Does Every Picture Tell a Story? It’s Next on My Top Album List.

Rod Stewart - Then and now. — Rod Stewart – Then and now.

When I say “Rod Stewart” you may think of the current creepy crooner singing American classics or the even creepier late 1970’s guy in tight Spandex (is there any other kind?) singing bad Disco (again, is there any other kind?) But when I think of Rod I try to block out all those painful visions and sounds and I concentrate on the rock and blues belter of the early 70’s. To remind me of that, my turntable is spinning the next on my list* of favorite albums, the 1971 multi-million seller Every Picture Tells a Story. It might be in my CD player as well, since it is the only recording I ever purchased as an LP, and years later, as a compact disc.

Rod, with his raspy voice and spiky hair, was everywhere back then. He sang with The Jeff Beck Group. He sang with The Faces. But it was with E.P.T.A.S., his third solo album, that he exploded onto the US music scene. The first single released from the album was “Reason to Believe,” the cover of a Tim Hardin tune. I liked it, and it got decent radio play. But there was so much more.

Surprisingly, it was the flipside of “Reason to Believe” that shot Rockin’ Rod to the top of the charts. I can still remember Casey Kasem whispering into his American Top 40 microphone that the new #1 song across the country was about “a boy… and a prostitute.” Rod Stewart and “Maggie May” were at the Top of the Pops. Over time, Ms. May has never left my heart. By my estimation, “Maggie May” is one of the two songs I have listened to the most, whether it be by album, radio, illegal download or Pandora streaming. (Dire Straits’ iconic “Sultans of Swing” shares that particular podium.)

The title cut on the album is a long, wide-ranging coming of age song, moving from the UK to the Far East, with stops in Paris and Rome along the way. The “slit-eyed lady” lyrics would definitely not be well received these days, but that lady does turn out to be the singer’s heroine. Rod even throws in a shoutout to classic British writers Dickens, Shelley, and Keats to showcase his literary chops.

There is a lot more good music on the record. “Mandolin Wind,” is a sweet love song. There’s a hidden version of “Amazing Grace” that really rasps, and covers of Dylan (“Feels Like a Long Time”) and The Temptaions (“I know I’m Losing You.”) It is almost 50 years later, and Every Picture Tells a Story is clearly Rod’s zenith.

I’ve never seen Rod Stewart in concert, and probably never will. But blow the intro to “Maggie May,” in my ear and I promise to follow you anywhere.

*Previous Albums on My Top Ten List

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After Jon Snow and Ygritte, Ten TV Couples We Would Have Liked to See Married in Real Life. You Might Disagree with Number Six.

wedding-rings — Real wedding rings for TV couples?

Jon Snow and Ygritte happily ever after? No, (spoiler alert if you are way, way behind) it didn’t turn out that way on Game of Thrones. But we have hopes in real life, as Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie, the two actors who play(ed) the roles, were married June 23rd. With no White walkers or impenetrable walls in sight (yet), their love affair has a chance for a good long run.

Jon and Ygritte are not the first TV costars to be married in real life. We can go back to Lucy and Ricky, ie Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, on I Love Lucy, and even before that to Burns and Allen, with George Burns playing off his real-life wife, the wonderfully ditzy Gracie Allen. A few years later Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, a married couple, were both part of the ensemble cast of Mission: Impossible, while Jill Eikenberry worked alongside her spouse Michael Tucker on L.A. Law.

So what other co-stars should have been married for real? Here’s my Top Ten list.

Ten Costars Who Should Be, or Should Have Been, Married in Real Life

Roseanne and John Goodman Roseanne: Only because he is such a good actor, he could make us believe they belong together.
Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore The Dick Van Dyke Show: Oh Rooooob, didn’t you want to be with Laura all the time?
Daniel J. Travanti and Veronic Hamel Hill Street Blues: The Pizza Man sizzled with the D.A.
Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn Breaking Bad: Because all that intensity should have carried on into real life.
Gwen Stefanie and Blake Shelton The Voice: Ok, this is a gimme.
Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey House of Cards: Yeah I know that wouldn’t be his preference, and he has done bad things, but it would be great tabloid fodder.
Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell AND Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson Modern Family: A sweet twofer.
Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette The Bob Newhart Show: They were so good together they made it to the final episode of Newhart, a totally different show. With apologies to Joanna Loudon. Sorry, you will never be the ideal mate for Bob.
Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Game of Thrones: No other brother and sister act ever lit up the small screen the way the Lannister kids did.
Claire Daines and Damian Lewis Homeland: Brody we hardly knew ye.

So that’s my Top Ten. As always, I am open to suggestions…

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photo credit: Philippe_ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12346585@N02/36815099536″>Alliances</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

When I Want to Laugh I Think of Allan Sherman

Folk singer, Celebrity, and Nut. — Allan Sherman’s greatest albums from 1962 and 1963.

Continuing on with my occasional list of albums that have had the most influence on me, I am heading back to the early 1960’s and the First King of Song Parodies, Allan Sherman. Before Steve Dahl rocked with “Ayatollah,” before Al Yankovic foisted his weirdness upon us, I was memorizing the lyrics to every song on Sherman’s three hit albums, My Son the Folk-Singer, My Son the Celebrity, and My Son the Nut.

A TV producer with a knack for putting funny words to well-known tunes, Sherman, a Chicago native, was a mega-star for a short period of time. He had a Top 40 hit with “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” he parodied the French Revolution and Louis the 16th to the tune of “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,” and he dipped into his own heritage with “Harvey and Sheila,” the story of a Jewish couple set to “Hava Nagila”. And yes, that is where Barb derived the name for our pond swans. More on Barb and “Hava Nagila” below.

My family had all three albums. I played them on our old mono record player incessantly, my parents allowing my 7-year-old mind to be indelibly marked. Just how permanent was the damage? Badly enough that just last month I was able to perform an acapella duet rendition of “Hungarian Goulash” while quaffing beers and eating schnitzel at a Haufbrau Haus restaurant just outside of Cincinnati.

I wasn’t the only family member with Allan Shermania. I remember my sister Linda and her friend Marilyn performing “Here’s to the Crabgrass” while rushing a high school sorority in 1965. They didn’t make it into the sorority, maybe because by then Sherman’s career was already on the wane. His health was waning as well; he died in 1973, ten days short of his 49th birthday.

And inspired by the master, I have been writing parody lyrics ever since…

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Hava Nagila: Alan Sherman parodied it; Harry Belafonte loved it. And Barb couldn’t get enough of Belafonte’s version on the incomparable (more than a year on the charts) 1959 album Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. She even asked Brett Lavender, the wacky, New-Yorky, DJ to play this version at Laury’s Bat Mitzvah. If Barb had a Top Ten list this album would rank right near #1.

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An Album for My Dad on Father’s Day

sinatra — Dad enjoyed this Sinatra album from the ’50s.

I’ve written about my dad before, but with Father’s Day coming up, I thought I would dedicate the next entry on my Favorite Record Albums of All Time list to his memory.

In the early 1960’s my dad briefly joined The Columbia Record Club, one of the “Buy 4 Albums, Get 1 Free” variety that was advertised every week with an insert in the center of TV Guide. I am not sure how long we had a membership, and my memory of what albums he ordered is quite foggy. But I do remember one, This is Sinatra!

This is Sinatra! was a mid-stage album for Frank, a collection of some singles from the 50’s and a few new tunes. This was well before the more kitschy “New York, New York,” and “Something Stupid” Sinatra. I absorbed most of the songs on Side One – we are talking LP’s here, of course, no CD’s or downloads in those days! “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Love and Marriage,” and “South of the Border” were all stored in the recesses of my mind, with the latter resonating every time we “went down Mexico way.” Side Two is more of a blur.

I can’t say the album turned me into a big Sinatra fan. I was a bit young for that, and the British Invasion was headed this way. But watching a Frank Sinatra Special on a PBS Pledge Drive the other night brought back thoughts of that album and my dad just in time for Father’s Day.

The Columbia Record Club wasn’t the only subscription service that Dad got hooked into. A few years later he joined the “Literary Guild of America,” a great way for getting hardcover copies of current best-sellers. I remember him ordering (and my reading) political thrillers like Fletcher Knebel’s “Vanished,” my first taste of John LeCarre with “A Small Town in Germany,” and, as a curious 12-year-old, my introduction to literary porn with Phillip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Dad like waitresses too, but I don’t think he had a subscription for those.

Anyway, Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Maybe somewhere you, Mom, and Linda are listening to Sinatra croon. I hope so!

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What Mind Games Do YOU Play?

So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun
John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973

Remember the game Rack-O? You might not. It was originally marketed by that old game master Milton-Bradley and has been around since 1956. Each player started with a plastic rack loaded with 10 numbered cards in random order. On each successive turn, the players picked a new card from the deck and inserted the card anywhere they wanted in their rack. The goal was to be the first player to wind up with a rack of 10 cards arranged from lowest to highest.

Rack-O never seemed to be as popular as other custom card games such as the classics Uno and Mille-Bornes, or current games like Apples to Apples. But I always enjoyed it when I could persuade my sister or a friend into playing a game or two. I don’t think I ever tried it with three or four players, the two-player head-to-head competition seemed just right.

Does anyone play the game anymore? I can’t recall if we had it when the kids were growing up. If we played it at all, memories of it are swamped by those of our nightly games of Killer Sorry. And a quick Google search shows that there is no electronic version. I suspect that these days if you can’t do it digitally, you aren’t doing it at all.

So why write about this old, never-very-popular game, other than the fact it was created the same year that I was? It’s because of a vision I had last week. I was walking Milo, planning my activities for the coming day. And in my mind, I suddenly had a vision of a Rack-O rack. Each planned task was a different card, and I was mentally moving the cards back and forth in the rack, lining them up in the order that would make my day most efficient. I was weighing various priorities against the time the task would take, and where I could best accomplish the task. Some would be at the lab, some at home, and some could go either way. Was it my imagination, or once all was set in place, did I startle Milo with a little yell of “Rack-O?”

Rack-O Brain. That’s what I am calling it. Figure out the things I need to do, put them in order and then just go do ’em. Woe to the person who gets in my way or disrupts that schedule. And once everything is done it’s “Rack-O!” and “Lights out!”

Rack-O Brain is different from a chess mindset A good chess player is seeing many moves ahead and envisioning what the final result will be. I need to put things into place before I can see the big picture. No coincidence, I was always a lousy chess player.

Rack-O Head, chess brain, or something else. What kind of a brain are YOU?

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Your Doctor Hates the Electronic Health Record. I Love it.

We have all had the experience. We go to our doctor for an annual physical, or to work out some specific problem, and they spend most of the time reading their laptop or typing data into it. Personal contact and face-to-face time feel smothered by the need to enter all your information to be stored in some vast cloud. Is it worth it?

Electronic Health Records (EHR) have been around for quite a while now. They started out in hospital settings but moved into doctors offices in force a few years ago when the Federal Government partially subsidized their purchase and Medicare began instituting payment policies that virtually required physicians to use them in order to receive “maximum” reimbursement. All while collecting lots and lots of data.

The drawback, and one of the reasons physicians hate them is that they are massive time sucks. “Maximizing” reimbursement is a losing proposition if maximizing patients 1 through 5 means that you can’t schedule patients 6 through 8. Some practices hire “scribes” to enter data in the EHR while the physician examines the patient. That works for some.

These systems are also notoriously balky and require hard-working IT teams to keep them at a functional level. And heaven (or Medicare) forbid a change in regulations. Updates can wipe out a system for days, grinding information transfer to a halt.

So whether they go by the name of Epic, or Allscripts, or any of dozens of others, most clinical offices hate these things. But I love them. Before the EHR, I was working in isolation. On receiving a biopsy to diagnose, my only information about the patient’s clinical history was a code number or two identifying a clinical condition. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess.

Now I can feel like I am part of the team. I have full access to the group EHR and patient’s record. Let’s say I see a set of changes on a prostate biopsy that raise a certain flag for me. I can flip onto the EMR and confirm my hunch that the patient had a previous diagnosis of prostate cancer treated with radiation therapy. I can reset my mental slide review to incorporate the appearance of post-radiation changes. At other times, I can find the pathology report of a patient’s original biopsy, even if it was performed by a doctor not part of our group and interpreted at a different laboratory. That helps me read the patient’s “active surveillance” follow-up biopsy.

Bladder biopsies performed in the office are frequently very small scrimlets of tissue. It can be difficult for even the most diligent pathologist to determine if the architectural changes are an artifact of the biopsy or true papillary growths of a bladder tumor. A few clicks of my mouse and I can read the urologists complete cystoscopy note and learn what they saw during the procedure and just what they biopsied. It’s almost as good as being in the procedure room as the biopsy is being taken.

Looking at a stained urine slide under the microscope sounds straight-forward. But being able to read the EHR lets me know if a patient has had a urological procedure in the 24 hours preceding their turning in the urine specimen. Findings that at first glance look abnormal can be explained once I know the patient just had a cystoscopy, something I might not be aware of without the EHR.

Yes, your doctor might grumble. You might regret the loss of eye contact with your provider. And you might not be a fan of all the data that the government is collecting about you.

But I love it, and it helps me give you better care!

The opinions above are those of the author and not UroPartners, LLC.

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Trump Trickle Down

“The next person who has asked to speak at the Watertown Citizen’s Forum is Grady Fornstock. His chosen topic is Watertown: My Kind of Place.”

“Thank you for inviting me to be the keynote speaker at the Citizen Forum Day here. Hey, you’re a real cutey. Busy later?

“I’m looking out and I know this is the biggest crowd you have ever had for Citizen’s Day, even if the Daily Slime won’t report it that way. You know they just like to report made-up news, like about that traffic stop last week. Not true, not true. I wasn’t speeding and there was no money attached to my driver’s license when I gave it to the very fine state trooper. And if there was a fifty I think it was just stuck on by a drip of secret sauce from my morning Big Mac. No harm, no collusion.

“You know I almost didn’t make it here this morning. I was watching GCN, the Good Cable Network. They like talking about all the greatness I am bringing to Watertown. No made up news on GCN, just good stuff about how I have the most customers at my restaurant and what a good job I do at keeping my labor costs down. They never go into the kitchen so they haven’t heard all the Spanish back there, but I assure you it is all above board, all very legal. No dreamers, just good solid people who pay me so I won’t turn any of them in. Great, isn’t it!

“Remember the guy who owned the restaurant before me? LOSER! Paid the waitresses a decent wage and didn’t even water down the liquor. I think he was born in Rwanda or some other @hole country. I hear they want to name the street after him. I guess @hole Avenue has a good ring to it. Maybe I’ll sell some souvenirs. Have ’em made in Haiti or Mozambique. I got guys there.

“You know my brother is a doctor, the best doctor we have seen in Watertown for twenty, or maybe fifty, years. Never a problem; only writes prescriptions when people really need ’em. I know, he has written me a dozen or so. Always necessary, always for enormous pain, I have to be honest. On my feet all day at the restaurant, back starts to ache, even though I am in perfect health. Still a 1 handicap on the golf course.

“Speaking of doctors, they don’t get paid enough. But I am working on that. Going to meet with the head of the Insurance Committee. Scary guy, a little crazy. But I can talk to him, tell him I am serious about this. I’ll get my brother big bucks, big bucks. It’s what I do. No one better.

“My kids are playing Little League now. Have you seen those games? They have idiots for umpires. You would think 17-year-old kids would have better vision. But this one ump, Big Smelly Kid, keeps calling the pitches thrown to my son strikes, even when they are, I don’t know, 2 or 3 feet above his head. I told that 17-year-old moron ump he should quit; if I had known he was going to be the ump I never would have let my kids play. If he doesn’t quit soon, I’ll have him fired. The head of the league owes me big time over that party we threw at the restaurant last month. How could I know what those girls did for a living?

“So I am thinking of running for Mayor of Watertown. Elect me and I promise, I’ll never work another day in my life. Just making Watertown great again.”

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The opinions above are the opinions of the author, not UroPartners LLC

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photo credit: Neil. Moralee Grumpy. via photopin (license)

Miss America Changes And Other Contests Should Too!

No more swimsuits, no more evening gowns. In the biggest development since firing Bert Parks in 1979, the Miss America Organization has revealed a change in focus for the Miss America Pageant. Physical appearance is out, replaced by an emphasis on the organizations stated mission: empowering women and handing out millions of dollars in scholarships. Personality and intelligence will be championed. These are good goals and I wish the pageant (excuse me, it is now a “contest”) well.

I would like to take this time to announce several other updates in various competitions, contests, and quests. Changes will begin immediately.

Forget the Super Bowl. The NFL Champion will be the first team to guarantee at least half of their players and coaching staff will show up for a White House greeting from President Trump.
The Nobel Prize for Literature will continue to be canceled until someone can interpret any of previous award winner Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
All future music and video award winners will go to whomever Kanye damn well says they should go to. It is expected 95% of future awards will be his to keep.
Meryl Streep will be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress whether or not she makes a film in a given year. Robert DeNiro and Johnny Depp have requested this designation for themselves as well.
The National Spelling Bee Champion will here-to-fore be the 17-year-old who can create the largest number of new Emojis in a 20-minute time span. No new dog poop Emojis will be permitted.
The World Cup Soccer Champion will be determined by…never mind, don’t care.
The winners of “The Voice,” “American Idol,” and “America’s Got Talent” will be the contestant to most accurately predict the number of hook-ups, divorces, and leaves of absence for “exhaustion” among the coaches and judges.
The “Airline of the Year” will be any airline that makes me happy. Leading contender this year, EVA. Look ’em up, they are good.
Print Magazine of the Year will go to any magazine that still appears in print.
The President of the United States will not be the winner of the popular vote, but rather the candidate who obtains the blessing of a mystical body known as the “Electoral College.” What, we ALREADY do things that way??? That explains a lot…

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So keep on playing those mind games together Doing the ritual dance in the sun John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973

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So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun
John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973