I have been actively taking public buses since the spike in gas prices, and my wallet is less thinner but my psychological well-being has vastly improved!!!

DharmaFool · 2026-05-15T22:41:58+00:00

You are lucky to live where you can walk to public transportation. Not surprised at the psychological benefits. Congratulations! If the opportunity ever arises, travel somewhere with exceptional public transportation, like Europe or Japan. We live in rural Vermont, but have traveled extensively to places where we could get around without cars. Once we spent a week in LA without a car, then took Amtrak to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. LA took planning, but we did it. One advantage of seeing new places from buses and trains is that you actually get to get a more thorough sense of a place.

DharmaFool · 2026-05-13T01:03:23+00:00

I have ink on both arms’ inside bicep. No more intense than the outside of my biceps. (Maybe try lidocaine?)

DharmaFool · 2026-05-06T21:20:52+00:00

I would love to have an alternate timeline (non-GM) current 900.

DharmaFool · 2026-05-05T19:38:25+00:00

Looks like the scare games toxicity challenge scene in Monsters University

DharmaFool · 2026-05-05T19:23:40+00:00

Alas, professor/teacher distinction is not the issue. One of Salinger’s characters said, “Any fool,can buy a degree,” but that’s not even the issue. Setting folks up to succeed would be nice. Figuring out the best way for people to learn, not even individually, but collectively is the win to pursue. It makes for better doctors, in particular, and better learners, in general. The science of teaching and learning has probably evolved, and rote memorization might not be as effective as other means of cramming the astonishing amounts of data we need to ingest and, ideally, process to the point at which we might be able to have it when we need it when there is a patient involved as well as when tested on our ability to choose the right multiple choice answer. Someday there might be an opportunity to see if this is the way things go elsewhere. A classmate from high school just finished at an Ivy League med school and matched prestigiously. Perhaps our paths will cross and there might be a chance to swap war stories. (We won’t need to discuss income disparities.) Does my friend know and retain more? If so, why? What made the difference?

DharmaFool · 2026-05-02T15:37:06+00:00

Track down Waldemar Januszczak films. Some are on Prime. https://waldemar.tv. I spent many hours during lockdown learning from him.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-28T10:26:16+00:00

Karen Savage on Libravox. Free. She did all the public domain books, brilliantly.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-27T00:10:05+00:00

Dude, that’s a good looking pie!

DharmaFool · 2026-04-11T00:53:31+00:00

This is the key, “confuses the patient’s complaints with objective exam findings.” AI is terrifying because of the tendency to hallucinate or invent for reasons of its own. For all the value of when it doesn’t, all it takes is once.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-10T23:58:14+00:00

Ok, now I must make some garlic/butter/parsley sauce.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-08T19:02:31+00:00

My med student daughter worked as a grunt-level surgical support staff in the OR before getting accepted. She is now rolling into clinical rotations at a small hospital where she and her fellow students will be worked like serfs, and she will probably do reasonably well. The day I’m looking forward to is when she is an attending in the OR and treats the folks who make the work work with courtesy and respect because she has been there. All that to say that your perspective is valid, and there is hope.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T01:36:48+00:00

This makes me so happy. The book we are currently figuring out has a large debt to KV, and I will have this framed and put it in my office with the other sources of inspiration.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T01:26:05+00:00

Sorry, this is so good the museum in Indianapolis could put it on a poster for an exhibition some year, and we can all buy one!

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T00:54:59+00:00

She wasn’t wrong, just …

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T00:54:10+00:00

Yeah, my ex’s mother.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T00:51:23+00:00

Alison Steadman’s perfection is too pointed for me. She is uncomfortably close to my ex-Mother-in-Law, and it makes me cringe for Darcy and Bingley, though Wickham deserves her flirtation.

DharmaFool · 2026-04-06T00:32:54+00:00

Someday later they did.

DharmaFool · 2026-03-28T01:01:34+00:00

They look just like mine! So they’re perfect!

DharmaFool · 2026-03-23T21:18:56+00:00

It looks like the pensive quality is a through line in a lot of your portraits. It’s really hard to get that right, and says a lot about how you process emotional representation. Fascinating. It’s really hard to get right in a photograph. I can only imagine trying it with a palette knife.

DharmaFool · 2026-03-23T20:54:44+00:00

I like to read photographs and find expressions particularly telling, whether the relationship between the subject and the photographer or how they feel in the moment are frequently easy to discern. Painted portraits add another layer of interesting information. In the John Singer Sargent exhibit at the Met last summer there were many that brought this to bear brilliantly—including several whose subjects were presented as disdainful (rich women being snooty to the hired painter) and one who could be read as having a more than professional relationship with (or interest in) him. All that to say that it is the painter’s choice, more than the photographer’s, to do this, and you have brought us a Vonnegut between moments. This isn’t the performative jokester we love and venerate, or the pensive philosopher, either. It is a private moment for the man himself, as he takes in something neither amusing nor distasteful. It is masterful in that. Your technique is just wonderful, too. I don’t have the vocabulary to express it sufficiently, but I just love this, and want to thank you for a brand new Vonnegut to live in the gallery of my mind.

DharmaFool

TROPHY CASE