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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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Iowa State Map Cribbage Board Size Matters?
I wrote most of this post while waiting for our internet service to reconnect, which it finally did. I’m pretty sure the wintry mix ice caused the outage night before last. Despite the icy conditions yesterday, our Iowa State map cribbage board was delivered. One of the first things Sena said about it was, “I…
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Thoughts on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
I got up at around 3:30 AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. It was mainly because of the current crisis in Ukraine. Russia has invaded Ukraine. I wonder if many of us will remember where we were and what we were doing when we found out that Russia invaded Ukraine? For us,…
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Wandering Thoughts on Talents and Traits in “To Kill a Mockingbird”
I’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird and thinking over something a character named Miss Maudie said in Chapter 10: “People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.” It seems to run counter to popular opinion. Why wouldn’t you take pride in your talents? I got a lot of hits on my…
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Thoughts on Near-Death Experiences
There is a very interesting Medscape article on Near Death Experiences (NDEs), “Young Doctor Explores Near-Death Experiences – Medscape – Jan 13, 2022.” The story was written by Stephanie Lavaud. It was a transcript of an interview with a general practitioner from, Francois Lallier, MD, PhD, from Reims University Hospital in France. He conducted a retrospective study on NDEs for his…
