Free Republic

Used to regularly drive down from Palatka to eat at Hollerbachs. Another favorite was European Cafe & Schnitzel House in Ormond Beach.

Seems to be safer to stay in the boonies w/ 8-10 foot ‘gators.

Oh goody. I get to make an opaque cover to use when I reread Cichester’s ‘”Gypsy Moth” Circles the World’ in public.

I’ll blame it on my bourbon. I’m not certain where you are going with this. I think I empathize, but,. Go back to the late ‘60s. I was a farm boy raised in the midwest. Courted by schools across the world ‘cause I was the connsumate nerd.

Full National Merit when that meant something. Finished a BA and a BS in three years (only germaine because it gave DOD 1st Army Training a headache)

Enrolled in ROTC at a second institution because my vision - from trauma - was not acceptible in my alma mater’s Navy or Airdaile programs. I did it because I thought I owed it to my country. Not because I expected anything.

When the sytem woke up to the fact that I was matriculating, and hadn’t yet gone to ‘summer camp’, pandimonium ensued.

In short, they realized I was 4F cause of past retinal damage. I sat before a medical review board, pleading to stay in.

They granted an exemption. Two years later, I was offered an RA commission and some tantilizing incentives. But I returned to civilian life.

The GI Bill made grad school a lot more pleaseant. Would I have been pissed if I was told I couldn’t take advantage of what I ahd been promised? Damn right. As now - I’m ineligible for VA benefits because of my income unless I declare/demonstrate my deficincies are service-related. That is a game I won’t suit up for.

But - there are easily 100k people world-wide enjoying a quality life today because of what I did as a biomed engineer and CV physiologist in industry.

I’ll grant you a point in that I would have done so anyhow. It was my driving passion through grad school and later in life. But how dare you compare me to a young parasite Biden or JAG who never humped an M14 in the boonies.

Rant off.

Darn. Good on you. As an ex-biomed engineer & cardiovascular physiologist I’m still giving you full credit for performance under fire!

You should have billed the hospital!

Interesting story and tag line. I empathize. I’m biomed engineer/CV physiologist/biophysicist. Friends from high school were Caltech geoengineers who migrated to N. Dakota. (one married an attorney so he’s comfortable)

I quite working in 1996 but I know what your thread of fate entailed. Gave up flying (mostly ‘cause of vision and work committments - don’t have pic of Cessna 340 in source for freerepublic) I’m ornery. Grew up farming in ND. Then mining on ‘duh range’ in MN. I’ll survive because parents installed that in us. But I worry about my god and great god-children.

To get back to the reasons for the post - High Flight
by J G Magee

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;”

and - despite growing up in MN/WI I never learned to water ski. At age 35 two friends - a pharmacist and an osteo-surgeon both at Brooks Army) had me fly to TX. They had me, sore and bitching, barefoot and on slalom in 4 days. The pharmacist was my CFII and is probably now retired from SW Air.

My respects and admiration. I like to to think I’d do this for family or dear friends. Spent a lot of years looking at the immunological aspects of transplants and stem cells for regenerative medicine before it was ‘a thing’.

To paraphrase Kipling - ‘you are a better man than I.’

Thanks for making me rethink my knee-jerk reply.

I haven’t ‘worked’ for 28 years, ‘cause I was one of the best in the world at what I did. But the point was/is - I did what I could AND what I wanted to do. No ‘effing bureaucrat got between me and employers.

Nor, when I started my own business, did they screw with me other than collecting taxes and fees. My customers and I decided what my output was worth!

Thus should it be always.

Y’all might find this imnteresting. One month ago, at a nearby camp.

https://alphanews.org/minneapolis-homeless-encampment-leveled-by-fire-thursday/

After leaving the army, I went back to school to work on my PhD in biophysics. I lived in an apartment on Stevens Ave for years just a few blocks from the camp described in this article. It was a very nice neighborhood in the mid-70s.

I quit driving theough the old neighborhood a year after the mostly-peaceful Floyd demonstrations. Incidentaly, this month marks the 50th anniversary of Uncle Hugo’s sci fi bookstore. It was closed for two years after arson destroyed it. I rode my bicycle or Toyota FJ40 past it twice a day, 7 days a week.

An email I just sent out:

Ah, yes. Sci. American. A once great publication.

30 years behind the times. I, in a land far away, a long time ago, has a 130-pound, 9.5 ft Burmese python in the freezer.

Thawed and steaked it. It was destined for a Dermestid beetle skeletonization but I never found the time to bring it to the UofMN zoology department.

Brought it to a potluck at XXXXXXXX [censored] - suitably labeled - so people would not mistake it for a large salmonid. [I had previously brought a low-country stew which included squirrel. I didn’t label it - just assumed that everyone knew that Brunswick stew included rodent or marsupial]

People were leery - my reputation preceded me - but it was well-received. Did not flake like a fish, but was tender and nondescript in flavor. No, it did NOT taste like chicken.

I though twice about leaving a gift for Teddy. I’ve been to Arlington twice on other-than-internment visits. It would have taken a little planning as his grave site is rather exposed and south of JFK and Robert’s.

As much as I abhor the SOB for all that he did (Mary Joe, immigration, waitress sandwiches) he did serve in the army.

Damn, I’m getting senile.

And back when we had vertically-integrated base industries - it meant a longer shipping season for iron ore and taconite pellets to go down=lake through the locks to feed the furnaces of Indiana and Pennsylvania

I grew up in northern MN. Spent many weeks on Isle Royale with wonderful memories of Washington Harbor fishing, seiches!, and hiking the ridge. Decades later, started my PhD in Ecology & Behavioral Biology. Met USGS’s L. David Mech several times.

Look up his research on the wolf/moose ecosystem.

My snark? The Isle Royale moose were always ‘happy’ when the lake didn’t freeze over and allow wolf packs to migrate from the MN shore.

As an ex pilot - use a float plane, you asses!

I applaud your cynicism. I did this stuff once - 5 decades ago. I was told that I was planning the first LOTS operation since the Korean war. A joint British/US task force pretended to do a landing/resupply op at Ft. Story, VA.

Much of it was rote. But I learned a lot, especially from the USMC whose special jigs, etc had not ever been assigned an FSN. [and damn, the Brits had discontinued their rum ration!]

On a tangent - I also remember the USS Liberty being attacked by Israeli air. Discussed this many times with Israeli officers attached to my unit - by then I was S3.

Uncomfortable conversations. And then I sat on my duffel bag next to a runway at Ft. Bragg during the Yom Kippur War, waiting to be detailed to set up a port to support the IDF.

My IDF acquaintances told me they were burning through all their munitions each day, expecting to be resupplied the next. I was < 30 days to ETS!

eFFJB.

Ironically - just published paper regarding a nasty parasitic disease caused by accidentally ingesting bugs. I find it ironic - once upon a time I was a biophyscicist/biomed engineer designing stuff as a last-ditch therapy.

Now the plague may be extending into Florida.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/oral-transmission-chagas-disease-has-severe-effects-2024a100042f?240307&src=FYE&ecd=WNL_recnlnew1_broad_US_perso_etid6358029&uac=439418DR&impID=6358029

From my email to friends:

Coming to a Florida site near you. The article confirms an earlier study that claims 30% of examined ‘kissing bugs’ in Florida were infected with Trypanosoma cruzi. I see these conenose bugs regularly. Sometimes even on the outside of my window screens. You don’t want to be bitten, even by a clean bug. Hurts like hell.

So now that vector based xmission is being reduced, oral xmission becomes a problem; “And as organic farming methods without insecticides become increasingly common, more research is needed in these areas, both in Latin America and in the United States, to understand if oral transmission of T cruzi is occurring.”

Ironic. So instead of the Assassin Bug biting you, you, in effect, bite them. The parasite load is estimated to be 100x greater. Yes, it is treatable IF recognized.

Interesting. Violating Freeper tradition, i read the article. Don’t know what to think.

On the family farm, we had about 2 square miles in oats. Remainder in winter wheat and oil seeds eg sunflowers. When I was young, we planted for alphafa.

I can blather forever on varieties, rotation after other crops (oats are very good scavengers of nutrients) and raising them for forage as opposed to cereal grain stock.

The N (as in 1 is small) but I eat them as hot cereal and cold cereal most mornings. They fortify my meat loaf. Sometimes I make haggis.

Biophysicist/CV physiologist in later life. I’ll have to look at the research protocol and analysis. Until i do so, my guess is that eating them is infinitely better than not eating them.

https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/ag-hub/ag-topics/crop-production/crops/oats/oat-production-north-dakota

https://practicalfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/OatProductionBook-2016-1-1.pdf

I live in an adjacent county. Too old to serve on the jury even if I resided 3 miles east.

If found guilty, I think the sitting garotte would be reasonable. Although WIKI says there are close to 2 dozen languages in Guatemala, I think it unlikely that he didn’t understand any Spanish. Once upon a time, in grad school, drifting on the River Usumacinta ...

Most of my family and I have spent our lives putting people back together. Physicians, surgeons, biomedical engineers. But I’m pissed.

Let’s try the Spanish Donkey on the lawyers if their case fails. Or the bastinado should they have already reproduced.

Amen to that. I was a young, niave biophysicist grad student. I’d already been exposed at the sidelines to academic fraud which probably cost my mentor a Nobel (look up Summerlin & Sloan-Kettering) I reported to R. A. Good..

I was newly graduated from high school at the time and on an American Heart Assoc. research fellowship. Later went to college, then the military, then to grad school.

Fellow grad students (mostly EEs) were using engineering notebooks.. Everything was documented. Seemd crazy at the time because I saved computer code, photos, and a decent lab notebook. You name it.

After graduation I went into academia, then industry. Intellectual property attorneys quickly noted that a full-blown engineering notebook was THE solution.

My only complaint? 39 years later! My budget for good ink pens remains outrageous.

I’m partially into a bourbon so don’t trust timelines, only physics. In ‘70s when I was PhD biophysics grad student i messed around more than I should have if degree were my only objective.

Friend had a Fiat X-1-9(?) into which we dropped a full-race Abarth racing engine. Campus police were used to me snaking oxy-acetylene hoses out the lab windows ...

The redline went up many thousand RPM. I needed to modify his tach. Chucked the distributor up in a lathe in the mechanical shop and began the calibration process - known rpms from lathe head RPMs. Easy peasy.

Had a small auto battery (I think from my VW Rabbit) powering the setup. 5 or so minutes in had a nasty explosion. The arcing from the distributor points ignited the gasses from the battery.

All OK. I was young. Worried about the lathe and the chuck and ways. Now I’d worry only about my eyes. Had safety glasses on but only because I needed Rx all the time.

I owed him. He helped me drop a Chevy small-block into my FJ-40 Landcruiser.

Thanks! Almost spilled a margarita. I was a comparative zoologist before ending up in biomedicine. Lots of time with dermestid beetle colonies skeletonizing carcasses.

And yes, as half-Norwegian, I eat lutefisk whenever I can. Maggots are simply a fact of death. And wound debridement.

Amen. But the analogies go deep. I grew up in a railroading family. My father started out shoveling coal as a fireman on the Moffat Road in Colorado. Worked his way up to Division Engineer, and eventually running a heavy-tonnage railroad in MN. (I was an apprentice diesel-electric loco mechanic before going on to grad school) He loved steam but always said it just couldn’t match the economics...

I remember one of his stories about the Burlington on a route between Chicago and Denver. Had to pull steam engines out of retirement because the Platte River flooding was shorting out the traction motors on the early F3s(?).

The fireboxes were high-enough above the rails there was no problem for the steam engines. Hell, cynically, the cooling of the cylinders probably increased the thermodynamic efficiency.