I'm linking here a post from The Health Care Blog which reminds me of a conversation I had with our pediatrician when our children were born in the Seventies. Having selected what was then one of the metro area's best hospital, I mentioned casually that it seemed to be the best in town. He replied…

This was from Dr. Salwitz' post Friday. Go read the whole thing. He's an oncologist and knows more about death than most people.  A poorly managed end-of-life experience can transform families for generations. I recently heard of a young man who suffered a miserable protracted death from cancer. This resulted in his wife becoming chronically…

I finally got around to reading the Smithsonian article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson. I'm guilty of too much scanning of material, enough to catch the drift, without taking time to get mired in details that I will forget anyway. But this time I printed it out, some ten or so pages, and took…

Story Corps Atlanta aired a great audio snapshot this morning well worth the three and a half minutes it takes to listen.  This summer and fall, 41 year old Atlanta attorney Kirsten Widner has been living with her biological son, Alex Locke, for the first time. Alex is now 19 years old. He was adopted…

Stuff you come across on Twitter. Ikea removed women from the directory in Saudi ArabiaIkea has removed virtually all women from the pictures in the catalog company in Saudi Arabia. In most other countries the Ikea catalog quite the same. But furniture giant has made sure to create a separate version for Saudi Arabia, writes…

I became aware of J.D. Kleinke from a post about abortion at The Health Care Blog almost two years ago. I later learned he is the author of several books, one of which with the clever title, Catching Babies. Anybody who wants to slog around in the abortion debate is invited to read that post…

Living in the South I don't follow very many Conservative media outlets. I don't need to. Their messages are like the weather — like it or not I'm sure to be exposed to them. But via Twitter and Daily Caller I came upon something that had to go into my Facebook status. THE DEVIL IS…

Dr. Salwitz is a blogging oncologist. Anyone who has cancer, or has a friend or family member with cancer, may find his blog a good place to visit. …There is confusion that the more side effects a chemotherapy agent produces the more likely it is too work. The patient is saying, “Reassure me that this…

I lately discovered to my happy surprise that our new printer/copier/fax/scanner — a Christmas gift from one of our kids — has a feature that even someone at the local office supply store didn't know about: OCR. Optical character recognition is a scanner option which captures print content in character form (not a photo image)…

This morning somebody pushed my button and before I could finish my morning surfing I had to stop and get this off my chest. Rather than allowing it to sink into Facebook Oblivion I'm reposting it here in case I need to use it again. 

Douthat writes much better than I so go read the rest of what he says. It's short and to the point. Today's wave of violence, likewise, owes much more to a bloody-minded realpolitik than to the madness of crowds. As The Washington Post's David Ignatius was among the first to point out, both the Egyptian…

Let us hope together that tempers are cooling in the Arab world. Responsible leaders on all sides are doing all they can to pour oil on the troubled waters even as our own retrograde elements continue churning conflict. Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown. It is with a spirit of reconciliation that I found this message…

Several times over the last few years I have linked to the following piece, thoughtfully made available at a link that is no longer active. I forgot how I came by it, but I post it here for future reference, both for myself and whoever has need of it. I posted this at my old…

Informative interactive map of protests against a movie which no one seems to have seen except for a few minute You Tube clip. This strikes me as something different from yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater. I notice Bahrain is conspicuously absent, although I read a Twitter message a while ago by Maryam Alkhawaja of…

In the areas of Humor and  Random Thoughts & Idle Chatter  I'm not to be outdone easily. In digging around at my old place looking for a different post, I came across this. I only vaguely recall posting it and as I watched I kept hearing sounds of the Chick-fil-a tempest in the background. Those…