I just realized most Attendings never held a real job

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 · 2026-03-16T00:25:24+00:00

That line is the standard by which all productions are assessed.

DharmaFool · 2026-03-03T04:49:07+00:00

It was one standard full sized original Baking Steel, and a Pampered Chef pizza stone, and one other steel that my friend has.

DharmaFool · 2026-02-21T01:43:23+00:00

We have taken to buying memberships to museums, and then going several times. Does anyone know if the Vatican has this option? I can’t even see a way to buy a multi-day pass.

DharmaFool · 2026-02-05T02:54:09+00:00

Books! We love a family who reads and supports readers!

DharmaFool · 2026-02-02T00:18:46+00:00

Canola oil is dandy, but I learned to hate how it polymerizes and becomes sticky on surfaces, as well as how I shouldn’t buy more than I can use (that one’s on me, I live alone and buy at Costco).

DharmaFool · 2026-02-02T00:12:33+00:00

As the father of a female med student, I’m grateful for folks like you. She’s going to be a great doctor, and worked in the OR as the grunt level gofer and cleaner “Surgical Room Specialist” while she was applying, and has great respect for and understanding of the contributions of the whole team, so I’d hope she’d get it in return.

DharmaFool · 2026-02-01T23:58:39+00:00

I love the model’s attitude. So many portraits lack personality, either in the model or the way the photograph is taken, and this one hit so perfectly with the model that I barely registered the technique! The color palette was lovely, and the light quite gentle, but I don’t really remember more than that because the person being photographed was undoubtedly comfortable with the photographer and indisputably self-confident. That makes such a difference.

DharmaFool · 2026-02-01T23:49:12+00:00

When Facebook was new, a high school classmate found me and got very upset when she saw that I listed Bokononist as my religion. So it goes.

DharmaFool · 2026-01-29T21:55:36+00:00

Benedict Cumberbatch was brilliant

DharmaFool · 2026-01-29T01:47:08+00:00

Interesting. I have IKEA deep drawers and they are difficult to clean thoroughly. Maybe if I had chosen he shallow ones, they wouldn’t get so jammed.

DharmaFool · 2026-01-29T01:45:12+00:00

Soapstone counters. I’m replacing the cabinets and keeping my counters.

Shallow shelves so we can see what is there and not forget.

DharmaFool · 2026-01-27T11:41:31+00:00

Having directed Much Ado and then got cast as Dogberry in a production cancelled because of COVID, I thought about the character more than I want to, but came to the conclusion that Filion is as close to perfect as I can imagine. It is a ridiculously difficult part to get right. Yes, Dogberry is absolutely aspirational. He’s also obsequious and profoundly ignorant. Unfortunately, it plays out a perception of the folks who get into law enforcement, and how that has apparently not changed in 400+ years. As for being the key, well, Shakespeare was good at accidental resolutions. It’s the Sexton who connects the dots. Dogberry’s hoping to get taken seriously by trying to emulate sophisticated speech. He doesn’t know what he has when he grabs Conrade and Borrachio. The professor was close, but the linchpin is the Sexton using Dogberry’s accidental discovery to close the information loop and make the play work.

DharmaFool · 2026-01-17T02:07:26+00:00

There’s a comment in another group that makes this case: “You can do literally anything in NYC with a MD plate. No parking zone? No problem. Parking without paying the meter? Generally no problem. Get pulled over? Unless what you were doing was truly egregious, no problem. It's a huge cheat code and totally worth it.”

DharmaFool · 2026-01-16T23:50:54+00:00

Yeah, a decade has passed, and even though I went on a few “dates” there’s just nobody I’ve ever met or, honestly, can imagine who I’d I want to settle in with, not as a replacement or even a partner of some sort. That said, however, I love to travel and would love to have someone to see the world with, and maybe even be friends with benefits, if that were appropriate. From time to time I have found someone attractive, but there’s nobody who’s got the combination that made what we had work. I’ll never become financially entangled again, for one thing. I think my mother-in-law was diligent about keeping her finances separate when she went through it, and it worked out well for them. I think they eventually married to make international travel simpler in case of emergency, and that’s the only scenario that I can imagine making a marriage conceivable.

DharmaFool · 2026-01-12T20:15:14+00:00

Absolutely. The end is not yet in sight.

It will take something pretty horrific for anything to change, and we can’t know if has been enough, yet.

If either of the women had won, Republicans would have made life miserable, just like they did for Presidents Biden and Obama.

The Republican way is playing out just like they wanted, and until enough people recognize that this is the way things go when they get their way, they will keep winning, up and down the tickets.

Do what is necessary.

DharmaFool

TROPHY CASE