Some Limericks for Our Times

A little look ahead toward the season to come. No, not the Holiday Season, the Republican Primary Season. With apologies to all!

Ms. Haley is from Carolina
She can give you a lecture on China
With her thoughts she can grab you
While with her heels she will stab you
I fear her plans might give you angina

In the South is a bloke named DeSantis
Not much height he is short as a mantis.
In all the polls he is dropping
His run seems to be flopping
I think he will sink like Atlantis

Young Vivek Ramaswamy's a newbie
Who glistens and shines like a ruby
In manners he's lacking
Other pols he's attacking
Chill out dude, have a puff, here's a doobie.

The ex-guv'nor of New Jersey is running
But I'd prefer Chris Christie off somewhere sunning
He'll shoot from the rump
To head off the Trump
A victory by him would be stunning

Don Trump's still the leading contender
He's beloved by the masculine gender
Is there still time at this juncture
His great ego to puncture
Or will he just bask in his splendor?

Let’s Connect With Rogers Park Again

It has been a few weeks since I invited you to try your hand at the version of the New York Times Connections puzzle I created especially for my friends in the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park. Hundreds of you tackled the puzzle, and many of you let me know that you had solved it. So it is time for Rogers Park Connections #2! Of course, anyone is welcome to play–no Rogers Park passport is required.

To review, the Connections puzzles test how well you can separate a group of random-appearing words into categories. I’ll give you 16 words, you divide them into 4 categories with 4 entries in each category. Once you solve the puzzle the Rogers Park Connection will be evident. To the best of my ability, I have created this puzzle so that there is one, and only one, correct solution.

Think you have figured it all out? Let me know at chidoc@post.com. Please DO NOT LEAVE YOUR ANSWER IN THE COMMENT OR REPLY FIELD. We don’t want any spoilers!

As Sherlock Holmes said to his companion “Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary” *

Are you ready? Here are your 16 Words.

ACRE———-BOONE————GALE————SCHEME

COLLUSION—TYPHOON———PLOT————CONSPIRACY

CABAL———ARMSTRONG——HURRICANE—-PARCEL

KILMER———FIELD————–ROGERS———TORNADO

Have fun and let me know how you did at chidoc@post.com. And don’t forget, we welcome new subscribers.

*I know Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote this line in an actual Sherlock Holmes story, but it WAS used in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

“Do We Know Doug Rhone?”

“Babe, do we know anyone named Doug Rhone?” Barb asked me as she got out of bed this morning. “I was having weird dreams again. Jews were being rounded up and a man named Doug Rhone was telling us to escape to Texas or Canada.”

During this current spate of antisemitism, having a nightmare of Jews being rounded up, although tragic, is easily explainable. The more startling part of Barb’s dream to me was her mention of Doug Rhone. I did once know Doug, but Barb had never met him. Through the strange workings of the subconscious, Barb had brought up a name she had probably not heard in more than 40 years.

I first met Doug in 1976, when I was a 2nd-year medical student at the University of Illinois in Chicago. With a class of over 400 students, many of us were exiled to surrounding community hospitals for our 3-month long course in pathology. I was assigned to Illinois Masonic Medical Center in the Lake View neighborhood. Our handful of instructors were led by Dr. Douglas Rhone, the new Chairman of Pathology at Masonic.

The students were a rowdy bunch; most of us had no interest in pathology and were more interested in our simultaneous P-Dog (physical diagnosis) lectures and our first experiences examining patients. It would have been hard to predict that two of us would wind up as pathologists.

But by the time my third year of school rolled around, I had chosen pathology as a career. I spent a month doing an elective rotation in the lab at Masonic, as well as months at Northwestern Memorial and Evanston Hospital.

When it came time to rank hospitals for our upcoming residency training, I opted to put Evanston at the top of my list and I landed there on the notorious “Match Day,” the day when medical students around the country learn where their internships and residencies will be. I told Dr. Rhone my decision, and while he was disappointed with my choice, he made me promise to look him up in four years when my residency would end and I would be looking for a permanent position.

It only took three years until Illinois Masonic needed an additional pathologist. Dr. Rhone selected someone from my program at Evanston who was completing his residency a year before me. When I finished my residency the next year I contacted Dr. Rhone, but he told me there were no positions in his department. I wound up practicing at a suburban Chicago hospital.

I had no more opportunities to speak with Dr. Rhone since that day in 1982. In truth, I rarely thought of him. A brief survey of the Internet shows that he passed away in 2011, a death I was not aware of.

You can imagine how stunned I was to hear Barb ask her question this morning. How was it that her brain had held on to Doug Rhone’s name and it appeared in a dream more than 40 years after she had last heard it? The future may be the era of artificial intelligence, but can that ever be as complex, as surprising, or as astounding as our own minds at work?

The Speech I Need To Hear From President Joe Biden

The 500+ words that I long to hear from our President. Written by Lester Raff.

November 15, 2023

My Fellow Americans:

Three years ago this month, in a hard-fought and fairly won election, you chose me to serve as your President. Thus far I have served you faithfully and to the best of my ability, and I will continue to do so for the remainder of my term of office. But tonight I am choosing to look beyond the next 12 months. I look to the Presidential election of 2024 and the consequential four years to follow.

After deep, thoughtful, discussions with my family, my friends and advisors, the leaders of both houses of Congress, and after examining my faith, I have decided that I will not accept my party’s nomination to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 2024.

I feel a great sense of pride when I look back on my first three years in office. Our economy is booming, with unemployment virtually non-existent, inflation tamed, and interest rates ready to fall. We have launched our efforts toward a carbon-neutral environment and we have seen unions once more mark out a space for our working class.

Sure, we haven’t solved all our problems. This is good ole Joe and I know that! We have worked for humanitarian solutions to the situations at our border, to poverty, and to crime. We are not there yet. And the world remains a dangerous place. But we have strived to remind the world that we Americans will defend countries seeking freedom, peace, and an absence of terror.

Why have I decided that January 20, 2025, will be my last day as your President? I have no fear of another election battle, one I am confident I would be triumphant in. I have no concern that my age would prevent me from fulfilling my duties in the manner the position requires. I have no doubt that with the aid of Congress we would continue to make progress on the matters of most consequence and their impact on the lives of everyday Americans.

But each man is allotted a limited number of days and years on this earth. By the end of this term, I will have given 54 years to the service of my country. I have done so gladly and I have not regretted a single moment, from my days on the New Castle County Council to my years in the White House. Soon will be the time for me to be with my family, to provide them with support and comfort. I want to write my memoirs while all is still fresh, and of course, remain a strong voice for freedom and democracy.

My party is filled with brilliant, caring individuals who have already done much and deserve the opportunity to do more. I encourage these men and women to seek the Democratic nomination for the 2024 Presidential election. I hope Kamala Harris, who has been a strong advisor and a willing ear during her Vice-Presidency will be one of those, but that is her decision to make.

I want to assure the nation that I will not be a “lame duck” President. In the 14 months remaining in my term, I will continue to fight for what I believe in, those ideals that make us the strongest, proudest, most equitable nation we can be.

In closing, as we approach the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address I repeat his words that this “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

God Bless You All. Goodnight.

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These People Are Why I’m Radio Ga-Ga. Who Did It For You?

I don’t do Spotify. I don’t stream Apple Music. When Alexa asks me if I want to sign up for Amazon music, I ignore her, even when she offers me a 90-day free trial of all my favorite music. I know how 90-day free trials turn into $9.95-a-month subscriptions in a hurry.

I was born and bred to listen to the radio Chicago style. There were WCFL and WLS in my grammar school years. I spent many Fridays walking down Morse Avenue to the local record store to collect their music surveys and see what was at #1. WDAI (pre-disco) and The Loop, along with a taste of WGN, were my companions early in my professional career. Next, The Drive held my attention for a few years but by the late 2000s I had morphed into a WXRT listener, and for the most part, remain that way today.

Behind the radio call letters and station names have been the varied personalities I have listened to. Each epoch had a jock or two who kept me listening, even after the music had stopped. In some cases, they didn’t play much music at all, and that was OK too.

I’ve spoken before about Joel Sebastian, the smooth morning man at WCFL, and later at many other Chicago stations. When Chicago radio, and my own tastes, evolved, I discovered Steve Dahl in his early solo days. I didn’t know what to make of his humor and stunts, but by the time he paired with Garry Meier, I was hooked on his style of very personal radio. I couldn’t have guessed then that his wife Janet’s school board adventures would be a forerunner of my own.

Dahl and Meier served me well on my morning commute, but once I reached my hospital laboratory office, I tuned in to a more “work-appropriate” radio format with my radio-wave friend Roy Leonard. Sadly, I think that I won more radio call-in contestants on Roy’s show than I answered questions correctly during my one Jeopardy! appearance. I finally had the opportunity to meet Roy before a show at Chicago’s Second City–and yes, I was there after winning the tickets for the performance on Roy’s show.

Mr. Leonard was followed on WGN by the combo of Kathy O’Malley and Judy Markey. I presumed I was the only male in their radio audience–a feeling reinforced when a male oncologist friend reviewing some slides at my microscope asked how I could listen to those babbling idiots. I think his chauvinism was peeking through.

And then came everybody’s best friend in the whole world, Lin Brehmer. When my daily morning commute doubled in length with my new company and new position, I fell into WXRT. I timed my drive so that I would arrive at the lab just in time for Three for Free, Lin and Mary Dixon’s morning musicology quiz, battling it out with Mailman Jack, Brad Frey, Cathy Chouinard, and many others. Lin’s death felt to all of us like the loss of a valued and loved co-worker.

Lin was my man at ‘XRT, but a shout-out to Terri Hemmert, who last week celebrated 50 years on WXRT with a Saturday Morning Flashback to the year 1973. That was a good year with great music, and even better memories.

Long live Chicago radio–I hope it never goes away.

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It’s A Classic Rock Connection!

Hey there rock’n’rollers. I know you all are puzzle fans, right? You love drawing the lines from the Yardbirds to Cream and Air Force. And it’s fun to compare lists of your 14 favorite guitar solos of 1974. But have you been playing the CONNECTIONS game in the New York Times? Take 16 words and figure out how to separate them into 4 categories.

I have created a few CONNECTIONS games myself (sorry, NYT) including one dedicated to the great Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park, and the other to Chicago’s north suburban Skokie. And now I have made one just for all the classic rockers out there.

How does it work? In the grid below you will find sixteen words. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, would be to divide the words into four categories. For example, if scattered around the grid you found the words Chrysler, Ford, Chevy, and Mercedes you might place them in an “Automobile” category. But be careful, because Ford could also fit into the category of “US Presidents”. The trick is to establish the correct categories so that each of those can have four members. It gets tricky!

My hint to you for today’s puzzle is that one of the four categories has a definite Classic Rock connection. Figure out that category and its four constituents, and the other categories should fall into place.

When you solve the puzzle, send me your solution at chidoc@post.com. You can send complaints there too! If you enter your results in Comments, please flag it as a spoiler. We don’t want to ruin anyone else’s fun.

Here is the rockin’ connections puzzle. Remember, solutions and complaints to me chidoc@post.com.

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Hi Skokie, This CONNECTION Is For You and Everyone Else Too!

(See Full Puzzle Below!)

In last week’s blog, I had you all take a stab at a home-grown Connections Puzzle. That puzzle contained a special shout-out to Rogers Park, the multi-ethnic Chicago neighborhood in which I grew up. The response was great, with many of you telling me how much you enjoyed the puzzle. Most of you solved it, sometimes after I provided a hint or two.

Rogers Park isn’t the only place I have called home. In 1978, when Barb and I first married, we lived on the second floor of a walk-up apartment building in Skokie, Illinois. The building was on a quiet street just north of Dempster and featured an in-ground backyard swimming pool that we helped the landlord paint, but never swam in.

We stayed in that building for just a year, buying our first home, a townhouse in Niles, during the height of the interest rate panic of 1979. (If you think mortgage interest rates are high now, they were over 16% then!)

I have fond memories of that year in Skokie as a newlywed. And Barb spent much of her childhood and teen years there. So in honor of those days, and the vibrant village Skokie remains, here is Connections Puzzle with a salute to Skokie.

Let’s recap how Connections Puzzles work. I am giving you a 4 x 4 grid, with each space containing one word–a total of 16 words. The object of the puzzle is to separate the 16 words into four categories with four words placed into each category.

The puzzle sounds simple but there is a catch or two. First, the categories are not given. Your first task is to figure out what those categories are. Second, some of the words can be part of more than one category. The challenge is to determine which category each word belongs to so that you finish with exactly four categories with just four words each. It’s tricky, but it’s fun.

By the way, you DON’T have to be from Skokie to solve the puzzle. Everyone should give it a try. Once you’ve solved the puzzle, let me know at chidoc@post.com. Please don’t leave the answer in the Comments section. We don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun.

So with no more delay…here is this week’s puzzle. Happy solving.

Remember to send your solutions to chidoc@post.com

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“Connections” Puzzle With a Rogers Park Twist

Have you all been playing Connections? It’s a word puzzle that has been appearing in the New York Times for the last few months. It doesn’t have quite the buzz of Wordle, but so many people asked me if I was doing it that I gave it a try. And as expected, now I am hooked.

How does the puzzle work? Each day there is a new 4 x 4 grid, with each space containing one word–a total of 16 words. The object of the puzzle is to separate the 16 words into four categories with four words placed into each category.

The puzzle sounds simple but there is a catch or two. First, the categories are not given. They are different every day, and one of your first tasks is to figure out what those categories are. Second, and the devilish twist, is that some of the words can be part of more than one category, and you need to figure out which one it belongs to.

For example, as you check a grid you see the words Chrysler, Dodge, Chevrolet, Ford, and Jeep. All seem to be car companies, but only four of the five can belong to that category. You look around and notice the word Kennedy in another grid spot, and realize that Ford might belong to a category of Presidents.

And so it goes until you have all 16 words arranged into your four categories. In the NYT version of the puzzle, you have four attempts to reach the correct solution. If it takes more than that, you are a loser for the day and have to wait until the next day to play again.

Here is my version of Connections, including a shout-out to all my readers in Rogers Park. See if you can separate these words into four categories. You can send your answers to me at chidoc@post.com

Let’s see how many of you can solve this, and how many of you get hooked on Connections!

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Canine Criminal Behaviour

Cooper's on the prowl again, 
Nothing stops his thieving.
The pooch is after paper goods;
His calmness is deceiving.

Our kitchen table is the spot
Where a napkin lies inviting.
Quick as a wink it's in his mouth;
To Coop it's so exciting. 

The receipt that nestled in your purse
For the shoes you were returning.
Is now in tatters in Coopie's mouth;
His lips the pieces churning.

A check was on the counter top,
You can guess that in this telling.
It's been torn in half by a hungry pup.
In the future, please try Zelle'ing.

Like a hungry fox in a house of hens,
His appetite's unrelenting.
From dawn to dusk all paper is his;
There's no use in lamenting.

I dare not bring into this house
A document worth keeping.
Young Coop will munch it 'tween his teeth;
And the shreds we'll soon be sweeping.

Better keep the bathroom door,
Tightly closed while you are using.
Or he'll snatch the tissue from the roll;
He finds this quite amusing

Is there something we have done,
Or is it in his breeding,
That has him scoff at kibbles and bits;
And makes parchment what he's needing?

I looked up in my medical books,
Through the chapters I went paging
Until I found his condition there;
They call this "xylophaging."

I guess that we will have to live,
With this behaviour so annoying.
It's good I write my blogs on line;
No chance for Coop's destroying.

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In Anticipation of a Breaking Heart

I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog that retirement has given me the opportunity to write a play. I’ve completed and semi-polished a mid-length first draft. Despite an encouraging online reading, it is clear my effort is too long to be a one-act play and not quite long enough to be a true two-act, full evening of entertainment.

The play is in the hands of my dramaturg–a much more experienced colleague who I am sure will have great recommendations and suggestions to rescue the piece from its unproducible length. I anticipate that he will tell me to add this character, delete that one, and change the focus of some of the scenes.

I have one problem. I have fallen in love with my characters. I love the way they act, how they talk, how they interact with each other. That is not to say the characters are paragons of virtue. In fact, Barb could not believe how unlikeable I had made one of three protagonists. (On the other hand, that was my daughter’s favorite character.)

Each persona has been living inside my head for quite a while now. They are at least as real to me as some of my Facebook friends that I know only by their icons and an occasional social media posting. I hear their voices and their accents, I know their favorite diversions and the things they detest.

I suppose this is an occupational hazard that many (most?) writers face. It doesn’t get in my way while I am writing a short blog piece–no characters to create, no scenes to set. But a lengthier piece gives me too much chance to fall in love.

So I know my dramaturg will break my heart. But it will mend and the play will be better for the tears I will shed over it.

And I hope there will be an opening night when I can shed my tears of joy.

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