Greetings everyone.

I apologize for the delay in getting this Arrow out. I had a trip I wasn’t expecting sprung on me. MD and I have family here from out of town for two weeks. And I’m still spending a lot more time than I want in the maw of the medico-industrial complex. I’ve had multiple scans and screens and office visits since the last Arrow, all of which take way more time than they should. I’m completely free of cancer, but dealing with some of the scarring left by the cancer’s blocking my right ureter. Nothing is easy.

From the Mailbag…

I received a number of emails, poll responses, and comments on the last Arrow that I thought the group might find interesting.

N=2

This one from a long-time reader about my photo a couple of Arrows ago. I was sitting in a chair with my legs stretched out on a huge blue ball. I wrote that I had serendipitously discovered that resting my legs on the ball, which is always moving very slightly, had eliminated my back pain. I had previously been plopping my legs on an immovable ottoman.

More on Grammar

As I wrote in the last Arrow, I was surprised that a) so many people have their own pet peeves in terms of grammatical errors, and b) no one took me to task for being a grammar Nazi. I’ve received even more feedback since then.

I did get one email telling me basically to live and let live. And that the English language was constantly evolving.

I wrote him back saying that we all have issues that annoy us. There are probably things that drive him up a wall that I wouldn’t take the slightest notion of.

I got a great response to a grammatical error in a quote I posted.

LOL

The respondent is referring to the following quote from Gary’s blog post I posted in the last Arrow.

It should be “we health-conscious parents…” Not us…” “We health-conscious parents…” are the subject. “Us” is an object. Boil the sentence to its essence, and you’ve got “We tried to get our kids to eat a nori seaweed snack.” No one would say “Us tried to get our kids to eat…”

In Gary’s defense, this was a blog post, not a book or magazine article. Given the number of Arrows I’ve written, I’m sure I’ve made countless small grammatical errors. (But some eagle-eyed reader usually tells me about it if MD and I both miss it.

Had Gary been writing a book, I reckon a decent editor would have caught that one, but I’m not so sure nowadays. I’m reading a terrific book right now about the therapy business and came across a different linguistic screw up committed twice in the space of four paragraphs on the same page. The author was writing about people who self diagnose various disorders. He says these people “self diagnose themselves.” A decent editor would have caught that. People either self diagnose or they diagnose themselves. “Self diagnose themselves” is one for the Department of Redundancy Department.

Strangely enough, when I was writing the sentence above: “He says these people “self diagnose…” Google Docs auto filled “themselves.” Uh, who else would they self diagnose, Google bot?

Tells me the English language is devolving, not evolving. Proof of this is the word “healthy” as used by just about everyone today, especially as applied to diet. Healthy describes a state of being. As in I am healthy. My dog is healthy. My kid is healthy. Healthful is an adjective modifying another word. A healthful diet. Not a healthy diet. But everyone and his brother uses “healthy” to describe a diet.

Once again, Google Docs got it wrong. Proof that the English language truly is devolving. As I was writing that sentence above, Google provided the following word-choice suggestion. AAARRGGHHH!

Gresham’s law applies to language in the same way it does to money. The bad drives out the good. Once some onerous expression enters the language, it drives out more appropriate expressions. Using the word “like” several times in every sentence one utters is a case in point. ‘I was, like, going to the store when this guy, like, looked at me funny. Turns out I knew him from, like, grade school or something. It was, like, wow!’ If that isn’t a degradation of the language, I don’t know what is.

Whenever some Valley-Girl-speak or other abomination creeps into the language, it drives out proper speech.

And it almost always happens. The good, it seems, never drives out the bad.

I say almost because I’ve borne witness to one such event.

Bitchin

My dad got transferred to Southern California in the 1960s, I was just going into my junior year of high school. We moved into a brand new tract home in Whittier. The way the neighborhood was set up following the streets meant I had to walk about three and a half miles to school. But since we moved there a few weeks before school started, I had plenty of time to scout out a better route.

In looking at a map, I figured out the school wasn’t that far from our house. But to get there via the most direct way I had to clamber over our six foot redwood fence around the back yard, walk across about a hundred-yard wide field that was right behind our house, then go through a culvert, and pop out about 50 yards from the front door of the school. That’s how I ended up walking to school every day until I made a friend who had a car.

The first time I walked the route and went through the culvert, I noticed a bunch of graffiti on the concrete sides. Among all the things there, someone had spray painted the words “Carl is a bitchin surfer.”

The only time I had ever heard the word bitch (which I assumed was the derivation of “bitchin”) was either in relation to complaining about something or in a negative context. As in SOB. I also knew the word bitch was used to describe a female dog, but I had heard it used that way only a few times. And mainly from old, farmer types in the Ozarks.

I didn’t really know what “bitchin” meant. Was Carl a good surfer or a lousy surfer? Or even a hateful surfer?

I soon learned.

Everyone at my school used it as a superlative. This is bitchin, that is bitchin. If you hear good news, you say “bitchin.” I thought it was dreadful, and swore I would never use the word.

But being the typical teen I was, I began using it just like everyone else. It became my adjective for anything cool. And I said it whenever I got good news.

I lived in SoCal for the next seven or eight years and used the word a hundred times a day.

Then after college I moved to Alabama for an engineering job. I reflexively used the word there a few times, but when I did, everyone looked at me as if I had two heads. Obviously, California lingo had not made its way to the deep South. Meanwhile, my dad had been transferred to Michigan. When I went to visit my folks there, none of my old friends used the word. (My dad had been transferred to Michigan a couple of years before he was transferred to SoCal, so I had gone to my first couple of years of high school there and had many friends I looked up whenever I visited.)

Since the word was used all the time in California, I figured it had spread all over the country.

But such was not the case.

When MD and I moved to California part time in the late 1990s, I never heard the word uttered. It was like it had never existed except for the few years I was in SoCal in high school and college.

Every now and then I still use the word. It always makes MD laugh and shake her head. She had never heard it until I used it. So bitchin is a case in which a word that came into constant use in an era in California and polluted the language there faded away rather than spreading; it’s the exception that proves the rule, I suppose. Although I’ve never really understood what that means either. The exception that proves the rule? Seems like the exception would disprove the rule.

Talk About UPF…

I came across an article in a Dallas scandal sheet a while back titled “120 Ingredients In Burger King’s Chicken Sandwich – Have Americans Become A Chemical Experiment?”

After the big, bold headline, I figured for sure the article would at least list the 120 ingredients, but, alas, it didn’t. But I don’t doubt that the sandwich in question does.

MD and I ended up taking a trip we hadn’t intended to a week or so ago (which is partly why this Arrow is so tardy). We got to the airport early, only to discover our flight was delayed for a couple of hours. (I don’t even whine about this anymore; I simply expect it. If the flight is on time, I take it as a lucky break.)

As we were waiting, MD went to one of the food purveyors and got us both a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, which is one of the few fast food things we eat of necessity while on the road. We always remove the biscuit or English muffin and eat the egg, cheese, and sausage contents. One would think the contents of such a meal would be flour, sausage, cheese, and egg and maybe butter or some oil. Along, of course, with a bit of seasoning.

One would be wrong. Here is the ingredient list on the wrapper of this fairly simple product.

Yuk. It tasted okay, but neither of us could happily choke it down. Especially since we got two coffees and two of these, and it set us back over $25. At least it was hot.

Now I can easily believe a Burger King chicken sandwich could contain 125 ingredients.

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The Fauci Chronicles

Where to begin on this subject?

I watched the entire almost three hour senate committee hearing. Every minute of it. You can watch it, too, if you haven’t already.

God only knows how many words have already been written about Dr. Anthony Fauci taking the fifth, so I don’t really have a lot to add to what others have already covered. But I do have my own take on what went down. And certain now (if I wasn’t already) that people can be totally blinded to the obvious by their political persuasion.

Before we get going, take a look at his commentary below. The internet never forgets.

The above interview was given before his diary (1100+ pg pdf) was made public. And before his comprehensive pardon. Had he known of the two in advance, especially the former, I seriously doubt he would have said what he said in the interview.

During the hearing, the Republicans had their shit together, as the saying goes. Each went after Fauci in a different way. There wasn’t a lot of overlap. The Democrats spent their time, not questioning Fauci, but praising him. Each started out by thanking him for his stellar service, then shifted to blaming Trump for everything. (If you don’t believe me, watch the hearing.) The strange part is that I’m sure most, if not all, of them had been briefed on Fauci’s diary.

In the good old days, when a complete scoundrel came before a congressional committee, both sides of the aisle took a bite out of him. Not this time, though. This time the Democrats vacillated between a Fauci love fest and a Trump hate fest. The performance of the Dems was almost as disgusting as the performance of Fauci himself.

I asked myself why this would be the case. My first thought was that the Dems along with the entire Biden administration were behind all the mandates, school closures, business shutdowns, and all the rest of that nightmare year or so. Thus they would be predisposed to make light of it. But they were simply going along with what the public health officials recommended. And Fauci was the face of public health during all this.

According to his own diary, he was on so many television shows that he couldn’t keep count. He was the go-to guy for everything COVID, then, ultimately, for everything re the mRNA jabs. He was ‘The Science.’

A handful of Republicans — Rand Paul and Ron Johnson to name a couple — were violently opposed to pretty much everything Fauci said. Not so, the Dems. They were all in.

Which is what surprised me the most about their sucking up to him during Rand Paul’s committee hearing. If someone I believed in and supported right and left turned out to be a bald faced liar, I would feel conned. And I would be pissed. To the max.

As Fauci’s diary proves, the man himself is a total liar. Or, I suppose, another option is that he simply lied to his diary. Maybe that’s what the Dems thought. I don’t know.

An aside here… I can manage to force myself to read the most complex, ill-written scientific papers. I don’t particularly enjoy these kinds of awful papers, but I can read them and end up figuring out what they say. It’s not the same for me with government documents. I just can’t make myself go through the drudgery. I try to read notices from the CDC, but they are typically so poorly written and documented, that I throw up my hands and quit. It’s the same with heavily redacted material. I spend more time trying to figure out what is being redacted than I do reading the non-redacted parts. I cursorily reviewed some of Fauci’s diary, but most of what I got from it came from others who have more stamina than I for this kind of reading.

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that COVID killed masses of people worldwide. Knowing this, there are a couple of crucial issues that should be dealt with to prevent such a pandemic (if that’s what you want to call it) in the future.

First, where did it come from? It clearly originated in China. But was it the result of a lab leak, as many have proposed? Or did it come from the infamous wet market as Fauci claimed?

In an entry in his diary from January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote the following:

That was in late January 2020, so, a long while before anyone contemplated a looming pandemic. Fauci knew – he wrote “now we know,” not “it might be possible”, but “now we know” – that it didn’t come from the wet market early on. But he was going to great lengths in public to blame the wet market for the origin and spread of the infection.

Just a day after writing the above entry in his journal, this is what Fauci had to say to a medical group. One day later.

A few days later, on February 1, 2020, Fauci gathered a group of scientists on a conference call to hash out the origins. Most of the virologists involved suspected a lab leak from the Wuhan lab. In fact of the 12 (including Fauci) on the call, only two (Fauci included) thought it came from the wet market. The rest suspected it came from a lab leak.

Fauci, as long-time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was the gatekeeper for issuance of grants. Despite the majority of scientists involved in the conference call leaning toward a lab leak, Fauci basically browbeat a number of them to write the now infamous “Proximal Origins” paper making the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus did not escape from a lab, but came from the wet market or some other non-lab source.

Fauci helped with the writing of the paper, made numerous suggestions, and helped get it published. Then when he was asked directly on TV about the origins, he basically said an independent paper published in a prestigious journal said the virus did not come from a lab leak, that it arose naturally. Which is indeed what the paper said. What Fauci did not say was that he had carefully marshaled the paper through the process from beginning to end. Yet he implied that it was produced independently.

You may be asking what’s the big deal? Why does it matter whether it came from the wet market or the Wuhan lab? SARS-CoV-2 was out there killing people across the world. Who cares where it came from?

It makes a big difference if there is blame to be apportioned.

If it came from a lab, then whatever agency funded that lab would come under fire. The NIAID did fund the Wuhan lab either directly or indirectly through another entity (EcoHealth Alliance). Fauci knew this, so wanted to deflect any guilt from NIAID and himself.

Even if it came from the Wuhan lab that Fauci had either directly or indirectly funded, it wouldn’t be an issue if there was no gain of function (GOF) involved.

Why?

Because GOF research had essentially been outlawed by the US government. But the Obama administration released a policy called PC3 that allowed a little wiggle room. But Fauci didn’t even want to run the risk of relying on that, so he vociferously argued that no GOF was involved.

He could be correct. According to Matt Taibbi, here is what Robert Redfield had to say about it.

If Redfield is correct, Fauci would have nothing to worry about in terms of funding GOF. But I doubt the general public would see a big difference between the two. It would seem IMHO that the bolded definition above shows an even greater GOF.

SARS-CoV-2 was definitely fiddled with. Someone added a furan cleavage site, which made it extremely infectious for humans. SARS-CoV-2 supposedly came from a bat, yet SARS-CoV-2 could not infect a bat. Which, to me, anyway, is evidence it was definitely tinkered with in a lab and not simply a naturally occurring variant in a virus that commonly infects bats.

I obviously cannot read Anthony Fauci’s mind, but I can’t help but suspect this was his foremost worry. Had the finger been pointed at him as the instigator of the COVID pandemic by funding the research that created the virus, it would have spelled the end of his career. And the general public would view his funding of the virus that escaped as the proximate cause of millions of deaths worldwide. He couldn’t let that happen.

He wrote about the whole GOF situation in his diary on Oct 7, 2021.

The second issue re Fauci’s involvement with the pandemic is that ultimately he was wrong on virtually all of his recommendations as to how to deal with it.

About the only thing he was correct about, he later changed his mind on. In the early stages of the pandemic, Fauci pronounced that masks were worthless in terms of protection against COVID. And he was correct. The virus is an aerosol, and masks don’t stop it whatsoever. As I’ve written before it’s like putting up a chain link fence to keep mosquitos out.

Not long after making the above pronouncement, he turned turtle and reversed himself. When asked about his previous stance, he replied that he said what he said in order to prevent a run on masks in an effort to save them for health care providers and early responders. In other words, he admitted to prevaricating. If he so easily told one lie, how can we believe him about anything else?

He was on the wrong side of every issue surrounding the pandemic. He advocated for social distancing, which was worthless. He was behind mask mandates. Although he denies it, his diary shows he was all in on school closures, which have caused irreparable damage to kids who were trying to be educated at that time.

He was behind the shutting down of many businesses and churches. According to his diary, he called Bill DeBlasio, the mayor of NYC, and Gavin Newsom the governor of California, and talked them into school and business closures. God only knows how many small business owners lost their life savings when their operations were shut down.

I have a particular animus toward Gavin Newsom. He was caught on camera unmasked at a private dinner party with a bunch of guests at a swanky restaurant in Napa. None of the guests wore masks. Let me ask you a question. If you actually thought there was a deadly virus out there circulating around and that masks would prevent you from getting it, would you a) even go out to a restaurant filled with other potentially infected people, and b) if you did so, wouldn’t you wear a mask?

That he and his group didn’t tells me he knew it was all BS. Yet he inflicted masks and shutdowns on everybody else everywhere, right down to toddlers.

There was a huge public outcry about his duplicity, and he was finally forced to give a public apology for going out to dinner maskless. And swore never to do it again. But he knew, or he wouldn’t have subjected himself to the risk.

Once the vaccines were available, Fauci was all over them. And that is despite the fact that he, himself, had what was probably a vaccine injury. That’s not to mention the number of times he came down with COVID himself. His emails, of which there are a multitude, show that a number of renowned experts warned him about the mRNA jabs.

I’ve read about all of his many, many screw ups and am amazed that just by the law of averages he should have gotten something right. But he didn’t. He was wrong virtually all the time. Once Trump was gone, I don’t know if Fauci was dancing to the Democrat’s tune, or if they were dancing to his.

Like Matt Taibbi in his column linked above, I absolutely can’t understand why the Dems and the mainstream media are circling the wagons to protecting him.

But not all of the media is carrying water for Fauci. The best summary I’ve read of the whole event comes from James Meigs, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

The whole piece, which contains may links not in the quotes above, is well worth reading. Especially the part about Alina Chan, the Harvard/MIT researcher who called BS on Fauci. Fauci, of course, smeared her and called her an “idiot,'“ because she flew a little too close to the truth. As Meigs writes, “her reputation will survive. [Fauci’s] will not.”

I could go on and on with instances where Fauci told the public the complete opposite of what he told his diary. But that’s not what I find interesting.

What I find fascinating about the entire affair is trying to guess what is going to happen next.

As I wrote in the last Arrow, I figured Fauci would appear with a phalanx of lawyers. Which he did. In the Arrow before that, I wrote that he would probably take the 5th. Which he did. I did not, however, dream that he would take the 5th for questions that could not possibly get him into trouble. How could he legitimately refuse to answer the question about the color of his tie or the color of the carpet.

He had a blanket pardon stretching from January 1, 2014 until the day Biden left office. As long as he told the truth, he was in no danger of any criminal liability. I’m sure it would have been hugely embarrassing to him to be asked questions along the lines of “Dr. Fauci your diary says this, but your statements to the public at the same time say that.” Which is true? How do you explain the disparity?

But if he answered truthfully with something along the lines of “My diary entries were my own personal thoughts on various matters, but I was the face of the public health establishment, and as such I felt I needed to use an abundance of caution (which was a totally overused phrase during the pandemic) in speaking to the people.”

It would have been difficult for the Republicans to trip him up on that one.

Whatever the ultimate disposition of this case, Fauci is going to have one helluva legal bill. He had one big-time defense attorney, who sat by his side until he wouldn’t shut up, and Rand Paul had him removed. According to Rand Paul, Fauci had a “half dozen lawyers” there with him. I would bet the heavy hitter, the one who got run off, bills at about a thousand dollars an hour, at the least. The other five probably bill at the rate of at least $500 per hour. Which means the ~three hour hearing cost Fauci somewhere north of $10,000.

And that doesn’t include all the prep work, which is probably billed at the same rate. And will continue to be billed going forward what with the contempt hearing and all that.

High-dollar lawyers are smart. That’s why they can pull down a thousand bucks an hour or even more.

Which makes me wonder why they decided to have their client take the 5th on every question asked? Even the innocuous ones, which made him really look guilty. It may have been due to Fauci’s main lawyer being removed from the hearing. Since he no longer had someone at his side telling him what to do, maybe Fauci decided to play it safe irrespective of how stupid it sounded just to take the 5th on everything. 111 times.

I’ve read all kinds of takes from a multitude of legal analysts on the subject, and they’re all over the place. The one explanation that rings the truest to me come from a science teacher, who wrote a long piece about it on X.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, which is fairly long, here is the essence:

Based on what went down, he believes Fauci’s lawyers have some concern that the Biden pardon might be illegitimate. There has been all this talk afoot about the so-called Auto Pen Pardons being challenged in court. I have no idea if they ever will be or not, but I suspect Fauci’s high dollar lawyers might be worried.

If Fauci spilled his guts and told Rand Paul’s committee the real truth believing he (Fauci) was protected by the pardon, he would be absolutely screwed if the pardon were later deemed by a court to be invalid. Were that to come to pass, I have no idea how a court would rule in that situation. I suspect Fauci’s lawyers didn’t want him to take the risk.

The X post is interesting to read if for no other reason than the history of the whole pardon and taking the 5th situation.

If there are any legal eagles out there who have any insight into this, I would love to hear about it.

To finish off about the Fauci debacle, let’s look at what a body language expert has to say. Let me be upfront. I know absolutely nothing about body language as a science. It could be all bunk, as far as I know. It’s a soft science, and I have little regard for the soft sciences. But the guy who narrates this video allegedly works for the police, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies. My many searches for Fauci prompted my algorithm, I suppose, which fed me this video and others.

If you’re into this kind of analysis, here is another on the same subject. The one above demonstrates Fauci’s stress, the one linked supposedly shows his shame.

Does Dietary Protein Decrease Longevity?

A new paper from a well-regarded journal is making the rounds now. Many of you may have seen it. Its thesis is essential that protein intake decreases longevity. And, of course, it is all speculation. The paper is not about a particular study the authors performed. Instead they dug up more than 350 other studies on yeast, rodents, and humans showing protein and/or amino acid intake might decrease lifespan.

I’ve read the entire paper, so you don’t have to. Unless you’re a masochist.

Most of the studies cited are on yeasts and rodents. I probably don’t need to tell you, but yeasts and rodents are not humans. They are useful as experimental models, because their lifespans are so short. But much of the time, what applies to them does not apply to humans. One has to be careful in interpreting yeast and animal studies. Some of the findings do apply to humans; others don’t. It takes an awareness of which particular rodent models apply and which don’t.

It’s almost impossible to claim that anything increases or shortens the lives of humans simply because the studies to actually prove such a thing would take a couple of lifetimes of the researchers doing the studies.

And it would be virtually impossible to get a truly randomized study of humans over the many years of an average lifespan. It can be done with rats, mice, yeasts, and even primates. But not with humans.

The best longevity data we can get on humans comes from observational studies, not carefully controlled randomized studies. Observational studies are valuable in a certain sense. We know heavy smokers typically die younger than non-smokers. We know those with diabetes die younger than do those without diabetes. We know people who have the metabolic syndrome don’t live as long as those who don’t.

Smoking, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome are major recognized risk factors for a shortened lifespan.

The same can’t really be said for individual protein consumption.

In terms of protein consumption, the paper posits that high protein intake in sedentary midlife adults may correlate with higher mortality risk. May, not does. For this analysis, the paper weighs heavily on an article by Levine et al, 2014 and related cohort data showing that, in adults 50–65, high protein intake (especially animal protein, ≥20% kcal) is associated with higher all‑cause and cancer mortality, whereas in older adults ≥65 higher protein appears protective.

A number of studies have shown that longevity correlates with muscle mass. The more muscle mass, the greater the longevity. Which makes sense. Greater muscle mass usually indicates a couple of things. First, we all lose muscle mass as we age unless we work hard to keep it. Muscle mass is driven by protein intake and exercise, especially resistance training.

A larger amount of muscle mass in an elderly person is a sign of an adequate diet and an effort to stay fit. Many elderly people succumb to falls. Those with greater muscle mass are less prone to falls, so there alone is one reason the elderly with sarcopenia die earlier.

I’m always suspicious of any paper claiming increased intake of animal protein is associated with higher all-cause mortality. We evolved to eat meat. When we switched to a basically grain-based diet, health went to hell in a hand basket.

As people age and get ever nearer to a close encounter with the Grim Reaper, most of them start worrying a bit about their health. If they are readers of the mainstream media, they will have picked up the notion that red meat is bad for them (it’s not, but the media constantly signals that it is). The health conscious individual will probably reduce intake of red meat, increase exercise, quit smoking (if a smoker), and work to maintain a lower body weight.

Those who are not health conscious continue to eat red meat and everything else that isn’t red hot or nailed down. These people are typically overweight, insulin resistant, and in poorer health.

So there is a big healthy-living bias in the studies demonizing red meat. Which, to me, is absurd since red meat provides all the nutrients we need. No other single food does so as much as a nice chunk of well-marbled steak.

It’s weird that the paper shows increased protein after the age of 65 to correlate with a longer lifespan. Why would a macronutrient — protein — shorten one’s lifespan if consumed from age 50-65, then prolong it after age 65? It makes no sense whatsoever.

One process that does increase aging is the accumulation of junk protein inside the cells. I wrote about it 20 years ago. The so-called junk protein isn’t a consequence of protein intake, but instead of faulty enzymes as a consequence of the aging process. Typically, the junk proteins inside the cells are transported by enzymes to the lysosomes, where they are broken down into their constituent amino acids. These are then released to form new proteins.

If these junk proteins can’t get to the lysosomes, then they build up and end up destroying the cell. One way to get these junk proteins dealt with is following a ketogenic diet. It helps the cells help themselves.

All in all, the claim the paper makes “high protein shortens life” in humans is overstated. The more defensible statement is: “In observational studies, high animal‑protein intake in sedentary middle‑aged adults is associated with higher mortality and cancer risk, whereas plant protein and higher protein in older adults may have different effects.”

That would be a more honest reading. But, in my view, at least, that one isn’t even valid.

My advise is to ignore all the media reports on this paper. Eat your protein. Do resistance training. You’ll be all the better for it.

Odds and Ends

• Need to spice up your life? This guy's got the 4-1-1 on it. Everything you want to know about spices but were afraid to ask.
  

• I love Egyptology as does the Bride. I went so far down the rabbit hole investigating Egyptian health and nutrition that it threatened to completely subsume what became. Thus I was unable to resist clicking to see this royal dagger of lapis lazuli found sometime in the 19thC with the mummy of Princess Ita. Beautiful.
  

• There are wine trails and beer trails, but this is the first cheese trail I've ever heard of. And it sounds delicious. Goes on the 'next time to Scotland' list.
  

• Ever wondered what the layout of the White House really looks like? MD and I had the privilege of an extensive tour of the residence and West Wing years ago, so we found this exploding floor plan video fun to watch.
  

• MD still has the vinyl LP of Sergeant Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band in its iconic cover (in storage now with all her music collection in this day of click on iTunes and play whatever strikes your fancy). Every one shown on the jacket is an historic or pop cultural figure of some significance to the Fab Four. I could recognize many but not all of them back when. But with this interactive image, you can just hover over a person and find out who's who. (You have to click into the article and scroll down to find the interactive link, but it's a fun jaunt down pop culture memory lane.)
  

• Message in a bottle. I couldn't help wondering what sort of hue and cry would be raised today if a bottle with a message like this were launched and found.

• What a find! Like finding the sword in the stone, but for real!

• Montana hiker impaled himself on his trekking pole and subsequently hiked 6 miles to safety. Amazing, yes, but no more so than in 1971 when actor Clint Walker impaled himself on a ski pole that pierced his heart, survived, and went back to work two months later. The human body is sometimes quite a piece of work, to paraphrase the bard.

• Can you guess what animal kills more humans than any other? I was surprised, but on second thought, it's pretty obvious.

• An interactive map of 5,800 forts and castles around the world. Kind of fun to look at. MD and I've been to a number of them in Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, France, Portugal, and Italy (she loves to tour great houses and castles) but to be fair in the UK and Europe, castles are thick as fleas on a dog. The US is pretty short on castles but long on forts.
  

• As a former SCUBA instructor and veteran diver, I absolutely couldn't resist listening to a recording of whales singing. 

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This VOTW picks up on two topics I covered above: my teenage years and the incorrect early treatment of COVID. It’s difficult to put those two together, but I’ve managed to do it.

When I was in high school, I desperately wanted a steady girlfriend. I dated a bunch of different girls, but none of them steadily. Finally, in November of my senior year I managed to go steady. It was short lived. She dumped me the following April for a college guy who had a hot car. A few weeks before, I could sense my impending dumping by little changes in her demeanor. I hated it, but I knew it was in the offing.

Now, let’s switch to John Prine, who was (always will be) one of my favorite singers/songwriters. He was a tough bird. He beat throat cancer in the 1990s and lung cancer in the 2000s, but he succumbed to COVID in the pandemic. He was put on a ventilator for weeks before he finally gave up his ghost. By that time, a number of critical care doctors had reported terrible results with ventilators — we are killing people with ventilators, they said. The reported experiencing much better outcomes with steroid treatment. These brave docs were, of course, canceled. And John Prine paid the price.

Below is one of the first songs I heard him sing. I love his songs, because they are easy to play. I’ve picked everyone of them out on my guitar. I also appreciate them for the way he has with simple words to convey huge emotional responses. When I first heard the song below, it immediately took me back to the few weeks before being ditched my my high school sweetheart.

Prine’s throat cancer surgery ended up leaving him with a sort of gravely voice. Many people said it was a better voice for his kind of songs. I disagree. I think his earlier version of this song, at least, were better with his non-gravelly voice. See the link and let me know what you think.

MD and I were in Asheville, NC years and years ago for a medical conference. We were hanging out with a bunch of other docs when one of them had tickets and suggested we all go to a John Prine concert. I did not want to go, but felt kind of forced into it. The concert turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever attended, and I’ve been a huge John Prine fan since. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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