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Birds of a Different Feather
This is the first day of spring in 2022 and it was a beautiful day. We went for a walk on the Terry Trueblood Trail. There were a lot of people out—different ages, different colors, different shapes. Just about everyone was smiling. There were plenty of birds out too. In fact, we saw many different…
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Calpurnia’s Lesson
I finished To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee a couple of days ago. Calpurnia’s line toward the end of Chapter 12: It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike—in the second place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change…
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Para-Debunking on Debunking Day
Today, in honor of Debunking Day, which is held on March 11 annually (starting in 2005) I thought I’d introduce a new word. It’s Para-Debunking and you won’t find it in the dictionary, at least not in our brand-new hardcover Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. It was just delivered yesterday. We needed at least one…
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About Me Page Revisited
I’ve been looking at my About Me page and see that it needs revising. I’m way past the stage of being in phased retirement and I’m pretty sure I can’t do without this blog—or at least some way to keep writing. I notice I said that I was not sure how long I’d keep blogging.…
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Elevator Pitch for a Very Slow Elevator
This is a follow up to yesterday’s post about elevator pitches. I’m using one of the standard formats below. The first step is to find a really slow elevator. Who am I? I’m a retired consultation psychiatrist, slowly evolving beyond that backwards in time to something else I’ve always been. I’ve been a writer since…
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Snow Day Reflections on Elevator Pitches
I got up early this morning, partly because I knew I wanted to shovel the snowdrifts from last night, and partly because I heard my neighbor’s snowblower, shortly after 5:00 a.m. I don’t have a snowblower. I’d rather shovel. It was the wet, heavy stuff. It was still coming down when I charged outside without…
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Honoring Dr. Mady Gray
I remember Dr. Mady Gray. I met her wen I was a student at the HBCU, Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas. This was way back in the mid-1970s. She died in 2014 and a legacy entry is all I can find about her on the web. She was one of the kindest…
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The Language of Diplomacy
The other day, I got to thinking about a previous interest in my early youth in learning to speak Esperanto. I couldn’t stick with it. It’s a constructed language, invented out of Russian, Polish, German, French, and English by a Polish ophthalmologist named Zamenhof in the late 19th century. It was supposed to be a…
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Don’t Look in the Dictionary for Mental Health and Mental Illness
I read an interesting article in Clinical Psychiatry News the other day, written by Dinah Miller, MD in the Shrink Rap News column, “Psychiatry and semantics.” Dr. Miller’s point was that it’s sometimes hard to define terms when discussing mental illness and stress. Can stress be defined as a mental illness? What the heck is…
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Thoughts on “The Next Chapter: Blazing New Trails (1998-2047)
The final presentation of the series night before last, Uncovering Hawkeye History in honor of the 175th anniversary of the University of Iowa was a fascinating review of the changes in architecture of the campus, how local and national politics influenced the university and vice versa, as well as the expansion of the role of…
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