Scrappy Blog

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Marcel Marceau has died.  Does it make me a horrible person that the first thing that ran through my mind was the famous mime-in-an-invisible-box (coffin) routine?

Our true evolutionary purpose…

Apparently someone has deliberately bred a type of cat with dachshund-size legs:

I’m sort of having a problem with this. Dachshunds have so many health problems related to their long back-to-limb ratio. That breed was created for a reason – to hunt in tight spaces – but why would a pet cat need to be bred like that? It seems to add needlessly cruel limitations.

Sorta cute, of course, but is that really a reason to contort nature so?

I just tried a “white nectarine” and … oh, yum!  Way more flavorful than any yellow nectarine I’ve had all season.  And a nice texture as well.

And I’ve been eating lots of a plum-apricot hybrid fruit that seems to have changed names several times just this summer.  First batch I bought, the little sticker on them identified them as “pluots”.  Later I saw they’d changed the name to “plumicots” and now this latest batch go by “dinosaur eggs”.  Regardless they’re juicy and sweet.

What fruit have y’all found to be particularly savory this season?

Probably actually fairly accurate though I’d have expected to score higher in tech than in math…

Is there a way to pull LJ entries into RSS feeds?

Or is there a site that’ll pull in LJs and also other things that are available by RSS?

And if the latter, how easy is it to post to my LJ from that site – or do I have to link directly to LJ to post?

I’ve been “releasing” old books to the wild with Bookcrossing.com id tags – I’ve released a bunch of books either in my clinic waiting room, or in the coffee shop I frequent.

But I’ve only rarely gotten any response.  So I get excited when one does get caught.  And one just did!  The weird part is that I’m pretty sure this is one of the books I left in the clinic but it got entered as “caught” on a weekend and many weeks after I released it.  So I’m guessing someone took it home from clinic, read it, and perhaps released it again without reporting on the site?  I know almost all the books I release in clinic disappear even though I’ve never had any of them reported as caught on the website.

Other BookCrossers – has your luck been as bad as mine?

I recently started changing where I glue the sticker – I was gluing inside the front cover but more recently I started putting a sticker explaining the concept on the first page of the actual text.  We’ll see whether that makes any change…

If a friend was going to tell you something negative about yourself, something that would be tough to hear, would you rather…

• Hear it in person (and/or via phone)?
• Get a letter or email so you can think on it a bit before responding?
• Something else?

Me, I’d rather get the news privately in writing, so I can process it, rather than being hit with it in a conversation where I’d have to think of something to say right off.  But I’m wondering if I’m abnormal in this regard…?

Having recognized that I never touch my old medical school library, I have gone through the books and decided to get rid of many of them.  At this point, I have electronic access to the newer versions of all the ones I actually use. 

So I have large books on basic sciences (biochemistry, anatomy, neuroanatomy, pathology, etc…) and clinical texts (internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry), all old enough that I wouldn’t consider them to be accurate anymore. 

What do to with them?  K suggested “ask the public library” –

, what would my library tell me? 

I’m pretty sure Half Price Books would turn up their noses at them.

Goodwill?  I’ve donated a ton of stuff to them over the last year (remember nadeclumo or whatever we called it?) but haven’t tried giving them books yet.

Thoughts?

Yesterday was an interesting day in clinic.

We (the city) found ourselves on the dirty side of a tropical storm/depression and so the rain started sometime between 7 and 8.  And got going real good by 9 or 10.  End result was flooding galore – street closures, stalled cars, stranded people, water everywhere.  About half the roads leading to the clinic were officially closed. It was pretty much impossible to get to us from the west.  Metro (public transportation) suspended most of its operations in our area, too. 

For the first time since we’ve been there, the water got bad enough to flood the clinic itself – a half-inch or less puddle covering our back exam rooms, cutting our capacity by about a third.

Worse, around 10 there was a brief power outage, and the surge as the power resumed apparently damaged something mission-critical in the building’s air conditioning system.  By noon, then, the temp inside the clinic was 80 F and climbing…

And yet the patients still came.  I had only one patient no-show for the morning.  The afternoon was lighter than usual because I usually leave slots open for the last-minute callers, and by lunchtime we’d decided all last-minute callers would not be offered appointments.. but I still saw a good number of people.  Many of these people didn’t have urgent problems – there were a couple kids who needed some shots for the next school year, for example, and several people just there to follow up on long-term conditions. 

We physicians were offered the option to cancel our afternoon clinics.  I chose not to because they didn’t offer the same option to my staff – my nurses were told that if they went (or got sent) home, they’d have to burn vacation hours to get paid for the afternoon. I thought that was an obnoxious policy decision on the part of the stuffed-shirts upstairs, and chose to keep my clinic open so my staff could get paid for the afternoon.  I’m confident my institution lost money on us and it serves them right 🙂

All of which reminds me of what happened recently in New York when the subways flooded.  Even though commuting was near-impossible, even though many institutions were without power, even though there were concerns that things could get a lot worse instead of getting better…. very few businesses actually shut down and few employers bothered to try to do anything to enable/encourage their employees and customers to get off the roads.  This makes me rather grumpy.