Shrink-Wrapped Sanity

"Remember, when it comes to Health Care:

Universal, High Quality, Affordable: Choose two of the three.

Anyone who tells you we can have all three is either a liar or a fool."

I've been looking at a few blogs lately. Would you believe that some of the most helpful come from our friends of the psychiatric persuasion? The above quote is borrowed from ShrinkWrapped. Recommended, not just because I like word play.

The caduceus is on the left, and the rod of Asclepius on the right. Wiki has some interesting notes on these.

A Date with my Wife at Barnes & Noble

Carol and I visited our local B & N this afternoon in order to hear our favorite teacher tell us something of the first century of the CE as they say in Academe. I think it stands for Common Era, though what is common about it I'm not really sure.

Big crowd, standing room only, at least on the side of the room I was on. Elizabeth's aging trophy husband Bill, ever the gentleman, gave up his seat to a younger woman. Elizabeth gave a very nice lecture and summary of the book.

Don't you just love Google: CE can stand for Common, Christian or Current Era and apparently is used in order to be sensitive to the feelings of non-Christians. Hmm.

Of course she willingly signed for free our copy of her just-published book, Jesus and First-Century Christianity in Jerusalem by Elizabeth McNamer and Bargil Pixner, which combines a look at some of the written sources as well as recent archaeology and some good guessing on the part of Father Pixner, may his soul rest in peace, and Professor McNamer.

Just like her marvelous Scripture from Scratch series, she is always interested in the commoners sitting in the pews. In fact she several times said "I did not want it to be a scholarly book that nobody could understand. My main thought was making it understandable for people in the pews." Good work, Elizabeth.

True Confession Time

I was playing around with a new small camera from Olympus that has an extraordinary telephoto capability for a small camera that is. So naturally I looked around for a place in Billings to try it out. I drove up toward the airport and along the road that leads to the Heights. I found a place to drive closer to the edge of the Rimrocks and eventually got to a fairly high point overlooking the city of Billings and the Yellowstone River. I also found the above gravesite, which I did not know existed here in Billings, though I have lived here almost 28 years now.

When I consulted Mr Google I was surprised to see that there is a book out about Mr Luther "Yellowstone" Kelly, and a movie starring Clint Walker, released in 1959; a hotel in West Yellowstone, and a catering outfit here in Billings using his name, and perhaps more but I stopped on page 3. I was not surprised at my ignorance. This is probably a good demonstration of the proposition that the things we don't know we don't know might be more important than the things we know we don't know.

[In case you have not figured out what the brackets are for: they are a reminder that I suffer from the peculiar habit of going back and adding to various blogs in the past. This morning, 11 March 2008, I remembered that I was up on this hill once before. I was called here by the coroner because someone had shot himself in the head. I did not recognize the shooter until he was laid out on my autopsy table and someone told me his name. He was an anesthesiologist who I then recalled had smiled at me in an odd way a few days earlier while passing in the halls of the pathology department. Vero.]

Tuesday of the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time

Spent much of the day gathering information and writing emails and talking on the phone to older and younger relatives about this summer get-together, tentatively being called the Mueller Family Melee.

Finished Jacqueline Winspear’s Messenger of Truth, the fourth in a series about some of the close and distant and usually unforeseen consequences of the Great War on the survivors in Britain. It was a good story about good and evil, as were the earlier ones in the series. One really cares about many of the characters, especially her main heroine, Maisie Dobbs. I suppose the critics would call the series a kind of a soap-opera in book form.

Two quotes stood out for me. One in the front matter was a poem that didn’t rhyme by Paul Nash, who served with the Artists’ Rifles and the Royal Hampshire Regiment during the Great War.

I am no longer an artist interested and anxious,
I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men
who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever.
Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a
bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls.

and then on p. 166, a few lines of prose, some of which rhymed, where the narrator describes a diphtheria fever hospital in the early 30s: “Austere, iron-framed cots were lined up, each with just a sheet and rough blanket to cover the feverish body of a child. The vapor of disinfectant barely masked another lingering smell, the foul breath of death waiting for another victim to weaken.”

I can actually remember an infectious disease ward, having had the privelege of serving in one in Cincinnati in the middle 60s. We knew it was a leftover from an earlier time, and probably not going to be around much longer, but tradition dies slowly in some places, and there was a peculiar smell I can still recall. I didn't know then much about the "foul breath of death."