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(1) the TSA policy on transporting breastmilk without transporting a baby has changed; it is now allowed to carry the former onboard without the latter (which indeed kind of defeated the purpose). I had no trouble declaring the milk on my trip this weekend – they didn’t even open the cooler. But I’ve read that one is well-advised to take a printout of the policy in case the message hasn’t made it to the TSA folks on duty.
(2) Soy cheese, at least soy cheese without casein: in the uncanny valley between soy and cheese. Really too bad.
Dean knows (some) Yiddish! My joy cannot be textually rendered.
Also, on my third serious time through Farscape, one thought stands out: I must acquire a Peacekeeper Barbie. Where is one to be found?
And today's fractured phrase: "Wise Bread runs the gamete on personal finance topics." Wise Bread will genetically screen your offspring for financial planning skills?
Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think: One thing the audiobook format highlights for me is an author’s organizational skills. Without a whole page to look at, I’m highly dependent on what just I just heard. Groopman’s book is, at least as a listen, pretty meandering, which is no real surprise for a book full of a practitioner’s war stories. Groopman’s argument itself is somewhat contradictory – he identifies many mistakes doctors make by looking only at obvious or common causes of a patient’s symptoms and encourages doctors to think harder, but he also is suspicious of evidence-based medicine when it conflicts with a doctor’s intuition. Doctors should rely on intuition, but also throw out all preconceptions and consider alternatives to the obvious. And they shouldn’t rely on drug companies’ promises, but should read extensively in the literature. In other words, they should try really hard on each case. The epilogue might be worth skimming in a bookstore – it contains some useful specific things patients can say if they worry that doctors aren’t helping with their problems.
Neal Bowers, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist: Bowers is a poet; some years ago, he discovered that another man was plagiarizing his poems, sending them to multiple poetry magazines and even succeeding in getting them republished numerous times. He set off on a hunt to find and stop the man, succeeding only in the former – and that only from a distance. As one might expect, Bowers is a lyrical writer, which makes it even more puzzling that he can only say, and not make the reader feel, how important his words are to him. Or maybe it’s natural that he can’t put into prose the violation he feels, can’t come up with an objective correlative – it’s part of what he sees as a detachment of most people from most poetry. Indeed, most of the outrage that rose from the page was directed at the dozens of colleagues and associates who minimized what had happened to him, who thought it was funny or who ignored his pleas for help. In the end, I’m not sure what the book wants to do, so I can’t say if it succeeded – though we find out in the afterword that he stopped writing poetry during the events he recounts, which puts a different gloss on his inability to defend the merits of his work. (Not that he should have to do so to fight plagiarism – but he repeatedly makes the point that he felt he had to make a case for his own merits as part of his campaign against his plagiarist, and while I absolutely believe that sometimes he was challenged to do so, I think those challenges took on their own momentum in his internal life.)
(2) Soy cheese, at least soy cheese without casein: in the uncanny valley between soy and cheese. Really too bad.
Dean knows (some) Yiddish! My joy cannot be textually rendered.
Also, on my third serious time through Farscape, one thought stands out: I must acquire a Peacekeeper Barbie. Where is one to be found?
And today's fractured phrase: "Wise Bread runs the gamete on personal finance topics." Wise Bread will genetically screen your offspring for financial planning skills?
Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think: One thing the audiobook format highlights for me is an author’s organizational skills. Without a whole page to look at, I’m highly dependent on what just I just heard. Groopman’s book is, at least as a listen, pretty meandering, which is no real surprise for a book full of a practitioner’s war stories. Groopman’s argument itself is somewhat contradictory – he identifies many mistakes doctors make by looking only at obvious or common causes of a patient’s symptoms and encourages doctors to think harder, but he also is suspicious of evidence-based medicine when it conflicts with a doctor’s intuition. Doctors should rely on intuition, but also throw out all preconceptions and consider alternatives to the obvious. And they shouldn’t rely on drug companies’ promises, but should read extensively in the literature. In other words, they should try really hard on each case. The epilogue might be worth skimming in a bookstore – it contains some useful specific things patients can say if they worry that doctors aren’t helping with their problems.
Neal Bowers, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist: Bowers is a poet; some years ago, he discovered that another man was plagiarizing his poems, sending them to multiple poetry magazines and even succeeding in getting them republished numerous times. He set off on a hunt to find and stop the man, succeeding only in the former – and that only from a distance. As one might expect, Bowers is a lyrical writer, which makes it even more puzzling that he can only say, and not make the reader feel, how important his words are to him. Or maybe it’s natural that he can’t put into prose the violation he feels, can’t come up with an objective correlative – it’s part of what he sees as a detachment of most people from most poetry. Indeed, most of the outrage that rose from the page was directed at the dozens of colleagues and associates who minimized what had happened to him, who thought it was funny or who ignored his pleas for help. In the end, I’m not sure what the book wants to do, so I can’t say if it succeeded – though we find out in the afterword that he stopped writing poetry during the events he recounts, which puts a different gloss on his inability to defend the merits of his work. (Not that he should have to do so to fight plagiarism – but he repeatedly makes the point that he felt he had to make a case for his own merits as part of his campaign against his plagiarist, and while I absolutely believe that sometimes he was challenged to do so, I think those challenges took on their own momentum in his internal life.)
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Re: close enough?