Take Me For A Ride

Hello World,

Boo! Don't look back, there may be something gaining on you that would scare the daylights right out of you. In fact, it's already too late, because that's just what's happening. We've come again to that fateful time of year, as we surely must, when the powers that be mess up all of the timekeeping mechanisms in the entire world and pull the daylights right out from under an unsuspecting public. Oh, the humanity! This weekend is when we turn the clocks back an hour on Saturday night, so after that, what used to be Sunday at 9:00 AM instead turns into Groundhog Day 1990, and Russia's glorious October Revolution happens instead on Chinese New Year. Boy, that Daylight Saving Time is no joke. Or is it? We have this timely tidbit from our friends at The Onion web site --

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Daylight Saving Time Yields Massive Daylight Surplus

Washington, DC -- Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman announced Monday that the country's seven-month-long effort to conserve sunshine has resulted in the largest national daylight surplus since October 2005.

"We have built up over 200 hours of this precious, life-giving resource," said Bodman, noting that "the sun's rays are not going to last forever." He added, "We have decided it would be most prudent not to squander this valuable daylight by distributing it to Americans," instead suggesting that they all "just wake up a little earlier."

Bodman said the surplus will be stored in the Strategic Daylight Reserve -- a system of opaque, sealed-off underground tanks located in Arizona -- and only tapped in the case of the sun burning out or a particularly rainy afternoon.
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Now, that's more like it! Speaking of things we like better, many alert readers may be wondering whatever happened about the ersatz silver Taurus with four doors and a spoiler, that turned out instead to be a navy blue Escort with four doors and no spoiler. I'm glad you asked! We had no difficulty adding the Escort to our family of cars, without managing to supplant anything else that was already here, so that instead of having two people with four cars between them, we now have two people with a total of five cars between them. Please let me know when this starts to make sense to anyone. Interestingly, in one fell swoop, I went from being the person with two of the oldest cars (1973 and 1986) to being the person with the newest car (1993) of all of them. I discovered that one drawback in buying a used car from the 30-year-old son of your regular mechanic is that you can pay for the car and go pick it up, and find out that the windshield washer doesn't work, the tail lights don't work, the back doors don't open (from the outside OR the inside!) but by golly, he makes sure that if nothing else, at least the radio works. It's all a question of priorities, don't you see. We did get that all straightened out, and it's been a pleasure to drive, in fact, it's got a lot of pep for a small car with what I consider a small engine.

I suppose it's because I think of it as small that I was so surprised when I went to register it at DMV and found it cost twice as much as the fabled Gremlin of lore and legend. The registration for the Gremlin is outrageously expensive because it's for two years, it has vanity license plates, and at almost 3,000 pounds, is just about the heaviest car of anyone I know. I don't really know what I was expecting the Escort to be, what with transferring the registration, the sales and use tax, the vanity plates and fees or whatnot, but I certainly wasn't expecting the highway robbery that they held me up for, because I never saw that one coming. But at last it was mine, and I drove back to pick it up and bring it home. Of course, it's always interesting to get a different car, and even if it's not technically "new," as they say on TV, it's new to me. The first time I saw it, I thought it had a teeny tiny itty bitty trunk, but it turns out that it has a hatchback, with a good sized cargo area, and besides that, the rear seats fold down for even more room. This can be a dangerous thing to foist on someone who already takes 250 pounds of firewood camping, the possibilities are mind-boggling! Driving it home for the first time presents a whole new series of complications, namely that you don't know where anything is. You don't know how to turn on the lights or blow the horn, you can't open the glove compartment or the console storage, and heaven help you if you need to open the hood or turn on the fan. At one point, I was stopped at a traffic light and I was poking around and fiddling with knobs on the dashboard, and when I accidentally turned on the windshield wipers in broad daylight, I almost jumped right out of the seat. The helpful folks at Ford no doubt think they are doing all of us a huge favor by providing handy icons for various functions, but I've got a news flash for them. Even standing still and in bright sunlight, I found myself looking at the pictographs and saying things like, "Well, that's a man with a musket, and this other one looks like a sailboat, and these two over here seem to be the zodiac signs for Sagittarius and Capricorn." It goes without saying that I utterly failed to discern the functions of these assorted buttons and switches, in spite of their supposedly helpful pictures. Luckily we found the owners manual tucked handily away in the glove compartment, so we should soon be able to crack the code of the incomprehensible icons once and for all.

While we're on the topic of incomprehensible things, we have this item from our friends at the Times Online (feel free to visit their web site at www.timesonline.co.uk and see for yourself) about the development of an invisibility cloak for real, after years as a science-fiction staple. Far from being a cloak, what this thing is actually, is a 5-inch ring composed of esoteric materials that deflect microwaves so that the ring and small objects inside of it, do not register on the equipment beaming waves at it. Obviously this has limited applications for making things invisible that will fit inside of a 5-inch ring, and certainly wouldn't be much help to the Klingons and Romulans of Star Trek fame, who as everyone knows, have cloaking devices that render their entire spaceships invisible. But the scientists are very excited, and feel this is a step in the right direction for developing a true invisibility cloak that could be used for a variety of military or security purposes. Well, I've got some bad news for these scientists, and don't forget, I live with a house full of invisible cats that wrote the book on disappearing objects. There's a whole world of difference between an object that is truly invisible, and one that is merely undetectable by measuring devices. Something may be standing right out there in plain sight, big as life, and not be perceived by radar, sonar, laser, microwaves or any other darned monitoring equipment, and may well be as undetectable as all get-out, but if you can still see it with your own eyes, then it's not invisible, no matter what they want to tell you. It's just not the same thing at all, and they can't just put something in a 5-inch ring and try to sell me a bill of goods about it, when I can see it plain as day. After all, I have invisible cats, and I ought to know.

We saw a story in our local newspaper recently about a horse stable in the northern part of the county, and the kinds of people who keep their horses there. They described one young lady by saying that she has a half-lease on a quarter horse, so Bill said that was 1/8th of a horse right there. Frankly, that creates a mental picture that I don't care for all that much. (Besides, that's a horse of a different color!) On that note, we can saddle up and ride off into the sunset, trailing after the waning glimmers of light, spilling purple upon riders of the wagon train, and spurs that jingle jangle jingle. Of course, we'd better hurry, because after tomorrow, the sunset will be a week later, and the sun will only rise on alternate Tuesdays in even-numbered months, except in rural areas during Leap Year along with a player to be named later. At least I think that's how Daylight Saving Time works, and please feel free to quote me on that.

Raising The Bar

Hello World,

Well, for those of us here in the mythical confines of Mudville, who were hoping that the Mets would beat the Cardinals in the playoffs, these are dark days indeed. Just like in the fabled poem, Mighty Casey has indeed struck out, and by next week, there will be only one team whose fans do not have the anguished cry of "wait until next year!" upon their lips. Considering that the media bigwigs can't stand it when there are two small market teams in the World Series, because people don't watch the games and the ad revenues are less, you would think they would have done more to keep the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers and Angels in the playoffs, if only for their own self-interest. After all, what's the sense of being a diabolical greedy media ogre with no soul, if you can't even keep St. Louis and Detroit out of the Fall Classic? These ogres we have nowadays are just not all they're cracked up to be, and that's all there is to that.

Speaking of sports, people can call me what they like (don't you dare!) but I may as well say right up front that I don't hold with this idea of young women on the football sidelines doing feature-ettes as if they care about the game. The first time it happened in the 1970's, it was considered radical, and that would be reason enough to do something different. But now that every single telecast has to have one, it has become nothing more than another boring example of the networks patronizing half of their audience while pandering to the other half. I was reminded of this today when I happened to pass by a radio tuned to WBLS, which is the station of choice for urban youth, and there was a young lady reading a story about some award that had been bestowed on Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb, which she gushed, he had won by receiving over 7,000 votes, no doubt by an adoring public. She wrapped up her report with this classic ad lib: "Go Phillies!"

Oh all right, for the sake of the KGB agents monitoring my email, Donovan McNabb does not play quarterback for the Phillies, although that might not be such a bad idea, all things considered. I'll bet the diabolical greedy media ogres never thought of that one either.

It may have been that same day when I was driving to work and as I went under the train trestle, I noticed a train passing overhead that was not the usual commuter trains that service our fair city, but something with a noticeably different design on the locomotive. Then I realized that it was one of the new Amtrak Acela trains that are supposed to use some sort of advanced technology to make them faster than anything else on tracks, speeding their passengers between Boston and Washington, D.C. in a twinkling, compared to more outmoded forms of transportation. Luckily, the train was moving so slowly that I had plenty of time to identify its logo, although that would seem to defeat the purpose of having a high-speed train in the first place.

Also on the subject of defeating the purpose, last week I got a call from Leonard in EKG, who requested a service call on their copier because it wasn't working. Our service people require more information than that, so I asked Leonard what happens when they press the copy button, and he said the machine makes a copy, but it comes out completely blank. Oh, I told him, that was part of our new cost-saving measures to save on ink. He laughed.

While we're on the topic of copiers, today I came back from lunch and found a message in my voice mail from Rita in the Dispatch office of our copier vendor. She asked me to call her back, so I did, and then she proceeded to put me on hold for 8 minutes, which I could tell because our telephones at work have a display panel that says how long the call is. Mind you, please bear in mind that she was the one who called me in the first place, I hadn't called her. In any event, when she came back, she apologized for keeping me waiting, because as she put it, she had been speaking with a customer. Excuse me??? I felt like saying, and what am I, chopped liver?! Thanks so very much not!

Incredibly enough, that wasn't my only "Rodney Dangerfield" moment at work this week. (And how we do all miss dear Rodney, and his wonderful "I don't get no respect, no respect at all!" routines.) I had been unable to the attend the HAZMAT meeting in June, due to being clinically insane at the time, and left the rest of the committee to carry on their important work with hazardous materials in my absence. Actually, I am the person who sends out the HAZMAT update forms, and in fact, I was particularly asked to attend the meetings when everyone on the original committee left, and none of the new people knew what they were supposed to do. So you can imagine my surprise when I received the minutes of the June meeting, and found, or rather did NOT find, myself listed as either Present or Not Present in the attendance section. You can believe that I called the chairman and complained, especially since he obviously had a sticker already addressed to me for inter-office mail, and yet still failed to include me in the membership, even though I had been there since before the beginning. Talk about "what have you done for us lately" and then some. After that, I was speaking to one of our clinical supervisors, who thanked me for a payroll report that I had compiled for her, and she said she wished that she could get the same thing from the Nursing department for her other employees, but we both knew that would never happen. I said, "I'm the only idiot who does that," to which she replied, "I know." Hey! With friends like this, who needs enemies, right?

Speaking of the wonderful world of healthcare, I had another co-worker come into my office this week and complain about some perceived injustice that he had endured at the hands of outrageous fortune, and he was in a fine state of high dudgeon about it. He was describing to me how he told off the offending party in no uncertain terms and pulling no punches. "And you know me," he fumed, "I hold no bars." I found that a curious new twist on an age-old wrestling idiom of "no holds barred," which manages to be succinct and incomprehensible all at the same time.

Another incomprehensible twist comes to us courtesy of a new book called "The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived," by Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter, which they claim explains "How characters of myth, legends, television, and movies have shaped our society, changed our behavior, and set the course of history." Please feel free to visit their website at http://www.101influential.com/ and see for yourself. Now personally, I have no problem with people writing a book like this, and in fact, I hold no bars, as the saying goes. (No, it doesn't!) But the funny thing was, I found myself taking exception to their rankings, and arguing the superior merits of James Bond (#51) compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (#44) or decrying the outrage of The Ugly Duckling (#55) coming in ahead of Batman (#60) as if they really were actual people who deserved to have their integrity defended. I won't spoil the ending for any mystery fans out there who want to be surprised at the choice for number one, but let me just say that no less a personage than the jolly old elf himself, Santa Claus, came sledding in at #4, so you can see at a glance that this was one tough competition. If you don't believe me, just ask poor Luke Skywalker, hailing in from a far far away and long long ago #85. Luke, I am your Barbie.

Meanwhile, our friends at Minntech Renal Systems wanted to notify their customers about their holiday hours in November and December, and they provided us with a handy reference card with a calendar of dates to show the days they would be closed for the holidays, and when to place orders to receive by a certain time. I glanced at it before filing, and couldn't figure out what seemed wrong about it, until I noticed that the dates didn't appear to follow in consecutive order, as they do on regular calendars. That was the first I realized that this handy calendar included only five days, so that you would see one week end on the 17th and the next week would begin on the 20th, or it would skip from the first to the fourth, for example. I suppose they did that to better highlight the days in question, but it certainly threw me for a loop, since I was expecting it to look and behave just like a regular calendar, not some screwy "Readers Digest Condensed Version" with only five days. Of course, everyone knows what I think about those short weeks, and this is my idea of just taking it to a whole new, and I don't mind saying unwelcome, extreme. On the other hand, if the folks with the 101 most influential mythical characters did that, and left out two numbers out of every seven, it would really help Luke Skywalker. And everyone knows that I am nothing if not helpful, because after all, I hold no bars.

An Apple A Day

Hello World,

Happy October! Naturally, that doesn't apply to those distraught folks in Mudville, where the agonized sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth is heard throughout the land, who expect nothing less than the Yankees winning the World Series every year, or else they consider the infinite universe to be hopelessly out of alignment. At any rate, they certainly don't expect their beloved Bombers to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, as happened last week, amid much rancor and antagonism in the media. Of course, the Mets have been doing their best at holding up their part of the playoffs, for the sake of local pride, but anyone could tell that it's just not the same. Well, I believe it was David Frost, or perhaps it was Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, who said: "What a difference a week makes." And let's not forget that it was William Shakespeare, writing under the nom de plume of Oscar Meyer Bacon, who said, "October is the cruelest month." Of course, back in his day, the Yankees were owned by some crazy tyrant who used to kill his opponents in September, so victory in October could be assured. On the other hand, I hope that doesn't give George Steinbrenner any ideas.

In other news, we find ourselves beset with the second Friday the 13th this year, since January. At least these are the only two that we will have in 2006, so if you managed to get through today in one piece, it should be smooth sailing for the rest of the year. Probably some places in the world, people still celebrate Columbus Day (where Bill works is one of them) and so I took Monday off from work so that we could enjoy a long weekend together. After that, I had no idea what day of the week it was, and the whole week turned into a kind of a lost cause. While we're on the topic of lost causes, we get the following from an alert reader:

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Funny you should speak about Columbus Day. Our local Knights of Columbus (oddly enough founded by an Irishman????) hosted their annual Columbus Day dinner dance last night (Oct. 6). Of course, everyone knows that Columbus Day is observed on the Monday prior to the actual date of his birth (Oct 12) - Thanks to the Congressional "give us a 3 day weekend act." So now Columbus Day is celebrated almost a full week before it occurs! Why don't they just do the same thing with Christmas? We could do our shopping right after Halloween - (oh wait, that would now be held on Labor Day.) We could give "THANKS" right before Christmas dinner, then all the gift giving, returns, exchanges & New Years could be gotten out of the way before we actually celebrate Christmas. BOGGLES THE MIND DOESN'T IT?
PS. In Spain, old Chris is know as Cristof Colon - he did, you know, sail for Ferdinand & Isabella. Our founding fathers, in wise judgment, Latinized his name to Columbus. After all, we would not want his special day confused with National Colon Health Awareness Day (I'm sure there is one.) They could have used his Italian name of Columbo - but the national yogurt foundation had its objections (although THAT Columbo family is Armenian).
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In other news, and this of the health-related kind, we find this intriguing information in the EatSmart section of the USA Weekend magazine, courtesy of Jean Carper, and touting the many benefits of eating apples for their therapeutic qualities: [[ Drinking 2 cups of apple juice or eating two to three apples a day may boost production of acetylcholine, often lacking in Alzheimer's patients. When University of Massachusetts Lowell researchers gave apple juice concentrate to elderly mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, they did better on learning maze tests and had more acetylcholine. ]] Now, I admit that I'm not a doctor or a researcher, and in fact, I don't even play one on television. But I can tell you that it would take an awful lot for someone to explain to me why they can't just give the apple juice concentrate to actual PEOPLE WITH ALZHEIMER'S, rather than a bunch of old mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, and see if it actually works or not. Are they afraid it's toxic? Too radical? Too expensive? I simply can't figure out why it would occur to anyone to test what seems like a safe and simple therapy on something that is not people, and who do not have Alzheimer's, in order to determine if this would work on actual people who actually do have Alzheimer's. It's just stupefying, or in the immortal words of George Steinbrenner, applesauce.

Speaking of hitting the sauce, I received a phone call last week from one of our nurses in the Clinic, asking me what department she should contact to have one of the new alcohol dispensers installed in their hallway. Of course, everyone knows that I'm much too polite to laugh, but I laughed anyway, and said this was the first I was hearing of alcohol dispensers in the hospital, although I was certainly in favor of it, and please let me know when Happy Hour was, because I'd be right over. After a bit more clarification, it turned out that she was referring to these alcohol-based waterless hand cleansers they've started using throughout the facilities, in order to encourage the staff to regularly disinfect their hands between patients. Personally, I liked the other idea better, and it would certainly give new meaning to the phrase "This won't hurt a bit."

Also at work, we all received a peremptory notification that we had to attend mandatory evacuation training being held in the auditorium, or else. I said to Bill that the hospital has been in the same place for 100 years, and they've never had evacuation training before, so either things have suddenly gotten very perilous there, or else they never cared before if the employees got out safely in an emergency. Be that as it may, last week found us tramping off to training sessions like good little soldiers, and learning everything we had to know about proper evacuation techniques, and it goes without saying, we are all so much smarter now. Actually, I don't like to complain about evacuation training, because that was the best sleep I've had in a week. (Oh, hit that easy target!) Anyway, it was when I was on my way to the auditorium at 1:00 PM that I bumped into Mario the painter in the stairwell, and he greeted me like a long-lost Croatian relative and said he hadn't seen me all day (which isn't easy to do, because Mario has been all over our hallway like a bad rug) so I said, "Oh, I'm just getting in now." He laughed.

It was at the end of the week before that I started to come down with a minor but annoying case of the sniffles, beginning with a bad sore throat, and winding up with coughing and sneezing in the classic style of colds throughout the ages. I did stay home from work one day, but the rest of the time, I just muddled through using the best that modern pharmaceuticals have to offer people trying to work while they're sick. It was on one of these days that we were visited by our retired co-worker, who brought us pastries from her local bakery, and which I found to be extremely therapeutic. When I told her about my cold, she said she had the same thing, which apparently has been going around, and how terrible she felt and how long she suffered with it, and then she wagged an admonishing finger at me and exclaimed, "And remember that it's going to get better before it gets worse!" Somehow, I found it oddly reassuring that she's been retired for six months now, and she still has the ability to turn a phrase like no one else.

I wish I could say that's about all the news, such as it is, from these parts, but that doesn't even begin to cover it, since this has been an extremely eventful week, at least here in our little slice of Paradise. It's at times like this that I find mere words to be woefully inadequate to describe all that's been going on around here, and so all attempts in that direction will have to wait for another time. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to join the rest of the hospital staff around the alcohol dispensers for some much needed workplace mood enhancing treatment. Hey, Doc! Let's have another shot, if you please!

A Slip Of The Lip

Hello World,

Happy Columbus Day weekend! And don't think that I can't hear all of the young people out there, and their name is legion, all scratching their heads and saying, "Who?" as if they can't imagine any reason to have a holiday named after a city in Ohio. Au contraire! (That's French for "If it's Tuesday, this must be India.") Although in modern times, Columbus has fallen victim to the "What have you done for us lately?" movement of revisionist history, in fact he might be considered its poster child, without him and his ilk of fearless explorers, the New World never would have been discovered, and then where would we be? It goes without saying that none of us would be here now, or if we were, we'd all be living in teepees and running gambling casinos. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, Columbus changed all that in 1492, and so here we all are today, although no one seems to appreciate that any more. I for one refuse to be daunted by the nay-sayers, however, and if nothing else, I appreciate Columbus for giving us a day off on Monday, and not a moment too soon.

Last weekend we were at Mom's to help her celebrate her 84th birthday, which we did in fine style and glad of it. The birthday girl was pretty in pink, wearing a nice new outfit that was an early birthday gift from my sister, and it goes without saying, her Birthday Girl tiara with the shiny balloons and sparkles. We had lunch and looked at pictures, and later had dinner and birthday presents, followed by mini Italian pastries. A person might be forgiven for being concerned that this might be just too much wonderfulness for one individual, but fortunately, my Mom has always exhibited a very high threshold of wonderfulness, so she managed to take it all in stride. And believe me, I don't have to appeal to the video replay judge to state that a fine time was had by all.

Last week was also that magical time of year that Bill so often despairs of, when the convergence of sports seasons makes it possible for all three of his favorite local teams to lose on the same day. After the Mets had already clinched their division, they perhaps did not play their last games with the same intensity as previously, and meanwhile, the Rangers were playing pre-season games that were important for training, but not necessarily for winning. Of course, the Giants had no such excuses, but still found themselves overmatched on occasion, and it turned into some very discouraging days for the hometown sports fans, at least around our house. I think that if professional sports commissioners are not going to institute the "Saving Private Ryan" rule of local sports, then the least they can do is make sure that all of the teams in one city don't play on the same day. After all, it's not a matter of life and death, it's much more serious than that.

One interesting thing to come out of the hockey pre-season, where winning or losing is immaterial and even the stats are irrelevant, was that the Rangers played one of their games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and thus became the first professional ice hockey team to ever play there. You might be asking yourselves, if no one had ever played an ice hockey game there before, what the heck were they doing with a beautiful, full-sized genuine ice rink right in the middle of town for them to use? It turns out that they sent squads of volunteers from the various hockey teams around the league to help construct this rink inside a multi-purpose arena used for concerts and other events. This is not as easy as it sounds, because there has to be the right kind of floor, and then you need the right equipment and people who know how to make ice on top of it, plus construct boards and safety glass around it, in addition to the benches, scoreboards and penalty boxes as well. It's a whole big undertaking to create a hockey rink where there has never been one before, unlike football for instance, where you can just paint lines on a grassy field and stand up two goal-posts and be done with it. In between periods, they showed the Zamboni clearing the ice, and we realized that some team had to also send them a Zamboni, plus the driver, because they certainly wouldn't have had their own. It was an interesting idea in foreign relations, and I give the NHL a lot of credit for being willing to take on the challenge and giving the native people something different than they had ever seen before.

Speaking of foreign relations, we get this story from Bill about a trip he had made years ago to The Great White North --

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I now have to bore you with my favorite High School French story. I took French for 4 years in High School and another 2 in my abortive attempt at college. So I got pretty good at it. In 1973, my family and I visited Quebec, LONG before the French Canadians became as hostile as they are now. I had actually looked forward to being able to really USE some of my French, but when we got there, everybody was, of course, bi-lingual. All the hotel people spoke excellent English and so we checked in. We went back to the room after dinner and realized we had forgotten to pack slippers. So I volunteered to go down to the concierge in the lobby and see if they had slippers.

I walked into the little shop and there was a nice young woman there smiling at me, so I said, “Hi. Do you carry slippers?” And she looked at me and said, “Pardon?” in that nasal, French way. “AH-HAH!” I thought to myself, “The NIGHT person only speaks French! This is my big chance!”

“Ahem. Pardonnez-moi [pardon me], I said. “Avez-vous des ..... [do you have ... ] um. Avez-vous des ..... “

Yes, after 6 years of French, I couldn't remember the word for “slippers!” All that work gone right down the drain! So what do I do? Improvise!

“Avez-vous des chausseurs de nuit?” I asked, combining “chausseurs,” shoes with “nuit,” “night” to make “night shoes.”

She looked at me like I had 5 heads and said, ‘Quoi?” [What?]

I said, “Uh, avez-vous des sabots de chambre de nuit?” which probably translates to “wooden shoes of the bedroom.”

Well, after about four of these idiotic combinations (“socks of the bedroom floor” might have been the best) the girl looked at me and said, “Pantouffles?”

PANTOUFFLES!!! You can bet I never forgot that word again! But I DID have the funny feeling the girl was just “busting my hump” (as they say in certain circles) and that later she and the other Concierges had a big laugh about it - in perfect English, of course!
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Well, as so often happens, I just don't see anyway to improve upon that, try as I might.

Meanwhile, here in the Ministry of Disinformation, we pride ourselves on not only getting all of our facts wrong, but disseminating that erroneous information to an unsuspecting public. So anyone who was taking bets that they would soon spot me driving around town in a small silver Taurus with four doors and a spoiler, would be woefully misinformed, and hopefully did not bet more than they could afford to lose. Of course, being in the Ministry of Disinformation means never having to say you're sorry, but I regret any inconvenience that this discrepancy may have caused. I am pleased to report that the previous falsehood was only incorrect in that the vehicle in question is not silver, not a Taurus and does not have a spoiler. Well, three out of four isn't bad, and in fact, with a batting average like that, you could play left field for the New York Mets. (Oh, hit that easy target!) Right church, wrong pew, as they say in the apologia of literary errata. It turns out that the car that's up for grabs at our mechanic's is a cute navy blue Ford Escort with four doors and no spoiler, so I'm happy to clarify any misunderstandings there may have been on this issue. Although technically speaking, and in the strict interests of pin-point accuracy, it cannot be said that the car is up for grabs any longer, since I actually have the title and registration application in my hot little hands, so in that sense, its fate is sealed. And that being the case, since I won't be embarrassed to be seen driving it around, if you do see me, you don't have to pretend you don't know me.

Days Of Our Lives

Hello World,

Happy Jewish New Year! Although this greeting is somewhat belated, since Rosh Hashanah was actually last week, it is still very sincere and full of the very best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous year ahead. Because they started counting the new Jewish years so many centuries before the rest of us, they're way ahead of everyone else in terms of years, and in fact, as advanced as they are, it's a wonder that they haven't already developed all of those futuristic, science fiction inventions like flying cars and teleportation devices, long anticipated by eager visionaries. Also last week was the first day of Ramadan, although as holidays go, I have always felt that Ramadan doesn't have much to recommend it, and that's not just the eager visionaries saying that, believe me. Another noteworthy event in last week was the autumnal equinox, and if all of that is not enough to make everyone happy, repentant and full of equinoxity, then I just don't what it would take. In fact, if there were any more special days that needed to happen all at one time, we'd have to call for the week stretcher to squeeze them all in there.

Of course, we all know how Bill loves a research challenge, and he's not one to take that idea of "no famous Croatian painters" lying down, so we have him to thank for the following information:

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Turns out that just because their names aren't household words doesn't mean there aren't great Croatian artists. I found a site that's full of them, running the gauntlet from sculptors through engravers and painters to miniaturists, which seems to have been a specialty. Of the latter, one of the biggies seems to be a gentleman named Julije Klovic, or Don Giulio Clovio de Croatia. His bio is below, but he seems to have hung out with all the big guys AND taught El Greco, which is a claim to fame right there. And he may not BE Michelangelo, but at present he's apparently right down the hall from one, tomb-wise. So Mario should rejoice in his Croativity (and maybe paint something smaller next time.)
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Julije Klovic, or Don Giulio Clovio de Croatia (1498-1578), is regarded as the last great representative of the classical European miniature. His works decorate many famous galleries: Uffizi in Florence, Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, Galleria Sabanda in Torino, Bibliothek der Albertina in Vienna, Louvre in Paris, Towneley Public Library and Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (which is in possession of "Officium Virginis", 228 pages, his most famous and the best masterpiece, containing 30 valuable miniatures by his hand), the British Museum and Soane's Museum in London, Windsor Castle (Royal Library). His pupil was El Greco, who portrayed him in his work "Expelling merchants from the temple" (together with figures of Rafael, Michelangelo and Tizian, appearing on the bottom left of that work), now kept in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (The William Hood Dunwoody Fund).
Among his friends let us mention Michelangelo. Klovic used to sign himself as GEORGIVS JVLIVS CLOVIVS CROATA
His grave is situated near Michelangelo's Moses in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, and bears an inscription "Pictor de Croatia".
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I shared this with Mario the Croatian painter, and he was happy to tell me that Croatia is located across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, and includes many hundreds of small islands. It is nestled between Slovenia, Hungary, Bosnia and Serbia, and a stone's throw from Italy, Austria and Albania, of all places. He also said that a Croatian sailor holds the record for sailing solo around the world in the smallest boat, and was decorated by Queen Elizabeth of England for this achievement. So now you know.

Earlier in the week, Mario was busy patching and spackling along the ceiling, and at one point, he had his ladder directly in front of the door of our bookkeeper's office, who picked that very moment to open her door and try to come out into the hallway. She wasn't expecting the ladder to be there, and she stopped short in full stride with a little gasp and a plaintive wail of being trapped. Mario quickly came off the ladder to move it out of her way so that she could get out of her office, and assured her that he never meant to block her in. As I happened to be passing by at the time, I told him to stop right there, and rather than letting the bookkeeper out of her office just on her own say-so, we should instead put it up for a vote and see what the popular opinion might be on this issue. At this effrontery, she announced to Mario, "Don't listen to her, she drinks." I laughed.

There are times in Purchasing when we receive information that we are not supposed to divulge, such as therapy devices for specific patients or confidential financial reports. At other times, we may discover something that is just so interesting that it simply cries out to be shared, and confidentiality be hanged. This may be one of those other times. I'm thinking there should be fascinating days ahead, because I see that we've just processed a purchase order to a local construction company to demolish a chimney at the hospital. What the scope of work actually says is: "Demolition of existing chimney 3' from top of existing height due to poor/dangerous existing conditions." That should certainly add an element of excitement to the proceedings. It also calls for "rigging, sidewalk bridging, scaffolding, demo chutes and safety netting as required." If this is the chimney that I'm thinking of, it's along the back of the main hospital building, above the awning to the employee entrance and practically the focal point of the courtyard where everyone crosses between different buildings. Having a demolition project right there will certainly be the center of attention for as long as it takes, and I can see a productivity decline on the part of the staff, from whatever it is now to practically zilch for the duration. In fact, if it's anything like the last time they worked on this chimney, it will draw people from out of their offices all over the campus, just to watch and editorialize on the progress. For anyone who has never worked some place where they demolished anything, you can believe me when I say that it is guaranteed to draw a crowd, unlike almost anything else you can think of. Another part of the scope is to build a new chimney in the same spot, so this should be a rather ambitious undertaking by all accounts. And because of its prime location, we'll all have a ring-side seat, as it were, and I know from past experience that any time you can't get hold of someone in their office, you can find them out in the courtyard with the rest of the spectators. Count me in!

Last weekend, we had a visit from a friend's daughter, who has traveled 3,000 miles from her home in Oregon to attend classes at NYU, where she is pursuing her Masters degree in Science Journalism. It would seem to me that they would have places closer to home where you could engage in this field of study, but she seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement. Although she had never been in Grand Central Terminal before in her life, she braved the terrors of the unknown and took the train to New Rochelle, arriving as expected and none the worse for wear. We whisked her away for lunch at our favorite diner, and then drove around to see the sights, such as they are, of the local area. She was gracious and charming through it all, and not to mention, infinitely patient with two old geezers who kept peppering her with hopelessly outdated references for anyone born in 1984, such as Glenn Miller, The Dick Van Dyke Show and pet rocks. The weather could have been more cooperative, however, the one thing we all know about the weather is that it can always be LESS cooperative also, so we should remember to be grateful for small favors. After we had dragged the poor young woman around all day from pillar to post, and no doubt bored her to tears, since she probably didn't want to see the pillar or the post to begin with, we put her on the train back to the city with our best wishes for a safe and pleasant journey. So, if "wander aimlessly around the suburbs" was on her list of Things To Do once she got to the Big Apple, at least she can cross that off now.

Bill has been working at the same small local sign company for so long that the first signs they made were carved in cave walls using stone tools. The ownership over the years has been frugal to a fault, and in fact, calling them stingy would be putting it mildly. So it came as no small surprise when the helpful pension representative showed up to explain the plan options and benefits to all of the employees, and Bill discovered that his pension was worth some wildly extravagant amount undreamed of by mere mortals. Well, as long as he's dead, that is, which some people might consider a significant drawback. But not expecting much to begin with, he was pleased as punch with this information, and even shared it with me, although I pointed out that since I was the beneficiary, it could just give me ideas that he might not care for. The same cannot be said for me, however, as Bill would be in for no windfall from the hospital pension if anything happened to me. Realizing that I'm not worth more dead than alive, Bill had no choice but to speak to our mechanic about getting another car for me, since it has been agreed by all and sundry that the Tempo's days are numbered, and not in a very great quantity either. Our mechanic said that he had a Taurus on the lot that would be just the thing, as it was up for grabs and going at a reasonable rate. I said to Bill that in the typical irony of poetic justice, it would no doubt turn out to be a little silver doorstop with four doors and a spoiler, and now I'm afraid to go look at it. All I ask is, if anyone sees me driving around in this thing, please pretend you don't know me.