Ice skating makes some people happy. How do I know? First I saw an overwhelmed sitcom mom having fun on an ice rink. Then I listened as an audiobook protagonist, grieving at his mother’s funeral, cheered up when he remembered skating on a frozen pond as a boy.

Now my experiences at the long gone Rainbo Arena Ice Rink in Chicago were mostly spent laying prone on the ice rather than speed skating across it, so I can’t consider ice skating a joyous activity. But the coalescence did make me stop and think about things that had made me smile over the last week or so. After all, it hasn’t been all Trump Tremors.

1. The Supermoon. We had a beautiful view of it rising above our construction site. And I got a laugh reading the article in the New York Times that dissed all the attention as being not particularly scientific. Come on–sometimes you have to think with your heart, not your head.
2. International Pathology Day. Yes, to my surprise, yesterday was a special day for my field. Of course it was totally ignored. I would have been the easy winner if it had been the topic for ‘XRT’s “3 for Free” but unfortunately the contest is off the air with Lin Brehmer in Italy. Oh well, maybe next year.
3. Our anniversary. Barb and I had the opportunity to celebrate our 38th attending a downtown wedding. We danced to “Shout,” sang along to “Don’t Stop Believing,” and of course took notes in preparation for next year’s Laury-Alex extravaganza.
4. Our anniversary, part 2. A video of our granddaughter singing “Happy Anniversary” to Nana and Baba. I won’t post a link here, but if you are a Facebook friend of Barb or me you can find it there.
5. Our anniversary, part 3. A gift book from Barb, “Hamilton: The Revolution” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. All the lyrics, with annotations by Lin explaining all the musical and historical references, as well as the back story of how the musical was created. A great way to indulge my Broadway passion, and prepare me for the next time we see the show (yes, there must be a next time.)
6. Some progress on the house. What is completed looks great, there just seems to be so much more to go. My smile comes when I drive to the site and see a row of tradespeople’s trucks lined up in front. I don’t get as much of a thrill when all I see is an empty house begging to be finished.
7. A surprise visit. I learned that Barb’s cousin from California will make the trip to Chicago to attend a dinner I am being honored at for Israel Bonds. Very sweet of her to come in for the event. And maybe a chance for her to spend some time with her son and his family who live here too. A definite win-win. Oh, and if anyone wants more information about the dinner or Israel Bonds, email me at les.raff@post.com.  All inquiries appreciated.
8. Buddy Ball. A great Sunday spent with good friends. Lox, chili, Password, and tears of joy (this means you, Gary) over the Cubs. Oh yeah, we watched the Bears-Buccaneers game. I promise not to spend any more Sundays this year with that.
9. Kate McKinnon on Saturday Night Live. Her rendition of Hallelujah brought a smile and then some tears of my own.
10. A Patrick Kane goal. Since we started talking skates, let’s finish the list that way too. Patrick Kane demonstrated his award winning skill against the Canadians Sunday night with an incredible falling down goal. Here’s hoping that Kane’s future is all highlight reels without any more news about predatory “locker room” activity.

So ten smiles in a week isn’t too bad! How about you–what has been making you smile? Add a comment, share the blog, let’s ind out what makes people happy!

To subscribe to downsize,m maybe! just enter your name in the box on the right margin. Or drop me a line at les.raff@post.com

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photo credit: MTSOfan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8628862@N05/30559568642″>Baby Smiles</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;
photo credit: will_i_be <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49083815@N08/30898183815″></a&gt; via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;
photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/30349157272″>Wolayta Woman, Ethiopia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;
photo credit: MTSOfan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8628862@N05/30026277443″>Out in Her Field</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;

The ice caps will melt, the oceans will rise. The storms will be violent, the droughts will be endless. Yes, I fear it is all coming. But what all the meteorologists and climate scientists and other doom-sayers have missed is all the bizarre things already taking place in the world. I don’t think it is related to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but in the last year or so we have seen:

• Leicester City beat 5000-1 odds to win their first English Premier League title, 132 years after the club was founded. Since this is soccer, the truly odd part is not that Leicester won, but that any Americans even heard about it.
• Keeping our sights on the UK, we have Brexit, in which the Brits stunned forecasters when they decided they don’t like the rest of Europe. Maybe not so odd in retrospect.
• Much to educators surprise, Americans are learning American History–at least as much as can be learned in 2 1/2 hours of the hip-hop musical “Hamilton.” And who should steal the show but that hilarious old mad man King George III. Again, in the world of the weird, “Rule, Britannia!”
• The Cubs World Series Championship. Who predicted that as a prelude to global warming hell would freeze over?
• Trump Trump Trump. No one foresaw him wiping out the Republican challengers and then mopping the floor with Hillary. On the other hand, the Secretary’s downfall was envisioned in the Book of Revelations where it is written “From Ilarkyork will arise a mighty wind, only to falter in its quest for world domination on the altar of baggage and emails.”

Are other odd things in store? Gazing at the Super Moon, I made the following prognostications:

• Angelina and Brad will bury the hatchet, and not in each others skulls. Professing undying love and devotion, they will retreat to an uncharted island in the Pacific and never be heard from again. The truly unusual part of the story will be that People Magazine will not ask Jennifer Aniston to comment on the reunion.
• The Ricketts’ family will buy every professional sports team in Chicago galvanizing White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawk fans. The Bears will continue to lose.
• The number one box office hit over the holidays will be a lovely romantic comedy without a superhero or spaceship. The producers will admit the CGI guys were busy the day they were supposed to add in the meteor crash.
• The cure to breast cancer will be discovered, but under TrumpCare will only be available to angry white men. Other cancer victims will be given a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.
• Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger will go on a Rolling Beatles World Tour. Their contract rider will insist on dinner for the performers at 4 pm, and the soup “shouldn’t be too hot.”
• Canada will build a wall to keep out stampeding US citizens. Those Americans who make it through will have one serving of poutine, change their mind about Trump,  and head back for home.

It will be a mad, mad, mad mad world.

If I missed anything, or to subscribe to Downsize-Maybe, drop me a line at les.raff@post.com

Dear Mr. Trump,

Congratulations. Over 59 million people chose you to be this nation’s leader for the next four years. A virtually equal number cast their ballot for Secretary Clinton but it was your vision that spoke more loudly across the country, and the presidency is yours. That’s President of the United States. You will be the 12th President in my life time, but the first one that I have been moved to write to personally.

Your supporters will expect a lot from you. Your slogan “Make America Great Again” struck a responsive chord. My life has been pretty great so far without you, but I have no problem with the slogan if we can just tweak it a bit to read “Make American Great Again for Everybody.”

You have made some pretty big promises,. You have spoken of walls and mass deportations. I don’t know if you really believe in those things, but many of your supporters do. Maybe you can convince your constituency that the wall was a symbol, a bit of election rhetoric, and that there are reasonable ways to accomplish your goals of lawful immigration and secure borders.

You have stirred people to your side with a promise to bring back jobs. That is a noble goal, and I hope you are successful. But it is not a simple goal, you cannot wave a magic wand and bring back steel mills, bring back factories. Convince your followers that the nation’s  investment in education and training is the long term solution, and that we can provide support for them in the interim. Don’t let them find scapegoats. Don’t let the brutish minority of your supporters take prominence, don’t become an administration of haters.

You will have a lasting legacy via your Supreme Court nominations. I know that your choices will have a conservative bent, but I pray you see fit to name those who will not trample on the hard fought for rights of our women, our minorities, our LGBT family and friends. We are a better nation when all of our people are established as  full citizens, entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Your biggest challenge may be setting how the country interacts with world. Where to support our allies, where to intervene, where to turn away. We live in a very inter-related time; when a butterfly flaps its wings in China we truly do feel it here. It is not an “I win-You lose” world.  If there is an element of Radical Islam that wants to destroy us it must be corralled and defeated, but the entire world of Islam is not our enemy. Other aggressors must also be contained, no matter  who their rulers are friends with.

I am both a producer and user of healthcare. I know the ACA and MACRA have many failings. But make sure what you replace them with makes our nation healthier. There are wonderful therapeutics being developed, but they are extremely expensive. Let’s look at what we can save with some emphasis on preventive care too.

The issue that the entire election ignored was climate change. It is not a hoax. There is no point in pretending it is. Barring a nuclear war (you won’t do that, will you?) it is the greatest threat to our civilization. Use your business man’s ingenuity to connect with the industries that can develop the energy of the future. Make America an exporter of that technology. Don’t just make America great, make it create–create the ideas of the rest of this century. Future generations will celebrate you for it.

I didn’t vote for you, but on January 2017 you will become my President. Please do these things for me, and for 300 million other Americans.

Lester J. Raff, MD
Son of Immigrants
Father and Grandfather to the Future

It is a Monday morning ritual. Every week at about 10 a.m. a head pops into my office saying “We’re here.” The head belongs to one of our Human Resource professionals, leading a group of dazed people, mostly young, predominantly female. These are the new recruits, the medical assistants, the billers, the nurse professionals, that are joining the UroPartners team. They are spending the day in our business office next door, being oriented, filling out forms and taking online courses on safety, HIPAA and other snooze inducing topics. The march across the parking lot to the lab is their only glimpse of sunshine for the day.

Why do we bring them over? With rare exception, these people are not future employees of the lab. They are hired to work in one of the 15 or 20 UroPartners offices spread across the metro Chicago area. But there are things I want them to know about the lab, about how we work, and I think the best way to get our point across is with some real face time and a lab tour.

Sometimes we start with a little history of the UroPartners; what we are, where we are, how the group functions.  Then we move on to lab specifics, beginning with how lab tests are ordered in the doctors’ offices and transmitted to us via our shared electronic medical record. It is at this point that I begin harping on my main theme, the proper identification of all specimens. My mantra, repeated at each stop on the tour, “each specimen label needs two identifiers, label the container, NOT the lid.” Barb swears I repeat this in my sleep.

I explain that the patients’ blood, urine and biopsy specimens are picked up from the various doctors’ offices every evening by our courier company.  I always see some eyes roll when I explain that the lab day starts at 5:15 a.m. when the specimens get to our door. Yes, we are an early morning bunch, but that is what it takes to get results out to the office in a timely fashion. By 6 in the morning, the place is really buzzing.

We walk through the lab, and I point out our various testing areas:

• Histology, where biopsy specimens are converted to thin tissue sections on glass slides awaiting our pathologists’ diagnoses.
• Microbiology, the olfactory challenging area where we look for bacteria causing urinary tract infections and also do bacterial cultures that help limit the risk of infection in prostate biopsy patients.
• Hematology and Chemistry, the home of blood counts, PSA measurement (you know how strongly I feel about that) and other important blood tests.
• Cytology/FISH, studying urine specimens in simple and more complex ways for the lurking cells of bladder cancer.

In each area, I give an idea of our turn-around time–the length of time from when we receive a specimen to when a report goes into the medical record. I explain how an abnormal result on one test can “reflex” to another. And I am always reminding about proper specimen labeling. We end the tour with introductions to our laboratory administrative team, the people who make the phone calls and ask the questions when something we receive doesn’t seem quite right.

How much of this information soaks in? Sometimes our newbies ask questions, their eyes shine, and I know they are listening. With other groups there is more of a blank, this doesn’t relate to my new job, look on their faces. My goal on orientation day is to convince everyone that sometime in there UroPartners career they will interact with the lab, and working together we can do what we need for our patients and providers. No magic about it!

Like what you read here? To subscribe to our mailing list, just use the “Subscribe by Email” box in the right column, or email me at les.raff@post.com.

“If I had a hammer…

…I’d hammer in the morning.”

Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes-1949

Like a convict in a lonely prison cell we etch lines into the wall to indicate the number of days we have lived in the dark apartment. 30, 40, 50. Unlike the convict we do not know how long our sentence will be. The builders always said house should be completed “around the holiday”. But which one? Halloween? Not a ghost of a chance. Thanksgiving? Fitting, but unlikely. Christmas, Hannukah or New Years? How would we even find a mover during that busy time. So my bet is on January 13th. Why? According to Holiday Insights website, January 13th is Make Your Dream Come True Day. Sounds like a prophecy to me.

Where are we on construction at this point? All the hardwood floors are in (see above), and some of it has been stained. The floors have definitely earned Barb’s seal of approval. All the floor tiling has been delivered, and some has been installed. It is a long tedious project, and Barb has made good friends with the installer as he and Barb figure out exactly where to lay the tile rug in the master bath and determine which way the pattern goes in the upstairs shower. Rough plumbing and electric have long been complete, though various patches and corrections are necessary. Dimmer switches? Those don’t look like no stinkin’ dimmer switches to us! We long for the arrival of the staircases so we can do away with the rickety construction ones.

On the exterior, after what seems like months, the stucco is complete. The stone needs an acid wash, the gutters need to be hung. Rough grading should be done this week, followed by the initial phase of landscaping, the footpaths and the deck. Some of our plantings will surely have to wait until spring. On a positive note, with the major clean up of the property done last weekend, the second dumpster was filled and hauled away. The garage door should be in this week, and once the house can be locked up tight, the construction fence can come down. Progress is in the air.

So why the pessimism on making it in before the end of the year? The builder gives us this rough timeline. Three more weeks to finish the floors and get the cabinets in place, another three weeks for counter tops to be measured, manufactured and installed, followed by three weeks of final plumbing, electric and painting. That is if all goes according to the current plan. With all those holidays ahead, it is clear we will be putting lots more notches in the apartment wall. At least we are glad it is not a life sentence.

__________________

Remember still time to get in on our music trivia contest with a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate Prize. Here is a recap of the rules:

• For each state in the union, name one song whose lyrics mention either a state or a city in that state.
• If a song names more than one state, only one state in that song counts.
• Official state or city songs, sports team anthems and school/university fight songs do not count.
• One point for each state named. Maximum score is therefore 50 points!
• 3 Top Entrants will get a shout out in a future column.
• ALL entrants will be eligible for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be chosen by random selection of all entrants.

To enter, send an email to les.raff@post.com with your responses. You will also be added to our mailing list for future blog posts. Entries will be accepted until Midnight October 30th

I have friends who will choke on that headline. They may stop talking to me, call me a traitor, tear up my holiday newsletter. But why should I miss the party?

It’s true that I have been a Sox fan since the hazy days of my childhood. My first visit to a ball park was the old Comiskey Park. But old Comiskey morphed into new Comiskey, followed by Cellular One, then into Guaranteed Rate and the Downward Red Arrow. Nothing lasts forever. Even Robin Ventura’s tenure as manager only seemed to stretch to infinity.

So what has attracted me to the Cubs this year? The easy answer is the obvious one. The team is a winner, something the South Siders have forgotten how to be. Joe Maddon has a personality and knows how to lead. The players are likeable and conversational, though management may have made an unnecessary misstep with one signing this summer. The team has the capability to bounce back from loses, as they showed in the National League Championship Series. They even have a pitcher named Lester.

Off the field, the radio and TV broadcast pairings are competent without being oppressive “homers.” (Yes Hawk, I am comparing them to you.) One thing I can do without is the hype for Wrigley Field. Yes, I know all the nostalgia the place stirs. But my memories of Wrigley are of a dilapidated, out-dated park, and I am not planning of spending a few thousand dollars for a ticket to “discover for myself” that things have changed.

Jumping baseball loyalties may have a genetic component as well. I was stunned back in the 90’s when young Michael announced he was converting from a Sox fan to a Cub fan. He was overwhelmed by the allure of a juiced up Sammy Sosa–apparently it wasn’t only chicks that dug the long ball. And now I see that there is nothing wrong with learning from our children.

I will never forget 2005. And there is no guarantee that this is a permanent defection. The White Sox may make some major deals this winter and revitalize the snoozing ball club. The Cubs may get sloppy from their own celebrity.  But while it is here, I am jumping on the bandwagon. When the circus comes to town, what are you going to do except go see the elephants? Oh right, never mind the elephants. But Go Cubs, Go!
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Remember still time to get in on our music trivia contest with a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate Prize. Here is a recap of the rules:

• For each state in the union, name one song whose lyrics mention either a state or a city in that state.
• If a song names more than one state, only one state in that song counts.
• Official state or city songs, sports team anthems and school/university fight songs do not count.
• One point for each state named. Maximum score is therefore 50 points!
• 3 Top Entrants will get a shout out in a future column.
• ALL entrants will be eligible for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be chosen by random selection of all entrants.

To enter, send an email to les.raff@post.com with your responses. You will also be added to our mailing list for future blog posts. Entries will be accepted until Midnight October 30th.

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I am a laid back kind of guy. Oh, I will advocate for things I believe in like PSA testing, childhood vaccinations, Hillary Clinton, and a timely construction schedule, but my psyche prefers resolution to conflict. Had my career path taken me to the law rather than medicine, I am sure I would have been a arbitrator rather than an aggressive trial attorney. In politics, I would have been NAFTA not nukes. As Barb says, I don’t burn my bridges.

That all made events in 2005 tough. The hospital I had served in was closing most of its lab as it converted to a different type of institution. On a steamy, traffic snarled Friday afternoon I was summoned to the office of the President of the pathology group I had been a partner and Board member of for more than a decade. The purpose was to discuss my new role with the group, which served several hospitals in the Chicago area.  The very private meeting was short, and compactly summed up in the five words which the President issued. “Your role is no role.”

No, I didn’t shake the President’s hand on the way out. But I didn’t scream, yell or slam any doors either. We (and our respective attorneys) negotiated a settlement, and I moved on to establish the top-notch lab that I have directed for the last ten years. The President and I maintained occasional telephone contact and even discussed another job opportunity a few years later. Barb has always been amazed that I am willing to speak to him; I just haven’t been able to bring out a torch and start a fire.

But I got a phone call yesterday. Not from the old President, who has recently retired, but from his successor. She had a business question for me. I was about to answer, to give my usual assistance, when it all came flooding back. You see, this woman had been Vice-President of our group. She had been the one other person present in the room when the “verdict” came down in 2005. This woman, who had previously supported me and had once even encouraged me to seek  the President position in the group, sat in that office and said nothing.

With her phone call yesterday it became clear I needed to burn a bridge.  I didn’t lose my cool, but I did tell her what I thought of her inaction 10 years ago, how cowardly it was for her and the rest of the Board of Directors to allow me to be discharged. Her defense, that she had been young and naive, that the President manipulated the situation, was flimsy, but probably had a small morsel of truth. She told me she  eventually  came to understand that it was the most unjust decision she had made in her career. But that realization was never accompanied by a note or phone call of consideration or apology. And until yesterday, I never told her what I thought of her. Now I have, and it felt as good as saying “The Cubs are in the World Series.”

Remember still time to get in on our music trivia contest with a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate Prize. Here is a recap of the rules:

• For each state in the union, name one song whose lyrics mention either a state or a city in that state.
• If a song names more than one state, only one state in that song counts.
• Official state or city songs, sports team anthems and school/university fight songs do not count.
• One point for each state named. Maximum score is therefore 50 points!
• 3 Top Entrants will get a shout out in a future column.
• ALL entrants will be eligible for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be chosen by random selection of all entrants.

To enter, send an email to les.raff@post.com with your responses. You will also be added to our mailing list for future blog posts. Entries will be accepted until Midnight October 30th.

photo credit: davidyuweb <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/55514420@N00/26132776395″>Burning Sky</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a&gt;

Yes, Hillary accused Donald Trump of cheating on his taxes. And how did he respond? As everyone knows, he called her a “nasty woman.” For the sake of argument, let’s say her remark earned her a one star  (★) evil rating. How does she stack up against some other famous nasty women in history?

• Eve ★ ★ ★ :  Here was a gal who knew how to get her man in trouble. If she hadn’t gone after that apple, none of us would be paying income tax.
• Bonnie Parker ★ ★ : Yeah, she robbed banks, killed people, and wrote awful poetry. But Faye Dunaway was just so damn alluring.
• Norman Bates’ Mother ★ ★ ★ : Now this was a mean one. Even dead and mummified she got poor old Tony Perkins to off Janet Lee. But that was a great shower scene.
• Marie Antoinette ★ ★ ★ : No, she didn’t cause the French Revolution by herself. Did she really say “let them eat cake”? In any case, it’s a great line.
• Hansel and Gretel’s Witch ★ ★ ★ ★ : A true nasty. Kidnap kids, fatten up kids, eat kids. It wasn’t until Hannibal Lecter came around that we had a comparable male maniac.
• Cathy Ames ★ ★ ★ : John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” is one of my all-time favorite reads, and Cathy is my favorite character. A prostitute without a heart of gold, she killed her parents and slept with her brother-in-law on her wedding night. But at least she didn’t eat her children.
• Polk Salad Annie’s Mama★ ★ : A wretched spiteful, straight-razor totin’ women. And I hear Annie was no sweetheart herself!
• Queen Isabella ★ ★ ★ ★ :  Whether you hate her for sending Columbus to the New World and blowing the ecosystem, or her role in the villainous Spanish Inquisition, there is not much for redemption.
• Gemma Teller Morrow ★ ★ ★ : The Mama Bear of “Sons of Anarchy, ” she almost killed her first daughter-in-law, and succeeded in killing her second one. And I had always thought that is was daughters-in-laws that wanted to kill their mothers-in-law.
• Elizabeth Holmes ★ ★ : Yes, I know, I should stop picking on the Temptress of Theranos. But her whole deal just gets me so pissed off…

So Hillary, you barely nudge the nasty meter. So keep on smiling that smile and do what you’ve got to do. Only one person on the ballot is truly evil.

_____________

Remember still time to get in on our music trivia contest with a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate Prize. Here is a recap of the rules:

• For each state in the union, name one song whose lyrics mention either a state or a city in that state.
• If a song names more than one state, only one state in that song counts.
• Official state or city songs, sports team anthems and school/university fight songs do not count.
• One point for each state named. Maximum score is therefore 50 points!
• 3 Top Entrants will get a shout out in a future column.
• ALL entrants will be eligible for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be chosen by random selection of all entrants.

To enter, send an email to les.raff@post.com with your responses. You will also be added to our mailing list for future blog posts. Entries will be accepted until Midnight October 30th.

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond

Joan Baez-Diamonds and Rust

The Nobel Prizes don’t get much respect. Oh, I suppose research scientists think a lot of them, and major universities like to brag how many laureates they have on their faculty (this years score-Northwestern 1,University of Chicago 0), but otherwise, you just don’t read much about the Nobels in People or on TMZ. OK, there is a Nobel page on Facebook, but I just looked at it…pretty dry stuff.

Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature certainly gave the award more than a little buzz, with positive and negative responses from around the globe. Apparently Dylan himself is so much in shock he hasn’t yet responded to the Nobel Committee or in any way acknowledge the award. In shock, or totally indifferent. The $900,000 cash award is nice, but I doubt he needs it to change his lifestyle.

Like all boomers, I grew up with Dylan in my head. Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of Blowin’ in the Wind was probably the first song of his I was aware of, followed by the Byrd’s cover of Mr. Tambourine Man. I was there for Like a Rolling Stone and lots of other hits in the 60’s, Hurricane and Tangled Up in Blue in the 70’s,  but then I guess I lost track of Mr. Dylan. Rumors of religious conversions, country music–he was still recording, I just wasn’t listening. I did read “Positively 4th Street”, a less than fawning history of Dylan, Joan and Mimi Baez, and their Greenwich Village crowd. He did not come off as the nicest person in the room.

No point in quoting a lot of Dylan lyrics here. You can find them anywhere on the web. There is one line I do try to remember when writing. It is from Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright. At the end of this great break-up song he writes “You just kinda wasted my precious time.” Something I hope my blog readers never feel!

————————————–

My headline promised a prize, so here goes. With Dylan on my mind I present our second Tuesday Morning Music Trivia Quiz. Dylan wrote some good traveling music so for this contest:

• For each state in the union, name one song whose lyrics mention either a state or a city in that state. For example, Dylan‘s song Highway 61 Revisited mentions Georgia, so would count for that state.
• Songs DO NOT have to be Dylan songs.
• If a song names more than one state, only one state in that song counts.
• Official state or city songs, sports team anthems and school/university fight songs do not count.
• One point for each state named. Maximum score is therefore 50 points!
• 3 Top Entrants will get a shout out in a future column.
• ALL entrants will be eligible for a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be chosen by random selection of all entrants.

To enter, send an email to les.raff@post.com with your responses. You will also be added to our mailing list for future blog posts. Entries will be accepted until Midnight October 30th.

The news is saturated with Clinton, Trump and the election. Since I decided long ago that I was firmly in the Democratic camp, and since I can barely stomach the vitriol being unleashed, I decided to report on a few non-political things I have come across in the last few days:

• Cheese to Please: We have 3 generations of  cheese lovers in the family, as well as a cheese craving dog. My choice on a sandwich is Jarlsberg, but I always feel just a little guilty at the grocery when I tell the clerk, “I want the real stuff, not the low fat variety that tastes like plastic.” Wouldn’t low-fat be better for me? Now there is “scientific evidence” that there is no health benefit to switching out real cheese for the low fat variety. Big dog Max will be especially pleased.
• Rolling Down the River: More family secrets. Some members of our family can roll their tongues, some of us cannot ( I am a non-roller). We took a survey and determined that this must be an inherited autosomal dominant trait. Further research reveals that this is a myth–tongue rolling can be learned. It is not a simple genetic inheritance pattern.
• The Story Never Ends: No matter how much I write about Theranos, I can’t keep up with the crash landing. No sooner did I write about the lab closing, than we learn that a large hedge fund that invested heavily in Theranos and its “new” technology is suing the company for “knowingly and repeatedly lying” while raising funds. Glad to say Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO, was neither a pathologist nor any other type of physician. A business savvy friend of mine swears criminal charges are soon to follow. Holmes may be soon looking at jump suit orange instead of turtleneck black.
• Through the Looking Glass: I don’t have an on-line link for this one, but in its print edition, the Wall Street Journal blamed tighter government regulation of banks for the Wells Fargo scandal. Sort of like Donald Trump blaming Hillary Clinton for his not paying taxes. Oops, couldn’t totally avoid writing about the election.
• Mean Mr. Mustard: TMZ (ok, not necessarily the most reliable source) posted a video of Alex Trebek “teasingly” calling a contestant on Jeopardy! a loser. As a former contestant on the show I can attest that Mr. Trebek has a higher opinion of himself than he does of many contestants.  During my taping he had another competitor close to tears over his weight. Fat shaming was no more pleasant in 1989 than it is now.

One other bit of news of note. Our blog about the challenges of replacing headphone cushions when dealing with a Swedish company was named one of ChicagoNow’s top three blogs for September. If you missed it, you can find it here. And don’t forget to treat yourself so some full fat macaroni and cheese!

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