The Red Knot at Montauk Point, dinner at Della Femina’s(terrific) and Dave’s Grill (although it doesn’t deserve a 26 for food), driving along Lily Pond Road and vicinity, the fish offerings at Citarella in East Hampton. Finally made it! I lived in Long Island and have been to New York so many times, but never made it out to The Hamptons. Visiting post-Labor Day makes a lot of sense, you can get around easily. I sure wouldn’t want to deal with the congested traffic Highway 27 during the summers.
Celebrities at U.S. Open
More U.S. Open Pics
U.S. Open Tennis Trip Highlights
New York Trip Part I highlights: Jersey Boys (and saying hello to Governor Bill Richardson), the new Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca (and Jen’s encounter there with Mr. & Mrs. Will Ferrell), great food at Marsailles and the newly opened Greenwich Grill, enjoying this with M1 (as in Mentor #1) Gary and Annette, and of course, the U.S. Open:
Barack in Milwaukee - Labor Day
Breaking News!
Thanks Andy & Diana
We had a great night in the Windy City! Thanks again for your hospitality.
Pics of Democratic National Convention - Denver, Colorado
Reducing Bird Collisions Into Glass
It’s that time of year again when tens of millions of birds crash into glass while migrating through the United States on their way to points south. In fact, it is estimated that A BILLION birds perish every year as a result of these collisions during migration.
The Rusinow Family Foundation has made a five-year grant to a program started by Scott Diehl at the Wisconsin Humane Society called WINGS (Wisconsin Night Guardians for Songbirds). Milwaukee is one of only a few cities in the North America who actively try to reduce bird collisions (the others: Chicago, New York and Toronto). There are all sorts of steps homeowners as well as workers and business leaders in office buildings can take to reduce the incidence of bird collisions.
Scott was recently interviewed on a local television station; here is the link to the video:
http://www.themorningblend.com/NewsArticle/tabid/1474/xmid/24698/Default.aspx
If Barack Loses Florida & Ohio, Wins Wisconsin: What Else to Win The Election
Here are the combinations to get the brass ring(calculations courtesy of Advancing Wisconsin):
Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico: 273
Iowa, Colorado, Nevada: 273
Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada: 269 US House decides
Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada: 278
Iowa, Virginia: 272
Virginia, Colorado: 271
Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico: 272
No matter how you slice it and dice it, this is going to be a very, very close election. The McCain attack machine is doing an outstanding job getting their desired results.
Saturday in Milwaukee
A Brave Thing To Do
In yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a second year medical student at The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Jessica Weaver, wrote a letter to the editor objecting to MCW’s continued backward use of live animals during physiology classes. MCW is now one of the last medical colleges in the United States using this outdated, inhumane practice. As a board member of the Wisconsin Humane Society, I’ve been dealing with this for the past couple of years. What has been particularly irksome about MCW during this has been has their permitting their spokesperson, Richard Katschke, to be Karl Rove-like in defending the use of live dogs and responding to the public outcry. Richard Katschke has been malicious, smug and mean-spirited during all of this. I have been surprised how both the board of regents and the President of MCW, Mike Bolger, has allowed Katschke to be such a belligerent representative for MCW.
Here is Jessica’s Letter to the Editor:
As another class of medical students arrives at the Medical College of Wisconsin, the controversy over the school’s use of live animals in its physiology labs is renewed. While this practice always raises discussion in the medical community and among members of the Wisconsin Humane Society and other animal protection advocates, many people in Milwaukee do not feel this debate is important to them. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
I am a second-year medical student at MCW, and I remember how shocked I was when I learned in January of last year that my school continues this outdated practice. I had strong objections to a set of labs that would result in the deaths of approximately 50 frogs, 36 pigs, 40 rats and numerous rabbits - all to restate points already made clear in our lectures and textbooks. I found this attitude that life is expendable to be entirely contrary to MCW’s tradition of educating physicians in understanding, empathy and compassion.
I presented the physiology faculty with a petition signed by 90 students requesting an alternative, but this reasonable request was refused. When I presented the petition to the course director, he agreed that the labs were not necessary to learn any of the physiological concepts, but he was clear that they would continue.
The school’s decision last year to switch from using live dogs to using live pigs suggests that MCW’s physiology department will listen to the public, but it missed the fundamental objection to this practice, which is an antiquated exception to the otherwise exceptional education MCW offers its students.
Simply put, no animal of any kind needs to be sacrificed. Several students told me they felt exactly the way I did but were afraid they would be punished if they said so. If students are unwilling or unable to take a stand, the community must do so instead.
Only eight of the 154 medical schools in the country still use live animals in their medical education, and only five use them for physiology. All other schools have switched from using live animals to using computer models, simulations and real patient observation. They have made that change because doing so offers their students a better education. The inability of the physiology department to offer modern laboratory exercises that focus on human physiology is causing the students’ education to suffer, and the community suffers as a result.
All of MCW’s students rotate through Froedtert, the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and other area hospitals. They are responsible for much of the doctor-patient interaction. Many of these students choose to stay in the area after graduation and become responsible for providing medical care to the people of Milwaukee.
The physicians I have met here are caring, compassionate men and women who have dedicated their lives to saving and improving the lives of others. They serve the people of Milwaukee. To enable them to provide the best possible care, they should be equipped with the best tools, including a modern education. The physiology faculty’s pride in the continuation of this ancient tradition is as illogical as being proud of having dial-up Internet access in our digital cable world.
The number of schools continuing to use live animals is dropping rapidly, and if MCW does not change, it will become the only school that uses them. This would portray the school as backwards and old-fashioned and could do unfair and unnecessary damage to the school’s reputation. As a result, the school and its hospitals would have trouble attracting the best physicians to the area.
The community needs to speak out and stop this practice.
Jessica Weaver is a second-year medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
The Police - Marcus Amphitheater, Milwaukee July 25, 2008
Hey, the Stock Market Performs Better Under Democratic Administrations
Attention Republican friends! Factoid for the Day: The Dow Jones Industrial Average returns 7.2 percent during Democratic administrations, compared with 3.6 percent under Republicans. OK? You want to tone down how Dems are bad for the economy? Want to go over budget deficits (or in the case of Clinton, a surplus) over the past 20 years?
I Now Have Paragraphs(!), and other Tech Musings
Why is it that when I started this blog last year the paragraphs I typed were published as text with paragraphs, only to have my posts a few months ago start to mashup into one mega-paragraph?
Well, this morning my web helper Dawn (how would guys like me keep our sanity doing stuff on the Internet without a helper like Dawn?), downloaded the latest version of Wordpress. I am writing this post in paragraphs in the hopes that when I select ‘publish’ and check it out it will retain the integrity of my text. OK, let’s see. Back to typing in a minute…..
Consider my tech quandries of the last 24 hours:
1. Watching the DVD of Season 1 of Mad Men - works fine with the setup in the living room, but when I want to play it on our Samsung Blu-Ray Disc Player in the bedroom……NOOOOO, it just won’t work. The player will play any other DVD we put in there, but not Season 1 of Mad Men.
2. After scanning a newspaper article on our HP Officejet All-In-One Printer and wanting to send via email on my PowerBook G4, I noticed that the image of the jpeg needed to be rotated so you can read it easily. Would you like to save your changes, I am asked? Yes, of course, I respond. I then drag the jpeg into my email (Apple’s Mail) and voila, the image loads upside down. I can retry a thousand times, and at least for the first 5 tries, the change is not saved.
3. I’m eagerly awaiting an email from a guy who has called me out of the blue from the West Coast who is very involved in a group that is gathering information on people who were instrumental in the educational film production industry (my dad was in this field in the 60’s and 70’s). I call him and leave him a message to tell him that I haven’t yet received the email. He calls back and leaves a message that he did send it, confirming the correct address, but that he will send again. A couple days later, I still haven’t received an email. And it’s not in my spam folder.
Oh Yeah for O Ya
When we launched TopNetPix.com, I intended to add to the site great restaurants and hotels that I enjoyed during my travels. But with TNP now basically on auto-pilot, this blog is my opportunity to call-out great culinary experiences as they happen. Last night in Boston, after being tipped off recently by a foodie article that gushed rarely used superlatives, we checked out O Ya, located in the Leather District. Oh Man, it was simply the best. It was one of the most expensive dinners I’ve had (the dishes kept adding up), but it was absolutely amazing how incredibly consistently great each dish was. In an earlier post When Sushi Was Sushi, I’ve complained how some sushi chefs, in an effort to get ‘creative’, really go over the top and forget about the 'roots’ of sushi being clean and simple. But O Ya was just terrific in how each dish was so well put together. I mean, there were people there taking pictures of their dishes, they were so well presented. Trust me, if you’re into this kind of food, this is one of the best in the country. oyarestaurantboston.com
Pietre Dure in NYC
Most of my life I’ve been drawn to works of art that involved the detailed and sometimes intricate inlay of wood or hard surfaces, like marble or semi-precious stones. For many years, I’ve been attracted to furniture and boxes that had well-designed and intricate wood inlaid patterns. And for the past few years, since visiting Italy, my exposure to inlaid art has expanded to what the Italians call pietre dure, which translates as ‘hard stone’, involving mostly marble and sometimes semi-precious stone. The art form flourished toward the end of the 16th century in Florence, primarily under the supervision and support of the Medici family. There is something about the incredible craftsmanship that went into making a work of pietre dure that really appeals to me. Today, while in New York, I visited the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “Art of the Royal Court: Treasures of Pietre Dure From the Palaces of Europe”. It’s billed as the “first in-depth survey” of this craft, with over 170 examples to look at, and be mesmerized by. The intricacy of inlaying finely cut marble is amazing. The exhibit is fantastic: I didn’t realize that many of the works had birds as part of the design; the Italians thought that birds were 'souls of the blessed’. It’s all there through September 21.
Al Gore, It Just Doesn't Look Good
For us tree-huggers who have had some financial success out there, take heed of the latest news that Al Gore’s energy consumption at his large Tennessee home INCREASED in 2007 over 2006, in spite of all the bad press he had earlier received about the very large carbon imprint he and his family were making. It just doesn’t look good. This is a slippery slope for people(like me)who care deeply about the environment and think that Bush and Rush are complete idiots when it comes to their understanding and appreciation of ecology and the impact we are making on Earth, but at the same time own a big house and drive cars that aren’t hybrids. And who had been employed by a company that had to chop down a lot of trees to build new stores, or more recently, who made investments in a real estate company that leveled desert landscape to build commercial retail buildings and parking lots. I may make some charitable contributions to conservation causes, but the conflict still remains. Admittedly, it’s not easy to reconcile. (July 20, 2008 Update: Just watched Al on Meet The Press and Tom Brokaw challenged him on all of this, and he had a spirited defense, with a lot of numbers to back up his claim that he and Tipper were “walking the talk”, so who knows…..)
Please Support the Neotropical Bird Conservation Act
Anyone who knows me even slightly is aware of my love of birding. There is some very important legislation in Congress that provides for additional funding to protect migratory birds. If you would please consider going to this link and filling out the ‘tell your legislator to support this legislation’ paint-by-numbers, it would be greatly appreciated: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5400/t/2205/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=284
Meet The Press Afterthoughts
This morning, Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) on Meet The Press did just a marginal job in handling the matter of Obama changing his position on public campaign financing. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) simply out-scored him on points during that early round. In a later round, this time on the subject of our dependence on oil and Senator McCain’s recent flip-flop on drilling for it off our coastlines, I thought Biden was much more on target and scored some powerful body blows. Until I read Thomas L. Friedman’s Op-Ed piece in this morning’s New York Times. The article is brilliant, and makes so many excellent points that Biden simply didn’t cover. Had he done so, it would have been closer to a knockout punch. Click here for the link: Article. On the subject of Tim Russert’s passing, some thoughts: 1. As a longtime, regular viewer of Meet The Press (particularly in the last year, leading into the presidential elections), it was jarring to hear about him dying from a massive heart attack. But certainly not a shock. I saw him and his son Luke at last year’s MLB playoff game (#7 at Fenway Park); we sat a few seats apart. While you certainly didn’t need to see him in person to know that he was a really big guy, in person he’s just a ‘bear’ of a man. Tim’s body-mass index (BMI) was no doubt sky high. So while it was a bit disconcerting to learn from his internist that he was on medication to keep his blood pressure and cholesterol in check and was supposedly on an exercise regimen, he was easily substantially 'overweight’ by any standard.2. But the real 'shock’ was the incredible amount of outpouring of emotions in the aftermath of Tim Russert’s death. We spent a lot of time watching MSNBC coverage and it was simply stunning how many people were truly touched by this guy. In all phases of his life, personal and professional. To sum this up, I am in awe of this. It has touched me deeply.
Breaking news.. intelligent Republican tribe identified.. had been living in the woods on nuts and berries for 40 years…. may have evolved to flint tools and fire-making technology….