11 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(04/01/11 9:48am)
Were it not for the vagaries that plague modern air travel—the periodic aerosols of respiratory viruses piped at facial level through the foul and thin cabin air and the annoying antics of clueless fellow passengers—the cramped seating of sardine class would otherwise provide a more or less tolerable experience for the contemplative sort. Time to read, to write and to enjoy, such as it is, a period when the only demands on one are those enforced by the occasionally officious and surly flight attendant.
(02/04/11 11:09am)
“The toad beneath the harrow knows/exactly where each tooth-point goes/the butterfly upon the road/preaches contentment to that toad”- Rudyard Kipling
(01/21/11 11:00am)
In the days following the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Tucson, it has become apparent that her assailant is bereft of any coherent political ideology, mentally ill and more Mad Hatter than a Tea Partier. The left has had to backtrack on their outlandish claims that hate-spewing right-wing talk radio and the vitriolic conditions that reign in our bitter and fractured political climate fueled the shooting rampage.
(12/03/10 11:00am)
Skeletons molder in most of our closets. They certainly do in mine, and there are some real beauties, and the ones I can actually share with you include the truly odious—I proudly pulled the lever for Jimmy Carter in the first election I was legally allowed to vote, for example, and stayed up late watching the returns to jeer and hoot along with my friends as Gerald Ford was turned out of office. Just look how that turned out.
(11/19/10 10:45am)
In the waning weeks of 2010 and with Thanksgiving around the corner, I became reminded it’s been a tough year. What was to become a true annus horribilis began when rheumatoid arthritis and the complications of its therapy finally took my mother. The hillside farmhouse in a remote part of central Vermont where she made her home didn’t make visits there for her Durham family easy, but thank God for Southwest Airlines and the Manchester New Hampshire airport. Despite having good medical care, she suffered mightily at the end, and as a physician it was difficult to stand by helplessly, or try in vain to make her better. As a son it was heartbreaking. Thank God, too, for hospice nurses.
(11/05/10 9:03am)
Pathologists, and surgical pathologists in particular, are in the business of frequently giving bad news to their clinician counterparts, and by extension to the patients they serve. Cancer remains a big deal, tissue diagnosis the gold standard needed to commence treatment and that’s where the pathologist comes in. The news that I often bring from the microscope is often bad; it’s cancer, or worse, it’s an especially aggressive form of cancer, or that the cancer has spread and is incurable.
(10/22/10 9:00am)
Washington, D.C. of the 1960s was a pleasant place to grow up and had much to offer. Four seasons to enjoy the outdoors, the Smithsonian, other museums and art galleries and the majestic halls of government. Years later Chelsea Clinton and the Obama girls would go on to attend the same school I did (as did Amy Carter, surreptitiously), but tony would not have been an apt descriptor for the Sidwell Friends of the 60s and 70s. Richard Nixon, good Quaker that he was, sent his daughters there, as did a number of his henchmen and lower-level minions. The parents of many of my friends and classmates were elected officials or served at the pleasure of an incumbent regime. This resulted in the periodic repopulation of one’s neighborhood and classroom as the American electorate perpetuated the endless cycle of turning the incumbent bums and lying skunks out of office. Winners from previous elections were routinely packed off, as promised chickens failed to appear in pots and Happy Days were, in point of fact, not here again.
(10/08/10 9:07am)
Once the medical part of the homicide autopsy was completed, or at least the part that involved the documentation and classification of injuries, the evisceration of the body and macroscopic inspection of the internal organs, the remainder of the procedure for those charged with the investigation of the whys and wherefores of the newly dead was an exercise in paperwork.
(09/24/10 9:10am)
The honking began first as a series of peevish, staccato beeps, then finally a sustained, angry drone. The grandmotherly type at the wheel of the huge sedan right directly behind me was going ballistic. This little drama unfolded last spring at the intersection of Towerview and Science, where I was poised on my bike in the left turn lane, obeying the traffic signal, preparing to proceed first down then up the hill towards the School of Engineering and then make my way over to my office in Davison.
(09/10/10 11:38am)
I’m not much of a television watcher. There are collegiate sports and the yearly surfeit of professional bike racing with the European spring classics and the Tour de France and the spectacle of televised American pro sports and all its excesses from time to time, but ridding my household of its televisions would be an easy, albeit unpopular, decision for me.
(01/30/01 5:00am)
There are numerous and valid reasons to take the Confederacy, conservative pundits and the NRA to task, but such reasons are seldom articulated coherently and often miss more salient points amidst the demagoguery and hectoring. The pharisaical dithering of Maureen McClarnon in the Jan. 18 Chronicle provides a case in point.
