest concern is that fats and oils high in saturated fats, instead of the healthier unsaturated fats, might be used to replace fats and oils with trans fatty acids. Many different options of alternative oils and fats to replace trans fatty acids are available or in development. Decisions on the use of these alternatives need to consider availability, health effects, research and development investments, reformulated food quality and taste, supply-chain management, operational modifications, consumer acceptance, and cost." American Heart Association Conference, Circulation, Apr 2007; 115: 2231 - 2246.

3916

Not peaceful around here today

It's a fabulous day after being in the 90s. Clear sky. Cool. However. It is trash day; lawn maintenance day; and the condo road is being resurfaced. A good day to keep the car in the garage and take my walk somewhere else.








Catch that pony tail. Missing the 80s?

3915

The retirement experts

Jonathon Clements reports that "Experts offer all kinds of advice. Mostly it's ignored." [WSJ 6-20-07] I know how you feel, Mr. Clements! I give such excellent advice, yet everyone is hell bent on making their own mistakes!

Actually, we did pretty much what he suggests the experts tell you to do in planning retirement, except the one about saving diligently from a young age. All experts agree on that one. We didn't save a dime toward retirement until our kids were gone from home. But since I was 46, that gave me some time before retirement. He suggests three things experts advise that most workers ignore (I didn't, but I also didn't know they agree on these three).

1) Rereading an old 1999 letter to my children I refreshed my memory that I had notified both my OSUL and Prior Health Library bosses that I would retire in the fall of 2000--about a year in advance. (I don't think that's such a great idea, but you can squirrel a date away in your head. You are a lame duck from that time forward if you let your employer know.)

2) From 1986, when I went back to work full time, through 2000 I put the maximum allowed in my 403-b tax shelter, and fortunately, when I took out my retirement money after leaving to have a family, I had tucked it away with interest so I could buy back my retirement time (it would not have grown if left in the system because I wasn't vested).

3) When my stocks began faltering in 2000 (before Bush, BTW, if that economic myth is important to you), I changed my investment mix, from aggressive to low risk/moderate risk. Apparently the experts suggest retirees need to do this, but it was really instinctive for this lily-livered investor.

However, I could have never guessed ahead of time how expensive retirement would be--actually I'm still surprised. Our "retirement condo" is bigger than the house we lived in for 34 years. Need a bathroom? I've got one where I hang our winter clothes in the shower stall. Travel? For years we went nowhere; now we get 10 brochures a week from travel companies.

I thought our second home on Lake Erie, purchased in 1988 and paid for since 1998, would be a nest egg because home values absolutely soared in Lakeside--moreso than in Columbus. Of course, we all know what's been happening in the real estate market, especially vacation home areas.

I couldn't have imagined what would happen to the cost of health care. My pension plan spent like crazy in the 90s on real estate and fancy offices for its employees, and then had to do some serious cut backs on health benefits for retirees in the 21st century. For some reason, those boomer staff people had never heard of a bust and were way overinvested in high tech. And we're healthy!

And cable. Our cable bill is higher than our gasoline bill for 2 cars--and we lived for the first 26 years of our marriage perfectly happy with 3 broadcast and 1 public channel, and no computer broadband. In order to get our phone service deal and a digital box, we just added about 50 new channels. More ways to sleep in front of the TV.

And taxes! OMG! Was I stupid to think that once we were on pensions the government wouldn't want so much of our money? Apparently. Do you know if every American had to write a check to the government each April instead of having taxes sneakily withheld by their employer, we'd have a tax revolution immediately? We pay quarterly, and even that is a huge reminder of how our government mismanages our money just because we aren't paying attention.

Clements says the most important rule to remember is save diligently. Everyone agrees on that.

3914

Fill in the blank

"It seems incomprehensible that authorities in a scientific discipline would be unaware of the wealth of data in the scientific literature that contradict the basis for its official position on"

dietary fat intake

global warming

global cooling

malaria control

acid rain

market forces

ethanol for fuel

alar

HRT

stem cell research

gender differences

fossil record

human behavior

safety

and so forth

Comment extracted from the Ottobonis' article in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 2007, p. 12 concerning the WHI low fat diet study.

You will waste hours

at Little Splurge, but it is such fun finding things you didn't know you wanted or needed, like this terrific shoe organizer.



HT Knowledge Problem

3912

Why big business opposes market-based medical care

Craig J. Cantoni used to earn his living making corporations more competitive and productive. He was the go-to guy who would figure out how to reduce costs in health care--higher co-pays and deductibles, second opinions, etc.--although he says the one problem he never could solve was how to stop employees from thinking they were spending other people's money. He admits he was slow to ask himself some painful questions about how he earned his living.

Corporate executives in high tax brackets benefit the most from getting employer-provided medical insurance with pre-tax dollars. But millions of lower-paid rent seekers also benefit from employer-provided medical insurance, including employee benefits managers and administrators, benefit consultants, tax consultants, actuaries, ERISA attorneys, producers of record-keeping software, and publishers of benefit forms and booklets. . . Many are Republicans who in the privacy of the voting booth would never vote to give up their regulatory rice bowl. . . Many others are Democrats who bemoan the plight of the uninsured and deplore the growing wage gap. But in the voting booth, they would never vote to give up their regulatory rice bowl, which drives up the cost of medical insurance and lowers wages by subsituting medical insurance for wages."

Read his article , published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, based on his address to the AAPS in 2006.

3911

25,000 wounded: they will need a lot more help

Josie at Life in a Cracker Box tells about her wounded husband's recovery and their life at Walter Reed. It's an important story being repeated in many families.

3910

The use of scare quotation marks

Annoyed Librarian is commenting on the use of scare quotes by the American Library Association (ALA).

"So it's not a debate on non-library issues, but "non-library" issues. I've noticed ALA always likes to use the scare quotes to poison the well on any debate before it even starts." Check it out. The comments alone are well worth the visit--just in case you thought librarians sit around selecting books to put on the shelves.

3909

Beyond hot here in Columbus

Yesterday it was 95 degrees in Columbus, OH. I was on duty for the mail run between our church's Lytham Rd. campus and Mill Run campus in the afternoon. There was road construction everywhere, even turning around after discovering I was blocked was difficult. At the intersection on our road I think I waited 4 lights to turn left.

I was surprised to see a number of people driving with an open window. They were all smokers. Inhaling hot smoke in a hot car, waiting at an even hotter, semi-stalled intersection, to creep along onto fresh hot asphalt, and drive behind trucks spewing more heat and pollution. Now how smart is that?

Smoking. It doesn't just damage your lungs and heart--it must destroy your brain cells too.

3908

The new media

Yesterday we got some sort of cable upgrade--not only does it now ring our phone, but we have more channels to not watch. I haven't yet read all the instructions and am just learning to use the new remote.

There is no reason in today's world of cable, broadcast TV, radio, satellite, wireless, iPod downloads, internet, usenet, blogs, digital archiving, on-line library collections, creative commons, etc. for anyone to be information deprived or only informed on one or two topics or viewpoints. An article, The Media Cornucopia in the Spring 2007 City Journal by Adam D. Thierer will show you the pictures, if you're tired of reading. We have somewhat of a free market in the media, and that drives the democrats crazy. They want more restrictions, not less.

So what's the problem? Well, the biggest one is that conservatives are able to get their message out (and so are radicals, anarchists, marxists, libertarians, pedophiles, polygamists, pornographers, pianists, go-fers, gamblers and golfers) unincumbered by the mainstream media's control. They see this diversity, which liberals usually try to cram into our thought world as positive, as a negative because some conservatives, like Murdock who owns Fox Network, owns more than one information source. Like ABC, NBC, CBS and AP aren't all clones of Twiddle-dum and Tweedle-dee despite the ownership?

Theirer gives an example of a "a lesbian feminist African-American who likes to hunt on weekends and has a passion for country music" who can program her television tastes to exactly suit her. But it also means that when PBS does a half hour bio on Ruth Graham (Billy Graham's wife) they can leave out any mention of Jesus. This also gives us hours of Paris Hilton in jail and who was the father of Anna Nicole's baby.

The latest hoop-la has some Democrats and Republicans united in efforts to close the ears and mouths of the people. And that's the immigration issue. We know too much because we have too much information and we're calling and writing our president and congress. For shame!

"When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it’s all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it’s just the result of consumer choice."

Monday Memories of my town

Actually, it's not "my town" and never was--I haven't lived there for 50 years. But after I started a new blog about what's on my bookshelves, I was reminded again of my connection to print. At my new blog, I'm mostly transferring, copying, or revising other entries about my books, but am eyeing my bookshelf of books printed in or about the county in Illinois where I grew up. So I'll quote here from Don Smith's privately published memoirs (1997):

"Mt. Morris has been more cosmopolitan than its size alone would dictate, partly because of the presence of the seminary and then the college but largely because of influences associated with the publishing trade. Printing is an inherently literate business; and Kable's emphasis on magazines--rather than wallpaper, food cartons, or oilcloth--meant that editors from Chicago and other cultural centers regularly visited the Mount on business. Similarly, management people from Kable's, as well as Watt and Kable News, often visited major cities on business. All these contacts with the outside world helped create a small oasis of sophistication amongst the corn and soybean fields. . .

One of my classmates [class of 1946] followed his father and his father's father there [Kable's], and the tradition was extended into the fourth generation when both of his sons joined the printing company's ranks. . . Mt. Morris attached considerable important to intellectual and cultural concerns as reflected in the excellence of the schools, the public library, and the town's near-professional concert band. . . few homes were in disrepair, and there was no real slum or shantytown. Most residences were handsomely landscaped one-and-a-half or two-story structures, and a certain amount of house-and-garden one-upmanship and peer pressure kept even sluggards in line. . . [there being] generally no substantial difference between the home of top Kable executive and that of a pressman."

Smith does a nice job of weaving together his family and personal memories with the town's considerable history, even mentioning some sources I've never seen, like Kable Brothers Company, 1898-1948, and the late-1980s Memoirs of H.A. Hoff, the school superintendent, both of which I assume are on someone else's bookshelf. Don Smith taught journalism at Penn State, State College, PA for 33 years.

3906

Happy Fathers' Day, pt. 2

Today at the coffee shop I was standing at the condiment table with a man in plaid, baggy bermudas. "Happy fathers' day," I said while we mixed cream into our coffee. "Thank you, but I'm not a father," he replied. "But you had a father," I said. "Oh my goodness, I never thought of it that way. Thank you so much." Another happy customer enjoying the holiday.

But some people aren't responsible. Read what else happened in the coffee shop.

Happy Fathers' Day

to all of you bloggers who are fathers or who had fathers. We're having the family here today, which caused some phone calls between my children who wondered what I was up to. But inviting someone for dinner is a good excuse to clean the house and get out the nice china. Unless something happens before noon, here's the menu

pork boneless roast with cranberry glaze tossed salad (supplied by lovely daughter) served in Grandma's painted bowls fresh, tender crisp broccoli fresh fruit--strawberries, pineapple, white grapes mixed home made bread (supplied by handsome son) brown rice tossed with mushrooms and red pepper (still not sure about this one--I'm making it up) lemon fluff with cherry topping (no sugar, low fat) served in Grandma's dessert dishes

Yesterday I wandered around Macy's looking for a gift, but at our age, we have everything we need or want, so I suggested to him golf lessons, but he didn't seem too excited about getting hot, sweaty and out of breath. Enjoy the day.